Mortals

this.

“Communism, socialism, what have you, based on mistaken interpretations of a few lying lines in Acts of the Apostles about a common purse and so on, the common purse being in fact a mere expedient for driven people who knew, knew, the end of the world was coming and Jesus coming back and so forth, very interim, but expanded absurdly into a model for national economics, somehow. And that gets conflated into socialism, which frightens the horses of the conservative branch of Christianity into a killing rage embodied in the good Catholic, Adolf Hitler, who no one ever bothered to excommunicate, by the way. I won’t go on.

“Except to say this. This is the position. If I can just get this right.

“I have imagined a destination. A world purged of the fictitious. A place fully lit for the first time. I visit this place.

“I visit it in my mind, a place where the rude fact that we are all dying animals has transfigured every part of life, where the great lie of life eternal has been dethroned and every form of division between human beings based on that lie is a memory and nothing more. I have seen a world where the shadow of the imaginary father is lifted. It was only a shadow, but it weighed like lead.

“Don’t leave this, my man! Stay with us. Abide with me, I have no faith, my man, my brother.”

I get it, a paradise of reason, Ray thought. Was Morel insane? Was he serious? Did he have any idea of the strength of the forces against him? Did he not know what man was, churches or no churches? A cartoon of Morel’s paradise came to Ray, in which the citizens of this paradise dressed uniformly in tweed jackets with elbow patches and pipes walked around stroking their chins… taking taxis where the dashboard shrines featured The Thinker instead of the jiggling Jesuses so common in Mexico but also now in New York, too… signs saying Irony Saves.

“I have no faith, but I believe in the pledge given by brother to brother, which I thought you gave to me. Well. So I thought.

“I’m running out of ways to say this, my friend…”

A light commotion could be heard, nothing unfriendly about it.

Kerekang began to speak. The tape ended. That was all Ray had.

22. A Homecoming

He was going to be late and it was because he had been overpreparing the event, stupidly, admittedly, overgrooming himself for the moment of homecoming with the result that she was going to be standing there annoyed or worse, and exhausted from the flight.

He hurried, sucking his mint pastille, unhappy. He disliked his appearance more when she was away, deprived of the tinted mirror she was for him. Of course, he never slept as well when she was absent, and that showed.

Ray disliked the overextended new big airport and disliked in particular the absurd, oversized terminal rearing up in front of him. The runways were endless and represented so much overcapacity that Zimbabwe thought there was a military rationale underlying the facility. The Botswana Defence Force had been called in to bomb or shell certain small koppies in the surrounding plain where baboon colonies had been established since the dawn of time, according to the animal rights people who had ineffectually protested. Even as things were, the baboons had come back, to a degree, frightening or delighting airport passengers, depending on who you talked to.

The way he felt was that the grandiose airport misrepresented the country. Botswana was a modest place. And the terminal was ugly, to boot, a tall vast Corobrick building with a serpentine, pushed-out facade and a peculiar fluted-concrete roof whose turned-up eaves gave a pointlessly oriental touch to the whole. There was enough parking for an army. This airport was for the thin stratum of winners, and for expatriates and tourists and official busybodies from Washington and London. It had nothing to do with the hewers of wood and whatever the rest of the quotation was that described the overwhelming mass of the Batswana stuck out in the swamps and velds, the drawers of water, although that hardly applied because of the drought. The site was perpetually underpopulated, except when the large tour flights came in, but the whole operation was geared to run on the fiction that it was a hive of industry, with long arrays of booths and stands offering elephant-foot wastebaskets and Bushman hunting kits and packets of groundnuts and other necessities. The arcades were melancholy. Most of the stands had portcullises that were dropped during closing hours, but it was not uncommon to see dispirited stand- clerks napping inside these cages in the middle of the day, portcullises down, because there was no business. Ray liked the humble, antique airport where Victor worked. It was devoted to cargo and military exclusively.

He was inside, on the concourse. The terminal was underlit. Someone had chosen dark pink flooring, so a dark pink gloom was generated. There were tall ventilation slots in the upper walls, housing in each slot a single vertical louver permanently fixed, apparently, in the open position, which accounted for the permanently gritty condition of the floor and the endless swabbing activity the blowing sand necessitated. It made no sense that there was no mechanism to close the slots in the event of storms. But then it equally made no sense that in half the toilet stalls the door bolts were mounted well above or below the receptor slots.

Where was she?

He saw her, his darling. There she was, leaning against the wall just outside the mouth of the arrivals tunnel, her swollen carry-ons at her feet. There she was, but how was she? She was beautiful and he was seeing that again, her graphic face. She waved and he waved. He hurried toward her. They never checked baggage when they flew. Africa had traumatized them permanently in that department.

His jewel was back, his what, his pivot, his unwobbling pivot, his wife. The question was, had she come back clearer about things and more like the way she’d been at the beginning, and happier to be with him? Her sister had been an ordeal. She would be glad to be clear of that.

The house she was returning to was clean to a fault, the yard policed, food in the refrigerator, no tasks waiting for her, only his needs, lucky woman.

Was she thinner? She was wearing something new to him, elf pants, he was tempted to call them, very tight green leggings, he guessed they were, so tight they made her legs seem flocked rather than clad. That was fine, but not for Botswana, which she undoubtedly understood. She was wearing a white tee shirt, sneakers, and her travel tunic, a pretext of a garment composed entirely of pockets of different capacities, not a jacket but an undeclared third carry-on. The pockets were jammed. When he put his arms around her it would be like embracing a sack of rubble. She was wearing her hair pulled back. If there was something distant or vexed in her expression, it didn’t matter. It could be because he was late. And God willing he would obliterate it with his love.

He reached her and caught her in his arms. Her breath was perfect. He said, “Thank God to see you,” demonstrating his confusion. She didn’t take notice of it.

“Oh Ray,” was what she said, followed by nothing, not that she was so glad to be back, not that this was where she belonged, nothing like anything from his maximum dreams. He loved her. He had wanted something unalloyed and stronger.

“How late am I?” he asked into her neck. He couldn’t let go of her.

“A while. It’s all right.” His embrace was harder than hers. Clasp me, delicatest machine, he thought, which was Wallace Stevens and which was what she was.

He held her. He thought, There may not be such a thing as a perfect human being, but there is such a thing as the bell curve and there is such a thing as a woman who fits into the thin part that covers only the very best.

He stepped back and bent down to gather up her carry-ons.

She said, “I have to tell you something.”

Still bent over, he froze, seized by the certainty that something ominous was about to be said that he needed to hear every nuance in.

“Don’t do that,” she said, truly irritated.

He knew what it was. It was that tic he had, which was to stop whatever he was doing in order to hear perfectly what she was saying, if for some reason or other he thought it might be something potentially significant.