Mortals

whole thing is either Strange News or Bright Cities Darken…”

“Clarae urbes. He stole that from Horace.”

“What?”

“The phrase. Also Strange News is Elizabethan. Yes, it’s Thomas Nashe. The title has been used.”

“Please don’t just pour out scorn and objections before I even get two words out on this subject. Please. You don’t know how important this is.”

She went on. “It’s in four sections, Sentences, Paragraphs, Incidents, Plots, and each section contains a thousand items, that is, a thousand sentences, a thousand…”

“I get it.”

“And each item or exemplar, as he calls them, is on a separate page, so you can tell how many reams of paper you were hauling around.”

“No wonder my knee hurts. That’s a joke. May I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“A sentence on a single page, a paragraph…? Can you explain what that’s about?”

“Well, as I understand it, it’s so you absorb, in a complete way, the particular item on the page, really take it in. He described the book in various ways, but mostly he described it as an anatomy. And he was explicit that I should tell you that it was not, was not just faits divers, you would know what that means. I can tell you what he told me it means…”

“I know what it means.”

“Every individual element is numbered, but the numbers don’t mean anything. What I understood him to say was that they were just numbers. He also described the book as a machine and also as a game, or was it that there’s a game buried in it? Can’t remember.”

“It’s a machine to destroy my spare time, what little I have. Machine is right.”

“It’s so hard to remember everything he said. Oh, one was that you shouldn’t start reading this with the idea that it’s some kind of Commonplace Book. It isn’t. Nothing is from other books. It’s all real, from letters, overheard items, his observations, stupid things said in the media. There are very few names. There are initials, mostly, where they’re needed. He said you would recognize some of the people and incidents. Don’t groan like that. Some of the items are from his childhood. He said he’s been working on it all his life, but not knowing it until he got into his twenties.

“Sigh all you want. This is important. I’m even leaving things out.”

Her eyes were moist. He needed to control his feelings about Rex. Questions like who in hell Rex expected to be readers for such a piece of massive self-indulgence could wait.

“Give me a second to think, Ray. Oh, another way he put it. This book is about literary significance, that’s the subject, was the way he put it. He even thought of calling it Significance. Now this is me speaking, but what I gathered is that he thinks if you read through this you’ll find here, scattered around, what narrative literature does in an extensive way, but in very emblematic or condensed form…”

“Ah, so you would never need to read another novel again, something like that? Because if you did you’d see… well… after Rex it would all be deja vu. Is that what he meant, would you say?”

“Ray…”

“He is putting an end to literature, rendering it nugatory, shall we say. No small thing to do. It must be something like this. The most original novel or story that ever was or will be is in fact a mixture of tropes and images and connectives and trajectories that my brother has captured and pinned down in his book for your pleasure! A wonder, in short.”

“Well, Ray, you’ll have to decide if that’s a fair summary. It’s certainly a hostile one.”

“And have you read his book?”

“God no. I’ve read very little, just here and there.”

“And how do you like it?”

“Some of it is hilarious, I think. Some of it is just more or less mysterious, but you get glimmerings of… something. Some is brilliant, though, which is the case whether your anticipatory sarcasm is justified or not. A lot I just didn’t have time to really get, to concentrate on. But I’m not the one to judge, you are, I can’t judge it as a whole.”

“So this is just about stories, narrative literature. Not poetry.”

“Correct. Oh no. Poetry, I have to tell you this, he is very dismissive about. He claims he doesn’t care about it. He thinks it’s lesser. I tried to remember his exact words because I was pretty sure you were going to ask me. Here’s how he put it. Poetry is about the poet… in a way that stories are not about the storyteller. Structurally narcissistic, he called poetry. He isn’t out to vivisect poetry, so you can relax.”

“You have no idea how abysmal his notion of poetry is, how sophomoric.” He wanted that sentiment to reach me, Ray thought.

Then he said, “He is… I was going to say an idiot. For example, does he think Paradise Lost is about Milton the man? But pardon me if I point out that this is classic Rex. He hands me a literary task and what? demeans my specialty. Incredible. My life is incredible.”

“No, Ray, it’s my fault. You know how I am. This is awful. I was groping around with him trying to get a clear grasp on what I was supposed to convey to you about what this was. And he wasn’t always clear. Which is another thing, oh God, another thing… So I was the one who brought up poetry. This was not something he was volunteering for you to be sure you knew. I am trying to do everybody justice. I was the one who said does this have anything to do with poetry. I got it out of him. It is important that you believe me about this, Ray.”

“You know that I haven’t spoken to him for years, Iris. He knows that. We are not reconciled in any way.”

“You have to be, though. I’ll explain it.”

“I’m perfectly happy this way.”

“You won’t be. You’ll see. So. I’m not competent to tell you more about how the different ingredients, I guess you would call them, elements, relate, in the book. I think in the Sentences, he takes care of metaphor, as I recall, maybe similes, maybe aphorisms. Also you have your choice of how you want to read this collection. You can go randomly, like reading the I Ching, if you want…”

“Like a pillow book. Like the hugest most monumental pillow book ever.”

“I think I’ve told you everything I can, Ray.”

“And I am expected to do what, once I read this thing? Use my contacts in this hub of international publishing, Gaborone? I have nothing to offer in that department, I hope he knows. I have no connections in publishing. I never had any. There’s no one I could recommend this to who has. That is the fact. If he imagines I have literary friends in power, he is mistaken.”

“I’ll tell you what he wants from you, if you let me.”

“Tell.”

“He wants you to read it and judge it. He wants a trained literary intelligence to read it and judge it. And I don’t mean sample it and judge it, I mean read it and judge it…”

Thousands of pages, he thought. He realized unhappily that he was incorporating into his consciousness Morel’s theory of religion as a conspiracy against free time and applying it a little differently, free time being mortal time, limited, limited, applying it to other, what, entities, like family I hate you, families as blind machines using up their progeny with demands on their time, whatever was left of their lives, the progenies’ lives, the time before the toad arrives, death the toad. But I have no children, he thought. He knew through Pony that on the wall in Morel’s meeting room was a papier-mache Mexican carnival mask with a toad or lizard occluding the smiling face.

“Ray, he wants to know if this is a brilliant thing, major, or if it’s a failure and a mistake. He doesn’t know, Ray.”

“What about the possibility he’s done something in between, something pretty good, say?”