Mortals

Rex was clever. He granted that. And he would like to forget it if he could. It had been his luck to have as his brother a sacred monster. The designation had never occurred to him before, but it was apt, and it was a little comforting.

Here was Iris. She handed him two airletters dated well before her trip, with certain sections checkmarked. Then she turned and went to her luggage and began rooting through it for something, another piece of writing, which she found and brought to him, murmuring that he should take his time while she took care of a couple of things. She fiddled with the papers, arranging them in the order she wanted them read, before leaving the room. She was agitated.

He took up his task, thinking Love your enemies. She seemed to have it askew, poor dodo. She seemed to love his enemies, his brother. She was indiscriminate. She loved the world, and insofar as he could love it at all, it was via her in some way. He should tell her that, or, rather, never tell her that. She would resent it. In her place he would hate it. It would make her responsible for him just at the moment she was what, experimenting with her feelings or whatever she was doing. It would be fatal to interfere with that. He had to keep her, keep her or what, die, was his situation.

Iris reentered. She presented him with a magnifying glass, a surprise. She left again, hurrying.

He hadn’t known she owned a magnifying glass. He did appreciate having the use of it, not because there was anything wrong with his eyesight, but because his brother’s small but perfectly formed handwriting could be a trial for anyone. Rex’s excruciated hand was on the border between the eccentric and the insane, in his opinion. Good eyesight ran in his family. He needed to be attentive to reading in a good light more now than previously, was all. He would begin in a minute.

He had to get going. He would like to know what, exactly, she was doing, as he began. He held his breath to help him listen in her direction, for any clues. He thought she was on the phone. He wasn’t sure.

Item one before him was a segment of Rex’s tips for long-absent returning natives, a joke genre created specifically for Iris’s benefit that of course relied on the canard that Iris was hearing nothing about movements and events in American cultural life from her husband, not to mention that she was herself an assiduous reader of everything from the International Herald Tribune to The New Yorker. Rex obviously wanted him to be a what, a stumbling block, an incubator of ignorance.

Here was his brother:

I want you not to be amazed by a startling development taking place within the African-American, formerly Afro-American or black, community. What we have is a significant element in the community, a vanguard element, executing something called the Islamic Turn, and dragging a good part of the masses along in that direction. It is serious. You will be greeted from time to time in Arabic. These leaders have brilliantly found a way to align the justified complaints of their people with the interests and image of the main certified declared enemy of the United States of America, the radical Muslim powers. This of course is an eerie replay of the situation in the thirties, forties, and fifties when the vanguard of that time, notably Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, cleverly sought to align their followers with the then main enemy, the USSR and its cat’s paw the Communist Party of the United States. So how excellent is it for black/white relations to have leading African American intellectuals sucking the hem of the main new enemy, now that the former main foe has collapsed in a heap, switching their adulation to the political descendants of the champion slave-trading powers of all time? Yes, the Muslim slave trade went on for thirteen centuries versus two for us, involved a higher overall total of slaves taken, by about a million (thirteen against our twelve), and, nota bene please, featured the castration of black male slaves. Nota bene that there IS NO BLACK DIASPORA IN THE MUSLIM COUNTRIES for precisely that reason. Also nota bene that the only places in the world where chattel slavery persists like a fossil are, guess what, Muslim countries, Mauritania and Sudan. O my coevals! (You can ask my brother what this comes from.) O tempora, O morons! Oh and by the way, with this brilliant feat of identification (Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, is a pal and associate of Muammar el-Qadaffi) these guys are giving the back of their hands to their former best and most effective friends and costrugglers the Jews, friends with power and influence and money and conscience. In addition, not only does the Islamic Turn cut the black community off from bien pensant Jews and their resources, but down the line it also threatens relations with the bedrock of African American community strength, the bedrock black Christian churches, in the following way—it is stone doctrine in Islam that Christ was a fake, a kind of hologram, on the cross. You can read it in the Koran in so many words, Christ was a phantom, of sorts. Of course this has yet to strike the consciousness of the black church, but it will, as the pastors rouse themselves to figure out why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, leaving them in its dust. Oh by the way, above I should have added that the Nation of Islam has gone specifically out of its way to defame the Jews as being leading slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries, a calumny, of course. And also of course, what they forget is that the Islamic Arabs of Palestine in the thirties and forties were fans of and collaborators with the then main enemy, the Nazis, through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Also, just as they line up next to the new main enemy, these guys are shouting out the main demand they have agreed on, reparations for slavery they would like the present white person majority to vote to give them, good luck, given their public relations status. Oh and naturally nothing is going to be asked from their pals the Muslims, who are still in the slave trade business in Mauritania and Sudan. O everybody! But such is this mod’n contemporary world of today in which we live in, to echo Paul McCartney, my dear.

Ray thought, Rex sees himself as Mencken, the gay Mencken, and also as the gay Tocqueville, apparently… and what he doesn’t realize is that what he’s doing is exactly the same thing the trend analysts that Marion made fun of think they’re doing… This is thin stuff: I could do it.

This was Iris’s next assignment:

You need to appreciate certain important deformations that are becoming prominent in Americanese. What is manifesting in our language is a strange hatred of consonants, especially the letters t and n. M is shouldering n aside, but m should not rest. It too is doomed. I realized I had to lay this out for you before your arrival when, the other day, I heard a word used that completely eluded me but that was perfectly intelligible to the people it was being addressed to. The word was plampaernheut. What was being said was, of course, Planned Parenthood.

Anyway, here’s a compilation that will show you what’s happening, pretty much—

imput

turmpike

temminutes (ten minutes)

avertising

love one (loved one)

produck

aministration

aventure

owrage, owlook (outrage, outlook, the t

swallowed)

he braw me home (he brought me home)

gramparens

exackly

carboar (cardboard)

Febuary

tempature

goverment (the t survives in this one so far)

ornjuice

estatic

Ray detected a carelessness or coarsening of his brother’s handwriting in this specimen.

The next selection seemed to be about the same vintage as the one before it, at least in terms of the peculiarities in Rex’s handwriting. But there was something else about it worth noting. It seemed oddly or badly