Mortals

organized, for Rex.

You could call these some useful current tropes you are sure to run into. I am providing them to you partly for desensitization purposes, so that you won’t be disoriented when you hear them used so repeatedly as you will, and partly for you to use, yourself, should you wish to pass for an uptodate denizen anytime you like.

Herewith the candidate tropes and prefab expressions social interactions are increasingly made up of.

—The premier thing to say if you should injure someone whilst you are regrettably in a rage is Let the healing begin.

—Say of any scene of natural disaster that it is just like a movie and if people have been hurt just like a war movie.

—If there is a huge government scandal but you happen to be favorably disposed toward the party in power and responsible for the mess, say There’s enough blame to go around for everyone.

—Remember that however miserably you have wasted or screwed up your life, you should say I’m a survivor, meaning that you are truly proud of uh, well, not being dead. And if you have had a grossly misspent life, be prepared to tell anyone critiquing you that it has been all for the best because you are about to embark on a career as a motivation counselor.

—If a close friend or someone in your family is killed by a malefactor but the malefactor is caught, say Good, but nothing can bring him/her back.

There was more, which Ray was going to skip because it would be similarly annoying. He would read a little more of this rant and then go on to the last assignment.

—Be there for you is a phrase that will quickly make you as sick as it has me, because it means nothing. It is everywhere. It is a phrase that purports. What it promises is that the promiser will lounge lovingly in the vicinity of the person who is in terrible trouble but without undertaking anything as concrete as lending money or driving him to the clinic from time to time. On television recently the phrase was used by a woman who has the largest collection of teddy bears in the state of Oregon. She was asked why she collected the teddy bears so madly, and yes the answer was that it was because they were always there for her. Yes, this phrase says, I will always be there watching the mess you’ve gotten into but not really assisting you, just sadly smiling. You will discover that if you get into deep trouble the people who said they would be there for you really did mean in fact only and nothing more than that they would hang around as spectators to your decline and fall. There is no love.

Ray thought, Man how he hates America! There were apparently no redeeming features! What had America done to deserve his hatred, other than destroy the gay-hating Nazis and the Russians who until recent years had thrown gays into prison? And hadn’t it been the great god of Russian literature Gorky who’d said homosexuality was a product of fascism? Rex hated America, but how could he explain a guy running for the presidency and pledging to legalize homosexuals in the military? Of course Bush was going to crush him, but still.

He didn’t want to read more. He wanted Iris to prance into the room naked. She might.

This last item he was supposed to read was startling. It wasn’t clear what it was. Was it a dedication?

Partly it was. It was a series of statements printed in turquoise ink, waveringly, drunkenly lettered, on a sheet of vellum. There was no heading.

I present this to the great friend of my life, Iris, my great friend, this assemblage of truths and secrets to peruse.

O my coevals! The secrets of a people are revealed in individual asides. Our lies reveal the deepest truths about us.

Please, Ray thought. This man was supposed to be the nemesis of the cliche.

In jests we show our deepest sorrow. All the secrets I possess are here, somewhere. You must juxtapose. Wake up and smell the offal!

The thing was signed ungracefully, atypically, which reminded him of something odd in his own history. His signature had been rather stiff and careful up to the time of their father’s death. And then he had begun signing his name more loosely and in fact in a form very much like their father’s. He hadn’t thought much about it.

Well, he was surprised. Unless this was a draft of something better, he was very surprised. But it seemed not to be a draft. It seemed to be a demonstration of Rex’s gnomic and aphoristic aspirations going mad on the page. They were feeble.

Ray felt he was on the point of being dragged into collaborating with someone seeking the lowest form of literary immortality as established and pioneered by the annoying James Joyce, who thought it would be such a good idea to create puzzle palaces for thousands of specialists to wander around in forever, using his genius to fabricate and drop clues and conundrums, or conundra, that would turn the body of his work into an everlasting object of academic interest and industry. That had been Joyce’s crap idea of immortality, endless lines of clerks, really, clerks fondling his clues and getting tenure out of doing it, hives of clerks working to reconstruct the so playful so antic so smart mind of James Joyce. There was enough natural mystery to go around and enough social mystery as well, and mystery was his enemy. Of course Dubliners was great, and Portrait was, unless the concluding sentence was a trick and joke intended to let you know you had identified with a protagonist who was in fact an intellectual peacock and a fool, but his great work had been prior to all the puzzlemaking, for which fuck him.

He sat there.

Iris was in the doorway, naked, virtually, with a gauzy green stole around her neck and hanging down over her breasts and leaving her beautiful lower self exposed, to his joy. But she looked unhappy.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, don’t you see the decline I see?”

“Yes, his penmanship, unless he was just in a hurry to throw together this preface or whatever it is.”

“But Ray, not only in his handwriting. There’s a loss of clarity.”

“You could be right.”

“I am and you know I am.”

She was back at the luggage again, bent over delightfully to him and then squatting, searching for something, more evidence. She had it. She presented him with a snapshot, a Polaroid, of Rex. It was dated February 1990 and it didn’t tell him anything. It was his fat brother, unsmiling, wearing a beret.

“This doesn’t add anything,” he said. He studied the photograph.

“There’s something pitiful, Ray.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t like his teeth. He always had to be begged to smile when anyone was trying to take pictures.”

Ray was having a definite event. It was inward but it was also visual and felt like an image coming forward through his head and through his eyes and out vaguely, out into the air between his eyes and the photo of Rex. It was the image of a minor character from his boyhood, Crawford, a contractor their father had hired to build an addition to their house and who had become a recurrent presence with them over the years, when something needed to be done or redone. His father had made him redo a flooring project. Was Crawford his first name or his second name? Ray couldn’t remember. Rex looked like the dark, heavy Crawford, the heavy but preening Crawford. This could be a picture of Crawford. Ray had always been uncomfortable around Crawford, for no reason that he could remember, for no reason that he would have been able to name at the time. Crawford had never been a handsome dog, and in his forties, whatever charm he’d had was gone, or almost, although he strutted around like a peacock. He had gone around with the collar of his windbreaker permanently turned up, a sure sign of vanity in that