Mortals

Birds seemed to avoid them for nesting purposes, if his limited familiarity with the tree could support such a conclusion. The hard, smooth bark of the baobab invited stroking. They inspired affection, of a certain sort. Whatever they were, they were perfect.

Ray signaled Keletso to stop. He saw a baobab he liked. He and Keletso had evolved a considerable repertoire of hand signals that saved them a lot of surplus talk. In lower gears, the engine made enough noise to render conversation effortful. And he and Keletso shared a preference for silent travel anyway. Ray amplified his hand signal to indicate that Keletso should turn the vehicle around for the return leg, while Ray was doing his assessing. Turning could require some art, depending on road conditions. They had been proceeding in what was in essence a broad, shallow ditch, sticking to the ruts, spoors as they were called, pressed into the soft sand by whoever had preceded them. There was a lay-by, or something like one, just ahead, where a turn could be managed. They had been wrong in choosing the road they had, misled by the fact that the first few kilometers had been freshly groomed, in the usual way, by a government truck dragging a monster bouquet of thornbushes along the surface. So it had seemed promising. But the grooming task had been abandoned. The thornbush bouquet had been jettisoned and pushed up on the shoulder. The government truck curved off straight into the veld, possibly in pursuit of opportunities to do some poaching. Keletso had detected duikers moving through this neighborhood, in the distance, twice.

Ray leaned against the baobab and watched Keletso delicately maneuvering the Land Cruiser for the return journey. How long these monumental vegetables lived was something he should be able to find out. They looked ancient. He wouldn’t mind being buried under one of them, being drawn up molecule by molecule into the ridiculousness and permanence they represented, if they were, in fact, longlived, like sequoias. He loved these goddamned things. They were like monuments, but slightly gesticulating monuments, when the breeze rattled their silly branches. He wasn’t being mordant. Everybody had to be buried someplace. He assumed he was going to be cremated when he died, but ashes had to go someplace too, and under a baobab would be fine with him. Molecules weren’t the smallest particles, though, nor were, what, electrons. All he could think of were monads, which came from Leibnitz and philosophy and not physics. He thought, Au fond we are monads, with gonads. He moved around to the far side of the baobab, where he was out of Keletso’s sight line.

The realization that you, yourself, are going to die, in fact, declares itself in funny ways, he thought. He could give a new example. Iris, in assembling the mountain of reading matter she wanted him to have, had included three months’ worth of unread Times Literary Supplements. And as he was reading through them, in the desert, he had noticed that his reflexive impulse to tear out and save advertisements for books he might want to read at some point was gone. A year or so back he had given up clipping titles from the Books Received listings of the TLS, which he could see had been precursory to this. Something was letting him know that there was enough on his forward reading list to occupy him for the rest of this life. In fact, there had been a longer progression. He had been serious about bibliography, cutting out ads neatly and gluing them to index cards color-coded for urgency. Then he had devolved to tearing ads out. And so on down. And now he had enough in his stuffed folders, enough. He had been serious. He had thought of literature and Milton in particular as subjects he would conquer like Shackleton or whoever it was had gotten to the Pole first, but not Shackleton, Peary or Amundsen, who? Definitely not Shackleton, he thought, shivering. He was getting old. He thought, In my time machine I would probably, before I went to Milton’s deathbed, go to Shackleton and the other one, Scott, and say Don’t go, leave the wastelands of the world and stay home… Grow old and perish at home in the arms of your wife… Goodbye and good luck.

It was time to write on his site-assessment form. It was something he had to do, had to be seen doing. He had put down a few scribbles already, during his approach to the baobab, for Keletso’s benefit. But, out of Keletso’s view, he would do something new. It had started as a joke but it had turned into something a little interesting. Instead of jotting down fake notes and observations, he had tried relaxing and closing his eyes and going blank and letting himself write in a dissociated state, or as much of one as he could attain. It was automatic writing, a weak variant. It was something to do. So far mostly he had gotten poetic flotsam, weird doggerel, grandiose self- instruction, pure nonsense, and sequences written so illegibly it was impossible to tell what was meant. He slid down to a squatting position and set the clipboard on the sand in front of him. Another nice thing about baobabs was that tampan ticks avoided them, the shade cast by the baobabs being so negligible. He got his Bic out. He tried. He had waited too long to get started. This wouldn’t work if he felt pressed. But he tried. He hummed to distract himself. He wrote a little. He hummed more vigorously, the Ode to Joy, always his first choice when he needed a tune to block something out, distract him. He was trying. It was no good. He couldn’t let go. He looked at what he’d written.

o hell o hell you look so well I’d like to touch
your Annabel
o brother snake I am awake
Ah me and my I like to die he hit my eye go home
ye fly
Thy alabaster cities gleam from
she to shining she

This was his worst effort. Thy should be thine. The glints from the dim past were boring. As a child he had thought someone saying He hit my fist with his eye was funny. He had known what he was writing as he was writing. The Bic was wrong. With the Bic he had to bear down too much. A pencil required less pressure and the results had been better, although still stupid. He got up to go.

Lately his appetite was problematic. His clothes were fitting more loosely. Keletso didn’t like it and was being maternal. Keletso wanted him to eat what he had just been handed. He wasn’t sure what it was. It was a mass. He probed it and concluded that it was a concoction of two kinds of dried fruit, apricot and pear, boiled soft. He was supposed to eat it with some of the warm box milk. He couldn’t.

Keletso was eating his own portion demonstratively. Ray was touched. It was possible that he could eat some, a little. They sat in the solid heat.

It was definite that government presence in the region was withdrawing, ceasing to be, where it had existed at all, in widely separated nodes, hamlets strung along the main north-south route. They were finding government offices closed, with no explanations for the closures posted. Government vehicle traffic was down to almost nothing. They were still seeing the occasional Wildlife officer. The last one they had seen had told them that the two fishing camps between Sepopa and the Caprivi Strip, on the western edge of the Okavango, had been closed, mysteriously.

Keletso was waving a shaker of cinnamon at him. He accepted it. Keletso wanted him to sprinkle cinnamon on his compote.

It was Ray’s turn to hold the umbrella support, but Keletso was refusing to relinquish it to him and at the same time making head motions indicating that it was more important for Ray to concentrate on eating. So he ate.

Keletso said, “Rra, someway you must phone up your wife, isn’t it?”

Ah, Ray thought. This was bold of Keletso. He was picking up that their radiophone contacts with Gaborone had stopped, just about. Clearly it worried him. They had gone four days without being able to find a link. Keletso was beginning to appreciate the strangeness of the zone they were in. So far Keletso hadn’t asked for any messages to be passed along when they had managed to make calls. He mailed something once. He was a bachelor.

Ray said, “You’re not married, yourself, rra, you told me.”

“Not as yet.”

“So, still, do you have any need to send word to anyone, when we phone next? Do you, rra?”

“Yah, well, no.”

“I apologize for not asking.”

“It is fine because in any case we must be returning back soon.”

Ray nodded vaguely. Keletso wanted to be reassured that this was going to end soon. Ray couldn’t help him.