Mortals (81 page)

“What?” Ray asked.

“What kind of place is this?”

“You mean the Bird Lodge? Well, it was supposed to be a resort for birdwatching, game drives …”

“Because apparently they had a zoo here, too, a small zoo.”

“That’s right. I remember that. One of the attractions was a private zoo. I don’t know that they ever got around to stocking it.”

“It’s stocked now.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have people in cages. They’re holding people in the zoo cages.” “What, they took you there to treat them? And how many people? And who is it?”

“I don’t know who they are. They’re local, mostly Bakgalagadi, I think. They understood my Setswana okay, but when they spoke it was not the Setswana I’m used to. I don’t know any Sekgalagadi, unfortunately.”

“How many were there, I mean how many are there?”

“Twenty. Four women and the rest men. All the people in the cages are black, of course …” Morel was agitated.

“Calm down,” Ray said.

“There were only black people in the zoo. And I’m in
here
, with you.”

“I can see how you feel, but look. It’s an accident. The zoo was meant to attract white people, tourists. It was a facility, it was available, it got put to use.”

“I saw three exposure cases. What am I supposed to do? I have nothing to work with.”

“Who are they, though? Did they tell you anything? Are they from the Toromole area …?”

“I couldn’t talk about anything but their symptoms. And that’s all they were allowed to talk about. That was the restriction. I followed orders. There were two of those goons with me. I feel like killing. I feel like killing.”

“I know. I do too.”

“I said they had to get those people indoors. Or at least they had to let them have fires at night, allow that.”

“Will they do it?”

“They laughed at me. I’ll get them, though, somehow I will, I’ll testify against them. If I get the chance.”

“We need to keep calm, come on.”

Morel squeezed his eyes shut and began breathing measuredly. Ray waited.

“Now I’m all right,” Morel said.

But he wasn’t all right. He was in a state of agitation. He was in the corner gesturing violently that Ray should come over and boost him up so that he might examine the ceiling. Escaping was on his mind, clearly.

Ray went over to him. “This isn’t a good idea. If they come in and see us doing this we’re in trouble. Really. I’ve gone over this. We’d need tools to get out through the ceiling. There’s chicken wire, layers of it, up there. And it doesn’t make sense because even if we got out we’d just be here. They watch this place. There’s nowhere to go except the bush and we don’t even have water. They patrol around here at night. You can hear them. Listen to me. Believe me.”

This was bad. He didn’t want to have Morel obsessing on this. There was a subject matter they had to discuss. He needed Morel to be calm, in his right mind, because of the subject matter.

Now Morel was scrutinizing the floorboards, pointlessly.

Ray said, “Tell me anything you observed over in the hotel.”

“What did I observe? I observed they have a problem. They don’t have a functioning medic with this unit. And they have two guys with serious sepsis, infected wounds. I don’t know what’s wrong with the medic. He’s comatose. I think it’s an overdose of some kind, maybe Mandrax. There’s plenty of dagga in the air, by the way, over there. That’s what I observed, this is a messed-up group of people. This is a messed-up operation. It could go any direction you can think of. That’s my sense of it. That’s what I observed.”

M
orel was continuing the business of studying the inner surface of their place of confinement. It was compulsive activity, something that would make him feel better without necessarily leading to a course of action. It made sense for Ray not to interfere. He would watch.

Before long Morel reached the point of examining for the second time aspects of the place he had already gone over. He was in a loop. He would recognize it momentarily, Ray was sure. And he would stop when he recognized it.

Ray could wait. The subject matter was waiting.

No one was coming for them.

This was the time to take up the subject matter. He would regret it. He expected to regret it. He couldn’t help it.

They were sitting on the floor, on opposite sides of the room, which seemed favorable to Ray, favorable to the project at hand. Getting a discussion going and sustaining it if they were closer, in closer proximity, would be harder. The distance was a good thing. The acoustics in their prison were good.

“My wife,” Ray said.

Morel said nothing.

Ray had to be sure he was being heard. He would have to speak a little louder. He might have to move closer. He didn’t want to startle Morel.

“My wife is okay, you said.”

“Iris is fine, yes.”

“You’ve examined her, of course.”

“Yes and she’s fine.”

Ray wanted to know urgently and irrationally if Iris had had to undress
for her examination, if she’d been naked for it. If it had been a full-scale examination, then of course she would have had to. Of course she would have been wearing one of those inadequate paper tunics. There were protocols. But of course he was being ridiculous because Morel had been with Iris naked under, how should he put it, under worse circumstances than an examination, worse from his standpoint, anyway. It was unlikely that they had gone to it without undressing. He needed to know everything, and he meant
everything
. And he wanted to know how it had started, what the actual trigger had been. And he wanted to know if the actual trigger was something, some act, some particular mistake, that he’d committed, so that he could direct the time machine he was going to get into in order to go back and redo everything to the right moment, the right date. He needed to know everything, but he had to recognize that there were limits to the detail he could expect to extract. He had to be rational.

He moved forward a little, away from the wall. He didn’t like raising his voice, and somehow that fact reminded him of something funny Iris had said, once. She had said it apropos the communications officer at the embassy. She had observed him in a number of settings and she had said, You know there’s something wrong with a guy’s relationship with his wife when he lowers his voice whenever he refers to her despite the fact that she’s in another country.

“So you examined her.” He was back to that. He didn’t want to be.

“I did. I said I did.”

Ray wanted to get unstuck from the medical side of his subject matter because in fact Morel had been helpful with a few concrete things, like teaching Iris to hock mucus out of the back of her throat, and, irritatingly, with her cystitis, and with her regularity problems. She had been grateful. And one thing Ray didn’t need was any reason to wallow in areas that implied he should be in a state of gratitude himself, toward Morel, not with what he had to do, what he had to get out of him.

There were too many sides to the subject matter. One minute he wanted revenge, if he could get it, and the next he was what, avuncular, wanting to know what Morel’s intentions were. There was no avoiding that question, ultimately. It would make a difference if his intention was to marry her after taking her away, marry her and be good to her forever. That would be one thing. Somehow that had to be determined.

Be yourself, he thought. That was an all-purpose thing he had heard from his mother ten thousand times in completely disparate situations. It was a bromide. It was the answer to how to get through any conceivable
situation. He should be more charitable toward his mother. She was suffering over Rex, her favorite.

“What do you think of Iris?” Ray asked. He’d wanted it to sound like a different question than the one he’d been asking so far. But it sounded like a repetition.

“I think she’s doing fine. Medically she’s excellent. But there are, or there were, rather, certain areas I helped her with that I don’t feel I can go into. But as of right now, she’s fine. I mean it.”

Ray found this enraging. He controlled his rage.

He said, “You mean because of doctor-patient rules? That’s why you can’t say, exactly.” He knew he was sounding hostile.

“That’s right.”

“But I’m her husband.”

“Of course. But that’s not relevant.”

“Don’t give me that, man.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“Let me put it this way to you, in case you don’t know. She tells me everything anyway. If there was something she neglected to tell me, it was by accident, something that got away because of circumstances. I guarantee you that. Anything she told you is something she would’ve told me, I guarantee you. We told, I mean we
tell
, each other everything.”

“You’re getting excited. Don’t get excited.”

“I’m not excited, I’m just trying to get you to understand something.

“Anything going on with Iris, physical things, anything, I knew all about. So, okay. That was our history. That’s our history. Same with me telling her about my problems, my ailments.

“So okay.

“So okay the only thing I can think of, kind of thing I can think of, kind of thing there might be a case for keeping secret, would be sexual things.

“Sexual, and I don’t even know what I mean, unless I mean something like a sexual disease she got someplace she didn’t want me to know about. Or catch from her. I’m using my imagination here.

“What else, a miscarriage she didn’t want me to know about. An abortion. I don’t know how that would ever happen. She wanted children. She always did. But I’m using my imagination, and let’s say the father was an insignificant other not myself. I am exhausting my creative powers.”

Ray felt himself doing something stupid, and sensing it was bringing him close to panic. He was referring to Iris and their life together as past, over with, past tense. That was impossible. He was giving away the barn. It was destroying his strategy for getting the whole truth, not that he had
a strategy worth the name. He had some ideas about how to proceed. But he was putting their relationship in the past tense too much, which was tipping his hand. There was a way to do successful interrogations.

He waited as long as he could for Morel to respond. He had no patience. He went ahead.

“So I can imagine situations it would be legitimate to keep confidential. Of course they’re fantasy situations, if I know anything about my wife, and I know a great deal about my wife. But I can imagine them and I don’t contest that it would be legitimate to be confidential about them. I’m repeating myself, I see.

“So you can do me a huge favor and just tell me yes or no, was it, is it, something like that, something she would legitimately need to keep private. I can imagine similar cases for myself, similar fantasies, which is what they would be. But … and I know I’m straining the limits of your professional oaths and all that, no doubt, but just tell me if what you’re talking about that you can’t elucidate was something in that category, that’s all, just that. You can do that.”

Now he was skirting another abyss he had to avoid.

Imploring
was the abyss, or rather it was right next to it, the real abyss being begging, sheer begging. He could see himself falling into that as a last resort, if his interrogation strategy failed, which it couldn’t. He was a professional. He had been trained in unusual subjects. He had to remember that. Be yourself, he thought.

Morel was being intolerably dignified. Ray felt he couldn’t take much more of it.

He had to go on. “Look, can you do me the favor of saying yes or not, I mean no, no it wasn’t anything sexual, some sexual thing, accident, misstep, what have you, or yes unfortunately it was, whichever is the truth.”

He had kept himself from saying please, by a hair. He was glad. But he seemed to be in a maze, with every step, every turn, taking him back to the beast at the heart of the maze, the beast with two backs, in fact.

“Don’t put me in this position,” Morel said.

“I don’t mean to. But look at it this way. This will be medication for me, sort of.”

Ray had something he wanted to communicate about sex before he forgot it, lost his grip on it. The thought was important. But Morel was hardly the correct recipient. And Ray wanted to remember it, for later. And it was an insight he was having about the sex act with a beloved, and the insight was that the poets were wrong and that sex was not a metaphor for loving, a good metaphor for love, for entering a beloved,
unifying with her, making a unity. It was difficult to put clearly. But sex was not a good metaphor for loving because there was a form of connection between real lovers that made sex look like an approximation of it. People like Lawrence were responsible for getting the less important thing moved up to the head of the line where it didn’t belong. It was possible he was making this up so good sex between Iris and Morel wouldn’t be so painful. Iris would understand what he meant, or she would have. And there was the rub, so to speak. Of course it was possible that his insights were commonplace and uninteresting. That was why he needed Iris. Because not only would she know if they were, no, the fact was that just framing a way to set something in front of her mind would cause him to think twice, see it for what it was, dump it or postpone it, or improve it enough to go with. That was then, he thought. It was something he had to get used to.

Morel said, “Okay look you can stop worrying about that kind of thing.” He said it rapidly and Ray knew why. He was speeding through it because it made him feel false. He was affirming that there hadn’t been some kind of precursory sexual situation with Iris, which he could do with a clear conscience. And at the same time he was skating past the fact that he was having an affair in the present, right at present, if affair was the right word for it. He was skating past a sex situation that was worse, more monumental.

“Thank you,” Ray said.

“My pleasure,” Morel answered. Ray resented Morel’s choice of language.

“So then can you just go a little further for me, on what it is you feel you have to be confidential about? I mean, narrow it down in some way.”