It always made him happy when the gate clicked shut behind him. Paradise was from the Persian for walled garden, probably the first fact anybody tackling Milton learns.
Ray liked working in the heat, being conscious of it. It was tonic for him, for some reason. You get a slight continuous feeling of virtue from working in the heat, on a level with wearing wristweights all day, he thought.
The scraped papaya skin was a flimsy thing, like a silk scarf and like the platonic idea of the color orange. Idly she held it up to the light to get the pure orange effect the skin yielded when she did that. She was sensitive to color. She was an aesthete, a genuine one. She stopped to notice aesthetic events there was really no time for, fleeting conjunctures and juxtapositions of things. Later you were glad you had bothered.
They turned to go back. He could sense that there was something she wanted to broach and probably would, before they got home, something not comfortable. Walks had a way of inducing things to come to the surface, repressed things. He had no theory as to why that was so, but wondered if it had something to do with sheer locomotion itself, the conjuncture of expelling something weighty or unpleasant and simultaneously leaving it behind physically. He thought, You escape your words as you go, in a certain way.
God I am stupid, he thought. His theory of why walks induced secrets to exfoliate had left out the most obvious explanation for why the situation would apply to him, at least. It was the fact of surveillance. Outdoors was safe, or safer.
Somehow Kerekang had penetrated Tennyson and found something splendid there. And although the Tennyson had been just one ingredient in the eulogy, it had been the heart of it, for Ray. It was what had rapt him away. He was sorry to say that this didn’t happen to him much anymore. It could still happen with Milton, if he got rolling, reading late, alone, on an empty stomach, oddly enough. Or if he was tired. Then it could happen. It had happened the first time he’d touched Milton. It was the whole point of literature, or one of them, anyway. Absent awhile from my designs was a line from somewhere that described that feeling of being extricated from yourself in a flash, in a liquid way, without struggle. Movies lacked the power to do it for him, certainly never movies on tape.
Morel had a trait which, in Ray’s experience, was common among important or self-important people. This was a reflex tendency to be aware at all times of who in the immediate area of the important person might be more important to talk to than present company. It was a scanning reflex.
She was one of those people who have a need to walk around while they brush their teeth, in whom the act of brushing sets up a tension over the basic nullity and boringness of the procedure that they have to release by strolling while they do it, holding one hand cupped under the chin as they go. People in that category were always assiduous brushers. More nominal brushers like himself could stay in one place until they finished.
“Once you look at it, almost everything people do in religion fits one way or another with the attempt to recapture a moment when there was an all-powerful protector-lawgiver figure in our lives, and we go through motions in this regressed state that deep down we believe are the kind that ought to attract the corrective attention of this all-powerful person. This comes from neoteny, the long period of dependency human infants have. When we get into a crisis, we want to regress into the power of a fatherlike entity, a patrimorph is what Davis calls it. Then we recapture the endorphins we got from being taken care of or attended to, historically. It’s a theory. It’s partly from Freud except that Davis doesn’t think this collapsing back is sick, a pathology, the way Freud did. He thinks it’s normal, and even, in a way, healthy. But it’s also a joke, and silly. Everything really fits with this. Confession. All the kinds of self-mortification, to make yourself more like a deserving injured or perfect child, all that. All the born-again symbology. Purity and obedience. Making yourself either pathetic or into the simulacrum of a deserving child covers just about everything from fasting and rending your garments to all the thousands of mortifications of the flesh, to being celibate, meaning you’re making yourself into a simulated presexual being, like a baby.”
It was doubtless the suggestion of guidedness in human affairs that luck and intuition stood for that he hated. There was no design, no occult design. Odd conjunctions not even rising to the status of coincidence also annoyed him, like the odd fact that the previous chief of station had been a collector of ancient Roman whorehouse tokens and the present one was secretly notorious within the agency for his practice of founding high-end whorehouses as part of his collection regime wherever he was posted.
In Marxian terms, Karl Marlo had been a reactionary. He had been a defender of the guilds. He had been an opponent of industrialism. He had wanted the extension of the guild system, with its masters and apprentices and its slow, merit-based upward mobility and employment stability. The whole thing was interesting. And Marlo had hated the liberals, who were for the industrial system, more than anything, which ought to recommend him to the liberal-hating Boyle, except that the historical context was so wildly different. What Kerekang wanted in Botswana was something like what Marlo had wanted. He had been influenced by Marlo and by an American named Borsodi. He wanted households to raise their own food and have fruit trees and raise small stock and sell any surplus on the open market. What was so terrible about that? There was a cosmic joke going on here. The reason Marlo had hated liberals was because they wanted to open everything up to the market, which he knew would mean doom for the guilds, and he had been right. Kerekang was an individualist, rightly judged. He wanted every family to be allocated an equal plot and house and access to water and he had schemes for raising a variety of agricultural products and taking the surplus for sale, which would sustain the family. You would have a base and you couldn’t be turned out into the street, like the homeless, but you could do wage work on the side, to the degree you chose. It was yeoman democracy, more than anything. It was Jeffersonian. It was innocent.
It occurred to Ray that a prime reason people want power is so they can say no, have that pleasure, exercise the power to prohibit. It was how some people made the world simpler, people who hated the confusion of the world. It was primitive.
“There is a difference between being yourself and playing yourself, which is something we all do. You do it when you’re tired and want to get through something that’s difficult in some way. Men do it more, I think.”
It was pointless to envy people like Keletso their simpler existences and pointless to go to the ultimate question of whether the world would be better off, net, once the main effort of your life had been added up, and especially pointless in his case because the main effort of his life had been to collaborate with others in preventing certain events from transpiring, so that his work product consisted of a null set, a sequence of zeros, unevents, very difficult to judge to say the least. His life was like the medals the agency gave its heroes and put into a vault and told nobody outside the agency about.
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.
He was unhappy to be thinking about his temptation to not exist, that period of his life. It hadn’t come into his consciousness for years. The Kalahari was bringing it back because the Kalahari was saying something to him. It was saying to die, actually. He was being notional and he knew it. But in the first stillness of dawn, especially, there was an infinitely faint ambient whine or hum detectible. He had to hold his breath to hear it. A similar thing was alleged to happen in the Arctic. In the Kalahari he assumed insect song or activity to be the thing behind the whine, but that could hardly be the case in the Arctic. It didn’t matter. No, what the desert was saying was that you would die if you got out of your iron bubble of food and water and first aid. Nobody could live in such a terrain except the Bushmen and they died at what ages, early, worn out by the effort to exist. Everyone said they were happy in that place, liked it.
Being read to was something Iris loved. It was almost magical, the effect it could have on her spirits. Undoubtedly what was happening when she was being read to was that she was regressing to experiences in her childhood that had been consistently pleasant. It was excellent to have pleasant tracts of childhood to regress to. He must have some. Of course he did.
How could he conceivably get what Strange News was, lacking any acquaintance with the genre, which, say, Coleridge’s Notebooks would be a reasonable example of, lines like My Bowels shall sound as an Harp interspersed with all sorts of oddments and sentiments like Let us contend like the Olive and the Vine to see which can bring forth the best fruit rather than contending like wild beasts or whatever the negative comparison had been. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t be expected to remember everything. Also it would be a safe bet that Quartus had never bumped into, say, a reproduction of the Mayan Codex, which Strange News with its sequences of enigmatic bits and pieces reminded Ray of, sort of. And then there were the nosegays the French made, bêtisiers? compilations of everyday grotesqueries and stupidities. Intelligent people spent their entire academic careers staring fruitlessly at items like the Mayan Codex.
She understood what was wrong with repetition of experience, vocationally. She understood why he had never wanted to be just the one thing, a teacher, for that reason. She had understood about what the agency work had meant to him. The agency had provided him a receptacle, a chamber, a secret chamber where what was going on was not boring. Secret adultery would undoubtedly accomplish the same thing for other people.
There was a falling asleep trick he just remembered. He didn’t know where he had picked it up. He hadn’t thought of it for years. It was possible that it was something he knew from training, or from beloved Marion Resnick. The idea was to take the sparks and lines and curlicues and all the other bright fragments in the eidetic display that shows up behind your eyelids every night, eidetic debris it had been described as, and catch the bits and pieces and through willpower force them into a solid coherent shape like a triangle or an oblong or a circle. He remembered doing it successfully. It was a strain to do it and it no doubt worked because the peculiar effort took your mind off the crimes and failings that rose up gnashing their teeth when it was time to rest so that you could continue your crimes when the sun came up the next day.
He had to retreat so he could attack properly, reculer pour mieux sauter, was the phrase. We live out phrases we barely remember, he thought.
Kerekang was standing off by himself, outside the faux cave, like a fireman without a hose, which was Iris’s phrase for people in hapless solitude, or appearing to be.
They were becoming a conspiracy, it felt like, a sauve qui peut thing, and his hat was off to the French for their beautiful precisions, especially when it came to treachery.