Free Mating by Norman Rush Page B

leaving, not touch anything. Then he left and it stopped. I walked him through it again when he told me about it because I thought the paper ash was a clue. It may have been. One of his chores as a boy was to endlessly burn newspapers and periodicals in a backyard incinerator. His father subscribed to everything, but by the time Nelson was fifteen or so his father’s reading had become haphazard and was in the process of stopping altogether, so Nelson would be burning a lot of periodicals unopened, in their mailers. And it had been painful for him, and he had a strong image of stirring the ashes and ofwhole intact pages reduced to black or gray ash with the print still readable. He denied there was a connection.
    Finally I got myself in hand. Not proceeding would be even more demoralizing than seeing where this would come out, even if it was ridiculous. And so to bed.
Two Feints
    He came in glum. I was rehearsed.
    I saturated the first half hour with protestations that I repented the whole thing, that I had been incredibly jejune, that the little nips of Mainstay I had taken while I was massaging him had been part of the problem, that I was distraught. I looked the part thanks to my dark night of the soul. My plea was that we forget it. It was just that when he had said Please let me do something for you it had been the equivalent of someone inviting you to make a wish, no more. Also I didn’t want things to end uglily because I had to start thinking about getting home and I wanted to not leave a stain behind.
    Also, I said, I know you can’t help but worry this is something that however circuitously could endanger your job. I want you to know I’m not cavalier about jobs. You can fall into a fissure between jobs and never be seen again, because of your age, for instance. My antecedents are one hundred percent working class, I said, by which I mean just barely arrived there and glad of it. Here I was exploiting my having gotten him to let slip that he was Labour, which people at his level in the ministry he was in are supposed to reveal only on pain of death, I gathered.
    I forget what I made for dinner, but I remember he toyed with the entrée. Not the bread, though. He could never keep his hands off my baking.
    We sat in the heat. I was supposed to pick up that he’d made some brave decision that rendered all the preambling I was doing irrelevant.
    Might we talk as friends, or family? he finally asked. He was going into a role.
    I know what you’re doing, I said: You have an instinct for the avuncular. But go ahead anyway. He smiled.
    Well, there are so many things of interest, aren’t there? The Bushmen. Let us say you were concerned with the Bushmen—everyone here is, it seems. The fate of the Bushmen. Sad, isn’t it, that the South Africans are turning them into trackers to hunt down guerrillas in Ovamboland?
    This annoyed me no end, because it was such common knowledge. But I just said that I knew about this because it had been in the Rand Daily Mail, and it was more than sad. Patronize me at your peril, my attitude said, and he got it.
    So sorry, he murmured. I could feel him punching the reset button.
    Then, Um, did I think there was anything to the stories that the South Africans were bribing certain Kwena chiefs to get them interested in joining up with the five million Kwenas the Boers already controlled through their thug Mangope across the border in Bophuthatswana, thusly threatening to partition and wreck Botswana for being so uncooperative? Mangope’s agents were working everywhere. I am summarizing. Halfway through this I started finishing his sentences for him. I read the Economist too, I said. But I didn’t need to read the Economist to know about Mangope. I reprised how serious I was about forgetting the whole thing, how embarrassed I was that I had ever said anything, especially if this was the outcome.
    Next I got a disorganized series of asides, essentially, to the effect that I was really a