Free Mortals by Norman Rush

about bananas when I’m not here to remind you, that is, when I leave you? Stop it, he said to himself.
    He thought he smelled smoke. Smoke would be comforting. He inhaled hard. Smoke could be responsible for his eye situation. For braais, the Tswana sometimes used morula wood, which he would be willing to bet was loaded with resins, a greasewood almost. Also, they might have jazzed up the pit fire by slopping kerosene into it, speaking of fumes. He must be swimming in irritants. Just then the kind of music hehated most began to jolt and blare from the patio, right when he needed to concentrate, naturally.
    His eyes were streaming. If he could dredge up the funny side of this, very fast, that might be brilliant. That was a thought. Something was making this happen. If sadness of some kind had anything to do with it he should try to get down to the hilarious side that everything supposedly has. Not that sadness did. There was another reason he should try this, something he could almost remember, something he remembered feeling uncomfortable about when Iris mentioned it, which should remind him. He almost had it. He had it, Iris reading a clipping to him proving that if you force yourself to smile your brainwaves change after the fact, proving you’re happier no matter how rotten you felt when you started smiling, what
shit
, but true, apparently.
    But what was something funny? It was like amateur theatricals, sticking his head out when he jerked these sheets back and forth. That was amusing. What else, lately? The goat eating the kneesock doesn’t count, he thought. But the panic had been real, when he’d thought the goat had a gargantuan tongue, and when he’d tried to formulate what the panic was all about, the answer seemed to be that it related to some fear of his that the world wanted to be abnormal, or rather was abnormal.
    To hell with it, he was going to go home.

7.  Doctor Morel
    A nother thing he could take pride in was this. To find out if something of interest to him had turned up in Customs, all he had to do was drive out to the airport mid-lunchtime on Tuesdays and Fridays, roll past the arrival/departures hall, and notice if a whitewashed cobblestone in the ornamental collar encircling one of the thorn trees shading the scatter of tables near the curry and pap kiosk had been displaced inwise enough to reveal a black daub on the stone adjoining. All his contact had to do was come out a little early for his platter of bangers and mealie, disarrange the landscaping a matter of millimeters with a nudge of his foot, and nudge everything back to normalcy later on. All Ray had to do was park, go up to the prefab kiosk, and commiserate with the poor woman who was baking to death inside it while he bought an orange Fanta from her. Then he would wander along the cyclone fence to the back gate of the Customs warehouse, always being careful to have in his hand an envelope or folded sheet of paper to suggest that he had legitimate business in Customs, which he often did, in connection with shipments of schoolbooks or supplies for St. James. Clearing schoolbooks through Customs was a chore he had volunteered for on the second day of his employment at the school.
    He was proud of all his systems. He had five signal or drop arrangements in play around the city at the moment, all of them simplicity itself, and foolproof so far. The airport was an ideal nexus because it was such an active setting, usually so crowded. A lot of people drove out to the airport for lunch. The airport management had yet to figure out that concessionaires are supposed to charge more for food sold at the airport, not less. The curry was extremely cheap.
    Today the black mark was showing, so he drew into the parking lot, parked, and locked his Beetle, not forgetting to take along his paperwork dummy, a kraft envelope.
    A new and bigger airport was going up on a site farther from town, near Mmadinare. He would have to adapt. He preferred small