I realized the luminon must be the object he’d referred to earlier as something he’d given up working on because he’d concluded it would take forever. I couldn’t resist saying At the risk of being what you hate most, that is, psychologistic, at least tell me we both see this object you’re making as a form of undoing or of some process related to putting the bottle castle your father smashed back together. I thought at first he hadn’t heard me, but then he said I’m not a complete fool, am I? So what? he said. He seemed calm. I thought but didn’t say that what this bauble would most resemble once it was up was a lit-up macropineapple or one of those mirror-chip globes that tell you this is a prom and not just a regular dance. That sent old feelings cascading through me, about dance avoidance. We had established that we were both nondancers, historically. With me it was a feeling of bad faith about dancing, especially close dancing, with someone you had no intention of letting sleep with you. Dancing is erotic for me. Dancing was unpleasant for him because it got him hot, or I should say had when he was adolescing and still in the shadow of the withdrawing batwing of the church. It was a minor bond between us.
His back was to me when he said We could stay here. He may even have been fully out of sight: all I have is the voice. We were in the glassery. I may have been facing the landscape, trying to catch a glimpse of my animal, which I could sometimes do if he drifted to the far end of the kraal he was in. I know I stayed fixedly wherever I was and tried to replay what Nelson had said, to be certain he wasn’t saying something as innocent and local as that we could stay an extra couple of hours at the glassery if I sent to the kitchen for some soup and scones, rather than going back for supper to the octagon. But the inflection was wrong for that. This was what it seemed to be and it was pivotal. I felt cold. I had to deal with the way I felt, somehow, without saying something that would turn out to be fatal, something assaultive re his lifework, Tsau. Also, why did I feel so cold?
By stay, I said, you mean stay indefinitely in Tsau, us both.
That was what he meant.
But what about Jews? was my absolutely peculiar first thought. I felt panic. Staying in Tsau with Nelson could hardly be considered durance vile, but there were no Jews there. All of my best friends were Jews. The only male colleague friends Nelson ever alluded to with signs of feeling were Jewish, I had happened to note. Then there was a surge of feeling about my mother. I would never see her.
Nelson came over then and we embraced.
How smart are you, fundamentally, I was thinking, if you love someone who produces these tests for you? Because I felt it as a test. This was not the drift things had been taking.
I went on a diversion. But how could you qualify, how could you stay in Tsau, I asked, since we’re not citizens?
There was no problem. There was a provision in his contract with the government specifying that he and any dependent of his could elect citizenship — but not dual citizenship, he was quick to point out. In fact the government had been pleased, he thought, when he’d proposed it. This also was news to me, and another rung in the ladder of tests I felt I was climbing. I’m trying to be fair to myself and what I felt when this news came. I was in tumult. I wanted to know why everything comes out as an ordeal, a test. Tests have been my bête noire all my life.
I said But what about your status otherwise? The rules are that men only get to stay in Tsau as dependents, relatives. Same for Sekopololo. You can’t just say koko, I want to be a member, and get in. There are rules.
I could through you, he said. It would be like this. As my dependent you could be a citizen and as your dependent I could live here and belong to Sekopololo. It would work. You could be chartered in terms of the rules, technically: you have no money, you’re unemployed, in fact with your student loans you’re a pauper. Your mother is not a resource.
I maintained my neutral to slightly positive attitude façade fairly well until he mentioned in passing that he had recently assigned all his royalties in perpetuity to Sekopololo. We hadn’t discussed that. He described it as only a gesture, but to me it was preemptive. I felt betrayed by it, but equally I felt I was betraying Nelson with my reactions, my apparent grasping at the negatives of staying on in his creation.
I fought myself back to a casual level. I remember Denoon as now back at his workbench and holding a piece of glass up to the light. He looked absolutely beautiful to me at that moment, more beautiful than he ever had. This is a serious man, kept saying itself to me. Other men aren’t. What I was suddenly afraid of was that this moment was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion. I couldn’t stand the idea that this was ours. I didn’t know why I thought it was, even. My eyes were hot. I had to leave. This is all hypothetical, I said, keeping it declarative and trying to keep any note of entreaty out. But I knew better.
I wandered out to the kraal. The odd thing about the fait accompli Nelson was covertly presenting me with was that I hadn’t noticed it assembling itself chunk by chunk before my eyes. A case in point was his recent recurrence to the theme of development projects always seemingly being good enough only for the locals to live in and never for the founders and donors, for long. Then there had been the conjunction of his murmurings about how rapidly the surplus was accumulating in Tsau — notwithstanding that it could be accumulating even faster if people would only be a little more ascetic — and the bleak general evolution of Africa over all. Then there had been Nelson’s reversal on the subject of my thesis. Before, he had been saying I should go for something new. But now he was thinking it was salvageable. What did this mean? One thing it meant was that if I stuck with my carcass thesis I wouldn’t have to go back to Palo Alto to negotiate a new one, do new fieldwork, be away from him for a long time and dot dot dot who knows? possibly get interested in someone else. All I had seen, up until now, in those discussions was his flattering interest in my academic tsuris.
Then, irrationally, it was the graveyard, everything about it plus the prospect of ending up there, that chilled me. I knew what I would hear from Nelson if I alluded to it: If you don’t like a particular custom or usage here, you can change it, or try to, you can propose your own. That was the central virtue of Tsau, supposedly. The same applied to culture. Tsau was Paris compared to ninety-eight percent of the villages of the world. I would hear again how deeply he believed in the village qua village. Any book or periodical in the world could be brought into Tsau. There were villages in Austria today less culturally open and advanced than Tsau. I would hear again that in Tsau we had everything we have a right to demand in a continent as abused and threatened as Africa: decent food and clean water, leisure, decent and variable work, self-governance, discussion groups on anything, medical care. These were not lies.
I did something infantile: I let the wind blow into my mouth. I did that and then in the same vein, and feeling like a Chekhov character, I said to Baph My question to you is Who is composing this life for me? I hated being emotionally disheveled so suddenly. I hated my volatility. Was this a form of premature retirement I was being summoned to join Nelson in? How could it be? He was still in his forties, however barely. But of course everyone reaches that point, some sooner than others. Was he that tired? And what was the name for the madmen who crouched on top of pillars in the Libyan desert in the name of purity, some going blind in the process, and whose name I knew I knew. The name Monachists came to me. Then I put my face against Baph’s neck and stopped talking.