Erasure

by Percival Everett

  (3) Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories. * Precisely is terribly imprecise, as the “first analysts” were not trying to see a landscape in a bean, but rather define the necessary and sufficient conditions for calling a story a story. So, “precisely” is ironic, quietly claiming that the subject text is above the pedestrian efforts of the “first analysts” (SEM. precision). What is implied by reference to the likeness in mission of the buddhists and the first analysts is that the buddhists are not in fact among the first analysts. Those bean-gazing, fat boys have no need for the establishment of narrative model because the model is already contained in the bean. Precisely—the buddhists do not look to the bean for a representative landscape, but for the landscape therein contained. Theirs is not to extract the essential quality which makes that thing what it is, but to see it completely, in which case attention to particular features might well destroy the achievement we have been told we should admire. Is our first analyst to be Aristotle and his concern with praxis and proairesis? Or shall we wonder about the prehistorics who must weigh the telling of two descriptions of events and decide which is true and which is fabrication, the assumption here being that telling the truth requires only remembering, while offering a fabrication requires a picture of what a telling of the truth might sound like. But maybe we are simply to choose the Russian formalists and leave it at that (SYM. analysts). And they are attempting (ACT. attempting) to undercover this model, the obvious implication being that they have failed. One never says of a man who has struck the motherlode, “He is attempting to find gold.” (SEM. attempt) … to see all the world’s stories * Embedded here is already the conclusion that there is this universal story (REF. story). The naming has done either the damage or the work and cannot be undone. The naming has created the thing itself and to then go look for that which makes it that thing is to fail to acknowledge that in the first place its existence must be verified; having been named not constituting the same as really being (REF. unicorn).

  (4) … (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a great narrative structure, which we shall reapply (for verification) to any one narrative … * As if there have been stones of which it has been said, “Is this story?” and really meaning it, instead of meaning what a lousy story it in fact is. At best, the effort seems a response to the commercial picture of the publisher saying to the writer, “You call this a story?” But this digression takes the whole of the notion (though a fragment of the text) and falls outside the spirit of the analysis. so many (HER. many SEM. many) ** seems ironic, even contentious, seeming to laud the productivity of the makers of stories, yet offering the comment parenthetically, thus compartmentalizing the writers of stories without ever mentioning them. they thought (SEM, thought HER they REF. they) ** an obvious announcement of the failure to complete their mission. The rest tells us what they expect from the beans into which they stare, but “they thought” renders their beans blank. And so we come to dismantling of the endeavor as the endeavor of the text at hand, Sarrasine, not being chosen as a model at all, but accepted as one treated in a way which in turn is a model for the treatment of other texts, as is this text. A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.

  When I was done, there was a tentative smattering of applause and then a nerve-dulling silence while people tried to figure if they were offended and why. As I stepped back toward my seat a ball of keys flew past my head and hit the flocked wallpaper. I looked into the audience to find Davis Gimbel, the editor of a journal called Frigid Noir.

  Gimbel shook his fist in the air and shouted, “You bastard!”

  I could tell immediately that he hadn’t understood a word of what I had read; his reaction seemed inappropriate and extreme. But he was eager to appear as though comprehension had come quickly to him.

  Linda Mallory was in the audience and we shared a look. She indicated with a nod that she thought my paper was all right and offered a single, quiet, continued applause. I picked up Gimbel’s keys and tossed them back to him.

  “You will no doubt need these,” I said. These words too were taken as an insult and Gimbel, a man who fancied himself a kind of Hemingway, moved toward me as if to fight. He was restrained quickly by his entourage, a changing but constant stable of four young, aspiring writers who would evaporate and be replaced by the next crop.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Gimbel,” I said. I could already tell that the session was going to be the talk of the meeting, that it was going to take on a life of its own and become the kind of thing these talentless puds thrived on. “Which part bothered you most?”

  “You, you mimetic hack,” Gimbel spat at me.

  “A mimetic hack,” I repeated his words. “Okay.” I glanced at the door and saw people already bolting for the outside, where they would offer their versions of the fight and say, “I was sitting right next to Gimbel when it all started” or “I couldn’t believe it when Ellison hurled the keys right back at him.” Anyway, I left the room, everyone giving me a wide berth, out of fear or reverence, I could not tell.

  1. A pause here, as within the subject text, to make clear what has in fact already been offered, that being the five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be categorized. They are, in no order of importance, but of appearance: The hermeneutic code comprises terms which imply, suggest, embody, contain, protract, disclose and/or solve enigma. Semes exist without connection to character, place or thing, and are listed to achieve some semblance of thematic congregation: We are instructed to allow them “the instability of dispersion, characteristic of motes of dust, flickers of meaning.” (In other words, free associative mumbo jumbo is not a bad way to install or jumpstart meaning or, more to the point, interest.) As well, there is to be no structuring of the symbolic grouping, but generous allowance for multivalence and reversibility. The opposite might well be the meaning of the text, since every positive carries with it some understanding of its negation. Actions (terms of the proairetic code) are merely listed, as any sequence of the terms is “never more than the result of an artifice of reading,” the reading accumulating a list of generic titles for those things done (sitting, dying, exploding, nodding off), such titles embodying sequences, the sequence existing because it is named, revealing itself in and by the very process of naming, the title is not the product of logical deduction or induction, and empirical only in the sense that the title is established for some reason (logic aside). Finally, and rather easily defined, the cultural codes are references to a system of knowledge or type of knowledge (medical, literary, historical …), indicating the body of knowledge without expression of the resident culture (REF. culture).

  I arrived back at my hotel to find a death threat scrawled across the back of a bookmark. It said: I’ll kill you, you mimetic Philistine, signed: The Ghost of Wyndham Lewis. I wasn’t worried about the acting out of any such threats, as the clowns who had taken me as their enemy were as unlikely to actually do something as they were to actually write something.

  Story idea. A woman gives birth to an egg. She goes in for a normal delivery and what comes out is an egg, a six-pound-three-ounce egg. The doctors don’t know what to do, so they slap a diaper on it and stick in an incubator. Nothing happens. Then they have the mother sit on it. Nothing happens. The egg is given to the mother to hold. She falls in love with the egg, calls it her baby. The egg has no limbs to move, no voice with which to cry. It is an egg and only an egg. The woman takes the egg home, names it, bathes it, worries about it. It is unchanging, ungrowing, but it is her “baby,” she says. Her husband leaves. Her friends don’t come over. She talks to the egg, tells her she loves it. The egg cracks …

  Went to my sister’s clinic over in Southeast. Washington hides its poverty better than any city in the world. Just blocks from the mall and Capitol Hill, where thousands of to
urists mill about each day, people cover their windows with towels to keep out the rain, and nail boards across their doors when they lock up at night. Though my sister lived up above Adams-Morgan, she practiced in Southeast, “where the people lived.” She was tougher than I could ever be.

  I walked in through the front door and ten women’s faces turned to me together, demanding to know what I was doing there. I went to the receptionist’s desk.

  “I’m Thelonious Ellison, Dr. Ellison’s brother,” I said.

  “You’re kidding me.” The receptionist was not fat, but there was plenty of her. She got up, came around her desk and gave me a squeeze. I sank into her, thinking that was what a hug should feel like. “The writer brother,” she said, stepping back to look at me. “And fine.” She called back down the hall. “Eleanor, Eleanor.”

  “What?” Eleanor asked.

  “We got us a real writer in here.”

  “What?”

  “Dr. E’s brother.”

  Eleanor came and hugged me too. She was wearing her stethoscope, but that melted into her ample bosom as she crushed me. “Doctor E’s with a patient right now.”

  “Yeah, honey,” the receptionist said, beside herself with smiling. “You have a seat and I’ll tell her you’re here. If you need anything, you call my name, Yvonne, okay?”

  I sat in an empty, thinly upholstered, orange chair beside a young woman with curling, blue fingernails. She had a little boy with a runny nose sitting on her lap.

  “Handsome boy,” I said. “How old is he?”

  “Two years,” she said.

  I nodded. The chair was more comfortable than I expected a waiting room chair to be and I felt the artificial pressures of my day fading away, trailing off to a whisper in that din of reality.

  “So, what are you doing here in Washington?” Yvonne asked me from her desk.

  “Came in for a meeting,” I said.

  “You must be important to be coming into Washington for a meeting like that,” she said.

  I shook my head and laughed. “No, it’s just a meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society. Hardly important. I read a paper this morning and now I’m done.”

  Yvonne looked at me as if my words were getting lost in the space between us. She nodded her head without looking directly at me and went back to her work on the desk. I felt awkward, out of place, like I had so much of my life, like I didn’t belong.

  “You write books?” the woman with the child asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of books you write?”

  “I write novels,” I said. “Stories.” Already feeling out of place, I now didn’t know how to sound relaxed.

  “My cousin gave me Their Eyes Were Watching God. She had it in a class. She goes to UDC. I liked that book.”

  “That’s a really fine novel,” I said.

  “She gave me Cane, too,” the young woman said, adjusting her son on her lap. “That one’s my favorite.”

  “Great book.”

  “It ain’t a novel though, is it?” she asked. “I mean, it ain’t just one story and it’s got them poems in it. But it seemed like one thing, know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “I think about that story ‘Box Seat’ and I think I’m in that theater all the time, watching them midgets fight.” She shook her head as if to come back around, wiped her child’s nose.

  “Have you gone to college?” I asked.

  The girl laughed.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said. “I think you’re really smart. You should at least try.”

  “I didn’t even finish high school.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I scratched my head and looked at the other faces in the room. I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.

  “Thank you,” I said to the girl.

  She didn’t respond to that and, luckily, was called back to an examination room at that moment.

  Lisa came out in her white jacket and her stethoscope slung around her neck. I’d never seen her in her element before. She seemed so calm, at ease, in charge. I was proud of her, in awe of her. I got up and though her half of the hug was stiff, mine was not and it worked to soften the whole thing. She was taken by surprise and even blushed a little.

  “I’ve got to see two more patients and then we can go,” she said. “You’re lucky, no picketers today. They must be in church or at a coven meeting. You’re okay out here?”

  “Yes, Yvonne is taking care of me,” I said, but the receptionist had cooled to me. She offered a mechanical smile and wagged the eraser of her pencil in the air. “I’ll be waiting.”

  When I was fifteen, my friend Doug Glass, that really was his name, asked me if I wanted to ride over to a party with him. This was during the summer in Annapolis. He was a year older and had his own car. I was excited to go. When we got there the music was loud and unfamiliar, the bass thumping. The air was full of male voices trying to dig down another octave and girls’ giggles. We stood out on the lawn first and I held onto a beer in a plastic cup until it was warm. I hadn’t acquired a taste for it yet and, to tell the truth, I was afraid it might make me throw up. We were in a part of Annapolis I’d never visited before, but I could see the spire of the capitol building, so I knew about where I was.

  “Yo, brother, what’s yo name?” a tall boy asked me, blowing cigarette smoke not quite in my face. “I’m Clevon.”

  “Monk,” I said.

  “Monk?” he laughed. “What the fuck kind of name is Monk?”

  Right at that second I didn’t want to tell him my real name was Thelonious.

  Another guy came up and the tall one said, “Hey, Reggie, this here is, now get this, Monk.”

  “Kinda looks like a monkey, don’t he?” Reggie said.

  “What’s your real name?” Clevon asked.

  “Ellison,” I said.

  “That your first name or your last name?”

  “Last.”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Theo,” I lied.

  Clevon and Reggie looked at each other and shrugged, as if to say Theo was an okay name not worthy of ridicule.

  “Why they call you Monk, little brother?” Reggie asked.

  I didn’t like the way “little brother” sounded. “Just a nickname,” I said.

  Doug came back over to me and said, “Come on, Monksie, let’s go inside.”

  “Monksie,” Clevon and Reggie repeated into their cupped hands as they chuckled.

  “Let’s go back to the beach,” I said to Doug, following him toward the house. “This is boring.”

  “Let’s go inside first. Don’t you want to see some girls?”

  As a matter of fact, I did want to see girls, more than anything. But what I was going to do when I saw them was anybody’s guess. I just hoped none of them would call me little brother or ask me my name.

  The lights were dim inside and the center of the floor, of what I took to be the living room, was studded with gyrating dancers. Doug started bopping and pointing at people as we moved across to the other side. I didn’t know Doug all that well, but still I was amazed that he was familiar with so many people. He stopped beside a couple of girls. They had to nearly shout to be heard over the music.

  “Some party!” Doug said.

  “Yeah,” the girl said.

  “This your sister?” Doug asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Then they watched the dance floor for a while. Doug was now my hero, the way he had talked to that girl was amazing to me. Then he turned to her when a slow song came on and said, “Dance?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was left with the sister. She was pretty, wearing a skimpy sundress which showed her shoulders. There was a turning light somewhere and every few seconds her neck and thighs became clear to my view. Her skin was beautiful. She caught me looking and I apo
logized.

  “I’m Tina,” she said.

  “Ellison,” I said.

  “Dance?”

  “Okay.”

  I worried about more things in the following three minutes than I ever had in my life. Had I put on deodorant? Had I brushed my teeth? Were my hands too dry? Were my hands too moist? Was I moving too fast? Was I actually leading? Was my head on the correct side of hers? I held her loosely, but she pulled me close, pressing into me. Her breasts were alarmingly noticeable. Her thighs brushed my thighs and as it was summer I was wearing shorts and could feel her skin against mine and it was just slightly too much for my hormonal balancing act. My penis grew steadily larger through the song until I knew that it was peeking out the bottom edge of the left leg of my pants. Tina became aware of it and said something which I couldn’t make out, but included the words “baby” and “all right.” Then someone switched on the lights and I heard the voices of Clevon and Reggie saying, “Look at Monkey’s monkey.” I ran out of the house and down the street toward the Capitol.