Erasure

by Percival Everett

  Lisa took my jacket to hang in the closet as if I were a real visitor. I looked at the house again. I had loved the house as a kid. It was a large two-story with many rooms and nooks and a finished basement apartment in which Lorraine resided. But it now seemed cold, despite how high the heat was turned. The drapes covering the windows were heavy, the wood of the stairway bannister and door jambs dark and somber.

  “Mrs. E is already at the table,” Lorraine told us and led us into the dining room as if we didn’t know the way.

  Mother remained seated when we entered. Her eyes were red and weak. We leaned to kiss her and she patted our cheeks.

  “Are you feeling okay, Mother?” Lisa asked.

  “She missed her nap today, Dr. Lisa,” Lorraine said.

  We sat on either side of our mother. I poured the wine and Mother waved it off.

  “Did you take your medication?” Lisa asked.

  “I did. All three thousand pills.” Mother fanned her off the subject. “How was your meeting?” she asked me, having forgotten our earlier conversation.

  “It’s over, that’s the important part.”

  “You presented a paper?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “On?”

  “Just some stuff about novels and literary criticism. Dry, boring, meaningless stuff. I actually just came to see you.”

  “That’s my sweetheart, Monksie. But why aren’t you staying here with me?”

  “Since I am at the conference, I need to be near the proceedings.” I looked at my sister. “I did go down to Lisa’s clinic earlier. She’s really doing good work.”

  “She’s just like her father.” By the way she said it, it was not clear it was a good thing. Then she aked me, “Are you still driving that station wagon?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Lorraine came in with the dinner. The roast beef was lean. The broccoli and cauliflower were overcooked and the grains of rice were so separate and distinct that it was near impossible to pick them up with a fork. Lorraine came in a couple of times to check on us.

  Lisa put down her fork and picked up her wine glass, held it over her plate without drinking. “Mother, I’ve been going over the books and I believe you’re going to have to sell Father’s office. The upkeep is costing so much that the rent is meaningless.”

  “That was your father’s office.”

  “Yes, Mother. You’ve got the other properties,” Lisa said.

  “Your father started out in that office in nineteen fifty. You weren’t born yet. Bill was just a year old.”

  “Well, I’m putting the office up for sale. It’s something we have to do.” Lisa was tugging at the corners of her napkin, a tic she’d had since childhood.

  “It was your father’s office, dear.”

  “I know that, Mother.” Lisa looked at me.

  “Mother,” I got her attention. “When’s the last time you visited Father’s office?” She didn’t have an answer. “The fact is, you hardly ever went there when Father was practicing. Now, it’s completely different. It even looks different from the outside.” I reached over and took her hand. “Lisa knows what’s best.”

  “Oh, Monksie.” Mother sniffed in her tears. “You’re such a sweet child, always have been. And so smart. You get that from your father, did you know that?”

  I glanced over at Lisa to see that she was eating again.

  “Of course, we’ll sell the office.”

  “Just like that,” Lisa said. “Monk chimes in and you’re hooked on the idea. Christ.”

  Lorraine stepped into the room just in time to hear her lord’s name used in vain. She collected our plates and issued an admonishing “Hmmph, hmmph, hmmmph” as she exited.

  Mother complained of a headache and we had dessert without saying much. Then Lorraine came in and mercifully informed us of Mother’s approaching bedtime. We kissed the old lady goodnight and watched Lorraine walk her upstairs.

  Sitting in my sister’s car outside my hotel, I apologized for butting in about the sale of the office at the dinner table.

  “No, you helped,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m sorry she always reacts to me like that.”

  “Monk, you’re special. I don’t mean just the way Mother, and Father when he was alive, treated you. I’ve always thought that. I just wanted you to know.”

  I looked out the window at the street. “I think the same about you, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She smiled. Her smile had always been so confident that I was jealous of it. Her smile always made me relax.

  I kissed my sister goodbye, told her I’d talk to her soon and went into my hotel where I found Linda Mallory waiting in the lobby.

  “Hi, Linda.”

  “I’ve been thinking about your paper.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Would you like to go upstairs and fuck me?”

  “No, Linda.”

  “I’m having a real crisis,” she said. “I really need to have some sex. I need it for self-validation.”

  “I’m sorry, Linda.”

  She stormed past me, out the door and into the street. Then I heard my name being shouted from outside. It was a bit embarrassing as I turned to find the hotel staff and a couple of guests staring at me. I stepped out and on the narrow path leading through the yard was Davis Gimbel.

  “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now,” he said.

  The words had little effect on me, save to announce Gimbel’s disturbed, certifiable, and agitated postmodern state. Behind the short, bomber-jacketed academic were Linda Mallory, seething with pent-up sexual frustration, and three other intellectually homeless academics aching to see a fight.

  “What’s this all about, Gimbel?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing to compare it to now,” he said.

  “Okay.” I stepped down the steps to take the noise away from the stoop. “Listen, I’m sorry you didn’t like the paper, but I believe you misunderstood something. I don’t even think about you guys, much less write about you.”

  That really got him mad. He circled me as best he could in the small space and even pounded his chest with a closed fist once or twice. “You don’t think much of postmodern fiction, do you?” he said. “Like all avant-garde movements, we never have time to finish what we set out to accomplish.”

  I looked at his face in the street and moon lights and found it no more or less ugly for its contorted state. “What did you set out to accomplish?”

  “You know good and well. You and your kind, you interrupted us.”

  “My kind?” I let that go. “Interrupted you? By not paying attention?”

  “The whole culture. You’re just one of the sheep.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, man? Are you drunk?”

  He continued his circling. A couple of unassociated people stopped at the gate to watch. “Of course, if an avant-garde movement ever achieves its purpose, then it ceases to be avant-garde. By the mere fact that it opposes or rejects established systems of creation, it has to remain unfinished. Do you even understand what I’m saying? We are defunct practitioners of defunct art.”

  “You know what your problem is, Gimbel?” I said, leaning away from him. “You actually think you’re saying something that makes sense. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  That’s when the little Hemingway doll took a poke at me. I sidestepped the swing and watched him roll into an azalea bush. Linda and the other defunct artists rushed to his aid. I offered a shrug to the confused bystanders and stepped away toward the door.

  Gimbel was on his knees now and he yelled, “Postmodern fiction came and went like the wind and you missed it. And that’s why you’re bitter, Ellison.”

  I stopped, not believing that the man had actually come to fight me because of a paper that I only barely took seriously. Standing over them all on the steps, I said, “I don’t mean to disparage or belittle what you do, Gimb
el. I don’t know what you do.”

  Gimbel found his legs and stood straight, puffed up his chest. “I have unsettled readers. I have made them uncomfortable. I have unsettled their historical, cultural and psychological assumptions by disrupting their comfortable relationship between words and things. I have brought to a head the battle between language and reality. But even as my art dies, I create it without trying.”

  His little group applauded.

  “Man, do you need to get laid,” I said, shook my head and stepped through the door.

  It’s 1933 and Ernst Barlach is cracking his knuckles while the cup of tea on the table in front of him cools. “My hands hurt so much these days,” he says.

  Paul Klee nods, sips his tea. He is saddened himself. He has just been expelled from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. “They are calling me a Siberian Jew.”

  “Who is? Das Schwarze Korps?”

  “Who else? And they are burning any books which contain pictures of our work. They call me a Slavic lunatic.”

  “They’re correct about both of us.”

  Ernst laughs.

  Eckhart: You know I have a novel, Adolf.

  Hitler: Do tell, Dietrich.

  Eckhart: I call it The Morning. The main character is essentially myself. The character is an unrecognized literary genius wbo is addicted, but manages quite well the sweet gift of morphine.

  Hitler: I hope it is as powerful as your volume of poems. Such anguish and sheer beauty those verses offer the reader.

  Eckhart: It irks me no end that the whole of my recognition rests on the translation of that damn Norwegian. I actually hate Peer Gynt.

  Hitler: Oh, but how you transformed it. Now, it speaks to the German soul. That is why it is so popular with the people. And what the work led you to, your patriotic writings and how you’ve unveiled the Jews for what they are. I will fight the trolls with you.

  Eckhart: They will destroy German culture if we let them.

  Hitler: Then we will not let them.

  Eckhart: I am ein Judenfresser.

  Hitler: Me, too.

  Eckhart: I can’t believe we lost the war. These pamphlets of mine however will show our people why we lost and that the enemy we sbould fear most was not in the trenches.

  Hitler: What is this one called?

  Eckhart: I call this one Judaism in and out of Us.

  Hitler: I liked Austria under Judah’s Star.

  Eckhart: Everyone seemed to like that one. I sent This is the Jew to a professor and he sent it back to me with a note telling me it is full of hate. So, I wrote back. I wrote, “It is said that the German schoolmaster won the war of 1866. The professor of 1914 lost the World War.”

  Hitler: You told him.

  Eckhart: I have an idea for a newspaper, a weekly that I plan to call, Auf gut Deutsch. And I have been thinking. You should join the Thule Society.

  Hitler: I am already a member.

  Eckhart: Shall we recite the motto together?

  Hitler and Eckhart: Remember that you are German. Keep your blood pure.

  Somehow these notes for a novel came to me on my flight back to Los Angeles. The faces of those nuts in front of my sister’s clinic served as inspiration. But I must admit to a profound fascination with Hitler’s relationship to art and how he so reminded me of so many of the artistic purists I had come to know. But those faces, washed with hate and fear, wanting so badly to control others, their potato eyes so vacant, their mouths near frothing. I could still hear them calling my sister a murderer. Their voices had the scratch of overuse, like the twisting of metal.

  On the plane I read a review in the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ runaway bestseller We’s Lives In Da Ghetto:

  Juanita Mae Jenkins has written a masterpiece of African American literature. One can actually hear the voices of her people as they make their way through the experience which is and can only be Black America.

  The story begins with Sharonda F’rinda Johnson who lives the typical Black life in an unnamed ghetto in America. Sharonda is fifteen and pregnant with her third child, by a third father. She lives with her drug addict mother and her mentally deficient, basketball playing brother Juneboy. When Juneboy is killed in a driveby by a rival gang, the bullet passing through his cherished Michael Jordon autographed basketball, Sharonda watches her mother’s wailing grief and decides she must have some voice in the culture.

  Sharonda becomes a hooker to make enough money to take dance classes at the community center. In tap class, her athletic prowess is noticed by the producer of a Broadway show and she is discovered. She rises to the top, buys her mother a house, but her limitations catch up with her and she comes plummeting back to earth.

  The twists and turns of the novel are fascinating, but the real strength of the work is its haunting verisimilitude. The ghetto is painted in all its exotic wonder. Predators prowl, innocents are eaten. But the novel is finally not dark, as we leave the story, with Sharonda trying to raise enough money to get her babies back from the state. Sharonda, finally, is the epitome of the black matriarchal symbol of strength.

  “Is something wrong?” the woman seated beside me asked.

  It was raining when I arrived in Los Angeles. A real Southern California rain, which washed away hillsides and homes, flooded parts of Newport and Long Beach and backed up traffic on every freeway. I found that I was restless during my drive home, not because of the sea of unmoving tail-lights in front of me, and not because of my having two more weeks of the semester left to teach, but because something was gnawing at me. I didn’t know what it was; I had seen or heard something that struck me as wrong. I let it go; what else could I do? I finally made it to Santa Monica and my house, where I brushed my teeth, not so hard, as per instructions of the dentist, through his hygienist, as I never got to see the big man himself, but just hard enough to interrupt the formation of the plaque that was eating me away from the inside, and went to bed. My head on my pillow, I had a dream. First, of my father telling me the stories of how Paul Robeson once broke into song in Miss Madsen’s Tea Room at the beach and how Paul Laurence Dunbar would stroll the pier reciting poetry, and then I was alone on that very pier, younger, but not so young that I was afraid of being alone there so late. The moon was full and bright and there was a corona about it. Way out, under the shine of the moon on the water, I imagined I could see the surface disturbed by a school of bluefish. Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush. “Are you asking for my help?” I asked her, but she just talked on, saying things I didn’t understand, but the quality of them left no question as to her anxiety. “Is it Mother?” I asked, but this too was met with chatter that, as soon as she spoke it, I forgot it. Until she said, “Did you see him?” I stopped her and asked, “See whom?” But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject. Then I awoke.

  All propositions are of equal value.

  The following morning, after a walk through the large back room that served as my woodshop, I got around to going through my mail and, as I expected, there was a letter from my agent, whom I had for some time been wondering whether to keep, as he seemed painfully, for me at least, resigned to the fact that my work was not commercial enough to make any real money. This was undoubtedly true, but nonetheless it seemed a part of his job to foster some kind of optimistic delusion on my part. Still, he was willing to take my work for what little return he saw. The letter from him was short, merely introducing the letter that had been sent to him, namely a rejection of my latest novel:

  Dear Yul,

  Thanks for letting me to take a look at T. Ellison’s lastest effort. Who am I kidding? Why did you bother sending it to me? It shows a brilliant intellect, certainly. It’s challenging and masterfully written and constructed, but who wants to read this shit? It’s too difficult for the market. But more, who is he writing to? Does the guy live in a cave somewhere? Come on,
a novel in which Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics?

  Thanks again.

  All Best,

  Hockney Hoover

  There are times when fishing that I feel like a real detective. I study the water, the lay of the land, seine the streambottom and look at the larvae of aquatic insects. I watch, look for hatches and terrestrial activity. I select my fly, one I’ve tied at streamside, plucking a couple of fibers from my sweater to mix with the dubbing to get just the right color. I present the fly while hiding behind a rock or in tall grass and wait patiently. Then there are times when I wrap pocket lint around a hook, splash it into the water while standing on a fat boulder. Both methods have worked and failed. It’s all up to the trout.

  Classes did end as all things must, and right on schedule, and with the welcome news that my promotion to professor had come through. But the news did nothing to erase my depression over the rejection of my novel, now the seventeenth one.

  “The line is, you’re not black enough,” my agent said.

  “What’s that mean, Yul? How do they even know I’m black? Why does it matter?”

  “We’ve been over this before. They know because of the photo on your first book. They know because they’ve seen you. They know because you’re black, for crying out loud.”

  “What, do I have to have my characters comb their afros and be called niggers for these people?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  I was stunned into silence.

  “Look at that Juanita Mae Jenkins book. It’s sold like crazy. The paperback rights went for five hundred thousand.”

  In my mind, I had the generous thought, Good for her, but I didn’t mean it. She was a hack. “She’s a hack,” I said. “She’s not even a hack. A hack can actually write a little bit.”

  “Yeah, it’s shit. I know that, but it sells. This is a business, Thelonious.”

  I didn’t say another word, just set the receiver down in its cradle and stared at the phone.