Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  I looked at the letter and at Meg Caro. Her fat little toes were so unlike mine, barely reaching the tips of her sandals. Seeing her again I found that any resemblance to me or anyone in my family had faded. Murphy had come by the day before to check on me, he said. That was what friends did. He had his camera with him and though he looked into it from time to time it was clear he didn’t care to take any pictures. He talked about his new patient who was taking up so much of his time.

  He sells drugs, he said. I can’t stand the man. I’m hard pressed to explain why I allow him as a patient. He’s despicable, pays me with camera equipment, and just like the idiots who buy his junk, I’m addicted. Leica and Nikon and Mamiya and Hasselblad and Zeiss and names that haunt my sleep. I’m carrying around this Leica now, can’t put it down. It’s all I can do to keep my eye from the viewfinder. I change lenses only to hear the sweet mechanical sound of the pieces connecting. I don’t sleep. There is film in the camera, was there when I took the camera from Donald or Douglas. I’m not so much confused now by the person as I am by the names. It’s clear that I have no descriptive material to connect to their respective names and so I have no idea as to which is who and who is what. I used to think they were identical, but disabused of that I believed that they were both simply fat, but it turns out that one, my patient, Douglas or Donald, is quite a bit fatter than his brother, Donald or Douglas. One of them, I will call him Donald, is the fat man who lies in his bed, and he is the man who encourages me to take cameras and he is the man who has the skinny, drug-addled consort whom he treats like shit and together, these statements together, should equate to his name, his descriptive marker, his designating phonetic flag. Maybe he doesn’t have a name at all or a different name, like Thomas, or Tomas, without the h, and I have never referred to him at all, though I have addressed him in his presence. Is his name a defining attribute of the man who is my patient? Does it matter whether he is Donald or Douglas? Would having one of these names or the other alter who he might be? A Donnie certainly would be perceived differently from a Doug, wouldn’t he? The present Donald is the king of France and he is bald. I might as well call him the fatter brother of either Douglas or Donald, if his brother is Douglas then he is Donald and if his brother is Donald then he is Douglas. I have been reading, always a bad thing with me, trying to understand how it is that I can refer to this man that I cannot even distinguish from another man who may or may not resemble him. I assume that there is a man such that that man is the fat man who is my patient. And for every man who is that man who is my patient and every other man, if both give me cameras, then that man is the same man. Any man who gives me cameras is the man who is my patient. See what all this has inevitably done to me. According to the truth.

  Heroic

  Viewfinder. Charlton Heston is playing backgammon with Nat Turner. They are sitting on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial. Black men are collecting the trash left over from the day’s activity. They are tired black men, hunched and wearing white coveralls.

  Turner shakes the dice in his maroon cup. He does it near his ear so he can hear the bones rattle. Double sixes.

  Lucky bastard, Heston says.

  That was some speech today, don’t you think?

  I really liked the part about little white boys holding hands with the little black girls.

  Double fives.

  Lucky bastard.

  Lucky, my ass. I cheat. I always cheat. I cheat whenever I can. I have to cheat. Slaves have no luck.

  Of course they do, Heston says. It’s just all bad.

  They laugh, Heston and Turner.

  Have you observed any changes in yourself because of today’s march? Turner asks.

  Why, yes. What about you?

  I’m letting Styron off the hook.

  That’s big of you.

  Rather white of me, he’d say. And you?

  I do want to keep my guns. I want more guns.

  Really?

  Guns. Guns. Guns.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  I wish I’d had a few back in the day.

  Stampings, Smitings, Breakages

  I was living in New York City at the time, writing a novel. In fact, I think I said that. Maybe I didn’t. It was an okay novel, not great. I knew the world would not be changed by it, was quite certain of that. You had not yet been born. I had just met your lovely mother and we saw our having sex together as some kind of social or political action, statement. We loved each other also, but that wasn’t the real turn-on. Then you were born. We lived a very long time together after that and then she decided to die. I’m not sure I ever forgave her for that decision, but I never loved her less for it. Then there was you.

  Old Business, Soon Wound Up

  A Perambulation

  Meg Caro asked if I was going to open the envelope. I looked at Sylvia, then back at Meg. I took it from the table and placed it unopened into my pocket. I know what it says, I said.

  Circumambulation

  Sick of all the you be’s? Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me? What do you say? We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead. We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street. We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly. We can listen to the whistling of the bombs. We can listen to each other.

  I do not want to know about the human heart.

  PHOSPHORUS

  Ontology and Anguish

  1

  One of us, or both, as we were and are equally present and, more or less, equally culpable, answerable, if not out of duty then at least by way of sheer good taste or decency, should have taken it upon myor yourself or ourselves to be more observant of what we were about, what we were doing when we put me here; recognized that not only were we setting a stage for the next stage of my life, but that we were also preparing a platform from which any rational being would find a plummet, forced or otherwise, not only unfortunate but sadly necessary. Had we weighed and measured the particulars, the specific details of the matter at hand, at least in hindsight, a drastic move, we might have proceeded accordingly, toward some other capsheaf, namely, the act that shall remain unnamed. I have lived a lot longer than seems to me necessary or in good taste or form, only to arrive at this point, this place, this truth, that it takes a lot more effort and comprehension of the inherent and ubiquitous structures of meaning to construct nonsense than it does to utter the plainest of mundane assertions, and that once set into motion, the cleanest and clearest of one’s nonsensical masterpieces does nothing but highlight everyone else’s incapacity to understand 103 anything at all. Though they will think they understand. The devil himself sometimes shall not drive them off the notion that they “get it.” The final irony is, beautifully, that they think they perceive the irony. And what was my question the day you drove me to this wretched place? Why, it was, Do we need gas? It turned out that we did and so you stopped, I believe, at a Shell station and somehow I found that significant, if not terribly interesting.

  2

  There was nothing behind my concern that you needed gasoline except that I sought to prolong our drive to this place. I had never known you to need gasoline before, had in fact remembered that you never let the indicator drop below half empty (half empty being a quite conscious word choice), though I’m certain that on some occasions you do actually need gasoline, but it was also a car thing to say, a car-ish thing. Do we need gas? I could just as easily have asked if we needed air in the tires or water in the radiator and, though every bit as car-ish, those utterances would have had no chance to pause us.

  You, we, did finally deliver me, along with my one mediumsized wheeled duffel and a few boxes of books, to be carried inside in short order by a couple of short orderlies with names so cliché that it hurt my feelings to commit them to memory. And I could see on y
our face, as we strolled by the queued-up bags of used-up blood and tissue, feelings and thoughts, that would be my neighbors, my dining mates, and finally my avenue to inevitable resignation, that you, like me, could not imagine that they comprised and were composed of the same endless strands of amino acids as me, that they shared the same skeletal base, the same basic musculature, the same chemistry. You tossed me a sidelong glance like the son I never had and you desired very much to leave me here alone in my new rooms to read Cicero.

  3

  There are those who understand and those who do not. The way you tell the difference is easy. The ones who do not understand have not yet killed themselves.

  4

  Not to complicate matters, as if I give a fuck about that, but I’d be remiss if I did not make clear the complete absence of clarity regarding one pressing and nagging matter, that being: just who the fuck is telling this story? There are readers, dear readers, and I use the plural modestly as to really mean possibly only one reader, counted repeatedly on different days, that require a certain degree of specificity concerning the identity of the narrator. Is it an old man or the old man’s son? Not that I am by nature disposed to behaving deferentially to any reader, or anyone, but I will clear up the matter forthwith, directly, tout de suite. I am telling this story.

  I was brought here on a Tuesday, the second Tuesday, to be precise, of the month of March. Or May. It was an M month. Driven to this place or that place, depending on whom you’re talking to and when. It is no bit of privileged information that a man born on my birthday, at the same hour, in the same state, Virginia, only two years prior to my birth, died in the corridor of this place the morning I was moved in. The frighteningly unfrightened staff whisked the man away to an airless room out of view and the flow of traffic (however slow). That is worth knowing.

  That night, shortly after your departure, I was taken or led by a cheerful aide named Billy away from my apartment, to the dining hall, where I sat at a round table across from a fossil named Billy while I was sized up by a gaggle of blue-hairs at the next round table. Nothing could have scared or upset me more than this scene. It was that evening, while I sank into my rooms, and listened to Die schöne Müllerin, and you know how I hate Schubert, that I was, in a manner of speaking, reborn. I was reading Eliot or a sports magazine when my renewal took effect. This was the grim evening of that second Tuesday of that M month. I resolved that I would be the music while the music lasted.

  5

  And so, yes, I was brought forth into this fate worse than life, my hands still atremble at my memory of my passage through that canal, the way the light hit my eyes, the way the first dose of that disinfectant-painted air worked its way into my not-yet-acclimated and surprised lungs, but unwilling to accept that this was the air I was meant to breathe. Not yet ready to become one of the drooling zombies, I resolved to work with the resistance.

  6

  O diem præclarum! shouted Billy, my dining mate, not the orderly, upon learning that we would be served French toast instead of our usual gruel for breakfast.

  I looked at him and tilted my head. This was the first time in a week of breakfasts that he had said anything other than, My name is Billy.

  So, you are an educated man, I said.

  On the contrary, he said, and then proceeded to eat his French toast in large syrup-heavy bites. It’s just that so many things are and just so on.

  Meaning?

  And just so on, he said. Und so weiter.

  Strangely, the German helped, but I was still stranded by his non sequitur.

  It’s like this, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and so on.

  I found what he had just done terribly irritating and I said as much. Why don’t you go ahead and say Z.

  I got tired and didn’t feel like it.

  Z takes up far less room and energy than and so on. It is one syllable as opposed to three.

  Still.

  Still what?

  I didn’t feel like finishing.

  Did you forget the Z ?

  No. Don’t you like French toast?

  Not so much. It’s not bad.

  In order to find anything good one must first know what sort of thing that thing ought to be. You have to have a concept of it. You need to think about breakfast for a while, then consider the French toast. You’re an old man. I am an older man. When you reach my age, you’ll find that pleasant becomes good. At least, pleasant and good are always bound up together.

  Kant.

  You too are an educated man.

  On occasion, Billy, on occasion.

  Billy, who had taken so long to tell me anything but his name, finished his French toast and pushed himself to standing. Muhammad was a Hegelian, he said, and then left the table and me to be studied by the women as old as he. At seventy-eight, I was a stud in the henhouse, if that is not a mixed metaphor.

  And so Billy, all ninety-two years of him, became my first friend at this place, Teufelsdröckh’s Retirement Village.

  7

  As if any of this matters, this business about friends in that place. This place. Just this afternoon, Billy said, pushing his lunch aside, The bread here is flavorless, there is no salt in it. It is like the bread in Tuscany. If only I had some Tuscan olive oil to bathe it in, then it might be edible.

  I said nothing in response but had to agree with him.

  He had an ongoing feud with the orderly named Billy. Called him Silly instead. This irritated the young man and so he always took his time when Billy rang his call button to go to the toilet. Billy, ever smarter, would take care to ring his bell long before the urge came on him but pretended to be in dire straits when the grinning orderly strolled in. Do you know what that Silly is? Billy asked. Silly is an accidental circumcision. As funny as it sounded I didn’t quite understand.

  The fact of the matter, how that phrase has always bored me, along with it all boils down to this and I didn’t want to say anything but, the fact of the matter was that you have always felt guilty for pursuing your own life, feeling that some of that distance from us, your parents, temporal, spatial, or emotional distance, was a bad thing, a shameful thing, pudendum, that you were failing as a son. Let me clue you in to something, it’s all failure, we’re all failures, as sons, as fathers, as mothers, siblings; it is a necessary truth. There are no rules and yet we feel bound to them, there are no duties that need be carried out, there are only expectations, unarticulated and arbitrary and formless and ever-changing expectations, expectations that exist as fistfuls of gelatinous blobs that we try over and over to nail to the walls of our houses and what they do is drip and collect and pool and ferment and turn into guilt and some other things. Oh, Jeremiah 3:24. Take the Baal and run with it, boy. Just remember, son, that your father has not labored all that hard.

  8

  Billy, one day in the garden, told me that he had been shot in the balls in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge. It was bad enough, he said, to receive such an injury at all, but to have it happen at a battle so named was to add insult. When I wrote to my wife and attempted to describe the damage to her, she assumed that I was joking and indeed said as much. Stop joking, she wrote on perfumed paper, and when I restated my condition, ever more bluntly, this too she took to be facetious, until finally I gave up and returned home with the surprise. She got to see with her own eyes what was in fact not there, that part of a man who so few glimpse and even fewer care to. Luckily my daughter had been conceived and born before my departure to participate in that awful war.

  This was the most that Billy had ever said to me at one time and after he said it he was as silent as ever for about two days, the silence ending as we stood back-to-back peeing separate arcs in the twilight. Let’s blow this pop stand before the walls cave in. He then added that I should never challenge him to a pissing competition be
cause somehow his lack of testicles had left him with remarkable urinary projection, some threefold normal. I asked why he thought to tell me that and he said, I just thought you should know.

  9

  A point is considered one of the fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry. Without depth, breadth, or dimension it is a part that has no part. It is represented by a dot or period that has some dimension but is not a point, but must cover the point infinite times over. The point in the two-dimensional world is the intersection of lines and in three dimensions of another line as well and on and on. A point is only location. And isn’t that what we are? Mere points? Some points suggest beginnings, some ends, all divide, and when they connect or divide, where they are defined, it is always because of a turn, an angle, a shift toward another plane. How else could we see a point? The point is. The point made. Getting the point. Pointing the way. Points out. Points in. Point terminus. Point Dume. That was where Billy and I decided we would go. A wonderful misspelling that had gone uncorrected, there even being a grade school there by the name. What freedom those children must feel, Billy said. They should spell school with a k. I asked him why he wanted to go there and he told me that there was no land due south of it until you hit Antarctica. You would see only ocean until you hit the ice if you could see that far. You might remember it from Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston was in that, wasn’t he?

  10

  I don’t mean for you to have this thing that you are writing or should be writing or would be writing if . . . to be your Ayenbite of Inwyt, as I would never expect from you either remorse or conscience. Guilt is such a vain and useless emotion. First of all, that one should be so sure of one’s responsibility for the pain or misery of another, well, you can be no more sure of a thing like that than you can be certain that Algarsyf and Cambalo fucked Canace.