Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  Are you Frenhofer? I asked.

  Are you stupid?

  Yes, but that is beside the point. Is this the Key-Ask?

  That’s Key-Osk.

  Of course it is.

  It’s a pun.

  If you say so. I’d like copies made of these keys.

  His name tag read nicolas poussin. He looked at the keys. A couple of these keys say Do Not Duplicate.

  I realize that. That’s why I want only copies of them. Do you always obey rules? You don’t look like someone who follows all the rules.

  Why do you say that?

  Just something about you, a kind of death thing.

  You’re really giving it a tug, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll make them.

  Just like that?

  Just like that. To advance your story. Tell me, old man, what are these keys to, eh?

  One fits a closet full of controlled substances.

  Cool. He paused at the very old key. I can’t do anything with this ancient thing. Is it real?

  I don’t know. Let me have that one. He took the old key off the ring and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket.

  His tag now read jan mabuse.

  Jan Mabuse paused at the last and smallest key. This key is beautiful, he said, and as he said it the traffic around the kiosk slowed or at least appeared to slow. This key is perfect. He hesitated, as if afraid to attempt duplication of the last key, which was in fact the key to the drug cabinet, but he could not have known that.

  I spoke to him, told him that the perfect key, like anything perfect, was but mere shadow, apparition, wraith. I told him that Orpheus should never have looked back. I studied his paint-darkened lips and said, Make the key.

  His tag now read: fernand léger. He made the key, with the whirring, screeching, and buffing that I had wanted.

  He did not charge me for my copies. He instead put down his protective goggles and prepared to leave. I asked him where he was going. He told me he was going home. No more keys for me, he said; his tag read claude lantier.

  32

  Sensuality, or more precisely lust, is the nonpareil Petri tureen for the breeding of ruinous and catastrophic miscalculation. I knew that, it having been a lesson I learned early in my so-called adult life, and so modeled my behavior, regarding all dealings with love and or lovers, actual and potential and imagined, on a robot I once saw in a movie when I was twenty-seven. I had smoked quite a bit of pot and the character might well have not been a robot, but I remember him as a robot nonetheless and his unfeeling and distant approach to matters of the heart seemed just about right. So, even though my short-afro-ed night nurse, her name will be now Clarabelle, made my heart flutter, or was it my medication, or worse? and even though she caused me to assemble a montage of some of my more fondly remembered erections, I did not and would not trust or confide in her completely. She had after all been intimate with Harley and loneliness and self-loathing can only explain so much. She had, on a purely animalistic plane, a plane worth noting and visiting, somehow bridged that experiential gap between the discrete and the continuous, between the distinct actuality of past conditions and the ephemeral, expanding, enduring, and untouchable attachment to those conditions, states of affairs, cases, hard-ons.

  She was standing authoritatively behind her station desk, was Clarabelle. Her light-green smock covered with pastel smiley faces and the V-slit of her collar pointing seductively down to her, I assumed, nonexistent cleavage. I had already placed the original set of keys at the far edge of her desk and I believe she had pretended not to see me do it.

  Finally, she looked at them. I wonder where those came from.

  What?

  Those keys.

  Oh.

  Are they yours?

  Not mine.

  Sarah, Sarah, are these your keys?

  Not mine?

  Anthony, are these yours? Clarabelle held them high and jingled them.

  Nope.

  I guess the owner will turn up, she said. She put them into her drawer.

  Do you believe in time travel? I asked her.

  I guess not.

  It’s just as well. Apparently, given that the occurrence of time dilation, whether based on velocity or gravity, doesn’t allow backward travel, we could only hope to get you as old as me and that would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

  You’re an interesting man.

  I was once, I think. I’m pretty sure I thought so then. More fool me.

  You know, I really don’t like Harley, she said.

  I nodded. I wondered if she thought that was supposed to make me like her more. I nodded some more.

  What do you see when you look at me?

  This was a great question and it took me completely off guard. I looked up at the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the hallway. I see a river in Iowa, I said. The first place I saw my wife naked. All we did was swim that day.

  That’s sweet.

  I’m a sweet man.

  33

  I

  My first self-conscious attention to a heading. I. A pronoun denoting the self. Me. It is also the letter representing an imaginary unit in math, the unit that lets the real number system extend to complex numbers. Me. I’m sorry, my best and favorite lover said to me, you are imaginary. I suggested that she multiply me by i and give me another look and try. But all of this to prolong a deferral, right?

  I could see Billy fishing in some far-off stream or pond even though I did not know if he liked fishing or had ever fished in his what I imagine to be staid accountant’s life with his daughter beside him teasing him about something or another perhaps the way he said the word apricot and there he was reeling in empty hook after empty hook happy because his girl was there with him and maybe his wife but wasn’t it odd Billy thought there by that stream or pond how when a child dies all other relationships seem so so so dismissible forgettable shallow though he knew that she must have been around perhaps in a backyard garden with an older or younger version of their daughter she teasing her mother about the fact that she wore her rubber boots on the hottest and driest days but Billy was with his daughter and then he was not but instead lying deader than dead against that bank his arms and legs akimbo his eyes open and lost-looking in the bright sun because there was no heaven no stream no daughter to revisit though someplace along that stream bank that riverbank she lay like him so so so still veins and arteries and curious things-closed all kisses having been blown up a skirt hiked up just over her knee her hands looking like they had wrung the last water from a towel pots and pans piled up the bank waiting for Billy to wash after the last dinner the last supper conjuring that lie of a story where that Iscariot guy did the brave thing and pointed out a toga-clad Jimmy Swaggart to the goose-stepping authorities and some others who were tired of reading letters from living souls who had ceased or failed ever to recognize the difference between hopes and lies. So blow me a kiss sweet Jesus Billy said and I will let it light on my ass and my daughter will remain skirt-hiked-dead on a shore and friends will make tea make tea make tea and then visit in the cold dark of night Point Dume

  And then there was you, me, us, red and black in the evening light lost to the wearing of hats and eager to return to stories that used to make some sense eager to recall easily demarcated boundaries of identity and designation and eager to resketch the likenesses of faces that were either familiar or desired wanting in the darkness of the wee hours which were no smaller than the rest to smell cooking that promised to free all of us from the chains of understanding yes ourselves and all those we loved or hated sought or dismissed the beautifulest of all visible things the lightning strikes of summer the stars the nebulae the nebulæ for only etymology’s sake some sea tempest and thus awaiting in an alley then to that day with a vacant hugeness of loss looming we counted our weapons one of us anyway and aligned with o
ur comrades and lined the halls with maps of our plans and stretched all things to their limits the budding disleafing and felling of trees notwithstanding my skull a great blue vault with eyebrows and anger in its large awkward gianthood rustling like some human noise in a forest a howling wind with no place to go a Brobdingnagian with a clumsy ham-fisted gait pretended to seek refuge while raising a hammer stood in a doorway prepared to fight in rude corridors and terrible closets and on beaches from which south extended until it stopped left unexplained left untouched left strange like a glance through a glass pane without a frame without an agent for beauty is a witch and did not we feel it so that the wretched made for lousy company not cheerful at all while hell and purgatory and paradise blended like clay on one spinning table upon which also rested my peaceable disposition until rough and then far rougher weather upset that temperament and forced me into that perplexing jungle that deep root-riddled tangle of wilderness that was myself

  In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.

  34

  A pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the sun.

  Emily Kuratowski had in life been married to a mathematician, she liked to tell people. She had been one as well but seldom mentioned that. She told me once that she had spent her life working on projective limit topology and canonical projections and she even tried to explain it a bit to me, but my glazed-over look made her smile politely and pat my twenty-year-younger head. That is why I don’t think about these things anymore, she said. I would rather eat cherries and think about the wind. Emily was what kids in my day used to call walleyed, but was called later lazy eyed. In her case her left eye pointed slightly out and so she suffered exotropia. She and I talked about that and I told her that the condition sounded more like a nice place to visit. She told me that her husband had worked on ring theory. I didn’t understand his problem and neither did he, she said. And none of it served him in life. He died bitter and, finally, unsolved. She picked up her yellow cup from the tray in front of her and drank through the bendable straw. I’m feeling a little better now. God, I hate this hospital.

  Emily had money problems, stemming, she told me, from her inability to balance a checkbook. Oh, I can explain the Hausdorff maximal principle or Banach-Tarski paradox, but don’t ask me to subtract seven from twelve. My husband was even worse, insofar as he had his head stuck so far up his ass he could smell his own breath.

  You must have loved him, I said.

  I suppose I did for a while. Then we just got wrapped up in life and work and love and the idea of it just fell away.

  That’s sad.

  If it hadn’t been for my constant affairs it would have been.

  I laughed.

  He never noticed. He never could have noticed. He never would have wanted to notice. If he had noticed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have understood.

  Too much in the clouds?

  Too stupid. Thank god we never had any children.

  I thought you had a daughter.

  I do.

  Oh. Just how old are you, Emily? My question came off as indelicate, I think, but she didn’t mind.

  I’m ninety-nine. Palindromic ninety-nine. At this age I look the same coming as I do going. And before you ask I have no sentimental or egotistical desire to reach one hundred for the mere sake of doing it. One hundred is not a terribly interesting number. In the Qur’an there are ninety-nine names for Allah. That’s a funny thing for a Jew to know, isn’t it?

  We end up knowing all sorts of funny things. Imagine how many of them we forget in a lifetime.

  Or two.

  Or two.

  35

  The dining room was quiet and then quieter when Harley and his henchmen walked in. They made their noises and stood like weeds near the salad bar. Harley smiled. So, the keys have turned up, he said. I’d like to know who took them, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Anyway, thank you. But know that I am still angry. This is my kingdom. He rocked there on those words for a prolonged moment, then repeated, This is my kingdom. He walked out, his workers on his pheromone trail.

  I looked at the faces in the room. None was terrified, but none was happy. They had all come to terms with the idea and the reality of death, but a change in the suffering along the path to death was unsettling. At their ages, they had a right to expect routine, even in pain, even in torment.

  The regional inspector is coming tomorrow, Sheldon whispered to me.

  The feckless, perhaps shiftless, certainly slothful regional inspector made four visits a year to our facility. If he was not somehow profiting from whatever the Gang of Six was about, then he was at least so incompetent that a complaint to him would prove meaningless. Also, the residents were just too intimidated by Harley and his thugs to be seen speaking to him. Yet, for some reason, beyond me and probably any sane person, I was going to have a conversation with him. Just looking at him, in his plaid jacket and chinos and oversized metal-framed glasses, I imagined him with his father, a hidebound pedant without knowledge of man’s nature or of a boy’s, giving lesson after lesson to this dutiful dolt, in some dead language of morality. In other words, he was a Christian, and not the good kind. He was a spit-hurling, brow-raking participle grinder. How are we doing? What are we eating today? Speaking of sleeping, are we sleeping well and doing our exercises and going here, there, hither, and yond?

  We’ve got a problem, I said to Finley Snerd. I kid you not.

  We’re having a problem?

  Yes, some of the orderlies are abusive.

  I’m seeing the problem. You’re telling me that some of the orderlies are abusing the residents?

  That’s exactly what I just told you. I refused to be sucked into his participle gurgling vortex. We were sitting rather conspicuously at a picnic table on the lawn and I saw the brute Leon see us. He nodded his monster’s head.

  What sort of abuse are the residents experiencing?

  Neglect. Mental and emotional ill treatment. I suspect there is some extortion.

  I’m listening and telling you that these are serious allegations.

  I am aware of this.

  Are you willing to name names?

  Harley, Leon, Ramona, Tommy, and Billy. And let me not forget Cletus. I’d like you to write this down, all of it. They killed William Marshall.

  You’re telling me they were responsible for him dying?

  That’s what killed means.

  Keep going.

  They attacked his room, his life. They damaged a photograph of his deceased daughter, it was very special to him, an extension of his being, and that upset him so much that he moved too quickly, fell and hit his head.

  Snerd thumbed through a folder, pretending to look at notes. I’m understanding that the orderlies were searching for some missing keys.

  That’s what they claimed. What would ninety-two-year-old, nearly blind William Marshall want with the orderlies’ keys?

  The regional inspector sighed. Well, I’m making note of all of this and we’ll be getting back to you. I’m assuming you won’t be minding if I’m popping in sometime so that we can continue chatting.

  They are going to kill all of us and I want you to write that down. Would you write that down, please?

  Okay, I’m writing it.

  And date it.

  I’m dating it, as per your request. He closed up his folders and packed up his briefcase. He offered me his spongy hand to shake and I shook it. Well, I’ll be going now.

  36

  Dear Son,

  I received and read your letter of 30 May with great interest and I am sorry to be slow with my response. Thank you for it. Your letters are a staple of my continued soundness. I had hoped that my missive before yours might
have allayed your concerns and fears, but I was evidently wrong. You appear to be as seized with panic as ever regarding my current state of affairs, but such obsessing serves neither of us. It hinders you from functioning properly, comme il faut, in the world and so undermines and negates my life’s work as a father. So, cut it out. The orderlies are disorderly and let’s leave it at that.

  If there were others left in our family, I might write that they do not know me or that they have a wholly erroneous picture of me. This, whether they be brother, cousins, or grandchildren. Do not take the last in that list as a request or complaint. That ship has obviously sailed.

  About my brother, your uncle. I envied him his life, simple and uncomplicated in its way. It perpetually seemed to me full of passion, if not love. Who knows which is better, or preferable. I would opt for the latter, but that is no doubt my artistic sensibility and penchant for the masochistic. But what does that leave one at the end? Some photographs? A few familiar tunes and scents? His death even seemed undemanding, easy, and uninvolved. All I have is involvement.

  I do not expect another visit from you. I’m not crazy. That ship sailed with the other one. Not that I don’t believe you would like to be here, but, you know, physics, geometry, and all that. Time simply is not with us. We are out of time. I realize that one can read that in a couple of ways. I choose it to connote out of sync, as if my choice matters, and in the end just what is the difference?

  Throughout my life I have found myself several times in so-called dire straits and I did not despair. Not so much because I was or am an optimist, but because I am prone to asking myself the question, just how bad can things really be? So, I ask you to not despair either; it is a little late for that.