At my age, with so many measures having been taken and being taken, no measures really seem extreme. It’s too bad, because sometimes extreme measures are called for. Extreme or not, measures have been chosen, if not yet employed. I remember hearing the cliché that one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater; that seems exactly the time to do it. But again, I am just Alice arguing with Humpty Dumpty.
The role of all this last act, as it were, is to provide a context for the impossible, a home for the contradictory, a bed for the irreconcilable. What I have planted, am planting, are like rhizomes, easy to put in, but you have to divide them before you know it. So much work. Come what may, we will do what we do and we will not stop or even pause for subversion or inversion.
All for now. I doubt we will see each when all is said and done, but who knows, really? Don’t pick up any wooden nickels.
Love,
Dad
37
Still, it was not all clouds and gray skies—there was some sunshine. As with Maria Cortez, who looked as if she had been soundly fucked. She sat beside a smiling Sheldon Cohen and so I knew that all of it had been more than mere bragging. They appeared casual and quite comfortable in the, shall we call it, the slipstream of their activity, the two of them naively trusting that they shared a secret. Well, Maria naively thought so, as everything in Sheldon’s posture and movement, he might as well have worn a display of bright feathers all around, was a betrayal of confidence.
Still, in spite of what I thought was rather barefaced and transparent, the fact of it was so incredible as to leave most, if not skeptical, then befuddled. I chose, quite reasonably, not to imagine the liaison and preferred to call it, in the privacy of my own head, though I did not consider it for any length of time, a bit of extracurricular activity. Of course, at their ages anything but using the toilet and going about the business of dying was extracurricular. If anyone had given Maria a cigarette, she would have smoked it happily. And I felt happy for her. And for him, however grudgingly. The two had just come wobbling and strutting, respectively, into my kitchen. Mrs. Klink was already seated with me, nursing her ubiquitous cup of green tea.
What’s wrong with the two of you? Mrs. Klink asked.
Nothing, nothing at all, said Sheldon Cohen.
Maria Cortez giggled, maybe chortled; I have never known the difference. She sat next to Mrs. Klink and stared out into my living room.
Emily Kuratowski was still in the hospital but was scheduled to return to us the next day.
Emily does not look well, said Mrs. Klink.
She’s ninety-nine, I said.
She looks beautiful. She’s a hottie, said Sheldon Cohen.
To a considerable degree, by the time we have reached a certain age, it varies for each of us, we have said all we meant to say. Everything else is either a reissue or an elucidation, a gloss. Some utterances might be reconstructions of some erased pages, palimpsests of sorts, but it’s mere repetition. There might even be supplement here or there, but our questions will have nothing more to seek but the texture of our texts, the colors of our recollections, but there will be no new colors and there will be no new tastes or sensations. The only new thing will be cessation, suspension, conclusion, and besides that we will have nothing to play with but the play within the shadows of whatever metaphors loom or we choose to have loom.
So there really was nothing for Sheldon and Maria to say and they said it. And so did Mrs. Klink in asking her question and so did I by sitting there and remembering the dream that I had, wondering if it was a memory.
In the dream I was back in the break room of the orderlies, the stolen keys already in my pocket, and I was hidden in the shadows of the lockers. I looked to the window that would be my escape and listened to the sickening huffing and panting of Harley and Caledonia or Clarabelle or Cissy or whatever I had decided to call her and on that same wall was a door, an old-fashioned wooden door that did not seem in keeping with the vintage or style of the building or any building on the campus. In my pocket was the old key. I had not placed it back on the ring with the others before leaving them to be recovered and it now occurred to me that this key might be important, that this key might be key. But the really strange thing about the door was that there was no corresponding door on the outside of that wall. I looked at the faces of my friends. They did not know that I was ever in the orderlies’ break room. They knew only that Billy and I had somehow come to have possession of the keys that had caused us all so much trouble. I would tell them about the door. What would it mean to them? What did it mean to me? I was not sure I had even seen the strange door I thought I recalled.
Deep, long past halfway, into the journey of my so-called life, I found myself in darkness, without you and you and you and you, a whole list of you, and stuck on this crooked trail, the straight one having been lost, and it is difficult to express how in this darkness, rough and stern, as bitter as death, but what I saw, what I saw there, out of slumber and wide-awake in that dark place, was the termination of some world and the beginning of another, a mountain maybe, a wind pressing against me, issued from some sea I could not see, and so I fled onward, thinking how lucky are the amnesiacs, when a panther addressed my presence and then a lion and then a love long lost, all three heads uplifted, but the last of them, she brought upon me much sadness, the kind that comes with fear, and she wept with me despite her hunger and we were cast back into some light, away from the cats, and I met a man whose silence was well practiced and he recited to me his lineage and I did not care and he told me he was a poet and about that I cared even less and he told me he would travel with me and then I was impressed. Who will be my Virgilius now?
This was how I thought as I dragged my sorry ass across that lawn, toward that wall, to that window and back to the orderlies’ smoke-sour break room.
38
Sometimes stories come and stop and go
Sometimes stories stop and go and go
Sometimes stories come and stop and come
Sometimes stories stop and stop and stop
Sometimes stories come and come and go
Sometimes Sometimes Sometimes come
Swing an ax at my head, brother Billy, brother Billy
Swing an ax at my head, brother Billy mine
Swing an ax at my head, brother Billy, brother kill me
Swing an ax at my head for I haven’t got the time.
A pistol in the first act and all of that. I could hear the plaintive cries of juvenile crows most of the time in that late summer. I wondered when the cries would mature. Would they one morning be the sounds of adult crows or would the change come in the middle of the caw? Would that adult sound be approached? There it is, there it is, almost, almost there, ahhhh, there it is. However it is, so it is with age. And when do two things that are in fact the same thing converge and negate any notion of their ever having been anything but one thing? When does Cicero become Tully? When does the morning star become the evening star? When does nobody in particular become nobody at all?
If I am to create you, me, them, or you create me, you, them, then you or I have to do something to allow that making, so that there is making, making, almost there, made. As long as an individual is traced out only in repose, in some milieu, its, his, her critical qualities and essential attributes can only be stated but not created. A lesson I learned from god in that story about the first and loveliest, and no doubt overly tended, garden. It was one thing to have A and E (possibly universal and existential statements, respectively) lying about, but finally somebody’s got to fuck up or fuck somebody or fuck the wrong somebody. Then you’ve got yourself a story. Then you’ve got yourself a world.
This whole business of making a story, a story at all, well, it’s the edge of something, isn’t it? Forth and back and back and forth, it’s a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with some logi
c, someone’s logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time. Like a good little wog. But, eh, don’t listen to an old man. I’m firing semantic blanks or, at least, filling them in. My son would laugh right about here. Or I would. Why do anything? That’s what I keep asking and then I remember I said to my son, or he said to me, that it’s not what you’ve made that will give you peace, that the only thing you get to take with you is having made it. Blah, blah, blah.
Sometimes I think about these things and I am taken back to my childhood. I perceived much of it as boring or painful, but that is growing up, isn’t it? I spent most of my time attempting to pass beneath the worrying radar of my mother. True that one cannot complain about such worry in any concrete way, but it was annoying and, more often than not I feared, a function of her narcissism rather than any real selflessness. Photographs of me then show a youth with red, tired eyes, not quite sullen but numbed eyes, perhaps. Boredom was my worst enemy, but not the kind that sprang from idleness, as I read and wrote quite a bit, but from a nagging lack of engagement with the world outside my thoughts, stricken every day by a tenacious noonday devil who would whisper from my shoulder that I should return to the sad, torpid world, as if I was some hermit who had left it. I ignored the devil then because he seemed too poorly informed and dressed; I had never been allowed to actually join the world. But then I did, first by climbing into it, then by walking into it until it was over my head and lungs, and a world with the world turned out to be as boring as a world without, only with more embarrassing moments and better jokes. The world seemed to me suited to people who smoked cigarettes, for they appeared to create their own weather.
Still 38
Emily was in a wheelchair and that was where she should have been. Still, without being bossy, as that was not her nature, she got to wherever she wanted to go, and I was the one pushing her. She was not faring well and it was clear that her being lost in her head featured a return to her craft, namely, logic, and so she seemed to speak in riddles. As when she said to me while I poured my cup of tea, You would do well to remember Zermelo’s theorem.
I’m certain that’s true, I said to her. And what does that theorem state?
That every set can be well ordered.
Well ordered?
A set is well ordered if every nonempty subset of that set has a least element under the specified ordering.
A least element?
An element that is less than or equal to any other element in a set.
And so it went. I hoped that when dementia settled in on me that I would be as obscure and as interesting as Emily Kuratowski. So it went, until one morning she asked, Are we going? I ask because I am not afraid.
You’re not.
You should not be either. Make it what you want. Make it exactly what you want.
I nodded. Then I will not be afraid either, my friend.
39
The exterior wall in the orderlies’ break room. Turns out it was real after all and I held the ancient key that would open it. Emily Kuratowski sat in her wheelchair beside me, she having confessed to being sent by you to escort me through the door and, well, I might as well stop here. Emily is stopping me here, mainly because she refuses to be called a Virgil and because she, as I, we, simply cannot bring ourselves to play dumb enough to entertain any business about the circles of hell or about eternal torment, punishment, restraint, or whatever bugs and annoys the Christian souls that love to read Dante over and over. We will not pass through limbo or Limbo (is it a place with a proper name?), will not climb up and over any hairy-backed demons, wrestle with she-wolves, chat with Horace and Ovid, take joy in watching the anguish of our evil enemies. Nice poem, is all I’ll say. But hell? Abandon hope, all who think there are gates. We will only acknowledge that there is a door and then realize, rather rightly, that it is not set into that exterior wall but leaned up against it, waiting to be taken home by some simpleminded employee, probably Harley, who no doubt needs a door to hell in his basement, or maybe by Leon, who needs really big doors.
So, why are we standing here? Emily Kuratowski asked. Rather, why are you standing? I’m sitting of course.
Because tomorrow is my birthday, I said.
How old will you be?
Seventy-nine.
A baby.
What will they do to us if they find us in here?
They’ll ask us why we’re here.
What will you tell them?
I’ll tell them that we were wondering why they are such failures as human beings and that we were wondering also how such people live.
We’re anthropologists.
Of a kind.
Why did you bring me here? she asked.
A moment of weakness, I said. Sometimes fear can make you creep into one camp or another, can make you almost believe what you want to think you’re too strong to believe. I wanted to think there is a hell. I guess I wanted to think there is a heaven. I wanted to think that I would see my son again.
That’s not a bad thing to think.
I shrugged. It’s a stupid thing to think.
I cannot argue with that.
Do you think there is evil in the world?
I don’t know what that means. I think there are people who are cruel. I know there are. What about you?
No evil.
Good?
Oh, there’s good. No evil. No god or gods or devils? If there is a god, he’s not very good at much.
What about meaning?
Meaning? You mean, like, purpose?
Okay.
She shook her head.
I nodded. Justice?
Maybe. Justice happens just often enough that the myth of it persists. Funny how injustice doesn’t create its own mythology.
Hope springs eternal.
Hope.
Do you think we’re in hell right now, this place?
No.
That was simple.
Hell would be if I’d never seen the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a child or if I had never been able to understand Gauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. For you it would have been never reading Huck Finn. I’m guessing.
Close enough. So, we’re not in hell now?
However much it feels like it.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it hell for someone else.
If I were twenty years younger, I’d kiss you.
If you were twenty years younger, I’d let you. Shall we get out of here?
Emily Kuratowski nodded. On our way out, she sneezed and then said, The axiom of choice does not apply if there is a finite number of bins.
Of course, I said.
40
It had been my experience that the one thing thieves hate more than anything else is theft. And so Mrs. Klink and Maria Cortez and Emily Kuratowski and Sheldon Cohen and I took all of our valuables, as they were called, and hid them away behind my azalea bush. And then we, in turn, went to the building administrator and told her that we had been robbed. The administrator, as she was called, had no face and so she could have no expression when one or all of us came to her with our reports. She made notes and said what she would whether she was being told a faucet was dripping or a chicken bone was caught in the throat of a wheelchair-bound, blind man, I’ll see what I can do. This came as no surprise to us, but we made our reports nonetheless. We walked the hallways looking forlorn and lost, our lives’ prizes had been stolen, our keepsakes, our memories. We stumbled into each other, we were so despondent. We cut sidelong and angry glances at the Gang of Six, whispered in the hallways that we knew who had done the pilfering—the bastards. It turned out that what upset a thief more than finding an empty mark was believing that he’d been beaten to the mark. My watch that you gave me, my watch that kept decent time if I checked on it now and again, a glance at the big clock on the street or called up that number that
there used to be just to tell you the time, that watch with the sweep hand (does anyone still call it that?) that was stuck in a little circle, one of three circles, one of the other two was for the date and that I never used and the third I have no idea about, but perhaps it was the most important one, perhaps it not only kept track of time but kept time and if I had only looked at it, if I had only understood it and used it, I might have some years some days some hours left, but not for myself because I really don’t need them, don’t want them, and wouldn’t know when to put them or keep them if I had them to keep or if I had a watch with a third circle that just happened to keep them for me. Rubato. My watch has been fakestolen, I will call it, but interred under the dirt as it is, not rendering its readings to me, tick tick ticking through the anything-but-friable soil to the wormies and the buggies and the seedlings, it might as well be stolen, so is there any real difference, except for the time that is stored in those springs, caught in them, twisted in them, warped, buckled, contorted in the skinny housing that looked so elegant when you gave it to me, a watch like the one I had owned before and a watch very much like a new one that I might have bought for myself, but it was from you, wasn’t it? And that made all the difference, all the difference when the leather wristband became stinky in the summer humidity, when sand would grind under it at the beach and I would wear it on and on because it was the time you have given me, time that just twiddled and peetled and staggered and tripped into the gloaming of everydayness, so that now my wrist feels so funny, outré, and not lighter, as one might expect, but denser, concentrated, like a head on Venus. My watch, your watch, sunk into the muck, laid to rest, inhumed with so much else, the wormies and the buggies and the seedlings and so much else, time, my time, because my time is all that’s left, my nonspatial continuum, my measures of change in position and temperature and velocity, my sequences, my durations, my repetitions my repetitions, I agreeing with Leibniz (happily, because he had monads) and with Kant (sadly, because he was so damn predictable) that we cannot measure this time and therefore we cannot travel this time and therefore we’re fucked and I’m an old man, so I can talk like this, say, say words like fuck if I want to, if I choose to, if the feeling moves me, if I have time for it, from time to time, but thank god and the devil for time, because if we didn’t have it, well, things would just stack up, wouldn’t they? Seconds piled on top of seconds on top of minutes on top of hours, with no place for them to go. What a mess. And this talk of eternity, it just won’t last, and besides, what an awful place to meet. I would rather count the hairs on a cat, the grains of sand in a desert, the lies America has told the world, than admit that eternity makes any sense. So, we buried a few things.
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell Page 14
