Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  41

  To save power in those late-summer months Teufelsdröckh’s turned off the air-conditioning an hour earlier and extinguished three of every four fluorescent panels in the corridors and so the evenings were warm and eerily lit, the flickering panels struggling to carve out small regions of shadowy light. By morning all the oldsters were shivering because to cope with the warmer early evening they had opened their windows and by daybreak the rooms were frigid. I never minded it so much, but it was no fun stumbling out in the mornings to be surrounded by bundled-up, yawning, and complaining residents of Limbo. Still, I was happier than I had been for my hours spent with my mathematician friend, her periods of hazy vacation and arithmetical flights of decampment notwithstanding.

  You know what would be nice one of these evenings? I said.

  A thunderstorm, Emily Kuratowski said immediately.

  You’ve been reading my mind.

  Or you mine.

  Maria Cortez had told us at breakfast that she suspected someone had rummaged through her things again. But of course they found nothing, she snickered.

  Emily and I were watching Harley and Tommy, involved in an animated discussion down the hall. I could not make out any of what was being said, but Tommy was scuttling left, the only way he scuttled, his head bent low, still high above Harley’s, but his posture was of contrition, if not fear. I could imagine the dialogue.

  You didn’t find anything? You went through all of Kuratowski’s drawers? What do you mean you didn’t find anything? Harley glanced down at us and though I had a momentary fear that he was singling me out with his stare, he was not.

  Nothing. And yes, I looked through every one of her drawers. It was like she’d been robbed blind.

  Somebody around here is up to no good.

  Us?

  No, somebody else. Ramona, I’ll bet it’s Ramona. She’s a sneaky one. Leon’s hands are too big. And that troll Cletus never had an idea in his life.

  What about Billy?

  Who?

  Just then one of the day nurses, the only one with any balls, her name was Gladys, made much noise walking toward Harley and Tommy. You! she shouted. Do you know how to use a key?

  Harley watched her. He had no power over her and so fell into his short body and found his nest.

  It seems you can unlock and open a cabinet well enough, but the real trick, the important part of using a key, is reinserting it and locking the cabinet. Do you understand me?

  Gladys might have been an ally save for the fact that she hated any one of us as much as she hated Harley and the orderlies. She simply did not want waves. She stayed in her glass-walled office and sat behind her desk, completely visible during her few hours at work, and, ostensibly, worked. She was like a fish in a bowl, rather a reclusive crab in a cave in a bowl. This is the one responsibility you have, she said. To lock the cabinet once you’ve taken out the medication. Do you think you can do that?

  Yes, ma’am.

  She turned her attention to the residents and smiled. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a bit brisk, isn’t it?

  42

  I noticed one other thing, moreover, which struck me rather markedly and with a smattering of nostalgia, and that was that Harley’s voice reminded me of the voice of a man who had annoyed and harassed me when I was a youth in college, when I had fancied myself a radical, when I got high a lot, but the voice from back then was considerably more educated, maybe even refined, but perhaps not as musical as Harley’s, not to suggest a mellifluousness in Harley’s voice, but it was certainly more so than that of the blazon of a federal agent who hounded me, and even then I didn’t believe it because he seemed too young, but they had to start somewhere, didn’t they, in the shacks of backwoods Kentucky or in the public school system of New York City, they had to come from someplace and they probably did begin early, were sought out in their formative years because of some observed proclivity or other, a knack for languages or a way with people, but probably something far more base and useful in law dumbforcement, meanness, cruelness, the ability to easily turn their gaze away from mistreatment and pain, and a large, set jaw that was good at chewing gum for hours on end and it was his voice that I was reminded of, how he would follow me down Thayer Street during a rain and drink coffee at Spat’s while I tried to ignore him and talk to the waitress on whom I had a crush and I remember her well too, an American studies major of ambiguous racial extraction or derivation and even she was struck by how struck I was by the presence of my shadowy friend and his suit that might as well have been a sandwich-board badge and there I would sit trying to talk to the waitress, and I hadn’t yet even met your dear mother, trying to ignore the walking, skulking badge. I thought that maybe the waitress liked me, but it was all too much. And so I never even got a date or her phone number and suppose I had, suppose I had written her number down the back of my receipt, why, I might not have been interested when I finally did meet your mother or I might have been in a different place, maybe in a commune in cold-ass upstate New Hampshire with a coven of racially challenged American youths, and that is why you might well owe your actual existence to the government of this nation, because had they made up their minds sooner that I was not a threat to national security and the American way of life, had they not been there to cock-block my efforts with the cute waitress, then I might be in New Hampshire yet, making backpacks and fanny packs out of hemp and natural dyes, and I was just mere seconds away perhaps from becoming the reluctant dance partner of a much larger man in some federal penitentiary or maybe a milder correctional facility where they serve cake, as one night I turned the tables on the big badge, shadowy man, managed to lose him on campus, doing so by entering a basement washroom of a classroom building and exiting from a high window, and after that I waited for him outside, his body language told of his exasperation and anger, but I followed him then, became the hunter and tailed him, as they say, back to his modest apartment on, of all places, Federal Hill, a silly and sad-looking walk-up next to a popular Italian restaurant, what else, and I wondered briefly if he was really a badge after all and then I saw him visited by other badges, they were either cops or unsuccessful bankers, the cut of their suits being rough and just fitted, and I had a difficult time imagining why this badge or any badge or anyone would have any interest in me except that I was a black man in America who could read and because I had traveled to Cuba on a sailboat when I was nineteen, on a sailboat with some partying white boys who I was certain were not being followed, wherever they were living, but maybe that was enough to label me a commie for life, a red, a pinko, an enemy of the state, and how did I get here except a noticed and remembered timbre of a voice, not a deep voice, in fact a bit high for a man, even though I don’t suppose there is any range that a man’s voice is supposed to fall into and I wouldn’t suggest such a thing, especially not to that boxer who used to annihilate his opponents in the first rounds of all his fights until the geniuses of the sport figured out that he couldn’t render them unconscious if he couldn’tn’t hit them and the guy got so frustrated that finally he bit off a piece of another fellow’s ear, off, I don’t care how hungry I might have felt, I would never have done that, but he was not an enemy of the state, had never read Marx, though he was running around in short trunks trying to eat the citizenry, no, but I was such an enemy and it was because I had read Mao and Marx (Karl and Groucho) and Malcolm and I had been to Cuba. But back to voices and back to Harley, who reminded me of the big badge in no other way except that they were both white, but that was hardly a shared attribute that was in any way defining, unless of course either one of them had been a heavyweight boxer back then, now they’re all large Russian fellows that eat rivets and make tools from their fingernail clippings, and, like I said, you weren’t even, you know the expression, a twinkle in your father’s eye, in my pinko eye. The badge, his name was Wesley, I saw it on his mailbox, I saw it and then I did a terribly f
oolish thing, I sneaked into his apartment because I was certain he had been in my home and I wanted to know a little something about the fucker, pardon my Danish, and when I did sneak in, it was easier than it sounds, old doors and all that and a key under the mat, I found him in mid-buttfucking session with another man, perhaps another badge, but it was difficult to discern, what without his clothes and with him frantically ducking for nonexistent cover, and because I stayed perhaps less than a second, well, at any rate, I personally didn’t have a problem with his sexual preference, but I’m certain that his agency would have a problem with it, their using the don’t-let-us-find-outwe-won’t-burn-you-at-the-stake policy, and so I never saw him again and it was too bad because he was not an unattractive man, unlike Harley, and after that I felt sad for him, hiding in that way, worried all the damn time that someone might find out he was fond of men’s bottoms, and I imagined him later, having left the force, living in Michigan maybe or Indiana and trying to carve out a life in the home-security business and hiding from his clients the fact that he lived with a man who was perhaps a designer of public fountains, while Harley, ugly, grotesque Harley, invaded the open legs of that sweet little nurse and arched his appliance-shaped hairy back over her small frame like a camel-man and thumped away until he came and she finally collected her tiny white clogs and scampered down the dim hallway to later chat with me at the desk, without a stain on her smock, on her face, or even the slightest inclination to apologize to me for having sullied my image of her, but I could not have cared less, who was she to me after all, a pretty face. I was too old to be impressed or taken in by a pretty face or twenty pretty faces or two hundred but she had left that Harley back there in the break room, on that pathetic cot, that I had regrettably seen and so could picture, with circles of Pall Mall smoke coiled around his head like serpents, smiling and enjoying the coolness of the wet spot, and he glanced down at his glistening balls and beyond to his yellowed toenails and observed that they needed trimming, but waved off the major project, too much trouble, grooming, too much trouble, scratched his furry ass and gobbled up a few more villagers, gnawed on the heads of those below him and his enemies, wondered who was stealing his spoils before he could and I am sitting with Emily Kuratowski, my friend, and she is slipping ever further away, her eyes looking alternately cloudy and glassy more of the time, her voice, which is truly melodious, trailing off so much more often, Tychonoff ’s theorem states the Cartesian product of any arbitrary set of compact topological spaces is itself compact and many people say that this is an equivalent of the axiom of choice, but I just don’t buy it, Zermelo’s well-ordering theorem, yes, Zorn’s lemma, yes, but not Tychonoff ’s, even when considering the proof of the existence of non-Lebesgue measurable sets, she says this and then comments on the zinnias, they seem a little droopy, and then drifts off toward a syrupy sleep, only to awaken and look me in the eye and say, We cannot let them live in peace, and I nod and lament that my poor friend’s last lucid moments must be consumed with the cancerous worry over retribution and requital, but I can say that these goals are not attractive and not as strongly longed for by me, though I would claim that we are not vindictive or spiteful, we, I think, seek more to discharge equity, not so much to exact revenge as to satisfy justice, and I feel it is my responsibility, mission, to see her and my other friends satisfied in their final days and it comes as a two-pronged campaign, at once putting an end to the reign of the Gang and our taking control of what we have left, our exercising our power to act, the way I acted when first I met your mother, I’ve always loved that construction, when first I met, well, when first I met your mother I was in my late twenties, seems like just a thousand years ago, she was ostensibly white and I, as the badges pointed out earlier, was and remain ostensibly black and though it hardly seems to matter now, it did then, and the excitement of our difference and the electricity of our head-turning presence in certain venues, sometimes unexpected, the venues, not us, like in a little church in a podunk village in central Connecticut. We had wandered in to beat it out of a torrential rain, the hardest in fifty years we were told by the old custodian who couldn’t stop staring at us, then again by the little nasty pastor who found us equally odd, hardest rain in a half century, I thinking that it could have simply been that they didn’t understand what a beautiful woman like your mother was doing with a homely oaf like myself, but of course that wasn’t it. I was born at night but not last night, as I heard a UPS man once say, and boy was that a relief, wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I couldn’t smell anything off it I’m sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night I couldn’t rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see why I am so damned nervous about that though I like it in winter it’s more company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was only about ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes dressing her up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those mountains the something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with the little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing about in it then make a race back into the church because the storm had started up again as suddenly as it had ended and so we were caught there once more in the house of Jesus with the pastor and the custodian and the holy spirit, until the pastor asked your mother if her parents knew where she was, she did look young, and I appreciated the pastor asking questions first and planning on shooting later, but still I didn’t appreciate it one bit, and neither did your mother, but maybe she did, maybe we did and it gave our being together, our approaching union, a bit of that outlaw appeal. We left there, heavy rain and all, hail by now, I had never been so wet, so thoroughly soaked, but we felt none of it, but wandered as deep into the middle of that little depressed town as we could go and we kissed there in the dead, and I mean dead, center of Podunk, Connecticut, the name of the town I can’t recall, maybe it’s age, maybe it’s something worse, maybe it’s because I’m making up my past just the way every one of us makes up our past anew each time we visit it, what actually happens is always just a dress rehearsal for what you will report later, but it was undressed that your mother and I made you, if I can be so vain as to use that term, made, but god didn’t make you, nature didn’t make you, if we’re going by cause and effect, then the big gay badge from Federal Hill made you because I wasn’t off living in a commune fucking an art-school dropout instead of your sweet, blessed saint of a mother, me, son, aye, yer mother was a saint, a fucking saint who had an affair with that flyboy and even if she didn’t, she still considered it, lusted after him, but I loved her then and I loved her then and then and then and even now though she left me before even you did before even you did before even you did before even you

  43

  But on the way back home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him.

  There was a rainbow over the hills to the north of campus. Maria Cortez stared at them. Gravity hates me, she said.

  Gravity hates all of us, I told her.

  I remember when gravity didn’t give me a second thought.

  It was just biding time.

  I heard that Ramona was fired.

  I looked around for Ramona and didn’t see her. I saw Leon standing at the central building. He was wiping down a wheelchair, perhaps of someone who had died. He’d been wiping it for a good thirty minutes, nervously glancing about all the while.

  I can’t say I’m sorry to see her go.

  The last I’d see of Ramona was when she and Harley were having an argument that tumbled with them into the dining room.

  I know it was you, Harley said.

  I have to clean Chen’s toilet.
/>   Leon and Cletus don’t have the initiative and I know it’s not Tommy.

  I punched in at six just like every other day.

  Just admit you’ve been doing stuff on your own.

  What do you want to talk about?

  I’m done with you.

  Me? Me? You think I did it?

  You might as well pack up. With that Harley stormed away.

  Ramona followed. Billy, it must be Billy.

  Who?

  44

  The question was whether there was some real value to which all of this, all our naming, thinking, speaking, breathing, wanting, loving, lusting, fearing, worrying, laughing, obsessing, liking, hating, changing, hindering, bringing, facilitating, curbing, retarding, tilting, running, sitting, looking, gazing, staring, listening, learning, ignoring, forgetting, misplacing, framing, distrusting, calling, naming, relinquishing, passing, entrusting, remembering, eating, drinking, sleeping, beating, hurting, contributing, basking, consigning, waking, stirring, losing, winning, drawing, informing, rigging, equipping, falling, disclosing, naming, administering, requiring, mustering, bathing, setting, washing, stalling, disguising, causing, ridding, masking, detailing, indicating, disposing, designating, clumping, breaking, counting, limiting, naming, eclipsing, assuming, flowing, tattling, tempering, flowering, veiling, dispensing, donating, teaching, helping, falsifying, disseminating, hurrying, dodging, naming, working, sullying, providing, succeeding, stonewalling, throwing, kicking, believing, uttering, serving, renouncing, attaining, venting, punching, treading, expanding, diminishing, devoting, hustling, stopping, dealing, allowing, qualifying, vacationing, showing, desiring, yearning, exploring, swearing, hedging, mining, raising, delivering, reneging, modulating, agreeing, betraying, naming, making, singing, whispering, exuding, burying, covering, occasioning, keeping, leaving, impeding, rising, clearing, deferring, sabotaging, executing, racing, balking, naming, stockpiling, sacrificing, distressing, coming, suppressing, slipping, inculpating, jacketing, shouting, lunging, frustrating, circulating, expressing, equivocating, flourishing, rotting, recoiling, repressing, emitting, impressing, collapsing, trusting, naming, thriving, trapping, pitying, depressing, convalescing, proffering, surrendering, renewing, hosting, slanting, stringing, ducking, knowing, deciding, lying, pussyfooting, challenging, doting, adhering, granting, hesitating, bequeathing, questioning, triumphing, obstructing, affecting, blocking, regarding, choking, grasping, delaying, inhibiting, shaping, milling, interfering, negating, reversing, revering, feeling, imploring, dipping, concocting, tergiversating, convincing, cherishing, naming, noticing, impugning, perceiving, camouflaging, arranging, tensing, evoking, sequestering, destroying, filling, sharing, healing, entwining, listing, steaming, petitioning, primping, separating, tainting, decentering, ambushing, refilling, becoming, sidestepping, sensing, emptying, steeling, calculating, identifying, smiting, converting, frolicking, achieving, adoring, refusing, dogging, constructing, clutching, stealing, extolling, quivering, faltering, menacing, imperiling, frothing, testing, abdicating, narrowing, opening, prospecting, directing, misunderstanding, judging, dividing, taking, producing, vacillating, hoping, indulging, tailoring, airing, atoning, sweeping, browbeating, repelling, surfacing, studying, reproducing, visiting, delighting, electing, copying, paralleling, creating, bracing, rattling, biting, reaching, taunting, functioning, obviating, gravitating, naming, turning, wavering, gambling, lapping, nailing, risking, discouraging, placating, divining, discerning, pushing, pulling, timing, preaching, spinning, yanking, processing, deducing, tracking, relying, lighting, preparing, referencing, stroking, understanding, substituting, facing, existing, portraying, moping, idling, furthering, sublimating, warning, hewing, darkening, petting, misdirecting, presiding, forcing, distancing, patting, rationalizing, alienating, elevating, putting, quibbling, caring, repairing, projecting, worshipping, apologizing, sizing, brownnosing, riddling, chancing, deploring, descending, prodding, skirting, orienting, asserting, gesturing, inserting, reducing, deserting, overtaking, righting, grating, echoing, fuming, torturing, insinuating, channeling, discounting, leaking, naming, diving, naming, practicing, deriding, continuing, sorting, laboring, interspersing, nodding, restoring, routing, situating, accounting, tightening, relaxing, doing, telling, occupying, uniting, ribbing, centering, releasing, revisiting, holing, pampering, losing, objecting, starring, appealing, doubling, positing, reviewing, giving, wobbling, referring, viewing, regulating, hooking, extinguishing, burnishing, encouraging, waffling, igniting, iterating, answering, reeling, naming, popping, recapitulating, shilly-shallying, dillydallying, refuting, disputing, blowing, tintinnabulating, conjuring, having, hunkering, rejecting, dithering, extending, undertaking, inhaling, exhaling, teasing, beating, scratching, defining, defaming, fooling, trimming, containing, cutting, nibbling, naming, attending, conforming, abiding, rerouting, lasting, taming, claiming, blaming, shaming, portaging, naming, ticking, kissing, tonguing, presuming, imagining, dreaming, graying, sectioning, lashing, jeopardizing, resting, meaning, testing, concluding, cresting, modeling, dragging, lifting, pickling, naming, inducing, tickling, slashing, licking, sticking, bounding, doubting, leaping, jumping, deeming, punctuating, naming, standing, tasting, spitting, swallowing, thumbing, fingering, naming, lounging, scrounging, hounding, resisting, clapping, waving, besieging, retreating, attacking, relenting, sucking, screwing, fucking, and naming, would lead to.