Glyph

by Percival Everett

  The woman, who was younger than my mother, and perhaps prettier, but far less interesting, stepped around to look at my face and touch my nose. She cooed at me and I glared back. “He’s so cute,” she said. “How old is he?”

  “Ralph will be one year old next month. Right, Ralph?”

  “I can’t believe the semester’s half over already,” the woman said.

  “Would you like to have coffee sometime?”

  ennuyeux

  Amen. Fiat, fiat. Amen. My mother hated talking to my father, but she tried all the time. I could not tell whether he hated talking to her, but he seemed to avoid it, until it started and then he couldn’t be silenced. Of course, my mother, knowingly or not, though I took her to be genuinely concerned, often approached Inflato badly.

  “Whatever happened to that novel you were working on?” she asked.

  He stopped eating, put down his fork, and said, “Fuck novels. I’ve found a better way of expressing myself. Besides, nobody is fooled by fiction or poetry anymore. Writing is the only thing.11 Criticism is my art.”

  “What about after you get tenure?”

  “I realize that all of this must be hard for you as an artist, the challenging of your station as superb creator, but what we’re discovering about language doesn’t diminish your worth, only that of your art.”

  My mother sat there, staring at him. If she could have, she would have struck him dead with a bolt of lightning. “You used to dream of being a novelist.”

  “That was childish,” Inflato said. “I was a kid and didn’t know any better. I used to think that novels were high art and mysterious, but they’re not. They are what they are.”

  “You’re rationalizing. You’re a failed writer and you can’t stand it.” My mother drank some water and smiled at me. “Your son’s going to be a writer.”

  “He’s cut out to be one, that’s for sure.”

  “What kind of crack is that?”

  I knew what kind of crack that was as well as she. The laughable truth, of course, was that Inflato was being so conspicuously seduced, or fooled, by the language he had chosen, though claiming a simple awareness of discourse. Had he truly been aware of what he was about with language then he would have shut up long before that and perhaps retreated to the reciting of Walt Kelly’s or Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical doggerels in his quest to make12 meaning. He chewed with his mouth open and talked with his mouth full. Rabbits are rounder than bandicoot’s sam. For Inflato, the subject of his failure as a writer forced a kind of reappraisal of agony and he didn’t suffer with dignity, but like the coward he was, advanced with a pointing finger.

  Aliquid stat pro aliquo

  Alterity

  Aufhebung

  Atopos

  A

  “So, you don’t think what I do has any value,” my mother said.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then what did you say?”

  “I can’t believe we’re finally rid of Nixon.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Come on, Eve,” said Inflato. “Your paintings can only be exactly what you are, a product of your culture.”

  “And your work?”

  “I readily admit the same is true for me.”

  “But yet you put your name on your few articles and your perpetually near-completed book.”

  Zing! Zeno could have had no quarrel with that arrow.

  “Fuck you,” Inflato said.

  “Fuck you, too!”

  libidinal economy

  And so for Inflato, from there on down it was uphill all the way.

  peccatum originale

  My mother, let me from here on call her Mo, put paint on canvases with a kind of abandon. Not a lot of paint, but with a wild hand I envied. There was great tension in her strokes, as if something, I am pressed to say what, was about to be catapulted somewhere. I was moved by the shapes and colors and whereas I recognized forms, trees, horses, houses, whatever, it was not to them that I attended, but something beyond them, or within them, or around them. And strangely her big paintings were as good as her small ones. But for all the colors and light she flashed on the surface, there was a blackness in her, a darkness of spirit13 that I found not only compelling, but necessary. That part of her wanted to eradicate all form from her work (she loved Mondrian), but the conflict was too great, she saw too much, and was not so much unable to free herself from that vision as she was committed to killing it. And of course one cannot slay an absent dragon. Kant was a cunning Christian.

  Mo was brushing gesso onto a large canvas when a man walked into her studio. I was in my monkey swing, a contraption that allowed me to stand and bounce, but finally was simply a way of chaining me up so that I could not waddle away or into trouble.

  “Hello, Clyde,” she said.

  “Eve.”

  “I thought I’d take you up on your invitation.” He turned a circle in the room, looking at the canvases. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “These are striking.” He did not say they were good. I liked that. Mo liked that. “And this is the most beautiful creation here.” He indicated me with a glance and made my mother smile. The line was frankly a bit sickening, but it rang as genuine, so I let it pass and continued bouncing. “What’s his name?”

  “Ralph.”

  “Great ears,” Clyde said.

  Clyde turned back to the work. He walked to the far wall to look at a huge mostly ochre canvas. “I love this one,” he said. “It’s lonely though. I can feel you in it, but no one else.”

  I stopped bouncing and listened to Clyde.

  “I see movement in a world that is frozen, but that’s not to say that it feels cold. Does that sound stupid?”

  Yes.

  “No,” Mo said. “That’s exactly how I felt when I made it.”

  I knew this was true, and I was impressed by his acumen, but still to say such a thing. But, for me, to say anything was a bad beginning.

  Mo and Clyde talked about painting for a while, until they were awkwardly silent and Clyde said that he had to go home.

  ens realissimum

  1

  In this culture predispositions of the conquered and oppressed seep into the foreground; it is those of lesser intelligence who seek salvation or, at least, refuge in it. This is why, more often than not, they are Christians. I am subjugated in the same way—I’m a baby, for crying out loud—but I do not fall for it. I don’t believe in sin. My body is not bad. I was playing with my willy just this morning. Inflato was shocked to find me touching myself and told me in a nice, but strained, tone not to do it anymore. He no doubt believed that my propensity for self-stimulation was connected in some way to my lack of speech and finally because of some holandric gene14 the presence of which was his fault. The first thing the Christians did after they chased out the Moors was close the public baths.

  2

  Inflato hates his senses. He thinks they want to trick him.

  causa sui

  Inflato kisses my mother stiffly, his lips hard, dry, unyielding like bricks and they have sex because they are married, because they must turn to each other for it. They own each other in that sense. They are each other’s cars. Sex is maintenance. Mo is hurt by each routine spin around the block. She cries and the darkness in her swells ever greater and so, oddly, she is fed by it, the sickness, fed by the thing that kills her. But isn’t that the human way? Kill the lamb for meat. Kill yourself for truth.

  Inflato’s scalp was dry, I noticed. It was a paricularly cold day and I was bundled up and wearing an itchy cap. There was a spring in his gait that day. We collected his mail, another rejection of his manuscript—this one from the University of Massachusetts Press—a nice enough letter. The bounce in his step persisted however as we left the building and walked a block to a nearby restaurant where we met the young woman.

  Laura was not as pretty as my mother on second viewing. Her hair was well cared for and her nails were neat, but her eyes were clear in that bad
way. From my perch on my father’s side of the booth I could see into her eyes and I could see forever. I could see the horizon. Nothing stood between me and infinity. But even I, at my age, could see that whereas nothing stood between me and the back of her head, that same nothing stood between my father and her nipples.

  Laura asked about my mother. Inflato told her that Mo was a artist and “a fine one, but she has bouts with insecurity.” “That’s too bad,” Laura said.

  “It’s really quite tiring. I find myself trying to build her up all the time. I mean, I want her to do well, but I’ve got my own work to do.”

  “I read your paper on alterity,” Laura said.

  Zing!

  My father tried to give me a sip of his juice, then laughed with Laura at the face I made. She said I was adorable. He said I looked like my mother. Bastard. She asked him if they could get together another time. He say that he would like that. Then he put the itchy cap back on my head.

  supernumber

  The shadowy figure relaxing in the corner is four years old now, and tucked away writing this. Writing myself into being? I think not. Doing more than surface, novelistic rendering? I think not. All too aware, am I, of my large ears and frightening silence, a silence so intimidating that my parents run from me. My emotional makeup is a sculpture, a marble real-world representation of the real world. Buoys float in my tears and toy boats collect about the buoys. Mondrian considered his work “New Realism,” claiming to see in nature what it was he represented, however cold and mathematical and even empty. Poor, poor Piet. But if that’s what he saw.…The world I see has no hard edges like his and it is full of symbols, but not simply my symbols or my language’s symbols, but reality’s own symbols. We do not give the creature reality enough credit, choosing to see it sitting out there as either a construct of ours or an infinitely regressing cause for the trickery of our senses. But I claim here that the most important thing I have learned in my four years is that reality has a soul, reality is conscious of itself and of us, and further is not impressed by us or our attempts to see it. In fact, we see it all the time and don’t know it, perhaps can’t. It is like love in that way.

  seme

  Mo knew the essential thing. She knew that what she loved loved her back. It was not me, but the colors, the shapes, the stretcher bars of her canvases. They loved her and she could feel it. She never spoke of it and wouldn’t. She wouldn’t have understood the idea of speaking of it and as soon as she considered speaking of it, it would have become unintelligible. Mo was in that world too real to speak.

  ephexis

  “So, you had lunch today?” Mo asked.

  Inflato picked me up to greet me in the living room and ignored the question.

  “Well?”

  “Did you have lunch with someone?”

  “Yes. A graduate student. A woman who is interested in alterity.”

  incision

  My mother fed me more and more books. I read the Bible, the Koran, all of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke. I read about game theory and evolution, about genetics and fluid dynamics. I read about Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Joseph McCarthy. I read the service manual for my parents’ ’63 Saab, for the Maytag washing machine, for the Kenmore air conditioner. I came to know about the interactions of adults and the workings of machines, history, and the problems of epistemology. Experience was something I understood would be gained, but my comprehension of those things that had yet happened to me was substantial and solid. I dreamed about fishing with Hemingway and walking the streets of Paris with James Baldwin. I didn’t know what flan tasted like, but I knew how one was made. I could picture the recoil of a fired shotgun and the damage done to the unsuspecting mallard. Through reading, I had built a world, a complete world, my world, and in it, I could live, not helplessly as I did in the world of my parents. I took the fuel dear Mo provided, but I did not use it immediately to write Ralph on Ralph, but to write poems. I wrote them on the pages of a loose-leaf notebook with a crayon (pen and pencils are dangerous) supplied by my mother.

  The Hyoid Bone

  Brace the words,

  the delicate instrument,

  the tongue for sweet kissing,

  upsilon.

  Arch of bone,

  greater cornu, reaching,

  reaching, stretching

  above the lesser.

  Fracture this bone,

  by the violence,

  feel the sick

  pain of swallowing.

  Fracture this bone,

  compromise the support,

  feel the true anguish

  of speech.

  This was the first and it caused Mo to faint dead away. When she came to I was still in my crib staring at her.

  “You wrote this?”

  I nodded.

  bridge

  My father did not believe my mother when she presented him with my first poem. He didn’t laugh, but looked at it and asked, “Okay, what am I supposed to say?”

  “Your son wrote this,” Mo said.

  “Eve,” he complained. Inflato looked over at me. I was standing in my playpen, holding myself up by the padded rail.

  “He did,” Mo insisted. She got up from the sofa and walked over to me with my notebook and a crayon. “Ralph,” she said, “write something else.”

  I understood why she was asking and I sympathized with her situation, but I could not simply write on demand. I stared at the book, admiring the infinity of the blank page. Inflato made some kind of disparaging remark that might have been meant for Mo, me, or both of us.

  “Oh, Ralph,” Mo said.

  I tried to shrug my baby shoulders.

  “I’m going to the office,” Inflato said. “I’ve got some papers to grade.” He stopped at my pen on his way to the door. “Say ‘bye-bye,”’ he said.

  I blew a raspberry through my lips.

  Vexierbild

  periscope depth

  Inflato was beside himself with excitement. Roland Barthes was coming to visit the campus. Barthes was his hero and though Mo had slipped me a couple of books written by the man, I did not share my father’s enthusiasm. I had read his Elements of Semiology and S/Z15 and so he was no mystery to me. But Inflato was bouncing off the walls, singing and saying to my mother at the breakfast table that perhaps Roland Barthes would read his manuscript and then everything would be on track.

  Inflato brought the great man home.

  MO:

  Would you like something to drink before dinner?

  BARTHES:

  To drink. Sometimes I drink. Sometimes I am consumed. Often I have an urge to commit suicide. (Hinckley) But to drink on an overcast evening such as this. Tonight I will be engulfed.

  INFLATO:

  Oh, my.

  MO:

  So, wine then.

  BARTHES:

  To start from a dream: If I slip, fall, and hurt myself in a dream, where is the cause of my fall? If it is a banana peel on which I slip, then is it in my dream or is it in the real world, where there are banana peels, where I learned about banana peels? (Nietzsche) And why a banana, of all fruits? What is it that excites our cause-creating drive? A kind of nervus sympathicus? But that banana, the shape of it, the obviousness of it. (Freud) But, of course, some are more banana than are others, a sort of general formula for embarrassment. Wouldn’t you say, Townsend?

  INFLATO:

  Douglas, please.

  MO:

  Here’s your wine, Professor Barthes.

  INFLATO:

  I’ve been trying to perform semiological analysis on the film Lawrence of Arabia and it hasn’t been going well.

  BARTHES:

  You must first accept the structural pitfalls of gestural language and realize how, shall we say, impotent the hand of the director, not only is, but must be. This in order to allow the film the room it needs for the kind of attention I need to give it. (Twain) And the particular movie you mention, why it
has no clutter of cultural signs, despite its pretense. The function of the signs is in tacit conspiracy with the subverted language in all games of discourse and that is, of course, the final blow to the director.

  Don’t you agree?

  INFLATO:

  Yes.

  MO:

  Why don’t we move into the other room for dinner?

  Mo lifted me from my playpen and carried me to the table. As she strapped me into my high chair, she whispered, “I hope you’re not as bored as I am.” I nodded, but she didn’t see it. I looked at the cigarette dangling from Barthes’ fingers. He did not notice my staring. I don’t think he was aware of my presence.

  MO:

  We’re having pork butt. I hope you eat meat.

  INFLATO:

  Some months ago I sent you an off-print of my paper on alterity. It was in Critical Inquiry.

  BARTHES:

  Christian eschatology appears in two forms, one personal, the other cosmic. When a person dies, it’s like a world ending.16 (Aquinas) But what is an ending, except for a narrative device, a trick of language that would have one accept the distances between sounds and the signs representing them, between denotation and connotation. (Searle) A spectrum exists with me at one end and unformed matter at the other and in between, just as before, is all sense and nonsense. Everything and nothing are ontological. The closer to me an idea gets, the less sense it makes because of its distance from its refractory origin. I call the distance infinite privation.

  INFLATO:

  The article was in a green envelope.