Glyph

by Percival Everett

  Mo and Inflato looked over at me and I shrugged.

  “I guess not,” Inflato said.

  Steimmel was not as inept as I presumed as she looked Inflato in the face and said, “Are you for some reason intimidated by your son?”

  And it turned out that Inflato was quicker than I had given him credit for being, because he responded, “No more so than you.”

  Mo nodded, then said to get things on track, “It’s not just the writing. Like I told you, he reads. He reads everything.” She opened her bag and pulled out a stack of pages. “Here are the notes he writes to me. He dissects arguments in scholarly texts. He comments on the structure of novels. He also writes poems. He wrote a story, but I don’t understand it.” Saying it was hard for her, she then paused to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Is there anything wrong with my child?”

  Steimmel looked through my notes. Her face registered her plummet deeper into terror. “You’re sure he wrote these?”

  “Positive.”

  Steimmel was silent for a few seconds. “And he has never spoken?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Any sounds at all?”

  “He cried for the first week or so when he was hungry,” my mother said.

  “Then he started pointing,” Inflato said, appearing to be confronted with the information for the first time himself. “I didn’t even know what he was doing. I just thought his hand was flying around. But he was pointing.”

  “That’s true,” my mother said.

  Steimmel got up and walked over to her desk, regaining some composure and control, and looked at her appointment book. “Can you bring him here tomorrow morning at nine?”

  My parents said they could.

  I don’t know what possessed Steimmel at that point, but she knelt down on the turquoise blanket beside me and said in a baby voice, “You’re a sweet wittle thing, aren’t you? Doctor Steimmel will see wittle Ralphie tomorrow. Okay?”

  I looked away from her to my parents. It was she at whom they were staring.

  mary mallon

  My babiness aside, there was and is nothing wrong with me. Nothing about me functions improperly or incorrectly or fails to function. If anything, a couple of things worked too well, but, of course, there was the problem. If the boat knows two speeds, stop and fast, docking becomes a difficult and perhaps impossible task. One could cut the engines and drift in, but there is little control and currents can play loose with the mission and those on the pier will just hate to see you coming. I wanted, still want, and expect to continue wanting a slower gear for my brain. I cannot even say that I am smart, only that my brain is engaged in constant and frantic activity. Mo and Inflato touched me when I was an infant as if I were a container of erosive or caustic or potentially explosive material. They would race to walk away, trying to force the other to have to lift me and bring me along. Still, I know that they did not want to leave me. Mo loved me. Both were doomed by a sense of duty and societal pressure and a basic fear of doing something wrong to keep me with them and to not put me into a sack with a brick and drop me into a lake. Often, however, I found comfort in that very thought. The idea of my drowning made me more interesting to myself. I hated the helplessness, the doorknobs so far above my head, not being able to completely trust my sphincter muscles. I was constantly afraid that some adult would fry me in a skillet. Frying is very much like hunting. The unsuspecting prey is startled by the sudden heat of attack and as I saw myself as likely prey, tender, helpless, small enough to carry back to the cave, I feared for my life. My only bad dream was discovering myself in a cast-iron pan, sitting in sizzling butter. But even in the dream, I simply lay back and tried to feel the fear for all it was and sought complete silence and absence of sensation. The dream, though bad in the beginning, did not awake me with a start, as I have read happens, but became an intense, but welcome immersion into sublime pain and finally stillness. However, I caution the reader to not rush to some assumption about my wanting death or hating life in an attempt to understand me. Occam’s razor is sharp and I am not afraid to use it. In fact, attempts at filling in my articulatory gaps with a kind of subtext, though it might prove an amusing exercise, will uncover nothing. At the risk of sounding cocky, my gaps are not gaps at all, but are already full, and all my meaning is surface.20 My parents watched me read and take notes, sitting on the sofa, pretending to read themselves, but studying me all the while. During those gaps in time when my eyes were not on a book and my hand not set to writing (i.e., when I was thinking), they would sit up straight as if feeling the initial trembling of an earthquake. I did not like the effect I had on them and I regretted having allowed them knowledge of my capacities. They thought I was a genius and this I found laughable. I reserved that designation for someone who could drive a car or at least hold his shit. But I was going to go ahead with the trifling tests and I had no doubt that I could come out smelling like a great mind, true or no. That I could and would live with, and from there on I would do what I wanted and devil take the hindmost. I knew that I was headed for the battlefield and I knew what the enemy looked like and how they dressed, but I didn’t yet know what any of our weapons would be.

  Jhem or Shem

  Knowledge of my ability to see the world caused my father to act as if he were the drunken Noah at the end of the ark’s voyage and I, Ham. But there were no Shem and Japheth to hide his nakedness. So, whereas I still caught a occasional glimpse of my mother’s breasts, I never again saw my father’s willy. Nor did my father ever again bathe me. My willy, on the other hand, was still of interest to me and I learned that I could change its attitude. At first I thought I had broken the thing, but a bit of reading cleared up the matter.

  No Children are Volunteers. Therefore, no children being tested by Psychologists are volunteers—

  Statius, in the eighth book of the Thebaid describes how after Menalippus mortally wounded Tydeus in the war of the Seven against Thebes, Tydeus was still able to kill Menalippus. The interesting part is when Menalippus’ head was brought to Tydeus, Tydeus chewed on it like a big apple in a fit of rage. I cannot decide whether Tydeus was so outraged because his opponent had taken his life or because Menalippus had done such a poor job and allowed his dying to drag out so.

  exousai

  The sounds of the hospital were what I expected, whispering, the rolling of carts, the unrhythmic buzzing from this way and that, and an infrequent cackle from a nurse or doctor and that is what I heard until my presence was detected. Word spread like airborne pheromones and then all on the floor was silent, all available eyes turned to me and a few previously absent pairs appeared around the corners of doorways. Steimmel met us outside her office. She was not wearing her khaki skirt showing beneath her lab coat that day, but a pair of demin trousers and a loose-fitting sweater, as if she expected a fight or, at least, to get down on the floor and wrestle.

  “Professor and Mrs. Townsend,” she greeted my parents and then to me, with the same insipid baby-chat she’d ended our last time together, she said, “And how is wittle Ralph doing?”

  Mo, sensing my mood, asked, “Can we just get started?” She adjusted my weight on her side.

  “Certainly. If you two would just take seats in the waiting area over there, I’ll take Ralph in for the first test.”

  Inflato moved to protest.

  “Please, Professor Townsend. I assure you everything will be just fine.”

  My mother looked at me and I gave her a covert wink. She then handed me over to the hard and awkward hands of the doctor.

  Steimmel took me into a room with tiny furniture obviously meant for child a few years older than me and sat me at a tiny table. “Okay, young man,” she said, stepping to the large mirror across the room, then walking back to me. “Let’s see what you can do.” She took a tray from a cabinet and put it in front of me. “Boy, do I feel stupid saying this to you, but, why don’t you put the blocks here into the right holes.”

  I looked at her and frowned, the
n shrugged.

  She turned to the mirror and said, “A learned gesture, no doubt. Not much more than a tick. Go.”

  The eight holes were filled with circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles before her lips had closed from saying the “o” in go. I looked up at her wide brown eyes. Then I dumped the pieces out onto the table and did it again as quickly.

  “Well, okay.” She paused as if to compose herself, then said to the mirror, “As I mentioned, the child exhibits extraordinary motor skills.” Then to me, “Repeat after me.”

  I shook my head. Then I gestured that I wanted paper and something with which to write. She went back to the cabinet and returned with a pad and a marker, put them in front of me.

  “Q,” she said. I didn’t write. I knew she wanted to give me a string of things and so I waited. Then, as if accepting a challenge, she fired off, “Q, seven, T, Q, V, B, N, Q, thirteen.”

  I wrote down the letters and spelled out the numbers.

  Steimmel gasped. Then, double rapid-fire, “T, U, K, six, Y, Y, Y, A, I, E, Y, Y, Y, Y, X, D, J, K, J, L, two, two, Y, Y, Y, Y, I.”

  I wrote down what she had said.

  “Okay,” she said and now she was pacing, to the mirror and back to me. “The subject appears to have an excellent memory. We’ll try something crazy here.” She pointed at me. “Two plus two.”

  4

  “Three times seven.”

  21

  “Two hundred seventy-six divided by thirty-three.”

  8.36363636363636…

  “Solve for x, 3x equals thirty-nine.”

  x=13

  Steimmel went to the cabinet and took out a book. “All right, you little bastard,” she said. She read: “’If a plane area is revolved about a line that lies in its plane but does not intersect the area, then the volume generated is equal to the sum of the area and the distance traveled by its center of gravity.’ Can you make any sense of that?” Steimmel was perspiring, casting desperate glances at the mirror. She appeared unsteady on her feet.

  1st theorem of Pappus. And may I point out that it is the product and not the sum of the area and the distance traveled by its center of gravity.21

  Steimmel snatched the pad from my wittle hands and threw it across the room as hard as she could. I watched her and, though, I didn’t show it, I was more than a tiny bit frightened by her hysterics. She went to the mirror and screamed at her reflection. Then she went to the door and screamed for my parents.

  derivative

  Pothen to kakon

  bene ha-elohim

  mal’ak Yahweh

  onomata

  angeloi

  Nergal

  incision

  My parents and Steimmel and the people who had been hidden behind the mirror huddled like plotters in a corner across the room, each one in turn raised his or her head to check on my whereabouts. They were all so frightened, though the quality of my mother’s fear was discernibly different. I wanted her to break away from the group, lift me, and take me home.

  “It’s not possible,” Steimmel said in a voice not a whisper.

  A short, balding man with thick glasses worked away on a calculator, then grabbed his head, shaking it at the same time. “Four seventy-five,” he said.

  A husky woman wearing a brown suit said, “I get the same thing.”

  “Not possible,” Steimmel said.

  Mo and Inflato looked over at me with their mouths agape. “Four seventy-five?” Inflato asked. “Good lord.”

  Steimmel took over and said, “If all of you would excuse me, I would like to talk to Ralph alone. Just everybody, just step outside.” She ushered them toward the door and closed them out, then turned to face me, fear showing in her eyes, but her movements suggesting that she had remembered that she was much larger and stronger than me. “Okay, young man, let’s get down to some real business here.” She went to the cabinet and came back with a thick folder. She sat in one of the tiny chairs near me. “I want you to look at some pictures for me. Here, now, tell what you see in this one.”

  I wrote:

  It reminds me of Motherwell’s

  Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70.22

  I could see that my answer distressed her and so I wrote:

  I think I see a bear. Is that a bear dere. Ouch, bear bite me.

  Steimmel snatched back the blot. “You’re a smart ass.” Then she sat and just stared at me. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to herself. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Mo burst into the room and marched over to me. “Come on, Ralph, we’re going home.”

  subjective-collective

  I slept little, but when I did, my dreams were vivid and of a kind. I was hardly ever present in them in a capacity other than spectator. They were like the novels my mother fed me constantly. Some were like tone poems, but with images, not lacking narrative impetus, but straining the convention. Indeed, I wondered as I read more and more about dreams, in fiction and in psychoanalytic literature, about the convention of dream narrative, as it seemed that all descriptions of dreams fit a rather narrowly defined picture. Interpretation, of necessity, is of interest to anyone who hears the story of a dream, but my interest became the structure of, not any specific dream, but of the category. “That’s sounds like a dream.” “It was like a dream.” “It must have been a dream.”

  So, imagining that I had exposed the tricks of dream convention, I sought, consciously at least, to subvert the whole thing and dream in as straight a narrative fashion as possible. My dreams frequently became movies, without bizarre logical twists, every action and word making sense even upon my waking. My dreams became so transparent that they became devoid of meaning. Jung would have been proud of me. Freud would have gone to sleep during our sessions. My dreams became an exercise in boredom, though I was actually impressed with my imagination and its ability to create so many characters, even if they were stock and repetitive. I thought I knew how it felt to be Louis L’Amour or James Michener or even Dickens.

  Ironically, the actuality of my having subverted my dreaming practice made the fact of my dreaming of great interest. I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it. So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.23

  1. The cows, of course, remaining forever in the pasture, their bags fat with the milk Zeno awaits, are no more than the arrows, by extension. And finally, the infinite of the imagination, standing in necessary relation, because of its contrast to the infinite of self-relation, must be part of the signification of that thing from which it is separated by infinity.

  2. For it was certainly not the case that, when they pointed to themselves and made their vain and insipid pleas for utterances of Ma-ma and Da-da, they were trying to get me to recognize other parents in the world. So, why didn’t they point and say, “Our breakfast table,” or “the table that Uncle Toby gave us?”

  3. Aside from the fact that they would throw me into the air and catch me like a ball, they, for all their stock in the words they babbled, often made meaningless sounds, which were not even good music.

  4. And I do mean speech here and not language. Language was no more the villain than she and no less she than herself, as with me, as with you, but she spoke it with her lips and so, built a fence, a gap, which like the Stygian can be crossed but once.

  5. Or not, as I find no shame in wanting Inflato, as I called him, if not completely out of the picture, at least shoved to one side or the other.

  6. To different infinities, if you will allow, one infinity being no different from the next and so the same, but being necessarily different by simple reference.

  7. You, no doubt, recognize the text and of course, as the author would later point out himself, it was complete nonsense. But what nonsense. He loved the words, the pregnancy of them, how they swelled with meaning and at once fell stillbor
n from the page. I mention this to underscore that the reading was in no way speaking. Reading, amplified, is no crime, though it is unnecessary, not a luxury, just something that is not bad.

  8. Ideas, words, concepts, puppies—all the same things. The world, things, signifiers, signified, pigs, planets, philosophers.

  9. I do not say “made love.” They no more made love than they made sex or made me. If I drop a hammer, it falls to the floor. I may drop it to the floor, but I do not make it drop to the floor.

  10. Because, what is the confusion in boredom? It is simply what it is and can be nothing else, is safe for this fact. This is why people listen to rock ‘n’ roll and rap. It is the same. It is boring. It is finally an affirmation of everything, but an admission of nothing.

  11. I traced his source on this matter. “Poetry, novels, short stories are remarkable antiquities which no longer fool anyone, or hardly anyone. Poems, narratives—what’s the use of them? There is nothing but writing left.” J. Le Clézio, Foreword to La Fièvre, Paris, Gallimard, 1965. But I do not know how novels were meant to fool anyone. What are novelists and poets trying to do?

  12. Or perhaps I should use the word construct, though it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak.

  13. Nothing could be better or more attractive than a darkness of spirit. For I do not mean evil. And I do not mean dim light. It was as if she were born in some far-off land, lost from the world around her, it failing to accept her more than she failing to grasp it. Consequently, she craved some kind of attention, perhaps affection, not on a broad scale, but in a rather specific way that it was all too clear my father neither recognized nor understood. She was trying to save her own soul through her art and, bless her heart, she was trying to take me with her. She cried while she painted, wailed. But she could not, for all of her talent, take care of herself. A sad truth that it was clear to me she appreciated and so, sadly, was her reason for being with my father.