Glyph

by Percival Everett

  “How is it you can drive all of a sudden?” they asked.

  “I’m a genius,” I told them. And then I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that driving was so much fun?”

  “It’s also dangerous,” my mother said.

  I turned to look back at them. “And why is that?” I asked.

  They both screamed. “Keep your eyes on the road!” Inflato said.

  “You two are making me nervous,” I said. “I’m going to stop this thing.” Then I realized that I didn’t know how to stop. “How do I make it stop?”

  “Step on the brake pedal,” Inflato said.

  All of a sudden, my legs were pudgy, baby legs, and I couldn’t reach any of the pedals.

  “It’s the one in the middle,” Inflato said.

  And I couldn’t see through the windshield. All I could see was the bottom of the steering wheel, which was turning this way and that without my assistance. I looked back at my parents. They screamed and I screamed with them.

  umstände

  As Boris carried me back to the car so that we could drive to our quarters, I wrote a note:

  I will need many books.

  Steimmel took it and read, then said, “I’ll get you all the books you want. You can have all the books and all the paper and as many different-colored pens as you like.”

  “I think you should be careful the way you talk to him,” Boris sad.

  “Are you afraid of him, Boris?”

  “Frankly, Dr. Steimmel, I am.”

  “Don’t worry, Boris. I’ll protect you from the big bad baby.”

  excessive alliteration is a sign of an arrested imagination—or worse

  Boris read the note and laughed.

  Steimmel was halfway into the car. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Boris said. “Nothing at all.”

  causa sui

  “Truth and falsity. Sense and nonsense. Self and nonself. Reason and madness. Centrality and marginality. The only thing standing between any of these properties is a drawn line. But a line has no depth, no depth, and so is no boundary at all. Its ends are merely positions in space and as such mean only something to each other by some orientation that might be a line, straight or curved. And so, I know I occupy some point in space sane because I can see and orient myself in relation to another point insane and as I observe the line that gives them both meaning, I realize that the line does not separate them, but connects them. And I realize as well, my heart pounding that I can, since I have two points and a line, find other points beyond the point insane and that I really cannot tell which point is which since points in space have no dimension. Likewise, it is true as I look behind me at the endpoint sane that it is really no endpoint at all. So, the line goes that way behind me and this way in front of me and I can’t tell where on the line I am standing and so I bisect that line with another line and I say that insane is over there. But how do I know that it has not circled around behind me? How do I know that the point on the line insane has not planned it this way? Maybe I should walk forward so that it cannot sneak up behind me. Maybe I should run. Or maybe the point insane hasn’t moved at all and has planned it that way. Perhaps the point sane has abandoned me. Maybe the two points are working together. I am not paranoid. I am not paranoid. I just won’t move. That’s it. I will stay right where I am, fixed in space.” Emil Staiger sipped from the glass of water he clutched in sweating hands. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said J. Hillis Miller. “I used to have a car like that. Sometimes, when it was really cold, it would never start.”

  “I forgot to include real and unreal. And dead and alive. The bracketed and the unbracketed.” Staiger screamed as loud as he could and hurled his glass against the far wall, breaking and streaking the flocked wallpaper.

  “It was a Mercedes, that car.”

  “Tell me, Miller, all things considered, do you think anyone will remember who we were?”

  “Hell, no.”

  subjective-collective

  Boris pulled into a parking slot in front of cottage 3A and turned off the engine. Before Steimmel could open her door and get out, a woman had run up and given a light tap on the window. Steimmel rolled down the glass and asked, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Anna Davis. We met at a symposium a couple of years ago. In Brussels. I do work with primates.”

  “The monkey lady,” Steimmel said.

  The appellation “monkey lady” did not seem to please the woman, but she went on without pause. “Yes, that’s me. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Well, here I am.” Steimmel pushed open the door and got out. “Boris, this is the monkey lady I told you about. Dr. Davis, I’d like you to meet my associate, Mr. Mertz.”

  Davis looked into the backseat at me. “So, tell me about the human infant,” she said.

  “Maybe later,” Steimmel told her. “We’re in a hurry to set up.”

  “The chimpanzee I’m working with has mastered American sign language.” She stepped away and watched as Steimmel retrieved me from the car and Boris grabbed the bags and files. “That’s an infant of African descent, isn’t it? Are you studying the development of minority-status offspring?”

  “Not now, Davis. Maybe later.”

  “Okay. Maybe we can get your baby together with my chimp.”

  flatus vocis

  It was very much like my crib at home. Slats of wood behind which I would be placed on a soft mattress with blankets, but it was different, the slats rising higher and then joining another panel of slats on the top. It was a cage. Steimmel opened the thing up, put me in, and latched the door. She tossed a couple of books into the cage with me and proceeded to unpack her files. Boris stood staring at me behind the bars.

  “Dr. Steimmel,” Boris said. “I don’t think we should lock the baby up like that. It’s kind of like abuse.”

  “Is the baby starving?” Steimmel asked.

  “No, doctor.”

  “Is the baby too hot or too cold?”

  “No, doctor.”

  “Does the baby seem in any way uncomfortable to you?”

  “No, doctor.”

  “Then shut up and go outside and get the rest of the equipment from the car.” Steimmel came over and looked down at me. “This is your home for a while.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she peered about the room. As I sat there observing her face, I realized that she was in fact homely, but not as homely as I had first thought. The light coming through the curtains gave her features a favorable cast.

  Boris came in with a heavy box and set it on the desk. “So, what are we going to do about Davis?”

  “Fuck her,” Steimmel said. “I don’t have time for monkey ladies. Fucking zookeepers. Piaget was a fucking zookeeper.”

  “She’s going to come back around,” Boris said. “What if she figures out that the child is kidnapped?”

  “You think that ape is hers? She’s here because she stole it from some-damn place.” Steimmel shook her head. “That’s what this place is for, Boris. If you want to keep a secret, you come here. If you want to put a pig’s heart in a human being, you do it here.”

  “So, you think it’s okay for the kid to sleep in here alone?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Boris gave Steimmel a disbelieving look. “Because he’s only a year and a half old, that’s why.”

  “You can sleep in here if you want to. It’s probably a good idea. That ape woman might come snooping around. I’ll call the desk and get a cot sent over.” Steimmel clapped her hands and kept them together. “I’m going to shower and get some rest.”

  “What about Ralph?” Boris said. “He’s probably hungry.”

  “Go to the kitchen. They must have bananas there for that chimp. Mash some up and get some milk and feed him.”

  bedeuten

  Given the rates of phyletic evolution through the history of the Earth, it was quite possible, at least in
the bugging eyes of Steimmel, that I might even represent a kind of evolutionary burst. Of course, her interest was not that, but the thought must have occurred to her as a kind of peripheral money-making possibility. She had brought along a couple of books concerning paleontology and evolution. These were the books she left with me that first night. Boris did indeed sleep on a cot in the cottage with me and he even unlatched my cage door and left the lid up. I felt, more or less, as I did at home in my crib. I read that night about the Devonian Period and the Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene epochs, and learned more about the evolution of the horse than anyone needs to know.

  molarization

  lophiodonty

  To Boris:

  I need some type of hard crackers.

  I’m teething and I’m getting cranky.

  1. This gap talk I discovered at the same time I determined I was a Romantic. Not because I needed to position myself as a subject of derision by the likes of my father, but because I’m fond of a good story.

  2. I say this even though one of the texts in my crib at the time was Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading.

  3. I was interested in her lie. What could she have thought I was working through by having such a dream? What kind of symbol could she have thought she might be for me? Perhaps she considered, even in waking life, that she be could a condensation of the world and my parents or perhaps a displacement of some adjacent influence. Whatever her delusion, she was not nearly enigmatic enough to pass for some wild hair of a symbolic image in a dream of mine.

  4. In fact, it was my first movie, a made-for-television affair starring wooden actors and using a contrived plot, and I saw it on a motel-room television. Steimmel and Boris wanted to be off the roads during the daylight hours.

  5. This was particularly difficult for me to spot because I had had no experience with the outside world when first exposed to literature. All idioms and vernacular were lost on me, and so, sadly, much of the meaning, intended or otherwise. I wonderd about the language of babies and realized that I didn’t even have a world of babies through which to move and call my own. I was truly without a country and in that way I understand the literature of the people with whom I shared like coloration (though from what I read that coloration had extraordinary range, which seemed to go unacknowledged by what was specified as the oppressing culture).

  6. According to Grice, to say that a speaker means a particular thing is to say that he intends to produce some effect or change in the hearer of that thing said by means of recognition of that intention. This is non-natural meaning. So, in fact, the meaning of “take off the kettle” at the tennis match is not so odd at all, given that it is uttered to elicit a response, even if the response is troubled concern or nervous laughter or annoyance.

  7. I looked forward to meeting Alfrud Adlur and Sagmund Fraud.

  Pronounced Articulations

  SAUSSURE

  C

  différance

  Ecce Signum. There was an outdoor lamp that shone through the window just behind my new container. I was caged, but I could read. And I was caged, more than less, held illegally and clandestinely and against my will by someone who did not have my best interests at heart. It was certainly a screaming injustice, and had I been one for screaming, I would have. It was indeed a substantial injustice, but it was far from tragedy, in spite of the torture my parents were no doubt experiencing. I felt, in fact, privileged. Instead of spending day after endless day in the same surrounds, staring at the same walls, hearing the same voices, reading the same books, sucking the same nipples,1 I was out in the world at large, meeting people, going places. And better, the world was a secret one. I was a prisoner and an abductee, but I was, in my way, willing.

  I was more than an innocent among the advantage-taking, sin-ridden heathens in a furtive world of professionals hell-bent on advancing personal fame. I was a babe in the woods. My circumstance, however, was not so upsetting to me, one of my dispositive characteristics being a kind of buoyant patience. I was ready and eager, naiveté my fuel, to watch the events unfold. I had read that young adults often entertained notions of immortality, but such delusions paled next to my complete absence of any concept of mortality. As well, no delusion of mine was sustained by hormones, dime novels, or television. Lacking a past, and so having no comprehension of future, I lived for the moment as a way to make the beat generation envious. My life was but a moment. My ideas and knowledge were more-or-less present; I didn’t know what waiting was, so I didn’t become anxious or apprehensive. To me the endgame was no different from the opening moves.

  degrees

  Although I was being toted around nearly all the time, I was developing stronger leg muscles. While sitting in the car I did isometric exercise, squeezing my knees together for a few seconds at a time. In my crib, I did deep knee bends while holding onto the rails. Just standing, bouncing, and walking around the confines of my cage I felt new strength and better balance. I was quick and small and my captors were big, slow, and lacking considerable attention spans.

  some early threat of promise

  The first meal taken together was the following morning’s breakfast. After a bit of arguing, Boris finally told Steimmel that he was taking me to the dining room whether she wanted me there or not. Go, Boris. As well, Boris made an early trip to the nearest market and bought baby food and cereal and zwieback. Boris was a good man.

  The dining room was ostentatious, crowded with heavy furniture and ornate lamps, but lit mainly by a gigantic chandelier of hundreds of multicolored, faceted glass spheres tethered on a too-small-looking chain. The table was long, the dark wood visible through the lace tablecloth. Jelloffe greeted guests at the double-door entry and instructed them where to sit, but Steimmel ignored him and sat the three of us in a row, she and Boris on either side of me. I stood in the chair, my little white sneakers pressing into the cushioned seat.

  Doctor Steimmel

  Doctor Davis

  Doctor Jelloffe

  Doctor Kiernan

  Doctor Kiernan

  They all introduced themselves informally, smiling and pulling grapes from the platters of fruit in front of them. Standing on a chair directly opposite me was Davis’s chimpanzee. I had never seen an ape and I was fascinated, the more because it was more or less my size. Well, actually the chimp was quite a bit larger, but was so much smaller than the adults that I felt some bond with him. His name was Ronald and he wouldn’t keep still. Dr. Davis exhibited remarkable patience and treated the animal with much the same gentleness that I had experienced with Mo. Davis talked to Ronald with a soothing voice and fed him with her fingers, slices of banana and wedges of orange. She even let the ape drink from her own water glass.

  seme

  Steimmel was going to uncover the secrets of language acquistion and the mechanism of meaning by cutting open my brain. But she didn’t tell anyone at the table that. She told them that I “was a mildly retarded, non-speaking toddler with exceptional manual dexterity.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the table. “I’m working on motor skills.” She sat there, smoking, continually smoothing out the lap of her khaki skirt, and left it at that.

  Davis was going to show that apes were people too, that only the differently constructed larynxes of humans, allowing for a great range of vocal sounds, made us distinct. Her ape knew over ninety-five signs and could even construct simple sentences. Her ape could spell six five-letter words. Her ape liked some television shows and detested others. “He just loves CNN,” she said. “And the weather.” Davis was a nervous woman, her eyes darting from face to face at the table, though they never rested on mine. Whether she was looking for approval, I can’t say, but it was clear that she was not shy about her work. She must have been comfortable with the veil of covertness that covered the resort, but still her eyes darted. “Ronald also shits in the toilet. However, we’re still working on flushing.” After a round of hearty and overly polite laughter, Davis looked at me as if to ask if I could
do that.

  Doctors Kiernan were wife and husband psychiatrists from northern Minnesota and they believed a return to the the thinking of the eighteenth century was the path to doing away with mental disorders, believing as they did that all madness, and they insisted on calling it madness, was due to the absence of reason. They wanted to purify bodies, awaken patients, and force the return of reason. As they spoke, taking sentences in turn, they became more animated, their eyes glowing, the husband Kiernan even appearing to drool at one point.

  “We use water mostly.”

  “We have the pool house and we blindfold the patient and walk him around and when he least expects it, we push him in.”

  “The shock we hope will restore reason.”

  “We also use a big tub.”

  “A terribly large container.”

  “We tie a patient down and act really upset with him.”

  “We convince him that we’re truly angry and fed up.”

  “Then we begin to fill the tub with water.”

  “We let the level rise and rise, until it’s lapping at the tip of the patient’s nose.”

  “It’s a kind of baptism.”

  When asked if the therapy became expected after a couple of times and so ineffective, one of the Kiernans said, “That’s why we’ve brought fifteen subjects.”

  “And they are raving mad, let me tell you.”

  “You’d be surprised how nearly drowning to death can be repeated as a startling event.”

  “All this brouhaha about mental disease is just a ploy to get grant money for drugs and hospitals.”

  “Believe me, if you take a paranoid-schizophrenic and point a.44 magnum at his forehead and pull the trigger, he’ll straighten out.”2