Glyph

by Percival Everett

  Vexierbild

  BARTHES: Do you remember when those felt-tipped pens first showed up on the shelves? I couldn’t wait to get one home and try it out. They were made by the Japanese as well and if they’ll use them to write…

  HURSTON: I was dead by then. But also, who cares?

  BARTHES: But don’t you see? I’m talking about the action of writing. The gesture itself defines so much of the meaning, don’t you think? I mean, even where I sit while I’m engaged in writing shapes my import.

  HURSTON: What have you been smoking?

  BARTHES: I have even observed what I call a “Bic style” of writing. You’ve seen it, those people who just churn out words endlessly.

  HURSTON: (nodding) I do believe I have seen it.

  BARTHES: I finally discarded the felt tip because the tip flattened out so soon. I’m back now to, and I think I’ll stay with, truly fine fountain pens. They’re essential for the kind of smooth writing I require. What do you use?

  HURSTON: A sharpened bone and blood.

  exousai

  All of a sudden, I was no longer Baby Ralph, but Defense Stealth Operative 1369. I was no longer sleeping in the crib in my tacky little room, but in a bunk in a sterile, eight-by-eight cell with a toilet modified to accommodate my little keister and a guard just outside my door of bars. The little boy was growing up. There were no more novels for Ralph, only dry, technical, defense-oriented journals and manuals. No more strolls through the park, now it was policed parades across the exercise yard, the guard holding my hand while we walked to the far basketball goal, and then back. There were adult men, dressed similarly to me and there for reasons unknown to me, in the yard. I didn’t know if they were DSOs like me or rapists and murderers. They were heavily muscled and tattooed. The guard wouldn’t let them talk to me, but some shouted out, “Hey, look, baby meat!” and “What you in for?” and “What’d ja do? Take candy from another baby?” Finally, on the third day, I stopped and wrote on the pitcher’s mound of the baseball field with a stick,

  I am small enough to squeeze through the bars of my cell in the wee hours. Signed: Paper Cut Mike.

  Why am I in here?

  I asked Uncle Ned when he finally came to see me.

  “Just trying to protect you, boy,” Uncled Ned said. “You should know there are forces out there that will do nearly anything to get their mitts on you. Believe me, this is for your own good.”

  But a prison?

  “Not just a prison, Ralph. This is a high-tech, state-of-the-art, maximum-security facility where some of the deadliest and most ruthless of the scum of society have been sentenced to spend the rest of their, hopefully, short lives. Why, even I, get the willies just thinking about this place.”

  I want some novels.

  “No can do. You’ve got to be prepared at a moment’s notice for any mission I dream up. So, it’s the manuals for you.”

  I want to see my mother.

  “I’m afraid Nanna has been reassigned.”

  My real mother.

  Uncle Ned just looked at me as if I were crazy, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “Well, you read those journals and I’ll get you a lot more.” He stood and looked at me. “My, you’re growing like a weed, aren’t you?” Turning to the door, “Guard, let me out of this stinking cesspool.”

  umstände

  With a limited past, the present can only mean so much. Or so my reading would have had me believe. As I saw it, at least the quality of my experiences had run the range of any life, however long. I lacked volume, but bulk is probably, and perhaps necessarily, a bad thing. Uncle Ned was my sole contact to the outside world. The guard, who held my hand during my daily crossings of the yard, never said anything. He never even turned around to observe me in my cell, but just sat there reading fat novels about spies and sea creatures. I wrote him a note introducing myself and slipped it to him. He looked at it and, with an unchanged expression, folded it, and put it in his breast pocket. I observed him receiving orders, but never responding in any way other than nodding. He never made a sound, silencing my fellow inmates with glares and a show of his baton. I felt a closeness to my guard. Finally, I wrote him a note that read:

  Please, would you help me? I miss my mother.

  The guard read the note and for the first time looked me right in the face. He put his novel in the back pocket of his trousers as he always did before our walks across the yard, then put his finger to his pursed lips.

  I nodded and watched him unlock my cell. He came in and wrapped me in a blanket, hoisted me up under his arm, and walked out of the block. He waved to a guard at the desk by the door, and in the locker room he stuffed me into a duffel bag with his smelly socks and dirty shirts. He carried me out and put me into a car, which upon being started made a whirring sound that some of my technical reading had allowed me to recognize as a failing water pump. I managed to work the zipper of the bag down some so that I could get some air and see out. I was in the backseat, again, and all I could see was a bit of bright blue sky through the window and the back of my guard’s head. Hanging from the rearview mirror was a green figure of a tree and a white crucifix. He drove rapidly. I could tell by the way the car took corners and curves and it seemed that as his deed sunk into his thinking his driving became faster and more frenetic.

  ootheca

  It occurred to me that for those who spoke, the idea of silently speaking to oneself was not strange, but to me it made virtually no sense. I cannot tell you how I expressed my thinking inwardly, if even that makes sense, but it was not a matter of some inner voice finding some inner ear. The whole notion of the inner voice and the inner hearer raised the question of spatial orientation. If indeed there is no space between the two, then they are one, and it makes no sense to express either in terms of a contrary function to the other. I did not talk to myself, of course. But neither did I think to myself.2 I think, I thought, I have thunk. I had no voice and Husserl would have perhaps suggested that for me there was no possibility of consciousness and for all I know that’s right. For Husserl, I would have lived constantly with a broken proximity of the signifier (me) to the signified (whatever the hell I was thinking), since instead of speaking, I wrote, a gesture that somehow stood away from me. Whether that made me more or less vague or diaphanous, or standing nearer to or farther from my meaning and my self, I did not know.

  How long is a memory?3

  tubes 1…6

  The guard’s name was Mauricio, I learned when he walked into his house and his wife ran up to him and said, “Mauricio!” I was still in the stinking duffel. Then he pulled me out of the bag and she said again, “Mauricio!” Both utterances were complete sentences and meant nothing like each other.

  “It’s a baby,” she said.

  Mauricio, to his credit, said nothing.

  “Is this the little boy you’ve been guarding?”

  “Get packed,” Mauricio said.

  “Packed?”

  Mauricio nodded. He was indeed a man of few words.

  “Mauricio?”

  “Hurry.”

  Rosenda didn’t need the situation explained to her. She began to pack. I sat on the sofa and looked at the mute, but switched-on television across the living room. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall and the wallpaper was peeling just above it.

  Rosenda was a short woman, a little fleshy, soft looking. I liked seeing her breasts through the thin white shirt she was wearing. I was hungry, but just then was not the time for a note. Especially with Rosenda already in a state.

  “Mauricio? Where are we going to go?”

  “Mexico.”

  peccatum originale

  MO: So, what are you planning to do?

  INFLATO: About what?

  MO: I know about your little fling.

  INFLATO: What fling?

  MO: Don’t insult my intelligence. You’re not clever. In fact, you’re clumsy.

  INFLATO: I don’t think this is a good time to talk.
r />   MO: When would be a good time to talk?

  INFLATO: I might as well tell you. I’m up for a job at the University of Texas.

  MO: Hell, I know about that.

  INFLATO: You couldn’t possibly know.

  MO: Texas called here because the third page of your vita was missing.

  INFLATO: You didn’t tell me.

  MO: How could I? I didn’t know anything about your applying. But I sent the page along anyway.

  INFLATO: This stuff with Ralph—

  MO: Fuck you. Don’t use Ralph as an excuse. Ralph has nothing to do with this. I don’t even think you miss him. I think you’re glad he’s gone. You were afraid of him.

  INFLATO: That’s not true.

  MO: Yes, it is. As long as he was a dumb baby, that was all right with you. You were good at tossing him up in the air and shit like that. But as soon as he was on your level, above your level, you lost it.

  INFLATO: I’m going to Austin for an interview on Friday.

  MO: Great. I hope you get it. Is Bambi going to move there, too?

  INFLATO: Eve.

  MO: Go on. Please.

  mary mallon

  Colonel Bill paced the shag carpet of his Pentagon office, muttering, swearing, swinging a putter. He held his pipe clenched in his teeth and the words swam around it. He walked to his desk, slapped the button on his intercom, and shouted, “Gloworm! Get in here!”

  The colonel’s aide, Lieutenant Gloworm, stepped into the office and cowered by the door as the head of the putter narrowing missed his brow.

  “Gloworm!”

  “Sir?”

  “What else have we heard from that goddamn maximum-security joke they call a prison out there?”

  “Nothing, Colonel. The guard is missing. His house is empty.”

  “The guard, eh? What do we know about this man? I saw him when I was there, but I’ll be a cow’s teat if I can remember him. That’s a bad sign. Not about me, but about him. Must be an enemy agent to be able to blend in like that.”

  “His name is Mauricio Lapuente. He’s married to a Rosenda Paz. He was born in El Paso, but as far as we know he has no living relatives.”

  Colonel Bill pointed a finger at Gloworm. “See, there’s a red flag. A fucking Mexican with no living relatives? Am I the only person who thinks around here? What about the wife?”

  “We don’t have anything on her. She might be from Mexico.”

  “I don’t like this, Gloworm. You know what it makes me want to do?”

  “What, sir?”

  “It makes me want to fucking break somebody’s neck. So, you get on the horn with those bastards out there in La La Land and you tell them to set up road blocks and send up heli-choppers and call out the dogs. But I want my little boy back! Do you read me, mister?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what could happen if that little spook fell into the wrong hands and became a little spook for them? Why, it would be the end of the world as we know it. Now that anybody, no matter what they look like, can go anywhere they damn well please in this country, nothing’s safe. And he’s a fucking machine, Gloworm, a genetic freak. He’s a baby who can read. He reads! That’s enough reason, baby or not, to kill him. In fact, I want you to issue an order to our field operatives. I want that baby back. But if we can’t have him, nobody can have him. You reading me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Colonel Bill slipped his putter back into his golf bag in the corner of the office and muttered, “Goddamn monster baby on the loose. This is bad. Do you really understand the gravity of this, Gloworm?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “And call Camp David and have my jet readied.”

  “Shall I call March and tell them you’re coming, sir?”

  “Hell, no. I’m not going to California. I’m flying down to Miami for the President’s orgy. Didn’t you get an invitation? Of course, you didn’t. You’re just a pathetic slug in the pecking order of life.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, get out of here!”

  pharmakon

  up periscope

  There once was a man named Tod

  Who believed he’d spoken to god.

  He rode into town,

  Spread the word around

  And slept with a hooker named Maude.

  There once was a hooker named Maude

  Who slept with a disciple of god.

  She did him up right,

  Straight through the night

  And when she awoke he was tod.

  Q: Why is thought like money?

  A: Because you can’t take it with you.

  ephexis

  1

  “I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought;

  I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

  I had no problem with the Other, myself the Other, myself, or any bold line drawn between myself and the world, between signifier and signified and certainly, not for one second, was I troubled by a notion that in considering my conscious I-self that I was inhabiting or obscuring the line of any division between any of those things or my perception or conception of them. Blah blah blah.

  If language was my prison house, then writing was the wall over which I climbed for escape. But climbing the wall either way meant, finally, the same thing, and so language was the prison and the escape and therefore no prison at all, any more than freedom is confinement simply because it precludes one from being confined. Indeed, my much regarded and remarkable relationship and facility with language had caused my incarceration, but also it had freed me, though I was still confined in the car of my new adults. I was still a prisoner to my size and to my inability to fend for myself. I was called a genius, but I was not. A genius, as far as I was concerned, was someone who could drive a car.

  2

  Ahead of us, cars were stopping and becoming a puzzle of steel. This made Mauricio very nervous and so he left that road and drove along a smaller one. Rosenda was terribly frightened and kept turning around in her seat to look past me out the back window. Then she looked at me.

  “We have to stop and feed the baby,” she said.

  “We’ll stop soon.”

  “And we must stop at a Kmart or a Target so we can buy him some clothes.” She tilted her head and smiled. “He is a pretty baby. What are we going to call him, Mauricio?” She reached over the seat and touched my cheek. “We have been trying for so long to have a little one and here you are. It’s a miracle, Mauricio.” She looked at her husband. “So, what are we going to call him?”

  Mauricio shrugged.

  “Pepe,” Rosenda said. “I think we should call him Pepe. How does Pepe sound, Mauricio?”

  “Pepe,” he said and nodded.

  The likeness of their skin color to mine made us a proper-looking tribe. I could have been their baby. Mauricio drove us over a winding road, craggy slopes on either side, until we emerged from the hills before a plain of human activity. Cars swarmed and collected at intersections and at the mouths and anuses of parking lots. The afternoon sun was intense through the glass of the back window.

  There was a shopping center and Rosenda was telling Mauricio that we had to stop. “Stop, honey, stop. We need things for our baby boy.” Looking back at me. “Our sweet little Pepe.”

  I must admit that there was something like love in her eyes, but I was sickened by it. There was no subtlety, no understatement, no refinement, just wide-eyed, sloppy, indelicate adoration.

  “Go,” Mauricio said.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” Rosenda asked.

  “We’ll wait here.”

  “No, Mauricio, it’s too hot in the car,” she complained. And she was right. I was sweating on the vinyl seat. I was thirsty. I was hungry. I had to pee. Rosenda added, “Little Pepe probably has to go potty.” What an unfortunate expression. She was out and opening the back door. “Come on, li’l Pepe.”

  supernumber

  You don’t know Polk County lak
Ah do.

  Anybody been dere, tell you de same thing too.

  My mother was crying somewhere and not entirely for the loss of me, but for every wrong turn of her life, my father being the most glaring token of her misguided journey. She was sorry she had ever had me, but loved me no less for the regret. She would not have given up my life to negate her mistake, and she would have given her own to have me back again with her. Instead of my face serving as a painful reminder of her unfortunate encounter with the man she so despised, his face conjured feelings of loss and guilt as it made her think of me. She was crying somewhere because she thought she was a monster. She was crying somewhere because she was not sure she wanted me back. She was crying somewhere because time and space and language had cheated her badly. And finally, she was crying because, since my loss and since her severance of connection with my father, her painting had gotten good.

  ergon

  eidos

  emic-etic

  event

  everywhere