Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  He himself had no idea who or what he was. He remembered, certainly, that there had been a sort of mother, the Queen, who had sent him thither, waving a hanky and weeping like mothers ought. At first, her image offered him consolation, but now he felt angry resentment as he thought to himself, “I wish I’d never been born. If that’s even what it was! Was I born? I feel worthless and I’d happily kill myself if I knew how to do it.” (I loosely render these thoughts for the convenience of my reader in order to avoid the impression that we are merely looking at the inner workings of something numb and dumb, like looking into the eye of a cow.)

  It’s easy to sympathize with his feelings. He’d started out with such confidence and optimism, although he would not have known what those words mean. But people who feel that they have been assigned a duty, who have been sent out on a mission by a Great Person, will do what is required even if they can’t explain it all, or even a little. Duty is duty, loyalty loyalty. Moreover, he was given courage by his companions. How well he remembered the little men on their horses, with their pennants and standards, neatly lined up behind him like the terra cotta armies that once stood behind the emperor Qin Shi Huang. How could he not have felt stout-hearted? Fearless, bold, intrepid, resolute, and super-manly? He had spunk. He had sand and grit in his makeup. And backbone, forsooth.

  But where were they now, his little comrades? They certainly weren’t here in the courtyard where he’d left them. The Marquis’s horrible suggestion that he’d slaughtered them all while playing some sort of game made no sense and sickened him. One thing seemed clear: he couldn’t return home to the Queen without some sort of explanation.

  “Where are all of your friends? Your brothers in arms?” she’d ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? How can you not know? Sit down, mister. I want an explanation. Now, there were a lot of them, and I asked you to look out for them, didn’t I?”

  “I thought they were taking care of me.”

  “Don’t you try to place the blame on those poor little guys!”

  “And don’t you just render them back into flabby cack when they return?”

  “Wherever did you get such an idea?”

  “The cack master told me.”

  “Well, I shall have a word with him as well. But you won’t distract me. What, did you just leave them over there with those horrid Americans? They are probably living in Sacramento, in one of those homeless encampments by that disconsolate river. They are listening to the squalid cackling of bag ladies, pushing around shopping carts full of worn shoes. They are covering their innocent ears at night when the smelly trollops are brutalized over and over by fermenting hobos.”

  “What is fermenting?”

  “Did you at least make sure that they applied for food stamps?”

  “What are food stamps?”

  “Oh! You should be ashamed of yourself. Go to your room!”

  “I don’t have a room.”

  “Well, then just go.”

  Tears came just thinking about the possibility of this scene.

  Of course, the Queen of Spells would have said no such thing, although Percy is not to be blamed for not knowing that. This is what she’d have said. She’d have said, “It’s okay, sweetheart, calm down. They were just little creatures that I made to keep you company. Each one began as a little bit of spit and a single breath. They were no more than bubbles.”

  Ah, there was the rub.

  “But dear Queen, dear author, what then am I?”

  18.

  “Only that which is the abyss of meaning can be at the same time the ground of it.”

  —PAUL TILLICH

  Except for the black mask, the stingy-brimmed fedora, and the fine calfskin gloves, Percy was much like any other homeless person in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Oh, and the tight, tight black leather pants that shaped his buttocks in a particularly buttery way. That was different too. It may surprise you that I call attention to his pants and ass now, after all we’ve been through, now when he is so lost and vulnerable. If it does surprise you, it won’t for long.

  To say that Percy didn’t have a place to stay is to state the obvious. It’s not as if the Queen had given him a credit card so that he could stay at a motel. Who knows what she had been thinking? Maybe she assumed that the Marquis would put him up, or let him do some couch surfing among the local aristocracy. He was, as usual, clueless about her intentions.

  That first night, he just walked. (SOP among the newly homeless.) He walked from the Marquis’s manor over to Linden, then south to Eastland Mall, where he found a half-eaten bag of caramel popcorn on the ground in front of a J.Jill outlet. He didn’t much like it, but he ate it. (The Queen had him on a whole-grain, plant-based diet back in the old country.) Then he walked across Veterans Parkway, where he was narrowly missed by cars in every lane. Exhausted, he sat among the enormous concrete blocks left behind where the old Holiday Inn had been torn down. The blocks seemed to him like the last traces of a once-proud civilization that was no more. He half-expected to see the giant head of some dead king, some Ozymandias, rolled to the side with these crapulous concrete slabs.

  The next night he concluded that he really did need to find a place to sleep, so he walked over to a nearby subdivision, Collie Ridge Estates. (No collies, ridges, or estates have ever been sighted anywhere near Collie Ridge Estates.) There he found a Chrysler SUV, got in, watched Spider-Man 2 on the backseat video player, and curled up for sleep beneath a blanket with Shrek on it. “This isn’t so bad,” he thought in the full innocence of his heart.

  As you might imagine, the SUV was not a permanent solution. He was awakened the next morning by an adolescent girl, mouth bulging with an erector set of finely laced metal, a set of designer braces modeled after the Golden Gate Bridge, haute monde among N—’s teens.

  The girl said, as best she could, “Hey, Mom, the Joker is sleeping in the backseat of the car.” That’s the closest approximation I can give of what she said, because it really sounded a lot like a teaspoon stuck in a garbage disposal.

  “Who?”

  “The Joker.”

  “The Joker! Honey, the Joker is not a real person.”

  “OMG, you know who he looks like? Kelsey posted a picture of a guy like this on her Facebook page. Only this guy’s still got his pants on.”

  “What?!” She looked in and was struck with awe. “Honey, do you know who that is? It’s Zorro! And just why is Kelsey posting pictures of men with their pants off?”

  She ignored her mother’s question. “Maybe she’s trying to share him with me.”

  Blinding metallic flash of lecherous teenage incisors.

  To make a long story short, eventually the police explained to Percy the downside of sleeping in other people’s SUVs. Percy was disappointed. He rather liked the teenaged girl, in spite of the fact that she made his ears ring when she talked. The girl, her name was Melissa, or Missy, suggested that if Percy couldn’t sleep in the SUV, he could sleep in her room, but when he nodded his head in agreement there was such a righteous clamor from her mother and the police that, with yet another disconsolate sigh, he gave up on the idea.

  For her part, the girl pitched a fit, saying, “Please, Mommy! Please! He’ll be quiet! He can just sleep on the rug by the closet.” Then, “I never get anything I want! I hate you!”

  “Forget it. You are not sleeping with Zorro.”

  “Who is Zorro?” Percy asked.

  * * *

  —

  Later, he was driven to the outer walls of the city where muscular men—wearing skintight Under Armour sleeveless T’s, tattoos of jungle vines and blossoms spilling down their arms—rolled open the city gates. One of them pointed beyond the gates and said, “That is where the dogs sleep, in that field of grass across the road. You should join them. It’s where you belong.” As Percy passed, they performed bodybuilder poses that inflated their tattoos and caused the vines to pulse with menacin
g snakes and panthers in the undergrowth.

  Percy spent the day sharing smells with his new comrades, and woke the next morning in a tousy shag of warm fur. The dogs were sympathetic about his predicament, and why not? They were not so different. He was grateful to them, but, at the same time, he couldn’t help feeling a little depressed that his lustrous black regalia was now dull and covered with dog fur.

  His situation was bad. He did not really know what or where N— was. He didn’t know what an Illinois was. He didn’t know if there were more hospitable places nearby. So, he could stay with the dogs, be with them at the Dumpsters where the fast-food joints flung down their excess burgers and chicken-like portions. He could shit on the ground with them, sleep in the dog-dark night, and, at dawn, join in singing their doggy plainsongs and chants. Or, he could sweep the fur, the grease, and the vague, wild smell of piss and bile from his swell black getup and get back into town. The dogs all said he was a human, and that he should go back inside and make the best of it. This fragrant field of balms and attendant bees was no place for him. But just beware of the coppers. They didn’t like dogs and they obviously didn’t like him.

  He replied, sadly, “Okay, I’ll go. But are you sure I’m human?”

  That thought was way too heavy for the dogs, who lacked proper preparation for Kant’s “transcendental deduction.” A couple of the older, grouchier dogs, who thought they knew it all, growled unpleasantly, thinking that our Percy was perhaps a wisenheimer, as they put it. (They were what you might call love-it-or-leave-it dogs, and they wanted him to go back where he came from. Actually, I think they just said, “Git!”)

  Anyway, back through the city gates he went, without much hope, half-thinking that he should have just bared his throat to the jingoistic canines. As for the gatekeepers, they didn’t seem to recognize him. They handed him coupons for an oil change and a thirty-six-point vacation checkup, a two-fer-one at Boo-boo’s Chicago Style Dog House, and special introductory rates at one of those newfangled ChakraBump soul studios where they do cross training in the front with a retired drill sergeant, and massage in the back where the girls wait their turn, margaritas in hand. Sort of like basic combat training joined to a gay bathhouse.

  But there was still the problem of sleeping arrangements for our hero. Where would you have slept? His only thought was that he should sleep where there were beds, and the beds were in houses, so he’d just go to houses and ask if they had a free bed for the evening. As you might imagine, simple as it sounded to him, this didn’t work out well, and had the unfortunate consequence of bringing the “coppers” back into the picture. Happily, the dogs had instructed him well in “running away.” Most nights, the best he could do was wait for lights-out, and then make himself at home on a chaise longue out in the backyard. One morning when the owner, I think her name was Wanda, came out to sunbathe, drink her a.m. piña colada, and comb her platinum-blond hair, she felt the weird shift in magnetic fields caused by the fairie creature sleeping on her patio. And when she saw Percy in his lubricious leather jeans, she hummed, “Hmmm.”

  Wanda’s hum would prove fateful, at least for the next forty-five minutes.

  * * *

  —

  Lacking an alternative, Percy kept at it, knowing that he didn’t need the offer of a bed in every house he asked at, just one. Just one lucky house. And thus it was that, early one evening, he found that one.

  It was a decent if somewhat worn tract home with the nicest sort of vinyl-covered aluminum porch rails. A woman answered the door, plump but attractive in a softly glowing kind of way. He could tell there was something different about her as soon as she appeared, silhouetted by a corona thrown upon her by a huge flat-screen monitor in the background. When she saw Percy, her mouth dropped in mixed astonishment and awe. She said, “He is come. The one I was told of.” She went to her knees and bathed his feet with her tears.

  Then she said, “Your place here is ready. My name is Fanni. I have been waiting for you.” She rose and took his hand, like Beatrice leading her beloved Pilgrim to that place where God’s ways are explained to man, to that place where willing and doing are one.

  19.

  “Every authentic work of art has one primary purpose: to find what it means to be a work of art.”

  —SCHLEGEL

  Just as Percy had done in his search for a bed, Felicité went door to door, saying, “Hello, have you seen this young man?” just as if she were looking for a lost cat. “His name is Percy and he may have been wearing a mask.”

  Weirdly, no one had a neutral response. No one said, “Nope. Sorry.” Some had a look of horror and said nothing. Others cried aloud and slammed the door shut. A few said, “Oh, my God, Percy! If you find him, please tell me. I can’t go on like this. I’ll give you twenty dollars. I’ll give you my car, whatever it takes. Here’s my cellphone number. Call me!”

  Finally, late in the first morning of her quest, a man answered her knocks. He had mascara tattooed around his eyes, as if he worshipped Nefertiti, and a large image of the sun above the outside corner of his right eye shedding its beneficent rays across his face. (Apparently, he fancied Akhenaten’s Amarna style for his tattoos.) He took the photo, gave it a quick look, and said, “Hey, that’s Percy.”

  “You know him?”

  He smiled, slyly, “Well, everybody knows him.”

  “Do you know where he might be?”

  “Oh, I know where he is. Eh, you see that house at the end of the cul-de-sac?”

  “With the white porch rails.”

  “Yeah, the one that’s got the carved newel post.”

  “Yes. I see it. That is amazingly…”

  “Phallic.”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, just go there and ask. He’s been living in that house with Fanni and her boyfriend. Real fixture in the neighborhood now.”

  “My God, how wonderful! I’ve found him!”

  “Wonderful? Are you really sure you want this Percy?”

  “Of course I am. I’m his mother.”

  “Really!? Nothing personal, but you don’t look like his kind, let alone his mother. Frankly, I’ve never thought of Percy as a person with a mother.”

  “What can you mean?”

  The tattooed sun above his right eye flared uncomfortably. It seemed that it might burn him.

  “I apologize. It’s nothing. Forgive me. Anyway, if you go down there, just give him a little peck on the cheek for me and say, ‘Gerald will see you Thursday at seven o’clock.’”

  “You will not see him Thursday because he’s returning this afternoon with me to his home in the Hebrides.”

  “The Hebrides? Oh, so you’re…”

  “The Queen of Spells.”

  “Of course! Hey, where the hell are the Hebrides? They’re islands, right?”

  Looking a little exasperated and impatient to be on her way, she just glared at him.

  “Oh, never mind, I’ll Google it. But one last thing before you go. You’re not the first person to suggest that Percy needs to leave town. You’re the first mother, of course, but not the first person. Like you, they all say they want to help him, or it’s for his own good, or our good, or whatever. Some have even complained that his ‘methods are unsound,’ whatever that means. I’ve never found anything lacking in his methods. Frankly, I’ve never seen any method at all. But, as you can see, he is not gone. That’s part his doing and part ours. You see, we love Percy here, in our own way. He has his perfect place not merely in our midst but in our very hearts, dark though they may be. You might even say that he is venerated.

  “When you go down there, you will meet another person. Her name is Fanni, but don’t let that give you the wrong impression. There’s nothing soft about her when it comes to Percy. She is like the pope of Percy, or something. I don’t know how to put it. If you ask her, she’ll explain that there was the One who was given up by his followers in the garden at Gethsemane, and there is this One, and his name is Percy. That famo
us betrayal, Fanni says, will not happen again, not on her watch. This probably doesn’t make much sense to you, but then you’re a pagan, aren’t you?”

  20.

  “I follow the law of the good only in so far as it is compatible with undisturbed sensual pleasure.”

  —KARL JASPERS

  Felicité walked up to the house that Gerald had pointed to. When she came to the newel post, she regarded it carefully, and circled the palm of her hand speculatively above its tumescent head. Instantly, there was a snap of electricity and a rainbow of intense hues hovered between her hand and the post. She pulled her hand back.

  “So,” she observed, “there is Power here.”

  She knocked on the door and it was answered promptly.

  It was Percy.

  “Mother!”

  “My child!”

  She took him in her arms.

  Quickly up behind him came a woman—Fanni, as we now know—cleanly dressed in a nice summer outfit that was belted at the waist and printed with red hedge roses. She was smiling, and she seemed full of an organic friendliness. She was like the idea of a mother that you would get from someone else’s mother, not your own.

  “Who is it, Percy?” Fanni asked.

  “It’s my mother. Sort of.”

  Felicité and Percy soon requested, and were granted, a private place where they could talk. Percy took her hand and led her to a cheerful, sunny room overlooking a beautiful and carefully maintained garden. Whoever kept it knew and appreciated the difference between a flower and a weed. They sat at a small table and Fanni brought them cups of tea—smoky Russian Caravan—and a vase of freshly picked flowers, mostly lilies and purple coneflower, all from the spotless garden.