Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  Will it fit?

  It fits, I tell him. His pressure is high and I tell him so. I look at his throat and in his ears. I ask him questions. Any chest tightness? Blood in your stool? How are you sleeping? How much do you weigh?

  About four fifty, but that’s a guess.

  I would imagine.

  You should get yourself a blood pressure reader from the drugstore and keep track of your pressure. If it stays high, you’ll need to be on medication. I’m pretty sure you’re going to need medication.

  Am I all right?

  No. Why would you even ask that?

  What’s wrong with him? The woman is standing in the doorway. I notice her flip-flops.

  Where’s your gun? I ask him.

  I don’t have a gun.

  What’s wrong with him?

  I look at Donald. You’re fat, I say to him. There’s probably a lot wrong with you and if I were you I’d go get a real physical examination and cut down to maybe ten meals a day.

  Hey, from the woman.

  You asked.

  I want you to be my doctor. I like you because you don’t bullshit around. Hey, I know I’m fat. I work at it.

  I do not respond. My eye has caught the table across the room. It is covered with cameras and lenses. I step over to the table and study a late 1950s or early ’60s Leica M3 camera in a plastic bag.

  I said I want you to be my doctor.

  This is a nice camera.

  Take it out of the bag. Look at it.

  I take out the rangefinder 35 mm camera and feel the weight of it in my hand. I know that it is the first Leica with a bayonet interchangeable lens mount. There is a 50 mm lens attached and on the table are 90 and 135 mm lenses. The top of the camera is black, not chrome, and it has not been painted. On the table are also earlier Leica cameras and Mamiyas and Hasselblads and Rodenstocks, Schneiders, fieldand monorail-view cameras and lenses, all piled up. This is all so beautiful.

  You can take that one. Made in ’sixty-three.

  At this point you can well imagine that I have every intention of imagining that I will take this camera. It is beautiful. It is history. In the story I press the shutter and feel almost moved by the tight, quiet click, not even the cracking of a twig, but what it might sound like if a baby could snap his fingers. And here I could go on with my orgiastic discovery of lens after lens, of only the large-format Schneiders, Angulon, Xenotar, Xenar, Symmar, Rubinar, Isconar. But the Leica that I have myself holding, that 1963 beauty, this is what I will have myself take, but why does fat Douglas have this, any of this, on this big table in his scary room?

  There’s more in the storeroom. My father was a photographer. He was good friends with Ansel Adams. What do you call them? Contemporaries. They were in f/64 together.

  Your father and Ansel Adams. They were friends.

  Good old Uncle Ansel. Take the camera. I don’t use any of this stuff. I just have it. Douglas is always saying he’s going to sell it on eBay, but it ain’t happened yet and it won’t. Take it.

  And what do you want in return?

  Consider it your fee.

  This is worth a lot more than my fee.

  Don’t worry about that. Come back and take my blood pressure and listen to my internal noises and my heart and shit and you can have another lens, a telephoto even, to go with that baby.

  In other words.

  You’ll be my doctor.

  Donald lies there like the lump of adipose tissue he is. He smiles, nods his big head, his greasy hair, perhaps fearing to move. I do not will not employ modal verbs. Of course this is a lie.

  You must be my doctor, Donald said.

  Where is Meg Caro?

  She came walking back up my drive toward my studio. My wife was at home this time, in the yard separating irises. The rhizomes were in a pile at the border of rocks that surrounded that part of the garden. The sun was brilliant and boring. However, I was not there but at the market buying low-fat coconut milk for a curry I had planned for the evening. It was the afternoon and she stood so that her shadow fell over Sylvia. Sylvia pushed back her wide-brimmed and weathered straw hat and looked up. The young woman wanted to know if I was around and Sylvia told her that she was my wife. She then asked why she wanted me. Meg Caro told her that she had visited a few days ago, that she and I had talked about her possibly being my apprentice or, rather, intern. Sylvia stood and looked back at my empty studio, told her again that I was out, asked just when she had paid this visit. Sylvia wondered why I had not mentioned this young woman. Intern. Sylvia repeated the word and found she disliked the taste of it. Meg Caro told her that she had dropped by unannounced and that we had had tea and talked and that she had asked to work with me. Sylvia asked for my response. Oh, he said no and I thought I might try to change his mind And how might you hope to change his mind? Sylvia was angry, though she did not know why, perhaps feeling proprietary, but not likely. She did feel territorial and exhibited it by standing to her full height, some four inches taller than the young woman in front of her. If he said no, she wanted to know, why are you back? I’m back to ask again because there was something I didn’t tell him. And what is that? I need to tell him. Sylvia reminded the woman that she was my wife. He’s going to tell me anyway. I’ll wait and tell him. Now Sylvia was angrier. You may come back and tell him, but you may not wait. When will he be back? Just then I rolled up the driveway. I felt some alarm when I saw Meg Caro standing there and a great deal of alarm when I saw my wife and then her expression. We had a conversation through the windshield of the car, she asking why I had not told her about this young woman and I saying that I had not deemed it terribly important and then she said that I had obviously found it important enough to not mention and she had the last word, until I was out of the car, walking toward them, leaving the groceries in the back of the station wagon. You remember Miss Caro, don’t you? She was here a few days ago. My voice was cold, as if I was angry that she had returned, but in fact I did not know what I felt or what I thought I should have felt. Why have you returned, Miss Caro? I thought I made myself clear. Yes, but I forgot to tell you something when I was here last. And what is that? I’m your daughter. The scenario was not so unheard of, literature being packed with such surprises. Even so, I was shocked beyond belief, yet I could not properly explore or appreciate or process my stunned state because I was entertaining a rather pressing question of protocol—which of the two women was I to address first? I decided (actually, decided seems a bit strong or perhaps generous as what I did was simply open my mouth and let something come out) to ask Meg Caro, in front of Sylvia, how old she was. We’ll say that she said twenty-seven this time. So she was considerably older than my relationship with my wife. I then asked just who her mother was. Her name is Carrie Caro. I have never known anyone by that name. I felt some relief, as that sort of name would have been one that stuck in my head. She told you I was your father? You’re certain I’m the right Murphy Lang? There are not many Murphy Langs. Apparently there are at least two. You’re the artist. I have never met your mother. I don’t know why she told you that. As I looked at her I thought I saw a vague resemblance to my mother, which was disturbing in its own right, but I was also certain that it was my imagination toying with me, a notion that I found more profoundly disconcerting. I could not say then just what feature or features were somehow familiar, and hopefully not familial. Since time had decided to do that standing-still thing, I took the opportunity to study Meg Caro’s face. I looked at her upper lip, her lower lip, her right ear, her left ear, the bridge of her nose, her nostrils, the space between her upper lip and her nose, where her nose met her cheeks, her chin, the space just below her lower lip, her forehead, her eyebrows, her superorbital, her orbital, her infraorbital, her parotid, her hyoid region, her upper eyelids, her lower eyelids, the shape of her head, the thickness of her neck, and none of it could I say was familiar and
yet somehow, all put together, she did not seem so foreign. It could of course have simply been that I had seen her days before and so she was in fact, simply, familiar. But I had thought of my mother and then I had to wonder why. I imagined a somewhat normal and calm conversation with Sylvia concerning the structure of the young woman’s face. There might be something in the chin, perhaps the mouth. Do you mean the curve of her submaxillary? No, no that. What do you think of her eyes? Not mine. No, they are not. What about the shape of her head in general? Maybe. Something in the neck for sure. Along the carotid fossa or the sternocleidomastoid? Now you’re just reaching. Here is a photograph of my mother. She was about this age when she met you. I took the picture and Sylvia crowded into me for a view. She told me you never knew about me. She even told me it was a two-night stand, as she put it. I’m really sorry, but I don’t recognize her. She’s beautiful. This was from Sylvia, who seemed at once disappointed and relieved, or so I imagined. Perhaps she was angry and only angry. But somehow Sylvia and I managed to separate ourselves from Meg Caro and step inside the house, into the kitchen. How we got in there, I have as yet not figured out. Sylvia looked out the window at the young woman and filled a glass with water from the tap. How could you? One, we don’t know if she is telling the truth or rather if what she is saying is true. I thought it necessary to make a distinction, because Meg Caro needed not be cast as a villain if she did indeed believe her own story. And also, Sylvia, I did have a life before us and you knew that I was not a virgin. I thought you were more of a virgin than this. How could you not know? We don’t know that I didn’t know. I don’t remember the woman in the photograph at all. I certainly would have recalled a name like Cassie Caro. Carrie Caro. Whatever. I would have remembered if I’d had a daughter. Without question, but that’s not the point here, is it? What do I say to her? Do I ask for a DNA test or something? Sylvia looked out the window and finally drank her water. She doesn’t seem like a bad kid. What, now are you getting all parental? I didn’t keep anything from you, Sylvia. If she is my daughter, and I highly doubt that fact, then I have missed out on her entire life. How do you think that kid must feel? Even if I’m not her father, that’s what she’s feeling. Gregor Mendel wrote Experiments with Plant Hybrids in 1865, the same year that an actor shot a president, and it wasn’t until thirty-five years later that anyone paid attention and of course Mendel was long dead, but had he been alive he would have been very happy that his work was being recognized and that France had limited the workday of women and children to eleven hours, perhaps, if he cared about such things. Andrei Belozersky isolated deoxyribonucleic acid another thirty-five years later and no one knows his name, only the names Watson and Crick, and also the name Elvis Presley, as he was born in that year and he had DNA, too. Such is science. Such is history. The question remained, who was standing in my yard? Was she a grifter? Was she crazy? Was she a woman who believed her untrue story? Was she in fact my daughter? And that would have made me a father? Well, sort of. What importance should I have been attaching to mere biology? Suppose a sperm of mine had gotten loose to do what sperms want to do? Was I to feel an attachment to every sperm I had ever let go? Suppose this woman’s mother had come by my sperm in a used condom left bedside and in some dorm room that I could not recall? Would I be responsible? More, would I in fact be related to Meg Caro just by a mere biological joining of cells? Blah, blah, blah, I would have thought anything to keep from going back out there. You need to be tested, Sylvia said. I never met her mother. You need to know. You mean you need to know. We need to know. And so I devised this notion, if devised is the right word, that Sylvia had conspired with this young woman, who did in fact look more like Sylvia than she did me, especially around the eyes, especially especially around the upper eyelids and especially especially especially around the corners of the eyes, to trick me, to come to me and tell me that story so that I would begin to doubt my memory and so that I would go mad, thus leaving Sylvia in a position to commit me to an asylum, if in fact there are still such places, to a floating prison, if not on the water then floating on some kind of barely legal paper, me in my long-sleeved jacket, too tied up and drugged up and fouled up to appreciate the sheer genius of Sylvia’s plan to dump me into a psycho nightmare and then to trot off to some South American country, perhaps Brazil or maybe Argentina, with her young lover, her young consort, whom she had met at some riding clinic that she was always running off to on the weekends over in Temecula and once in Malibu, where she had to stay over because the drive was so long, she and that young woman who had been passed off to me as possibly my own daughter, entwined on the floral bedcover of a Comfort Inn or a Hilton Suites or a Hampton Inn, their faces buried in each other’s vaginas, laughing into each other’s tufts of pubic hair at how their plan would work to undermine my confidence, sense of self, sanity, and they would be left with it all, the land, the house, the paintings to sell, and book passage on a boat leaving Miami on Christmas Day on its way south or perhaps east, to Portugal or Spain, where they would eat arroz con leche and paella and butifarra and tortilla de patatas and gazpacho and end with tortas de aceite with a very nice Palo Cortada while I would be sitting on a molded plastic chair with my face hovering over a steaming plastic bowl of gruel, thin gruel, but not too thin, Mr. Woodhouse, and when I asked for more I would be struck a hard blow to the head.

  I’ll go out and talk to her.

  You do that.

  I do not want to know about the human heart. I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches. I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.

  Dad?

  Son?

  Dad?

  Son? We could go on like this until late into something or perhaps early into the next thing. But what about the man with the horse whose wife is gone and who might or might not be headed toward something intimate with the tough, straight-talking veterinarian? And what of the horse out there with those people whom the trainer doesn’t like? The biting horse and the loud people? Let’s do.

  The vet comes back and they slice open the horse’s neck and of course find nothing, but there is the beloved animal with his neck as open as a doctor’s Wednesday afternoon.

  The vet says, Leave it open. Irrigate it, but not too much. Let it granulate over and form a big scab. You don’t want to get in nature’s way.

  Don’t cover it at all?

  She shakes her head and begins washing her instruments in her metal pail of Betadine solution. She looks up, pulls her hair from her face with the back of her hand. Are we going to go into your house and have sex or what?

  Yes.

  That is one way it could happen. Perhaps not likely. Perhaps a pathetic male fantasy, but however they end up doing it, they do it, and so a relationship begins. Man with a horse meets woman who treats horses.

  Dad?

  Yes?

  Will any of this help?

  It can’t hurt. This is what I want all of this to do, to be. I want it to sound like nonsense, have the rhythm of nonsense, the cadence of nonsense, the music, the harmony, the animato, the euphoniousness, the melodiousness, the contrapuntalicity, lyrphorousness, the marcato, the fidicinality, the vigor, isotonicity, lyriformity, of nonsense.

  Okay, is this Murphy?

  Funny you should ask. Because I’m reworking Murphy. Maybe I am. Maybe you are. This horse stuff, I’m just so tired of it.

  And the trainer with the loud people?

  Fuck ’em.

  Murphy.

  At my house, which is now in town, my office being beside it in mid-twentieth-century fashion, I put down my medical bag and sit in my leather chair and examine my newly acquired Leica camera. I will have no more patients today. I look through the viewfinder and see:

  Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, Marlon Bra
ndo, and Harry Belafonte. Sidney Poitier is in the background. And in the foreground, in profile, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, is Nat Turner. Nat turns and smiles at the camera.

  There’s something about Charlton that I like. His love of guns. If I could have had some guns back in 1831, things might have turned out differently. Right now Chuck is all about helping us black folks, but there’s something in his eyes and I’ve seen it before. He likes being white, really likes being white, and like any reasonable person he has no desire to be black in these United States, but that’s really different from enjoying one’s whiteness. Balance, it’s all about balance.

  The telephone rings and it is Douglas calling me. Thank you for seeing my brother.

  You’re welcome. So you’re his doctor now.

  I look at the Leica in my hand and I cannot put it down. It is fused to me. My fingers stroke the shutter release.

  What do we do next? To help him, I mean.

  He needs a full blood workup. He needs a treadmill stress test. He needs to stop smoking, drinking, and eating.

  The first one we can probably manage.

  I’ll call tomorrow and tell him where to go for the blood tests.

  Do you like that camera?

  Yes, I do.

  It’s a special one.

  How do you mean?

  Only that it’s one of my favorites.

  By the way, I can tell the two of you apart now, you and Donald.

  That’s funny, no one else can. See you later, Doc.

  Thus, if I or you, son, can be relied upon, we are at this moment in time in a most grave condition, besieged and beset by that ceaseless host of negative thinkers and would-be controllers and, yes, disbelievers, threatening to undress us publicly. The world, says you, as it proceeds, is under an operation of devastation and misapplication and abuse, which, whether by creeping and insidious and assiduous corrosion, or open, hastier combustion, as things might be, will efficaciously enough destroy completely past forms and replace them with, well, whatever.