Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  The tree makes you think of that?

  Hey, it’s what the camera was pointed at.

  Forms of what?

  I don’t know. Society? Art? For the time being, it is thought that when all of our artistic and spiritual interests are at once dispossessed, these uncountable shapes to stories must be burned, but the better stories should be pasted together into one huge poem or graffiti for the defense of language only.

  And this is how you spend your day thinking?

  This is how I spend my day. All meaning must collapse under the weight of its own being.

  Do you know how you sound?

  I can only imagine.

  Where Do We Keep the Ineffable?

  This is where I pause to mull. You might think that I should be mulling something over, but I am a fan of the simple mull. I want to consider the day you were born. There was not a cloud in the sky and there were very few birds as well. Your mother was in the hospital in good time, time enough to even think that she was there too early. These were the days when fathers paced the hallways and waited helplessly, smoking, because everyone smoked everywhere. The obstetrician probably had a Camel filter dangling from his lips as he got a good grip on your oversized head and pulled you into this miserable, good-for-nothing world. You know the world I mean, where the rich get richer and the dumb get dumber and the horny get hornier and the only thing that ever changes is the size of insecure women’s breasts.

  A Deep and Inscrutable Singular Name

  Douglas and Donald now live in an apartment building down the street and around the corner, right next to Luigi’s Afro-American Taco Pagoda, home of the Barbecued Cilantro, Salmon, and Prosciutto Roll, known as the Barcisalproro, served with turned cider. They don’t make meth, but they sell drugs out of their home. It’s so much easier and they live closer, in town; that helps. I don’t have to drive. But I do have to walk through my neighborhood, a scary thing indeed, as there are many people who patronize the fat twins and many people who find nothing wrong with what the fat twins do. Let’s say we’re in DC and I live near the corner of 14th and U. Let’s say it and so it is true. We’re here since this camera that I, or whoever this I is, is holding in his lap seems to want to see Washington.

  I knew this guy once, he was a writer I guess, a white guy, I introduced him at a reading one time and neither he nor anyone else ever forgave me for calling him the Ralph Abernathy of American letters. A poet, a white woman, asked, pointing a finger at me without actually using her finger, just what I meant. I asked her if she knew who Ralph Abernathy was and she said she did and I said then I didn’t understand her confusion. Another poet, a man with blue eyes and blond hair (because I’m sick of saying white), stood up and said he took exception to my comment. I asked him what he had against Ralph Abernathy. He said he held nothing against Abernathy and so I asked why he should be so offended. Is it because Abernathy is black? I asked. He sat down. This was at the University of Iowa in 1976. You were six and hating every minute of first grade. The night before Gerald Ford gave the country a moment of clarity by declaring that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe while debating Jimmy Carter. Granted, it must have been a confusing thing for all those white people to hear and I’m fairly positive that even I didn’t know what I meant by it, but the consternation the remark caused was well worth what little trouble it took to utter it. As I said, you were six, and somewhat unhappy, and it made you unhappier still when I told you that such unhappiness was a condition you would more or less have to get used to if you planned to live into and through adulthood. You mother would not have argued, as she was already considering leaving me, though it would take her another seven years to finally do it. Actually she didn’t leave, she just never came back. She claimed she saw god. She was on a flight from Montreal, where her maternal grandmother lived, to Edmonton, where her paternal grandmother lived, and the Air Canada flight she was on ran out of fuel and had to be glided into a landing at a retired military airfield. She fell in love with the copilot of that flight, a nice Canadian man, and settled down in Ottawa. She never claimed that the flyboy was god, but she said the near-death experience of the emergency landing gave her the strength to seek happiness in her life. I agreed with her and said as much. Gimli, that was the name of the airport where they landed. Funny that I should remember that. I really loved your mother. I was sad when she didn’t come back, but, like I said, I understood and still think it was for the best. For her at least. It really fucked you up. Not so badly as I might have guessed, though. I mean, you’ve grown up to be successful and well adjusted and, of course, unhappy, the way a man is supposed to feel in this world. Just pulling your leg, son.

  I started writing in 1970, just after the My Lai massacre. That was quite a massacre as massacres go, five hundred defenseless children, women, and men. We at home (as we called it) were told that it was just an accident of war, but do you kill so many people by accident, and how do you sexually abuse and mutilate people by accident? That guy, Calley, served a couple of years under house arrest and in therapy trying to undo his short man’s complex and now he probably runs an advertising firm in Nashua, New Hampshire, or an oil speculation company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, married to a second wife named Sadie, who is constantly nervous and pissed because his first wife, also named Sadie, keeps calling, complaining that he’s behind with his child support even though the kids are grown and out of the split-level tract home they once shared in Redlands, California, but all that is just in the mind of a bitter old man, namely, me. I’m sure he’s attending a luncheon with a Kiwanis club in Georgia and that he still gets calls from that Medina guy telling him when he should scratch his ass and stiff his fingers, because that’s what good little soldiers do, right? Take orders, follow orders, obey orders, carry orders out, see to it, comply, roger wilco. I can still recall the images, the descriptions, the reported snatches of language from the soldiers involved, the way my heart broke, sank, collapsed, and the way it sounded so familiar, so much like white men in white hoods driving dirt roads and whistling through gap-toothed grins. I did not write about war or killing or overtly about my disdain for my lying, bombastic, self-righteous, conceited, small-minded, imperialistic homeland. Instead, I wrote about getting high, while getting high every chance I got, at every turn, smoking this, swallowing that, all this as a way to escape blame for my country, at least that was my excuse, all of it as a sad, juvenile metaphor about the lost American spirit, the mislaid, impoverished, misspent, misplaced, wasted, suffering American soul. The novel was titled Pass the Joint, Motherfucker, and it was published on the first Earth Day, not that it matters, not that I knew that at the time. The book was a success and so I became a success and I never published another word. I wrote plenty, keeping the pages in my drawers and burning them periodically, a haughty and vainglorious display, if you ask me. I gave interviews freely, usually to moderately, though to not overly bright students fresh out of some graduate program or another trying to see their names in the pages of those literary magazines that no one really reads. I contradicted myself from one to the next. I did not grow complacent, I was complacent. I was smug and I was therefore ugly. I was never bitter about my career, but I found it a bit amusing, ironic, ridiculous. Not that my career should have been anything more than it was. To say that I published nothing else is of course a lie. I published eight science fiction novels and twelve detective novels under different names. The science fiction novels, the Plat series, were penned under the name Nix Chance. As a crime writer I was known as Bill Calley. You should know that I’ve never confessed this to anyone. Only my agent knows. It’s a story in the works.

  Back up, if you can do the math; that means your mother left me with a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t particularly like me. Tell me that’s not cruel. To you, I mean. But I liked you well enough. I thought you were funny, sardonic, sometimes a little twisted. Me, I’ve always been just a punster, but you were funny. I suppose
you still are, but how would I know?

  I call this entification. I mean, as subjective as all this business is, at a point, it is, the story is, the world is, and there it all is, entified. It all starts at arm’s length, points here are there falling into focus, coming together or separating and becoming distinct. The process is not all that unusual, it’s all happening under rather obvious intersubjective circumstances. What am I trying to say? Nothing, if you ask me. I’m an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man. But none of this matters and it wouldn’t matter if it did matter.

  You are Lang and you write: The woman who claimed to be my daughter was still standing in the garden. Bathed in the afternoon light as she was I was still not prepared to admit a resemblance, but I did think she was pretty. I hadn’t thought that before and I wondered about how the gaze of parents is always so clouded. It’s hard to imagine a mother saying, This is my son Bobby, he’s uglier than a plastic bag of shit, but he’s mine. But that’s not quite the voice, is it? Again. Outside, I found Meg Caro staring at the pile of rhizomes. You can imagine that my wife is a little upset. She nodded. I have to tell you that I really don’t remember your mother and I’m not the sort of person who forgets the women with whom he’s slept. I mean, there haven’t been that many. I only know what she told me. I bit my lip and nodded, realized that we were just going round and round. I suppose we need a paternity test. You wouldn’t happen to know how we go about that, would you? No. I can ask my friend. Do you have a number where I can reach you? She gave me a number and told me it was her cell. Sylvia came and stood by me as we watched her walk back down the drive to the car she’d left near the mailbox. I’m going to call her when I know how to get the test. Sylvia turned and walked away, back toward the house. You can’t be upset with me about this. This I knew was completely untrue. How could she be anything else? And the last thing I needed was to compound the problem by further denying my relationship to Meg Caro or especially making an appeal that we consider the poor young woman’s feelings. I wonder what she wants was the only thing Sylvia said at the table that evening. My response was, I can’t imagine. The evening was difficult. My routine was to go out to my studio after dinner and work until Sylvia was well asleep, but tonight that seemed a bad idea. Yet so did the breaking of routine seem like a bad idea. In fact no ideas presented themselves for consideration. I could not abandon Sylvia with the weight of the situation and yet sitting and stewing with her in the cauldron of anxiety that was our bedroom appeared no better. All I could imagine hearing, since there was no speaking, was the bubbling of the bubbling broth around us and an occasional pop from the fire. Then my mind turned from my concern for Sylvia and by extension my concern for myself vis-à-vis Sylvia, to simply me or perhaps simple me. Just what kind of massive quagmire had my, I imagined, rather average-sized sexual appendage gotten me into some twenty-eight years ago, leaving me to roam through life happily, though clumsily, for so long, only to find myself feeling for the bottom of the mess with my foot while trying not to drown, laying my arms angel-like flat, as I had read in survival books, so that I might just float out and to safety, my organ, my penis, my stupid dick, for all the pleasure that I had imagined that it gave me, what had it done to me now, if indeed it had done anything at all, because I really did not recall the face of the woman in the photograph, the mother of my alleged daughter, and I was no playboy, was always rather backward, awkward, if not plain ugly, had thought myself so lucky that Sylvia would even give me the time of day and thought when she did that it was because she believed she could feel secure with a homely man that other women did not find attractive, but there had been others, a few, and I thought I remembered every one of them and every name and who could forget a name like Carly Caro, alliteration having always worked throughout life as an irritant on me, and I had not been the kind of man who had oneor two-night stands, at least it was never my desire, as I was always just a little needy and clingy and was possessed by the desire to not be that kind of man and why wouldn’t this Katie Caro have told me that she was gravid, enceinte, fraught, in a family way, parturient, with child, replete, expectant, about to bear fruit, knocked up? Was I so unattractive a man that even when he got a woman pregnant she would flee for the hills? And if I was that off-putting, physically or intellectually, why should she have kept the child at all? I mean, there were ways, and why would she then tell the poor genetically disadvantaged child who her father was? Perhaps upon learning of my career, that there was one at all, she decided that there was possibly a bit more to me than had met her eye (and apparently other parts), or maybe she thought, mercenarily, that there was something to be had, and oh how mistaken this Chloe Caro and her daughter were. What if it was all just a big mistake? A faux pas. Or worse, a ruse. A scam. We’d get the test done wherever one goes to get such a test done and we would discover that I was no more related to Meg Caro than I was to Chuck Berry or Igor Stravinsky and yet somehow I knew that if my pecker came out of this mess clean, untarnished, Sylvia and I would never again be the same. I just didn’t know why that would be so, but I knew it all the same, talking to each other would be difficult, I would not know where to stand when she brushed her teeth, when to leave to work, when to come back or how to touch her in or out of bed, and I was filled right then with such sadness and perhaps terror that I was far less afraid of Meg Caro’s actually being proved my daughter. I thought all of this while Sylvia and I lay in our queen-sized bed (she’d never wanted a king because we’d be too far apart), on opposite edges, the six-hundred-thread-count sheets she’d insisted on, growing as cold as an overworn cliché between us and the colder that space became the more difficult it became to traverse. When her back was turned, though she was nowhere near sleep, I glanced under the covers at my dick and it looked so innocent, harmless, and at that particular moment, pathetic.

  How could I have let him, you, lie there so miserably and do that to his, my, wife? He would have to have gone out to his studio and stared at a painting, one in progress, or one that he thought was finished but really wasn’t. A large canvas with reds and yellows. Goldenrod, corn silk, chiffon, cadmium yellow, lemon, bismuth yellow, Indian yellow, ocher, Naples yellow, jaune brilliant, burnt sienna, transparent maroon, Venetian red, Indian red, cadmium red, quinacridone red, rose madder, permanent red, alizarin crimson. None of the colors mattered anymore and so I looked at an experiment of sorts, a medium-sized canvas nailed to the wall with whites, zinc white and transparent white and foundation white and Cremnitz white and flake white (lead based as it is). I looked at the surface, which yielded no entry, and tried to imagine something to say about, to, myself or anybody else. I supposed I could claim that the narrative arc of the painting was intentionally contentious, that rather than culminating in a conventional denouement, resolving matters and seeking order, I was employing a highly metaphoric mise-en-scène, so obvious a thing and yet . . . Or perhaps I was saying that the painting was becoming its own wish, the white transforming white into a metaphor that stated its own essential self until the metaphor itself became an essential fact. All of that meant something to me and also nothing at all and so, in a way, I became my own wish, I became a dead artist. Self-pity bred such thinking, I fear. After a failed attempt at working on a new, blank canvas, I returned to the house, sat in the living room, and watched a mindless movie on one of the channels I didn’t know we received. I would have offered a description of the film, but the hand making this story apparently couldn’t come up with it. It was when watching the worst movies that I found anything close to rational clarity, but on that night nothing was clear, as my definition of myself was shifting, changing, and this was disconcerting because until this point, until my confrontation with this possibility of fatherhood, I had never imagined that had any sort of self-definition.

  A brief pause here while we address this whole single-fatherraising-a-son story. To say that I raised you is not quite true, as by thirteen I believe we are pretty mu
ch completely developed and completely fucked up. After that it’s just a matter of refinement.

  Dad, Mom never left us.

  Not literally.

  How do you mean? Mom lived with you until she died.

  You know me. I’m just trying to make a point, to illustrate something, to explicate, demonstrate, elucidate, adorn. Literally, everything I utter is a metaphor, if you know what I’m trying to say.

  And what’s that?

  Where’s the joy in saying anything flat out?

  Physis / Nomos

  I am motivated by affections that make me hunger for a connection to some entity. If as a frail man I am too prone to errors of judgment and impression, replacing, as I go, riches and power for what I should better seek, how am I to consider a mind that performs another kind of substitution? I may desire absolute being and imagine that the desire itself is an expression of attainment.

  Is this the ranting of an old man?

  We will all be old.

  Will we?

  So it is everywhere and so it will ever be, till all the semen is finally discharged and all the eggs are finally spent or all of everything is reduced to dormant matter in dormant organs on dormant islands, till a talented and zealous architect is hired and all are persuaded to sit around in communities and stare numbly at each other until all rank gives way to reason and reason gives way to feeling and all feeling gives way to simple human need and soldiers stop following orders and the orders stop coming in. Some of us seem to have perished, that is the bleak, woebegone truth, that not even in the blue stillness of death can we be decisive, resolute, unwavering. It was once that life found nourishment, pabulum (and I mean them in whatever ways you can make them mean), in death. If we could have, we would have personified Time, nonspatial as it is, as if in a children’s book, we might have asked it, politely or not, I don’t think it would matter to Time (untroubled as it is), not to run off to ruin.