Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  In this my modest but comfortable Connecticut saltbox house in which I have lived for some thirty-four years, I am reclining in the midcentury Eames lounge chair my Rose bought at a yard sale in Mystic. I cannot see the ocean from my farmhouse, but I know that it is there and yet it gives little if any solace. The bluegrass lawn is long and it is being mown by Gerald, a pleasant Negro man from Hartford, who tells me my bluegrass is rare now. I attend to the care he pays the edges of the yard, swinging his old John Deere riding mower wide to pick up the strip he missed on his last pass. I imagine the tide is going out now and that the constant sound of the ocean is softer, sadder perhaps, the way I feel, but I cannot hear it even when it crashes. I imagine that I am one of those sandy beaches, viewed from a high place, more of me exposed than ever, my sea fleeing for some distant, opposite land, shore, continent, until all is a great silence, a torture of silence. I reflect on my last trip to Paris, lament is more like it. I arrived at the Gare du Nord from I can’t remember where. It was a Friday night it had rained all day, leaving the streets shimmering. I knew the taxi ride to the sixth would be long and slow. I was there because I had won some award or other. I asked the driver to stop before we crossed the river, and I got out. Êtes-vous certain? the driver said again and again. I had some sense of where I was. I could see an archway ahead of me, cars bottlenecked and trying to get through, and I believed that through there I would find the Louvre and from there it would be a long walk to the Odéon and my hotel. It was on that long journey along the wet Boulevard Saint-Germain that I finally figured out that I had tumbled into depression, my shoulders aching from my bags, my feet hurting with every step, and yet it was a feeling of freedom, that realization. À quelque chose malheur est bon. I would contemplate this over dinner at Les Éditeurs, the restaurant across the street from my hotel, the walls of which were covered with photographs of writers, I among them, posed seated in a hotel lobby some blocks away. There I would have the gratinée de coquilles St. Jacques, my favorite, and a bottle of wine from the Loire, a sauvignon blanc no doubt. I did arrive at the restaurant. I still had not checked in to my hotel and so I sat with my bags in the chair opposite me at a table meant for two. As it turned out, I instead had a cabernet franc, the color of the wine befitting my mood.

  Nat, Nat, Nat, you can’t write this.

  Why the hell not? It’s deep, it’s intellectual, it’s cosmopolitan, and it’s timely. What do you mean I can’t write it? I’ve written it.

  It’s so unreal. How can this guy be depressed? Look at his life.

  Depression is a disease. Besides, you have not gotten to the part where he’s hiding in the lobby of the Four Seasons and has sex with a bellboy.

  Really.

  I could make the scene about you, I suppose, and I’d have to call it Go Down, Moses.

  Are you going to fill it with all sorts of literary allusions?

  No, I’m trying to remain authentic here.

  Dad?

  Son?

  I can’t keep up.

  Und so weiter.

  What?

  Ashita wa ashita, kyo wa kyo. It’s Japanese.

  That much I gathered. And it means?

  A shrug.

  I’ll be Murphy again. And I’m sitting with my Leica still, having just looked through the viewfinder and seen the cast and crew of the March on Washington. Nat was smoking a joint rather unabashedly. Charlton Heston was pretending not to know him. John Lewis was stepping forward to give his speech. A pigeon standing on Lincoln’s head did not know whether to fly away or shit. The phone rings and it is Douglas and he says, Donald needs you.

  Donald is my patient now and so I cannot leave him there to fade into fat death without treatment. He must at the very least do so while being treated and that is where I come in. And so I walked around the corner and up the block as I have described to the building where the twins reside. The air is rife with the smell of cooking Barcisalproros and I have a sudden fleeting understanding of how Donald has gotten to be all that he is. Still, I am able to control myself and not buy one of the rolls and walk up the one flight of stairs to his apartment. The woman greets me at the door.

  What is your name?

  Tracy.

  Is that the same name you told me last time?

  Does it matter?

  Not really.

  Donald remains in the bed where I left him. I can’t see that he has moved, but I assume, perhaps stupidly, that he must have, at least to get to the toilet, but more likely to roll his rolls downstairs for one or twenty of those ethnically confused, fried rolls. His breathing is in fact labored and I can see why Douglas, who is standing by the window, as if a lookout, was concerned enough to call me.

  Are you having pain?

  He shakes his head no. I just can’t seem to catch my breath.

  He is sweating and I realize that it is overly warm in the room. Would you open the window, please?

  This window.

  Yes. Please.

  The window is opened. The noises of the street come inside. A man yells at another man, Terrence! You’s a bitch, man! But I ain’t yo bitch! The man shouts back. A woman screams, Fuck!

  You need to check in to the hospital so I can examine you properly.

  No hospitals. People die in hospitals.

  People die in beds, too, and yet you’re in one. Okay, you’re asthmatic, I’m pretty sure. I’m going to prescribe an inhaler for you. I’d like to ask that you don’t abuse it. You might try some Claritin as well. Your eyes are red, but I don’t know whether that’s unusual for you. You’re not going to live as long as many people. That’s according to the truth.

  Don’t sugarcoat it, Doc.

  You’re probably allergic to something. More than likely, this room. Or yourself. Do you take drugs?

  You’re prescribing them for me.

  No, are you an illegal drug user? Not that I really care, but it might affect what legitimate drugs I think are safe for you.

  I don’t take drugs for recreation, if that’s what you’re asking.

  It is what I’m asking.

  I do not take drugs. He calls to the woman. Tracy, take that prescription from the doc and go pick it up for me.

  I’ll do it, Douglas says.

  And get some of those chocolate-covered raisins.

  You got it.

  I’m feeling a little better already.

  Helped to open the window.

  I won’t go to a hospital.

  I can’t force you.

  Take a lens, Doc.

  And so I do. I take a 135 mm for the Leica I have sitting on my desk at home. It is chrome and beautiful and I feel a thrill as I lift it. I consider for a second turning it down, but the thought gives me a shiver and I let the feeling, not the lens, go.

  Ch’ing Yuan could not decide if mountains were mountains and waters were waters. At least he could not commit to a position. Zen is like that. Or it is?

  And?

  You and I exchange lines of dialogue. Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we have previously agreed, if tacitly. Thereby appears the nature of meaning. It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages. We understand this all too well and yet, and yet—well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam. It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up. As do we all.

  All this to say?

  A painting may have a back, but no inside.

  Where did you find so many stories, Lodovico? I don’t understand.

  Of course you don’t, son. That’s what he said to me. Of course you don’t, son. That was all Ariosto got from the good cardinal. Where did you find so many stories, Lodovico?

  Freud believed we never give up anything but only excha
nge one thing for another.

  What made you think of that?

  I’m not sure. I was sitting here, looking at her belly all big like that, and thinking one day one of us will be talking to our son and the other of us will be gone.

  You mean dead.

  I mean dead.

  That’s true.

  And even then, unless I want to live in a fantasy, and I’m not saying I don’t, I’ll have to give you up. Or you’ll have to give me up. But I can’t imagine exchanging you for anything.

  A younger woman?

  No.

  You realize that Freud was full of shit.

  You don’t have penis envy?

  Not in the least. And why do you think this baby is a boy?

  Let’s just say it is a boy. Do we have to name him?

  What do you mean, do we have to name him?

  Do we have to give him a name? Is there some law requiring that we give him a name? Is there a law that any of us have to have names? What will happen? Will the government come and give him a name?

  Why would you do that to a child?

  Do what? Save him the ridicule that names cause? If you name him Buck, kids will call him Fuck. If you name him Richard, they’ll call him Dickyard. If you name him Louis, they’ll call him Lois. You can’t mess up ———. I want to think that a name is like a poem. It is not like a practical message that can be considered functional only if we can infer its intended meaning. A name says something, but no one need know whether what is inferred is what was meant. Gone are the days of Cartwrights and Masons and Smiths.

  You’ve lost your mind.

  And with it, my name.

  And I’m supposed to believe you had this conversation with Mom.

  Believe what you like. Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me. You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers. Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.

  She was claiming to be my daughter and I could not refute her by simply saying I was not her father. Perhaps if she had been Chinese, but she was, in fact, racially ambiguous, as so many of us are. For all I know she was Chinese. I know only that I am not Chinese.

  The morning came with a silent treatment that I did not believe was deserved. More than that, I did not believe a word of the silent treatment. Sylvia stood in the kitchen preparing breakfast, not an odd thing for anyone else, but the woman had never prepared a breakfast in our thirteen years together. Bacon was releasing its grease into several layers of paper towel and eggs were scrambling in the skillet.

  I’ve done nothing wrong, I said.

  Of course you haven’t.

  Well, what if she is my daughter?

  The more the merrier.

  No, really, what if she is my daughter?

  Then you will be Papa and I will be Sylvia and she will be your child and my stepchild and when she has babies you will be a grandpa and I will be Sylvia. I began to understand some of Sylvia’s anxiety. I don’t mean to be silent. I simply do not know what to say. Do you want her to be your daughter?

  She’s not my daughter.

  That was not my question.

  No, I don’t want her to be my daughter.

  And if she is, how will you feel about having said that?

  Are you trying to drive me mad? I’ll feel like shit for having thought it, that’s how I feel. But it is how I feel. A person feels what a person feels.

  She favors you slightly.

  You go from not talking to this?

  I’m not attacking you.

  I know.

  If Meg Caro was my daughter, what was I supposed to do? It was a little late for diaper changing and parent-teacher conferences. I tried to think what I would want if I were her and all I could come up with was knowledge. I guessed that she would want to know me, as a person, as an artist perhaps. She’d said she was a painter, told me the first day she’d come around, and I hadn’t received her too kindly. Still, she came back. She did not return to modify our initial meeting, to recast it or even to say something she forgot to say. She returned to punctuate her original request that I allow her to be my apprentice. Only now did I understand the apprentice business. But all interpretation relies in some part, if not all, on charity, I realized, appreciating (a generous term) that I had to dispraise or at least blink at some differences in our use of the term. Her notion of apprentice was layered in ways I could not have anticipated and, given the discongruity of our experiences, the inequality of our stati or statae or, splitting the gender difference, stata, it became clear that, though we were participating in the social activity of language, we were not speaking the same one. All this to say that we never know what the fuck anyone is saying to us, that the only legitimate and correct response to anyone uttering any sentence, even Your pants are on fire, is: Excuse me?

  Murphy? I’ll be Murphy again.

  Lang?

  How does one go about getting a DNA test to prove or disprove paternity?

  I take it you’d like to disprove paternity, else you would not have said prove or disprove. Well, you don’t need me for this, you just get a kit from a lab and send in your samples.

  Samples of what?

  They’ll give you a kit.

  You don’t sound particularly intrigued by my question. Don’t you want to know why I need such a service? We’ve been friends for a long time.

  Long enough for you to know that I never care about other people’s business. I assume your pecker has come back to haunt you, or bite you, or whatever metaphor you find the most accurate.

  I might have a daughter.

  I guessed son. I had a fifty percent chance and blew it.

  It could be that I’m pulling your leg and simply need this bit of information for something I’m writing.

  You’re not that funny. And you’re not a writer. And I don’t care why you want to know the ins and outs of this, in spite of the fact that ins and outs must have been involved at some point to create this situation.

  Situation is right.

  Before you go, let me tell you this joke.

  I’m not in the mood.

  Won’t take a second. The president is on a tour of this new hospital. There are Secret Service guys all around, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, the doctor leading the tour takes the president through this ward and there’s the House minority leader sitting in the corridor and he’s jacking off. The president shakes his head and says, Christ, what’s that all about? And the doctor says, That poor man has advanced semen over-production syndrome, ASOPS. His seminal vesicles and his testes are hyperactive and so he must ejaculate every ten minutes or he’ll suffer severe damage to his reproductive system. The president says, My God. And so they go up to the next floor, right, and there is the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and there’s this orderly and he’s sucking the chair’s penis. And the president says, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch in a cornfield, what’s the problem here? The doctor says, Oh, this is the same condition, ASOPS, but he’s got a better health-care plan.

  Can I hang up now?

  Not yet. I want to tell you one more thing, something Hippocrates said.

  And what’s that?

  He said, he said, he said that you can discover no measure, no weight, no form of calculation, to which you can refer your judgments in order to give them absolute certainty. In our art there exists no certainty except in our sensations. What do you think of that?

 
Now may I hang up?

  You bet.

  They have big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. This was the line that Nat remembered from somewhere as he considered his station as narrator. He didn’t want to be any kind of mediator, yet he understood that he had to murder the authorial presence and to do that he’d have to find the author and kill him, for it was all too clear to him that in spite of his station, there was yet another layer sitting on the world, like a blanket of volcanic ash, smothering meaning and, while changing meaning, covering meaning while making it. He would have to rise up with all others like him and slit the sleeping throat of the master. That this master would put an eye in his mouth was too much.

  On the external wall of a liquor store in Southeast District of Columbia was some graffiti: God was here, but he had to leave. And below that was scrawled: I was here! Wishing you all the best, God.

  What was the thing in your career that irked you the most?

  Funny you should have me have you ask me that question.

  Strange.

  Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don’t even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.

  What did you say to him?

  After I told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on, I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then I punched him. That’s why I had to leave my job at Iowa. That’s why we moved to Providence. Well, you and I did. Your mother went to Canada and married the flyboy. And the thing about your mother was that once gone, she could not look back, if I may segue in so non sequitur a manner, not that she would have become a pillar of salt or anything so horrible or fanciful or wonderful, but because in looking back she would be admitting that she was gone, that she had left something behind, and with that glance, with that admission, she would be doomed to recognize her memories as constructions of a left world, necessarily fictions, necessary fictions, because in looking back, she would see a reality to which her memories might be compared and contrasted and she would know that her memories were not that world and so all would be fucked, the world behind and the world awaiting. So, you see, it never pays to look back, maybe not even to the side. It’s almost like going through that whole mirror stage thing all over again, except this time you have to actually acknowledge the initial lack that must be present for the glance backward to be possible at all, and even if you don’t look back, the wall between subject and object, you and it, is already obliterated, but if you do, if you actually do look back, then god help you—and, I suppose, and as well anyone you look back at, if you will allow this clause to save this sentence from ending with a preposition. I might have blamed your sweet saint of a cheating mother for a very short time for leaving, but I never blamed her for not looking back.