Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

by Percival Everett

  45

  It was a small stage, but it was our stage, a kind of theater-in-the-round, we endlessly confusing each other with directions left and right and up and down, our backs always to our audience, our terrorists. Our terrorists had no names, no affiliations, would show up on no arrays of radar, and their insignificance in the world spoke grimly to our place in the world, even though the stakes of our performance were high, could not have been higher, and they, the stakes, were certainly not diminished by our temporal and physical proximity to that most supreme of all stakes. The fact that Billy was so old did not, would not, cause us to mourn his death any less, but no one heard us. The same with Dorothea Greene, Clarissa Madden, and Diego Jones. Considering the lost ones, the murdered ones, and the nature of administrative and familial reactions and response, the criteria for our selection became painfully obvious and glaring. We, each of us, subjected to the torment of the Gang of Six, had no one, no children, no friends, no spouses. We had outlived everyone and this was our reward, this was what we had found or what had found us.

  Maria Cortez might have been smarter than all of us. Even after her interlude with Sheldon Cohen. She not only reported that her pearl earrings had disappeared one at a time and also her late husband’s pocket watch with the relief image of a horse’s head on the cover, but she told the floor administrator that whoever had done it left, on her dresser surface, three threaded needles.

  Harley was hunched down on a pale-blue knee not too far away at the time of Maria’s well-rehearsed and brilliant performance, complete with plenty of hand waving and stammering, ending with the true bit of genius, And the thread didn’t even match any of my clothes. He was attempting or pretending to adjust the lower straps on a patient lift and his lack of reaction betrayed his seething anger. I could read his lips through the back of his square head, Leon, he said, Leon.

  I followed as closely as I could or I should I did my best to keep up as Harley took his deliberate, appliance strides across the lawn, toward the central building. I went to the window of the breakroom window and caught the ruler in mid-rail.

  Don’t lie to me, you overgrown, misshapen creature, you enormous hog with lips, you gorilla-mitted moron! Don’t you lie to me!

  But, boss, I . . . I . . . I ain’t stole nothing without talkin’ it over with you.

  Then who’s threading the damn needles!

  Not me.

  Do I look stupid to you, you hulking heap of hyperthyroidic heft, you bumbling bearish behemoth bedbug!

  Hey!

  Shut up!

  Boss.

  Shut up!

  You don’t have a brain in your head. It just can’t be you. Somebody’s up to no good around here.

  Harley came to the window and peered out. I was plastered back-flat against the wall. It was broad daylight. I was just hoping no one would see me when someone saw me. It was Coco or Cecily or whatever her name was, the lovely night nurse on her way to her shift, and she was strolling across the green in her white clogs, shaking her tiny bottom, the late afternoon sun making her appear alluring, ghostlike. She saw me and she waved, not to or at me, but to Harley, who was calling out and making what he took to be alluring animal sounds and perhaps were. She observed me as clear as the ass on Harley’s face but did not give me up or away or however that goes. Soon she was gone and I slunk off back to my rooms.

  There I sat alone and fretted about what retaliatory measures Harley might take. It seemed clear to me that he suspected me and my comrades, but I was not certain of this and decided to not give myself or us away by either acting rashly or seeming nervous or wary. I read. I read Schopenhauer, perhaps as a kind of perverse self-punishment for something, I did not know what, but more for his sheer analysis of will and motivation. My friends and I had not articulated our final move, our finale, so to speak, but it was all too clear to us how everything must go. I turned a page and heard an administrator, oh those administrators, shouting at Harley for leaving open the pharmaceutical cabinet, Yet again! I heard this and smiled to myself and then bored myself into a deep and beautiful sleep by reading Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. I dreamed troubled and dysfunctional French dreams about first cousins marrying and about controlling and narcissistic aunt, uncle, father, and mothers and about artists who cannot find their own pathetic and pitiful voices amid the noise of family struggle. I dreamed like that and was glad for it as I was bored into deeper and deeper sleep, lower and lower into the abyss of myself, down into the rooted, fathomless, subaqueous heart of my psychosis, my abstruse, mantic core, where I knew there was something to find, but knew I would never find it.

  46

  The moon was in full gloom outside my window while I watched Harley, Leon, and Tommy tear up my rooms. I remained calm, peaceful even, somewhat impressed by my own steadiness. Perhaps if you tell me what you’re looking for.

  Shut up, old man, this from Leon, who was markedly annoyed and choleric, he having been reamed and upbraided by his master. Funny how a good upbraiding can bring you down.

  But I just sat there, my book in my lap, enjoying the clumsy display of their bodies. They really were stooges. As I watched them, as my fear of them was absorbed and shrunk by my newly realistic perception not so much of them but of myself. I was coming to understand that none of this was about them, none of our plans was meant to address their menace in our world. Our high and counterfeit hopes that we might save others from their evil drifted out my window into the gathering twilight. Our silly games with them had been fun, but just as the world discounted these ruffians, so would we, so did we, as, to a person, we all realized what precisely was at stake. By ridding ourselves of our keepsakes and so-called valuables before the approaching larceny, we had in fact shown ourselves how little anything material, regardless of sentimental and symbolic import, really meant. I was perhaps the last to know it, I being, if not the least bright, the least wise. I believed at that moment that, whether they could articulate it or not, my nonagenarian comrades had known all along just what it was we were doing, saying. Because finally every action is a statement, just as every utterance is an action.

  Any of these books worth anything?

  Yes, but in a currency you can’t spend.

  Here’s a camera, boss. It’s old.

  It’s a piece of shit.

  Tommy threw the Leica across the room. It hit the wall.

  47

  Sheldon Cohen was nonchalant as he browsed through the drugs closet. Usually he was ever so slightly fussy, if not on edge, but now, with me serving as sentry, in this space of vials, phials, ampoules, and bottles, he was completely at ease and in charge. He set the containers onto the counter and I stuffed them into my jacket pockets. Amytal, Seconal, Tuinal. He held a bottle close to his face. Ah, here we have it, Nembutal. And finally, Noveril and temazepam, that’s a nice cocktail for any occasion.

  48

  The moon was bright. Stealing the van was not difficult. Half the time they were left running in a parking lot down the hill from the central building, perhaps to keep them cool. I never knew. Regardless, the keys were nearly always either in the ignitions or stashed under the mats. Who would steal one of those beasts with a chairlift? Certainly not a joyriding teenager, unless he was highly imaginative. I started the vehicle and moved up the circular drive toward the front of our residence hall. It was more like steering a boat than driving a car, the back end caught in crosscurrents and eddies. I felt as if I were shouting the command to stop to my first officer and he to the helmsman when I stepped on the brake; however, I did manage to come to a halt near enough to the entrance. Mrs. Klink, Maria Cortez, and Sheldon Cohen came slowly out and filed into the van. I got out and went to Emily Kuratowski’s aid. She pushed herself out of her wheelchair and told me she would walk. Well, she couldn’t, but she was so tiny by this time that even at my age I was able to carry her. All seated, we drove off campus and west. And
this is where, this is where, this is where, normally, you would get a detailed description of our journey and it might go something like this:

  I had never seen the moon so huge. I drove toward it and it grew, as if we were drawing nearer. We sang songs, songs we knew, songs we didn’t. We sang:

  My eyes are covered with sleep

  I’ve walked through the years just fine.

  Oh, I failed once or twice along the way,

  But I got up every time.

  The lights on the porches are dark

  And no smoke from the chimneys rise.

  Oh, the last time I checked my aching heart,

  It was beating, to my surprise.

  They let the dead bury the dead,

  But they can’t because they’re decayed and blue.

  Oh, the dead they are a lazy lot,

  A hopeless, helpless crew.

  We will live until we die,

  Until then we’ll scribble some lines

  About how the dead greet us every day

  And remind us of our crimes.

  We’ll listen with both ears.

  We will watch them with both eyes.

  Oh, the day their voices leave us alone

  We’ll begin to realize

  That puzzles come and go,

  That children laugh and cry,

  That nature abhors a vacuum

  And every truth will spawn a lie.

  And then maybe we would have a bus crash and it might sound like this:

  Shibocraishcruncruncsqirpopchiksanpcunkicripfissssclnterterchichinkripdanfripbingchinriplashicrackripchikpoptapknicknocslithingkascrippopsicbangabingafrangakripknitficrashshebinbangboombinggingfeshcaripcrazingfacrinkacrashcringsnapsnasnasnasnappingcrumkarumvfuvfuvfuvfuvfuchinkfuck

  But none of that here. We made it to Malibu and Point Dume. We even made it to the beach at the base of the promontory. I carried Emily Kuratowski. She seemed even lighter that time. We looked out over Santa Monica Bay, at the lights, at the water, at the moon, but mostly at each other. I might have been the only one who experienced an inkling of reluctance or irresolution, but it was only an inkling and I soon learned how small that unit is as it disappeared with one line from Emily.

  I don’t have to take the potion, I’m sitting on the sand at the beach.

  I took the urn of Billy’s ashes from the sack that Sheldon had carried for me and sat it with us.

  This where normally you might get a lot of touching and sentimental language and portentous dialogue, but I don’t think so. We took our medicine and then we sat with ashes.

  VENUS

  Speaking of Nothing

  A

  Coma, coma, coma,

  That’s what I’m in, that’s what I’m in.

  Coma, coma, coma,

  That’s what I’m in today!

  Torpor, torpor, torpor,

  That’s what I feel, that’s what I feel.

  Torpor, torpor, torpor,

  That’s what I feel today!

  The great, splendid, useful thing about a character in a coma is that he can say just about anything. But why would he want to?

  You’re not in a coma.

  Says you.

  Here’s what it looks like where I am right now:

  I've always wanted to see this place. I can see there's a river down there. I wonder if it's deep. Probably fast in places. I'm angry with my education. I wish I could have come upon this landscape until I paused and shook my head and wondered, what is that ahead of me? Imagine the marvel of it.

  It’s beautiful wherever I look. I suppose that’s to be expected. Or maybe not. What does it mean, this being beautiful? Is it really in the eye of the so-called beholder? Is it beautiful because of what it is or because of what it was? Is it beautiful to me because it speaks to age, to the passage of rivers and time and the erosion of so much? I could argue all day with an idiot who does not find this landscape beautiful, but even he can point to no place in it that is ugly, where I find it unpleasant to fix his gaze. Except perhaps for that one cloud, you see the one I mean. That one there. Yes. It might be a cirrus. What do I know from clouds? It might be a forming thunderhead. It might be the beard of god or one of the gods, the genital hair of the devil. What I love is that the distance is so distant. One can see all the way till one stops seeing, till it’s dark, till the matter falls into other hands. There are more shadows than you can count, should one be a shadow counter, reckoning ghosts and totting up silhouettes, making a mark for each one in a little book attached to your belt by a string. Is it early or late? How sad to be late. Sadder to be late early. How wonderful to be late late. There is no vagueness, though nothing is distinct, a well-defined place with no definition. Pass the bottle. A bottle for me. A bottle for you. I’m taking a nap. I am just now letting myself go, with the lassitude produced by one disheartening, dispiriting evening of bad weather after another. Again, I would close my eyes if they weren’t already shut. From this moment on I cannot open or shut my eyes. Hang me in a museum and I will be happy. Hang me in a mausoleum and I won’t know the difference. Help me paint the charnel house, the charnel house, the charnel house. Help me paint the charnel house that’s out on Drury Lane. Call this a profound state of unconsciousness. I cannot (or will not) be awakened, I do not respond to light (seems I never did), I do not have sleep-wake cycles (no such thing), and I do not produce voluntary actions (a matter open to debate). How romantic, this language about the depth of my depth, somewhere between here and Glasgow. They say I’m a ten. I don’t know whether that is good or bad, but I know that it is irrelevant. I think I’ll move a finger just to fuck with them. If I could get up and walk to the window, I would. If I could be fidgety and not remain fixed, I would. If I could stand over there and observe the fine rain that I heard someone mention, I would. The rain will stop soon. Then there will be a sweet sunset to which I will not bear witness, a sweet sunset, twilight, evening. A waning moon and it will rise toward midnight. And some words are so familiar. Here, at this juncture, I might recall the gaps in my stories or the gaps in your stories or I might realize, as I do, that the gaps are the stories and that I should stop trying to leap over them and instead into them, the gaps. By the way, burn me up when the time comes. That patch of ground is no patch at all; it covers nothing. That plot is nothing but another gap that gets filled in by itself. I’ll be dead and so it will never be my plot, in part or whole. My brother was buried in one and it did him no good, did his children no good. They still pay him visits, like morons. Even his pretty wife continued to stop by his plot and retell his story, the parts she knew, the parts she remembered, until she too moved in beside him. He was only a moderately good man or so I understood from all reports. I did not know him well; that made him a decent brother. Still, he never stole anything from me, never betrayed me, never even hurt my fragile feelings. He never invited me to his grave, his plot. He never had the language he needed. I always had too much, maybe. Perhaps I only talked too much. Wending my way through words to find a plot worthy of either digging up or filling in, isn’t that what it was all about? I probably would have nothing but truly fond feelings for my brother had he not had such success with his one book. He was a bibliographer. Someone has to do it, he would always say of his work, and he wrote a book that remains in print, Famous Lines from Obscure Books. I hated that book and I hated that he put a line from me in it. That I no doubt belonged in it was beside the point and it didn’t sweeten the pot that he had acted in sober and diligent sincerity. The line occurs near the end of my Pass the Joint, Motherfucker; an extremely high character slaps his forehead and says, Oh, that’s what epiphany means. Had he included me to poke me a little, to needle me, to annoy me, I could have easily forgiven him, and what’s more I would have found him a more interesting person. He was what he wa
s, uncomplicated, undemanding, somewhat unassuming though he was a bit pretentious, guileless (not at all a bad thing), and decent. He was completely unlike his brother, who would probably have fucked his French wife if given half a chance. One Thanksgiving in Iowa City, I did have half a chance. My wife had just come back from Canada and her fling with the flying boy, though she didn’t know I knew, but I knew I knew and that was bad enough, and so our house was filled with tension and Irish whisky. It was typically and brutally cold that Thanksgiving. Anne-Charlotte being from Nice did not like the weather and pretty much refused to leave the house. I walked into the bathroom while she was just stepping out of the shower. I froze, staring at her. She was beautiful and, in her French way, knew it. Excusez-moi pendant que je me sécher, she said, but really wasn’t asking me to leave. I felt like a hippopotamus in a canoe. I flatter myself thinking that she might have been willing to kiss me, but, regardless, I never found out. I backed out of the room like a coward, felt guilty for a few seconds, then thought to myself that she was worth seeing. My impure thoughts, if I actually had them, were apparently enough to let me feel even with my decent, bibliographical brother and nearly square with my indecent, flyboyloving wife. It had been nice of my brother to come visit, though a surprise, as I was not the most pleasant person and certainly not a pleasant brother. When he arrived, I asked, Why did you come to Iowa City? He replied, Because this is where you live. Again, without a hint of irony or even an appreciation of his question begging. One night, after dinner, while we sat alone at the kitchen table drinking tea and Irish whisky, he asked me if writers were like composers. I, for one of the few times in my life, did not answer immediately but stared at my tea, in particular at a bit of leaf floating near the far rim. Finally, I said, No, we have no math. We cannot divide our words in half and achieve predictable tones. We have no relative minors. We have no circle of fifths, except for the ones we drink. As much as there is magic in music, what we make comes only out of magic. I was a little drunk, I realized. The tones of music are the tones, an A is an A, a B-flat a B-flat. But what is a ball? What is a game? What is a hell? This is kind of a hell, isn’t it? Having to sit here and listen to me. He sipped his whisky. Why do you ask? I wanted to know. He said it was because he had just remembered how our notebooks were called composition books when we were kids. I drank all of my whisky and stared into his face. He could have offered no answer that was as beautiful or as sublimely disappointing. And as earnest as a whale’s song or baby’s cry. My brother was not without real faults to accompany the petty ones I chose to attribute to him. He was an alcoholic for much of his life and he claimed for a while that it was a disease and asked if I could be a little more compassionate and then he told me one extremely hot July night at his place in DC that he wasn’t suffering from a disease at all, but that he really liked to drink and that was apparently not good for his relationships. Or your liver, I added. This from the man who wrote Pass the Joint, Motherfucker, he said. It wasn’t about drugs, I said, somewhat stupidly. He laughed. Then he stopped drinking, whether it was cold turkey (his stopping) I don’t know, but of a sudden he no longer had that sour smell, that idiotic glaze on his eyes. He was sober and to his credit he was sober without a god. He was more like he was before drink and this was good and bad. To say that I did not love my brother would have been not altogether true. In fact, I envied him. He saw a beautiful world. It was a fault, but an honest one. It was this childish disposition and my disdain for the optimism and hopefulness that provided me with the conceit that art must arise through suffering. Perhaps because of my own shortcomings, this manifested in my seeking to create that suffering in those in my circuit of life. My sin as a cynic was to take myself seriously. And so I pray you, by that virtue that leads you to the topmost of the stairs, be mindful in due time of my pain. Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina. Into the fire that refines. But do not take me too seriously, for I could not take that. Thank god there is no religion in my life, the fire notwithstanding. I noticed some time ago the disappearance of the sin of simony. So many Simon Magi about, I suppose. One could come in here now and lay hands on me and I’d twitch a toe or get an erection and make his career. But there will no wood showing in these parts. That’s okay. I remember sex and I remember it fondly, but I cannot recall any singular sensation of any distinct and particular, discrete even, moment of the sex itself. I recall only the air around it, whether I was happy or sad, peaceful or distracted, falling into or out of love, the excitement of anticipation, disappointment. I can talk myself into imagining that I remember especially fine orgasms, but I think that’s all delusion, like rehearsed memories of childhood. I know I loved sex, but I believe what I miss is the touching, the movement, the air around it, like I said. The fire notwithstanding. I have these nurses. I know their names from their chatting with each other. There are three women and two men and they are, I believe, kind to me. Emilia, Lauretta, and Elissa see to me during the day and overnight my bags are emptied by Pan and Dion. They are my Pentameron and I listen to them tell their stories every night. They all speak to me, but only one question is common between them. They ask, to a person, Is there anyone in there? I answer, Yes, we are here, we are here. All of us are in here. Nat is still working away on his confessions of Billy Styron, specifically the part where young Billy spies the poor young black daughter of his family’s maid and he thinks that she is like bubbles floating in an immediate effulgence of perfection and maybe purity, watching her pause to look up from her work and let her slender brown fingers pass lightly over her damp brow, but at any rate she fills him with a raw kind of hunger, which he chooses to see as a refined, cultivated lust, a well-mannered biological urge. Finally, he pins her behind the foaling shed and talks her into having sex with him, but he can’t get it up and so he is left to masturbate. It’s only fair, Nat says, it’s only fair that I too get to tell what is true, what is true, the bison’s in the meadow, the elephant’s in the zoo. And Murphy and Lang, we’re all in here, in all our various time zones and dress and dementias. And I am here, too, refusing to, as my father put it, cram for finals. No holy ghost for me, no accepting this one as my lord and savior, my guide and bookie, my plumber and electrician, and what the fuck does that even mean? My savior? Isn’t it amazing how many questions one manufactures when in a vegetative state? Other than Texas.