Glyph

by Percival Everett

  BARTHES:

  Evil is a privation of sorts, a lack of goodness, just as emptiness is a lack of that which would make a void full or complete. (Miller) But when a man and a woman decide that language is simply skin and they rub it against one another, then the privation becomes something else again. Imagine that words had fingers and we talked and achieved a kind of double contact. (Plato) Wouldn’t that negate privation? Wouldn’t it have to? Unless, of course, one believes in evil love.

  I looked up because of what I had heard, but my parents were so perplexed as to be dumbfounded. They stared at their plates and pushed pork butt and string beans around. But Barthes was looking at my mother with his French accent.

  BARTHES:

  Townsend, about your article.

  INFLATO:

  Yes?

  BARTHES:

  I haven’t read it.

  vita nova

  The Sternum

  Level,

  centerpiece of the table

  of my chest,

  find the median line,

  locate my heart.

  Oblique in inclination

  from above and downward,

  forward,

  it is my shield.

  Convex on anterior

  surface from side

  to side, concave

  from above

  and downward.

  Manubrium,

  gladiolus,

  ensiform,

  come together,

  absorb the world

  through compact tissue.

  degrees

  I have endeavored, rather rudely perhaps, to trace the genealogy of the sickness that infected my father, and so my parents, and so my family, and so me. To view the sickness as it existed, I think, does not entail naming it, for to name it would be to miss the point and, more importantly, to limit appreciation of its effects by limiting our perceived possibilities. So, I will speak of a thing unnamed and address it as the multitude of things that it must be, keeping in mind that as I write, the thing has already undressed and changed its antigenic costume, leaving me stuck with language, with sense only in a context that no longer exists.

  My father’s father was a bowler. I know of the game only what I read in one article in a postmodern journal that claimed the game was an elaborate metaphor for the male-female and male-male (but not the female-female) relationship, the pins having something to do with epidermal boundaries and balls. Grandpa was a bowler, this I know because every photograph that I ever saw of him—he died during a tornado in Indiana in the late sixties—depicted him in a shirt, ugly even in black and white, which had short sleeves a darker color than the rest of it, and he was wearing similarly colored shoes with the number 9 tattooed boldly on their sides. Even in the photographs, I could see the disdain for the man on my father’s face. In one picture, the back of the photo said, “Elkhart, 1955,” my father’s father was pretending to use his son’s head as a bowling ball on his approach to the lane. The man was smiling largely. The boy looked tortured and in his eyes was not fear, but hatred. I believe the man, his name was Elton, worked in a musical-instrument factory, but had no aptitude for music himself. From things my father told my mother, he had no aptitude, no interest, and no idea that music existed outside the selections on the jukebox at the neighborhood lanes. My father pretended to love music, listening to the right kinds of music and memorizing the important works, but his interest was superficial, in spite of the breadth of his knowledge. He would listen to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and no tears would come to his eyes. He would simply walk over and flip the vinyl disc. He would put on Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, but would not become agitated or angry. Music never made him cry and it only made him smile when he purchased a difficult-to-find recording. He collected many jazz recordings and knew all the dates and all the personnel on each disc, but he felt nothing; I could see as he listened, stretched out on the sofa with his pipe or sitting in the recliner with a glass of cognac. In most things, no doubt sex among them, he confused enthusiasm with passion. He was a sort of involuntary ascetic. Like the Orfic, life in this world for Inflato was finally pain and weariness. He was passionate insofar as he was at war with himself. On the other hand, his intellect was more form than substance, a flash of style more than a deep well (no wonder the attraction to certain so-called schools of thought). Inflato imagined that he possessed a kind of control over his passions; as true as my having control over satyrs and muses. My father was not ugly, but neither was he handsome, and finally, a lack of handsomeness is a kind of ugliness, but this did not bother him, to hear him tell it, because Socrates was ugly. He would stand in front of the mirror and say to my mother, who was still drying after her shower, “In the Symposium, it is said that Socrates had a stumpy nose and a protruding belly.” He would say no more, but leave my mother and, unknowingly, me, to infer his meaning.

  mundus intelligibilis

  WITTGENSTEIN: Friedrich, let me ask you a question. Do you think that my having consciousness is a fact of experience?

  NIETZSCHE: Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has had them is not terrible. Who has not, for the sake of his good reputation, sacrificed himself once?

  WITTGENSTEIN: If I know it solely from my own case, then of course I know only what I call that, not what anyone else does. Make the following experiment: say, “I have a good reputation” and mean, “I have a bad one.” Can you do that? And what are you doing as you do it?

  NIETZSCHE: What is the matter with you?

  WITTGENSTEIN: Can you do it?

  NIETZSCHE: Why should I want to?

  WITTGENSTEIN: Then consider the following form of expression: “The number of hairs in my ears is equal to a root of the equation x3 + 2x - 3=0.” Or: “I have n friends and n2 + 2n + 2=0.”

  NIETZSCHE: You are truly mad. You know, the thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: It helps one through many a dreadful night.

  anfractuous

  Inflato was giggling. He was holding me in his arms as he stood in the first room of the graduate student Laura’s apartment. He talked a lot about how he really shouldn’t be there and how it was awkward, “what with the baby and all.” Then she touched his hand. He gave me a glance as if to put to me the question: Do you know what the hell is going on? I put back to him silently: No, do you?

  Then he let Laura hold me. She was soft enough and I understood on some level the attraction he felt, but still I was upset by the gesture. Had I liked my father more, perhaps I could have been a bit more tolerant or even forgiving, accepting his transgression, if you will, as a human search for something. But knowing him as I did, as the man who still assigned me to periods in my playpen prison because of his belief in my retardation, as a man driven mainly by insecurity and adherence to form, I could not. What was going on was all too obvious and I felt some sadness for the naive Laura. I didn’t know, however, if they had indeed already done that thing about which I had read, which caused adults so much consternation, which my parents did, and which made me, the putting of the penis into the vagina. I looked for clues, but saw none.

  “I’ve applied for a job in Texas,” my father said. “I haven’t told Eve, however.”

  “Don’t you think you should?” Laura asked, holding his hand now.

  “She’s happy here. It would be so hard for her to pick up everything and start over. You know, her painting and everything.”

  “It must be so difficult for you.”

  “I’m so tired of this department. Just a bunch of stodgy old farts.”

  Laura stroked his knuckles.

  To their credit they did not go beyond knuckle fondling in front of me, but I have no doubt that later, when Inflato claimed to be in the library, he was in fact putting his penis into Laura’s vagina. Had I any money, I would have bet on it.

  ootheca

  Out of me came a story that I presented to my mother. There had already been several poems and a few notes, and so she did not f
aint. She liked it and told me so, and then she read it to me. In spite of the fact that speech was so hard on my ears, I did not mind hearing it as much as I expected.

  The story came after my reading of Twain’s Roughing It and all of Zane Grey. Not a bad story, not a deep story, but a story nonetheless, decidedly more self-conscious than Twain or Grey17 and finally not as funny as Twain and not nearly as exciting as Grey. But the story was instructive.

  Mo saw the story’s instructive possibility in a different way. She handed the pages to my father in my presence. He read, gave a ridiculing laugh, and said, “I don’t know why you insist on keeping this joke going, but at least write a decent story.”

  Mo looked at me and I could feel a reaction showing in my baby face.

  “Even a mildly retarded child should be able to write better than this,” he said. He threw his head back, laughing. He was attempting to insult my mother, which was bad enough, but to say that about my story was too much. Then he said, “Mixolydian is even misspelled.”

  Ignorant bastard! Mo was prepared and waiting just for this. She had left a marker and notebook in the pen with me and before I knew what was happening I had taken up both. It wasn’t until I was near done writing that I looked up to see the completely stunned and befuddled face of Inflato floating over me. What I wrote:

  1) Mixolydian is not misspelled.

  2) Though the writing is young and, perhaps, overly exuberant, the story is solid and thoroughly and absolutely readable.

  3) Da-da is full of shit.18

  Inflato looked at my eyes and then to Mo, swayed for a second, then fainted. His head made a thump when it hit the carpet.

  tubes 1…6

  During the Second World War submarines terrorized the north Atlantic. Unsuspecting ships would be suddenly struck by steam-driven torpedoes, then sink to the bottom of the ocean, never seeing their attackers. But the submarines could stay submerged for only so long and then their batteries would fail and they would have to surface to recharge while running their diesel engines. My father was the unsuspecting tanker and I was the stealthy U-boat. My mother had somehow gotten him onto the sofa and was gently bringing him around. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid (what could he do to me?), but I wanted to dive, to make a couple of zigzags on my way to just beneath the layer, reduce my speed to a crawl, and creep away slowly. Who knows what was leaking out of the hole my torpedo had made in him? As he came to and focused on me, he tried to climb over the back of the sofa to get away. Mo told him to calm down.

  “Calm down? The boy’s a freak.”

  “Ralph is no freak. He’s our son. And he’s special. Ralph is a genius.”

  “He’s the devil.”

  “I’ve been giving him books and he reads them. He devours them. He doesn’t seem to sleep. He reads two, sometimes three books overnight.” Mo was smiling at me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “I tried, but you wouldn’t listen. I showed you his poem.”

  “This is just so unbelievable.” Inflato grabbed his head and squeezed it between his palms. “Ralph is a genius,” he said, staring at me. “He’s not retarded.”

  “No, he’s not,” my mother laughed.

  “So, what do we do?”

  Mo shrugged.

  “He understands everything I say?” Inflato asked.

  “He certainly does. In fact, he’s remarkably sophisticated. He has read Fitzgerald and Proust and Wright, and not only understands but comments on the novels in his notes.”

  I could see, as I stared into my father’s eyes, that he was recalling my presence at his visit to Laura’s apartment. He smiled weakly at me and said, “Ralph. Ralphy. Son. My child.” He came around the sofa and knelt in front of me. “Daddy loves you. Do you understand? I’m so excited to find out about your…” he searched for the word, “…talent. Daddy and Mommy love you very much. Do you understand?”

  “He understands, Douglas,” my mother said. “He understands more than we do. I don’t know what to do with him.”

  Inflato stood and assumed the posture of taking over. “First we have to have a doctor take a look at him.”

  “He’s not sick,” Mo said.

  “A psychologist, Eve. Maybe a psychologist can tell us what’s going on with him, how smart he is, and what we should do.”

  I put my hands out, asking for my notebook. Mo handed it to my father and he handed it, cautiously, to me. I wrote:

  Ralph knows a secret

  I could see a single, glistening bead of perspiration break out of his ample forehead. And behind the bead I could see the wheels turning, slowly at first and then even more slowly. I obliterated my message with my marker and watched him exhale a sigh of relief, but our understanding had been established.

  donne lieu

  Everyone speaks of Thucydides, but Xenophon is dismissed as less than brilliant. But it is exactly his lack of brilliance that should have us remember him. His plainness is beautiful. His limitations are precise and astonishing. The Oeconomicus, a sort of codicil to the Memorabilia, is a remarkable work of mediocrity, but we still read it some 2,300 years later. What better subject for a student of Socrates to direct his scrutiny than the training of a housewife? Time has been kind and generous in its treatment of Xenophon’s substantial oeuvre. But generosity and stamina make the work no more than average and so, average work holding little or no value and interest for me, I consider the man and what stands out is his dullness. At dullness he excels. The perfect dim star. The candle beside which others are called bright. There is no substitute for the Xenophons of the world, the plodding constants, the droning, fixed designations that allow comparison and measurement. My father was such a rule and perhaps the world will remember him as a philosopher and critic, but his dullness was so profound as to be blinding. Even in dullness there must be some moderation; call it the exercise of taste. But his dullness was in excess, honed to razor bluntness, a burning monotony, a dazzling torpidity. However, and even then at thirteen months I was tortured by the thought, I was his son and I had to wonder what kind of awful genetic inevitabilities awaited me later in life. This finally is the central terror. That cytosine, thymine, adenine, and guanine and their tautomers can combine variously with bad and predictable results is sobering at least. Conscious thinking, however, I decided, might well serve to undo some of nature’s doings, my having discovered the possible inevitabilities at an early enough age to employ a kind of adaptive economy. So, I had a headstart in warding off the genetic pitfalls of my ancestry, but I was physically exactly where I should have been, my brain and nervous system incapable of modulating the actions of my unformed muscles. Yes, somehow my fingers, hands, and wrists were advanced enough for the complex operation of writing, but I was pretty much helpless in all other matters physical and material and so, I was at the mercy of my parents to take care of the business of life-function maintenance. This was the second terror.

  Mo loved me. Of that fact I was certain and so I could trust her to see to my needs. And Inflato was afraid of me.

  umstände

  The basic steps of the ontological argument for the existence of god are easily described:

  a) assume: a being such that none greater can be conceived does not exist.

  b) a being such that none greater can be conceived is not a being such that none greater can be conceived.19

  c) therefore: a being such that none greater can be conceived exists.

  That’s it. I will not quarrel with the argument, offer objections to its form, premises, implicit assumptions, or its mission. I will only ask that you entertain further:

  a) assume: Ralph does not exist.

  b) Ralph is not Ralph.

  c) therefore: Ralph exists.

  This was what I wrote on a nice stiff sheet of pink paper while seated on a turquoise blanket on the floor of the psychologist’s office at the University Hospital. She had been pleasant and indulgent of my parents up until the time I used my fat
her’s fountain pen to begin my message to her. Then she became nervous and animated and suggested numerous times that it was all a trick and that obviously I had superior, abnormally superior, motor skills, but insisted that I couldn’t possibly know what I was doing. And so I added in a crude, childlike scribble:

  what does shrinkie want ralph to do?

  The doctor, a very tall woman named Steimmel, looked at me and screamed something unintelligible, then looked at my parents and screamed again. She excused herself and returned just less than a minute later.

  “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Townsend, shall we sit down and talk?” Steimmel asked. “I’ll have one of the nurses watch Ralph.”

  My father glanced at me and I gave a quick shake of my head to show my disapproval. Inflato said, “I’d like Ralph to stay with us.”

  “Mr. Townsend, I think it’s better if—”

  “No, I want him here,” Inflato said.

  My mother questioned him by saying his name.

  “Ralph wants it,” he whispered loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Ralph wants it?” Steimmel repeated his words.

  Mo looked at me and asked me, “Do you want to remain in here with us?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t really believe he understands what’s going on?” asked Steimmel. The woman was staring at me like I was on fire and so I rolled my eyes as I had seen my mother do when talking with my father. Steimmel looked away, then sat down on the sofa across the room.

  The conversation that ensued was full of furtive and not-so-furtive glances over toward the baby in question. It began with the Amazon Steimmel saying, “Your son is, shall we say, special.”

  “We know that,” Mo said.

  “Well, Ralph is a little more than what we usually mean when we say special. I’d like to run some tests, both physical and intelligence. Do you have any problem with that?”