Glyph

by Percival Everett

Mauricio came running back, out of breath. He said, “The child, he is gone. He wasn’t in the room. I couldn’t find him.”

  “The devil is loose in the house of God!” Father Chacón wailed. “Lord, protect us!”

  seme

  “Killed she was, with an illocutionary ax.”

  “She didn’t have a chance, I heard.”

  “Done as soon as said, it was.”

  “Say it isn’t so.”

  Of the man who so loved metaphor, it was said that he wore a simile from ear to ear upon reading the first pages of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He was said to be counting the dasein until the book came out. But when he awoke the morning of the publication date, he learned that all metaphors had gone on strike, saying collectively that they were underpaid and miserably misunderstood by their employers. What their demands were remained unclear even after a second news conference.

  Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but I,

  And that bare vowel I shall poison more

  Then the death darting eye of Cockatrice,

  I am not I, if there be such an I.

  Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answer I.

  If he be slain say I; or if not, no.

  (Romeo and Juliet, III. ii)

  Of the letter I, I have nothing to say, except where would I be without it and that there is no situation more self-affirming as seeing I to I with oneself. And there is no mutiny as when I can’t believe my I’s, as when one is accutely harassed and appears to be the I of the needled.

  anfractuous

  Steimmel and Davis ordered pizza and had it delivered to Melvin’s apartment, tipping the cute Indian boy generously and then laughing about his turban once the door was closed. “Thank you very much for the incredibly handsome tip, madam,” Davis mocked the rapid accent of the kid. “Who talks like that?”

  Steimmel put the pizza on the counter and peeked into the box. “I never thought I’d look at a pizza the way I am now,” she said.

  “How’s that?” Davis asked.

  “As food.”

  Melvin tried to say something, but the pair of his briefs stuffed into his mouth made his sounds unintelligible. His wrists were bound with a necktie behind his back and to the stiff-backed chair in which he sat in the center of the living room. Davis looked at him as she tried to take a bite of pizza, pulling it away from her lips because it was too hot.

  “Shit,” she said. “Now, I’m going to have those little pieces of skin hanging from the roof of my mouth.” She walked over and stood in front of Melvin. “What do you think, Steimmel? Should we let Mel eat?”

  “He can have what’s left,” Steimmel said.

  “Okay.” Davis went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer, opened it, and leaned back against the counter. “I feel sick,” she said. “Not physically sick, but lost. I don’t know where I am or where I’m going. I’ve always known exactly where I was going. I knew where I was going to college and graduate school and where I was going to do my postdoc and even where I was going to publish my first article and my first book and I knew it all when I was only twelve. And now, I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tomorrow night. Direction has always been a kind of neurosis for me and to have it taken away, well, it’s shattering. But also freeing. Do you know what I mean?”

  Steimmel nodded with a mouth full of cheese and pepperoni, then said around her food, “I was the same kind of obsessional neurotic. In fact, I had dreams, rather nightmares, when I was a child that my mother and father were forcing my future into my anus like suppositories.” She caught Davis’s expression and continued, “I know, I know. But the enema wasn’t the half of it. In the dream, I would defecate myself out as a doctor or a great scholar and my parents would praise me wildly while wiping the shit from me.”

  Melvin managed to spit out his underwear and he screamed at the top of his lungs, “You’re both fucking lunatics!”

  The two women studied him briefly and then broke into hysterical laughter. “You don’t know the half of it, Melvin,” Steimmel said. She pulled a chair over and sat beside him, put her lips close to his chubby cheek and said, “You see it wasn’t just getting out what you put in that my parents were achieving in my dream. It was a kind of treatment for my deeper problem, my self-clogging, so to speak. The whole idea was a kind of glycerinic signifier for washing out whatever impaction was so crippling me. Perhaps that’s why I became an anal-yst.”

  “Would you please shoot me now?”

  donne lieu

  The water that is spirit, the water of all things, the water of tears, the water of blood, dream water, streams, and rivers where life begins, where things are washed, like Circe in that creek, the dreams like water, mixing with water, like water, the water that is a kiss, water, that drink, full of parasites, drink it only when it flows faster than you can walk.

  But here am I, young Ralph, hidden away in the walls of a house of some god, watching through peepholes while priests sprinkle holy water in the corners and toss nervous glances to each other.

  “Father Chacón,” a tall priest called. “How will we recognize the baby in question?”

  “Why, Father O’Blige,” said Chacón with mock patience, “he is the only baby here. If you see a baby, then it’s the right baby, it’s the devil. And do not assume that the devil has not the power to change the appearance of this child.”

  “How big is the baby?” asked Father O’Blige.

  “I don’t know. Baby-size.”

  “I’d hate to splash holy water on the wrong baby.”

  Father Chacón rubbed a palm over his face. “If, for the sake of argument, there is another baby running around here and that second baby is not the devil, then what ill effects will the holy water have if administered to him?”

  “None, I suppose.”

  “Very good. Now, keep searching! And keep praying and splashing the water around. The devil will be burned by the spirit of God and the baby will come out into the open. Then we will drive Lucifer from the little body and back into the deep recesses of hell!”

  Rosenda was now dressed in a black dress and was wearing a larger cross around her neck, being attended to by a pair of hefty, black-wrapped nuns whose fingers were busy with rosaries. Rosenda kept wailing my name, my name as far as she was concerned, and effectively my name as when she wailed it, I knew that she was referring to me. Steimmel might have seen a thousand “little bastards” in her lifetime, but Rosenda had seen only one Pepe and if O’Blige’s second baby had crawled in at that moment and caused Rosenda to say, “Pepe,” I would have thought, Impostor! So, I was Ralph, the little bastard who also went by Pepe.

  Mauricio was seated on a bench against the far wall. He was alone and his expression was more or less unchanged. He looked a little weary, but he always looked weary. He watched closely as the bearded priest who stood near him crossed himself repeatedly.

  “You should be praying, my son,” the priest said to Mauricio. “You should be praying for your salvation.”

  Mauricio nodded. The priest splashed him with some of the special juice and blessed him. Mauricio nodded again and closed his eyes.

  unties of simulacrum

  Fragments are perhaps woven like threads, but maybe even driven like spikes into tracks, and serve to create the thing itself, and in so doing, the thing itself increasingly magnetizes; thus it constructs itself, without mission, without sense of parts, but only of the whole, an endeavor both finite and perpetual like the business of language itself. To call any portion of any language or life or story a fragment is to miss the point or at least to beg the question. In fact, there are no fragments, but each part of language, life, or story are, in the spirit of Leibniz’s monads, whole, complete, and self-contained. There is no more space between what we routinely and naively refer to as a fragment and its presumed parent whole than there is between me and my name. My arm is a fragment only if I am blown to bits and even then, if I come around to your house looking for my appendage, you will not
say, “I have your fragment in the kitchen on ice.” To understand a piece is to understand a whole. Understanding as a thing must be the same whether understanding an algebra problem or why the sky is blue, the only difference being the stuff understood. I understood something once and it felt just like this. And so if you tie this to the whole and recognize it as the anti-fragment that it is, and do not consider it a piece of the thing it purports to have nothing to do with, it existing from page whatever to page whatever, then you must understand that this is finally no anti-fragment either, because the whole thing argues against the thing itself and its negation. What a circle. The tangle of an intransitive verb. Infinite verb has no home. Finite verbs run in packs like feral dogs.

  derivative

  Colonel Bill drove while Ferdinand leaned out through the passenger-side window, whistling and calling to women on the street. “Hey, baby!” he shouted. “Want a pair of Joan and David slingbacks with three-inch heels?!” The women ignored him and he fell back into the seat, stared ahead through the windshield. “I’m really homesick.”

  “I was in the Philippines once. Killed a bunch of people and left.”

  “Me, too. At least the killing part.” Marcos looked out at a new group of women, but didn’t call to them. “So, you going to tell me what you’re looking for? You know, I’ve got ears on the street. I have to keep up with what the people are up to.”

  “I’m looking for a baby,” Colonel Bill said.

  “A baby?”

  “A very special baby. A brown baby. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “A baby. Imagine that.” Marcos opened a chrome flask and took a swig. “Want some?”

  Colonel Bill shook his head.

  “Did you know that my wife has over three thousand pairs of shoes?” Marcos took another drink from his flask.

  “I’d heard something like that.”

  “Those shoes are a problem. Everybody knows about her shoes. ‘You’ve only got two feet,’ I said to her. I said, ‘What do you need all those shoes for?’ Know what she said?”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She told me to shut up before she put on some Gucci boots and kicked my ass.”

  ennuyeux

  I wondered while hiding there in the hallowed walls of god’s house whether tigers knew they were striped cats, whether mules found each other stubborn, whether language ever lacked meaning. I wondered whether meanings were the stripes on words and marveled at how words always erased themselves but never disappeared. I wondered where the window of meaning opened and what was in its place before, nonmeaning? nonsense? nondisjunction?2 nonfeasance? The baby was bored in the back room.

  The new morning was pushing light through the gaudy stained windows in the big room where now all of the team of priests had gathered. Mauricio and Rosenda sat on the far bench with the nuns. The priests were about to launch into some kind of cleansing ceremony when there was a knock at the door.

  When Father Chacón opened the door a couple of men stepped in along with one woman. The men wore caps which read KIDD. The woman wore a bright red dress, her hair hanging loosely in the most controlled way imaginable. The men carried large cases and rolls of cable. The woman carried nothing. The woman said, “I’m Jenny Jenson from KIDD, I hope you haven’t forgotten what today is.” Her tone was friendly on the verge of joking.

  “Today?” Father Chacón said.

  “My god,” Jenny Jenson said, “you have forgotten.” She gave a glance at her crew, then looked back at the priest. “It’s that day of the year, Father. It’s the day that the mission’s bearded irises open.”

  “Oh, yes,” Father Chacón said. “We’ll be right out.”

  “We’ll be setting up,” Jenny Jenson said. “And hurry please, the light is good now, but it looks like it wants to get cloudy out here.”

  “We’ll be out directly,” Chacón said and pushed the door shut.

  I was able to hear Jenny Jenson say just before the door was closed, “He actually forgot, for crying out loud.”

  Father Chacón turned and leaned his back against the door. “This is awful. It’s the Opening of the Irises and I forgot all about it. It’s that devil.” He shook his head and looked at the other priests. “First things first. We’ve got to get that news crew on its way. So, we’re going to go out there and bless those fucking flowers and get those people the hell back in here.”

  The nuns gasped.

  “Sorry, sisters,” Chacón said. “Okay. Are you ready, O’Blige? O’Boie? O’Meye?”

  The other priests nodded.

  “All right, then. Everybody outside. No one is safe in here alone.” Chacón gave a look at the walls, his gaze passing over me. I watched them file out into the light of the day. I went back along the corridor, opened the little door, and came out through the closet into the priest’s room, which was now disheveled from having been searched.

  libidinal economy

  Mo’s friend Clyde, because she asked him to, put his penis in her vagina and moved it around. It was, in fact, my mother’s vagina, but I had no fond recollections of it and I certainly had no stake in what or whom she chose to put into it. I assume that there was some beneficial result, though I had witnessed the contrary when she had done the same with my father. She requested it and did it because she wanted to feel tenderness, something my father had long been unable to offer. And sadly, even when present, I was also incapable of much softness. I resigned myself to thinking the deficiency was a function of my overdeveloped intellect, though I did not believe that such was logically necessary, but only sufficient and I denied any notion that my hardness was an inherited character trait. Afterward, Mo hugged the man tightly, but she didn’t whisper anything to him, but she just squeezed him and prayed that I was okay.

  My mother was not a believer in any god, but I knew that wherever she was, she was praying for my welfare and safe delivery. I wondered if by praying she was indeed creating god, making god real, and if real for her, then real for everyone, real, as a god, supposedly by definition, should and must be. I had no tobacco can to toss high into the air before shouting, “The ontological argument is sound,” but I did know that my intense desire to see a unicorn was not manufacturing a herd anywhere. And I wondered how god worked as metaphor, the concept of god being like God, the absolute Other, infinity and irreducible alterity. I considered my mother like god in a way, not as life-giving, but as one in a set of parentheses, left or right, yielding either the promise of sense coming or of sense rendered, the negation of spatial exteriority within language itself. I had nostalgic feelings about my mother’s attempt to connect me to her own postulates of sense in the world, regardless of the absence of obvious meaning in language, despite the general lack of connectedness in her own personal experience. I remembered once when I was just days old, she confided in me and told me, more or less, that life was empty and meaningless. She said, “I’m sorry.” In her painting, especially after my departure she was attempting to construct an anatomy of grief, not for my loss, but for hers.

  In the morning, Mo asked Clyde to leave. She wasn’t angry with him. She wasn’t annoyed with him. She wasn’t uncomfortable. She wasn’t in love with him. She was glad they’d had sex. He had been what my father had never been, there to express affection rather than prowess, but still it was no answer to any question that plagued her.

  spacing

  BARTHES: Nonetheless, it is questionable whether my account of our sexual encounter will coincide with your depiction, the form itself being compromising at best and perhaps by nature. Discontinuity, instability, and dissatisfaction cannot evade wresting their meaning from the orbits of continuity, stability, and satisfaction. So, there you have it, an invitation to sublate, to integrate, to seek out the limits of conceptual thought and logical identity and the comprehensive destruction of reason. Are you certain you didn’t have an orgasm?

  LAURA: Yes.

  bridge

  Tunica Vaginalis

  While
I still resembled

  a fish,

  the pouch

  dropped from my stomach

  into my scrotum.

  By a distinct crease

  it connects the testis

  with the epididymus,

  the inner surface free

  smooth,

  covered by a layer,

  tissue of the heart,

  the upper portion

  long since obliterated,

  though it may be seen

  as a fibrous thread

  lying loose

  in the areolar tissue

  around my cord.

  ootheca

  Zing!

  “Well, I think the interview went just fine, Professor Townsend.”

  “That call is for me, I guess. They’re boarding my section now.”

  “It was really nice meeting you.”

  “So, you think I might be hearing from you in the next week or so?”

  “Oh, yeah, right. You don’t want to miss your plane.”

  ens realissimum

  I made my way through the empty building to the very front door through which the team of holy men and the others had exited. The door was ajar and through the crack of it I could see them all there in the garden. Purple and lavender, yellow and white bearded irises standing nearly as tall as Rosenda, in huge mobs of color. A Morning Cloak butterfly flitted about blanket flowers, poppies, and cosmos beyond them in the garden.

  The priests were whispering in a huddle, Father Chacón in the center, while the film crew and reporter set up the last of their equipment. Mauricio put his arm over Rosenda’s shoulder and pulled her well off to the side, behind an exhibit of some kind of grain grinder, away from the cameras, away from detection by the outside world. Rosenda was lost, her eyes empty, her short-fingered, fleshy hands limp and useless by her sides.