Glyph (26 page)
Authors: Percival Everett
B.AGC) A story may comment on its storyness to underscore or illustrate the
real
intersection, but fictive space collapses and disintegrates.
B.AGD) A story can exist outside itself, outside its structure, but not outside its form.
B.AHA) Every story has an internal logic and the breaking of a logic becomes a part of that logic. Therefore, within fictive space all is logical, provided the limits of the space remain intact.
B.B) A story presents a possible reality by creating the possibility of that reality within a fictive space.
B.B_A) Fictive space contains all the possibilities of a given story, its associations and relationships and the set-ordering of its constituent elements.
B.BA) A story is neither correct nor incorrect.
B.BB) A story is true.
B.BBA) A story represents itself.
B.BBB) A story may disagree with reality.
B.BBC) Reality may be false when regarded within a corresponding fictive space.
B.BBD) Reality has spatial and conceptual limitations.
C) Nothing is a story but a story.
1
. An interesting expression that drives home my theory, but, as I have shaped my theory, even to negate it would have it be true.
Missing Meaning Turns Up Found,
the headline reads. Or perhaps,
Meaning Found to Be Missing.
2
. But instead of chromosomes, we perhaps have signifier and signified failing to separate subsequent to meaning in metaphor or metonymy, so that one, signifier or signified, has both meaning and misunderstanding and the other has nothing.
3
. Although any talk of a “hermeneutic reading” seems to belabor the obvious, to wave tattered, tautological flags of the understanding of meaning.
RALPH
H
What sits on the horizon for a far-sighted person is not the same for a near-sighted one. For the near-sighted, shipwrecked soul, there may be no rescue ship at all. But still when sighting of the vessel is reported, the near-sighted one does not complain by saying, “There is no ship on the horizon. It must be well beyond it.” So, the plane passing through the center of the Earth and slicing space at the edge of vision, where Earth meets sky or water meets sky, is not relative, like something being a “stone’s throw away,” it being a matter of who might be throwing the stone. The horizon is where it is and when the presence of the
Beagle
is reported to a blind man, he knows the location of the ship. The horizon is never a stone’s throw away, no matter how short-sighted one might be.
The fight was a messy and unsightly affair that spilled out from the chapel into the courtyard. Bloodied noses and lips curled in anger shown on every face. Mauricio moved his wife farther away, unable to pull her completely from the mission. Father Chacón was cranked with rage, though the emotion did not make him a better fighter. Each time he gained his feet, Jenny Jenson would deck him with a fist tethered to the round motion of her right arm. The cameraman was bleeding profusely from a gash on his forehead, but was managing to block the karate-style kicks of Father O’Blige. The soundman was pinned, face to the ground, beneath the girth of Father O’Boie. But no one saw me and so I scooted away through the irises and hid beneath a small lemon tree.
Steimmel and Davis screeched to a stop on the street in front of the chapel.
Colonel Bill drove his Hummer over the low wall of the courtyard and slid to a murdering halt in the bed of irises.
Mo parked on the street and walked through the main entrance of the mission. Barthes was some paces behind her.
Steimmel, Davis, Colonel Bill, and Ferdinand joined in the fighting. Ferdinand knocked O’Boie from the soundman and sat on the man himself. Colonel Bill knocked Jenny Jenson silly with a punch. Steimmel knocked Colonel Bill down with a kick to the face. Davis stood in the middle of the action and looked around for me.
habit
hiragana
hyperbole
heritor
hinge
My mere claim to existence, as a baby so
gifted,
must exist in the margins of sense, perhaps even as a vague shape or form on the horizon of logic, but if I lay claim to a kind of existential affirmative statement,
i.e., there is at least one baby who can write a paragraph,
am I running the risk of being perceived as a radical who denies the possibility of universals? Or am I picnicking with the likes of Tweedledee and Tweedledum? What are a nickel and four pennies?
My mother approached the commotion, her eyes darting all around for me. Steimmel recognizing her, took a wild swing at Eve’s face. Eve ducked and the blow connected solidly with Barthes’ chin. Barthes stumbled forward, unconscious on his feet and fell against Davis, knocking her to the ground. My mother was on her knees and from there she spotted me under the lemon tree. She crawled quickly over to me and hugged me.
The reunion, even in the middle of the melee, was sweet and deeply felt. She stroked my head and I clung to her like, well, a baby. A gesture that I could tell she appreciated. She was weeping and, though I too was moved by the moment, I wanted her to get me out of there. I stiffened as a signal and she responded.
She covered me with her body and made her way to the section of low wall that Colonel Bill’s Hummer had wrecked. She got me to the street and into her car and away we drove.
My mother and I are living peacefully and secretly in a small coastal town. She now goes by the name Alice and she calls me Isadore. And so I guess I am Isadore. I am four now and I have little friends who belong to women who are more or less like Mo. They are stupid children, but I do not hold it against them. I have agreed with my mother that we should keep
me
a secret. So, at night we read and I write notes and she tells me what she thinks. My father does not know where we are. We know he didn’t get the job at Texas and we know that he didn’t get tenure and we know that Roland Barthes never read his article on alterity. But that’s all we know. The Saab is long gone. My mother drives a Dodge Dart. She changed completely her way of painting and even she says now that the work is no good. She works at a drugstore. I love my mother and she loves me.
In spite of my reunion with my mother, I learned that nothing comes full circle, but stretches out like a line, extending infinitely toward some ideal terminal point that is necessarily only a point, just like I am only a point on the line. But am I insignificant? No. The point is whole, the point is complete, but the line…the line is everything.
The
line
is everything.
PERCIVAL EVERETT is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of more than twenty books, including
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Assumption, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, The Water Cure, Wounded,
and
Erasure.
The text of
Glyph
is set in Adobe Garamond type. Book design by Donna Burch. Composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
“I heartily commend this book to you.…
Percival Everett
numbers among [Everett’s] very best.”
—Lydia Millet,
Los Angeles Times
Paperback / Ebook available
“With equal measures of sympathy and satire,
[Erasure]
craftily addresses the highly charged issue of being ‘black enough’ in America.”
—Jenifer Berman,
The New York Times Book Review
Paperback / Ebook available
“One of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years.”
—NPR
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