Glyph (9 page)
Authors: Percival Everett
In the foyer of the main lodge we were met by an elderly man named Jelloffe. I was in the arms of Boris, holding my pen in one hand and propping my pad against his chest. I wrote a note:
Your name wouldn’t be Smoth Ely Jelloffe, would it?
7
The man read the note and nodded, smiling, and then he realized just who had written it. He stared at me and backed away. He backed all the way around the desk, where, without taking his eyes from me, he pushed the register forward to Steimmel.
“You can see why we’re here,” Steimmel said, leaning over to sign the book.
Boris hefted me to a more comfortable position. Across the large room to my left was a pink stone fireplace with gigantic matching columns. The walls were lined with pine bookcases and the floor was covered with rugs and leather sofas and chairs. Behind the desk was a staircase that was roped off with a thin chain and a sign that said
staff.
“I hope everything is ready,” Steimmel said. She was glowing, so eager to get to the work of dissecting me that she was bouncing on the balls of her ample feet.
“Yes,” said Jelloffe. “We have you in buildings 3A, B, and C.” He pointed to a map of the grounds on the desk. “You can park here. Just go around the building, past the stables, and it’s to your right. The cottages are in a row. The library is open until midnight every night. And we would just love it if you would join us for dinners and share your findings with us.”
“Ha,” Steimmel said. “I’m not sharing a goddamn thing. And if I catch anybody sniffing around our area, I’ll bite off his fucking head.” Then she smiled. “We’d be happy to take meals with you.”
behavioreme
biopoetic
boustrophedon
bees
be
In my dream, I was driving a car. I don’t know if I was a baby, but I was driving a car, doing things with my feet, and glancing at the mirrors and holding the wheel. It was an unusual dream for me because I was actually a part of it. I was proud to be driving the car. To me, driving a car was certainly a function of genius. So, in my dream, I was genius enough to drive a car. Mo and Inflato were sitting behind me, strapped in oversized children’s safety seats. They were amazed that I could drive and they kept saying so.
“How is it you can drive all of a sudden?” they asked.
“I’m a genius,” I told them. And then I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that driving was so much fun?”
“It’s also dangerous,” my mother said.
I turned to look back at them. “And why is that?” I asked.
They both screamed. “Keep your eyes on the road!” Inflato said.
“You two are making me nervous,” I said. “I’m going to stop this thing.” Then I realized that I didn’t know how to stop. “How do I make it stop?”
“Step on the brake pedal,” Inflato said.
All of a sudden, my legs were pudgy, baby legs, and I couldn’t reach any of the pedals.
“It’s the one in the middle,” Inflato said.
And I couldn’t see through the windshield. All I could see was the bottom of the steering wheel, which was turning this way and that without my assistance. I looked back at my parents. They screamed and I screamed with them.
As Boris carried me back to the car so that we could drive to our quarters, I wrote a note:
I will need many books.
Steimmel took it and read, then said, “I’ll get you all the books you want. You can have all the books and all the paper and as many different-colored pens as you like.”
“I think you should be careful the way you talk to him,” Boris sad.
“Are you afraid of him, Boris?”
“Frankly, Dr. Steimmel, I am.”
“Don’t worry, Boris. I’ll protect you from the big bad baby.”
excessive alliteration is a sign of an arrested imagination—or worse
Boris read the note and laughed.
Steimmel was halfway into the car. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Boris said. “Nothing at all.”
“Truth and falsity. Sense and nonsense. Self and nonself. Reason and madness. Centrality and marginality. The only thing standing between any of these properties is a drawn line. But a line has no depth, no depth, and so is no boundary at all. Its ends are merely positions in space and as such mean only something to each other by some orientation that might be a line, straight or curved. And so, I know I occupy some point in space
sane
because I can see and orient myself in relation to another point
insane
and as I observe the line that gives them both meaning, I realize that the line does not separate them, but connects them. And I realize as well, my heart pounding that I can, since I have two points and a line, find other points beyond the point
insane
and that I really cannot tell which point is which since points in space have no dimension. Likewise, it is true as I look behind me at the endpoint
sane
that it is really no endpoint at all. So, the line goes that way behind me and this way in front of me and I can’t tell where on the line I am standing and so I bisect that line with another line and I say that
insane
is over there. But how do I know that it has not circled around behind me? How do I know that the point on the line
insane
has not planned it this way? Maybe I should walk forward so that it cannot sneak up behind me. Maybe I should run. Or maybe the point
insane
hasn’t moved at all and has planned it that way. Perhaps the point
sane
has abandoned me. Maybe the two points are working together. I am not paranoid. I am not paranoid. I just won’t move. That’s it. I will stay right where I am, fixed in space.” Emil Staiger sipped from the glass of water he clutched in sweating hands. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said J. Hillis Miller. “I used to have a car like that. Sometimes, when it was really cold, it would never start.”
“I forgot to include real and unreal. And dead and alive. The bracketed and the unbracketed.” Staiger screamed as loud as he could and hurled his glass against the far wall, breaking and streaking the flocked wallpaper.
“It was a Mercedes, that car.”
“Tell me, Miller, all things considered, do you think anyone will remember who we were?”
“Hell, no.”
Boris pulled into a parking slot in front of cottage 3A and turned off the engine. Before Steimmel could open her door and get out, a woman had run up and given a light tap on the window. Steimmel rolled down the glass and asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m Anna Davis. We met at a symposium a couple of years ago. In Brussels. I do work with primates.”
“The monkey lady,” Steimmel said.
The appellation “monkey lady” did not seem to please the woman, but she went on without pause. “Yes, that’s me. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Well, here I am.” Steimmel pushed open the door and got out. “Boris, this is the monkey lady I told you about. Dr. Davis, I’d like you to meet my associate, Mr. Mertz.”
Davis looked into the backseat at me. “So, tell me about the human infant,” she said.
“Maybe later,” Steimmel told her. “We’re in a hurry to set up.”
“The chimpanzee I’m working with has mastered American sign language.” She stepped away and watched as Steimmel retrieved me from the car and Boris grabbed the bags and files. “That’s an infant of African descent, isn’t it? Are you studying the development of minority-status offspring?”
“Not now, Davis. Maybe later.”
“Okay. Maybe we can get your baby together with my chimp.”
It was very much like my crib at home. Slats of wood behind which I would be placed on a soft mattress with blankets, but it was different, the slats rising higher and then joining another panel of slats on the top. It was a cage. Steimmel opened the thing up, put me in, and latched the door. She tossed a couple of books into the cage with me and proceeded to unpack her files. Boris stood staring at me behind the bars.
“Dr. Steimmel,” Boris said. “I don’t think we should lock the baby up like that. It’s kind of like abuse.”
“Is the baby starving?” Steimmel asked.
“No, doctor.”
“Is the baby too hot or too cold?”
“No, doctor.”
“Does the baby seem in any way uncomfortable to you?”
“No, doctor.”
“Then shut up and go outside and get the rest of the equipment from the car.” Steimmel came over and looked down at me. “This is your home for a while.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she peered about the room. As I sat there observing her face, I realized that she was in fact homely, but not as homely as I had first thought. The light coming through the curtains gave her features a favorable cast.
Boris came in with a heavy box and set it on the desk. “So, what are we going to do about Davis?”
“Fuck her,” Steimmel said. “I don’t have time for monkey ladies. Fucking zookeepers. Piaget was a fucking zookeeper.”
“She’s going to come back around,” Boris said. “What if she figures out that the child is kidnapped?”
“You think that ape is hers? She’s here because she stole it from some-damn place.” Steimmel shook her head. “That’s what this place is for, Boris. If you want to keep a secret, you come here. If you want to put a pig’s heart in a human being, you do it here.”
“So, you think it’s okay for the kid to sleep in here alone?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Boris gave Steimmel a disbelieving look. “Because he’s only a year and a half old, that’s why.”
“You can sleep in here if you want to. It’s probably a good idea. That ape woman might come snooping around. I’ll call the desk and get a cot sent over.” Steimmel clapped her hands and kept them together. “I’m going to shower and get some rest.”
“What about Ralph?” Boris said. “He’s probably hungry.”
“Go to the kitchen. They must have bananas there for that chimp. Mash some up and get some milk and feed him.”
Given the rates of phyletic evolution through the history of the Earth, it was quite possible, at least in the bugging eyes of Steimmel, that I might even represent a kind of evolutionary burst. Of course, her interest was not that, but the thought must have occurred to her as a kind of peripheral money-making possibility. She had brought along a couple of books concerning paleontology and evolution. These were the books she left with me that first night. Boris did indeed sleep on a cot in the cottage with me and he even unlatched my cage door and left the lid up. I felt, more or less, as I did at home in my crib. I read that night about the Devonian Period and the Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene epochs, and learned more about the evolution of the horse than anyone needs to know.
molarization
lophiodonty
To Boris:
I need some type of hard crackers.
I’m teething and I’m getting cranky.
1
. This
gap
talk I discovered at the same time I determined I was a Romantic. Not because I needed to position myself as a subject of derision by the likes of my father, but because I’m fond of a good story.
2
. I say this even though one of the texts in my crib at the time was Harold Bloom’s
A Map of Misreading.
3
. I was interested in her lie. What could she have thought I was working through by having such a dream? What kind of symbol could she have thought she might be for me? Perhaps she considered, even in waking life, that she be could a condensation of the world and my parents or perhaps a displacement of some adjacent influence. Whatever her delusion, she was not nearly enigmatic enough to pass for some wild hair of a symbolic image in a dream of mine.
4
. In fact, it was my first movie, a made-for-television affair starring wooden actors and using a contrived plot, and I saw it on a motel-room television. Steimmel and Boris wanted to be off the roads during the daylight hours.
5
. This was particularly difficult for me to spot because I had had no experience with the outside world when first exposed to literature. All idioms and vernacular were lost on me, and so, sadly, much of the meaning, intended or otherwise. I wonderd about the language of babies and realized that I didn’t even have a world of babies through which to move and call my own. I was truly without a country and in that way I understand the literature of the people with whom I shared like coloration (though from what I read that coloration had extraordinary range, which seemed to go unacknowledged by what was specified as the oppressing culture).
6
. According to Grice, to say that a speaker means a particular thing is to say that he intends to produce some effect or change in the hearer of that thing said by means of recognition of that intention. This is
non-natural meaning.
So, in fact, the meaning of “take off the kettle” at the tennis match is not so odd at all, given that it is uttered to elicit a response, even if the response is troubled concern or nervous laughter or annoyance.
7
. I looked forward to meeting Alfrud Adlur and Sagmund Fraud.