Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (10 page)

An old man, with his beautiful daughter on his arm, walks through a park, along a street, emerges from the smoke of a dream and into some light that falls from a shop’s window. Behind the window, laid on a black fabric, are beads of gold and silver. Seated inside, sidelong to the window, is an old man, his face bent earnestly over the open workings of a watch. I gazed with little or no interest at the gears and springs.

I am not a man of science. I am not proficient in any branch of nature study. I do not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile. I have no yearning for hard knowledge about the hard world. And yet I have no affinity for anything spiritual. In fact, I have a pronounced, conspicuous, and striking absence of an affinity for anything spiritual.

I know but one hard thing about the hard world and it is this: from the sum of all theories, as arranged in accordance with ascertained facts, we make a few assumptions, that we have actually ascertained facts, that we are actually here to ascertain them, and that there is actually a
here.

So you are a writer, Billy had once said to me as we sat at the picnic table on the lawn.

Apparently.

How come I’ve never heard of you?

Your poor education?

He laughed.

I’ll bet my daughter knew your work. She was a real reader. And not that romance stuff or just detective books. Real stuff like Goethe and Joyce.

That’s wonderful.

What kinds of things did you write?

His use of the past tense bothered me, but at our ages everything seemed to be in the past tense. I wrote some novels.

If I could see worth a damn I’d ask to read one of them.

Thank you, Billy.

I was just a simple accountant.

I nodded. I had heard this before and the punch line that would follow.

Everybody likes an accountant with no balls. Not your tax man, you want your tax man to have balls, but not your accountant. He looked at his thumbnail, slowly raised it to his mouth and tried to bite it. My daughter was an angel. She had knock knees.

You don’t see too many girls with those anymore.

Do you have a middle name?

I do. And you?

It’s Virgil.

Thanks ever so much for the footnote, said he,

Thanks ever so much for the plug.

Thanks for the roses and very strong tea,

And for business swept under the rug.

Remember the pudding we dined on last night,

The wine and that stinky bit of cheese,

And jot down the names of those still all right

And tuck them away with the keys.

Dream of a place under the evening star

And of pigeons all lined in a row,

Of asphodels, lilies, and blooms without scent

And the tugging of the undertow.

Recall the pudding we dined on last night,

The wine and rather rank cheese.

Jot down the names to be read in the light

And tuck them away with the keys, the keys,

Tuck them away with keys.

When you kick out for yourself, my dear, and you will, remember, whatever you do, to find good people to be your friends. Billy had regained consciousness but not his complete senses. I was both his daughter and myself, it seemed. He was in a bed in a room in the hospital building of Teufelsdröckh. He then said, You know, we are as old as we feel.

How old do you feel, my friend?

I am a mountain.

I asked the doctor, a man not as old as a plumber’s new watch, how Billy was doing.

He’s ninety, the doctor said.

Immediately I had renewed respect for his judgment and his profession. I nodded.

Always build one door opposite another so that birds, bats, and the wind have a way out. It will also allow your house to become a flute, if it so chooses.

Were I to begin this all again, here and undeferred and noncircuitously, I might begin: The river runs past Eden, from the sag of the shore to the bend of the bay, delivering us back to where we first set about. But I cannot begin this all again and, what is more, I would not, will not, shall not. Never keep all of your allusions in one basket. And never assume there is not a fish at the end of your line.

Why are you talking like that?

I thought you were asleep.

How can I sleep with you spouting that gibberish and with all these hellish machines beeping and screaming every few seconds?

Are you feeling stronger?

Billy ignored the question. Tell them they don’t need these machines. I’ll let them know when I’m dead. Or you’ll let them know. They might not trust you at first, but they’ll finally believe you. He lay back and closed his eyes. Have you ever contemplated the meaning of life?

The meaning of life is the purpose of life. I’d settle for any meaning at all.

Is it going to rain?

The photograph is fine, a little wrinkled, but fine.

Billy nodded. Give them hell. Say something else crazy, like you were saying before.

I don’t have any more gibberish.

Of course you do. You’re full of it.

Once upon a time, Billy, once upon a time.

He spoke with his eyes shut, his lids fluttering. I don’t believe in god and so I don’t believe in heaven, but still I hope to see my little girl’s face.

I know just what you mean.

Come now, just a wee bit more from the fountain of nonsense?

Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost his job.

I knew you had it in you.

And so Billy ceased breathing and stopped his blood from circulating, though I believe his brain was still doing brain things. His unsympathetic, attendant machines announced his resolution in concert monotone. The doctor and a nurse clogged into the room to stand motionless at the foot of the bed. He’s gone, I said, and to my surprise they believed me.

Once upon the middle of a story—in the remote distance dense plumes of smoke mingled with jets of flame that gushed forth from an immense pile of earthly dividers—the multitude of common spectators sent up an ecstatic shout and clapped hands with an emphasis that made the welkin echo. Throughout that room there was the same obscurity as before, but not the same gloom associated with Billy’s loss. No flame had vanished and the whole scene remained.

That night I brought in the keys from the hole behind the azaleas beneath my window, removed them from the plastic bag from the Rite Aid pharmacy, and sorted them by size, then color. Keys. Blades and bows. I again paused at the very old-looking one, so primitive and so strange.

Murky as it is, the conventional precept that the idea
signification
contains an augmentation/intensification uncertainty has rather obvious ramifications. The theory that the signification of a term is, in fact, a concept supports the implication that significations actually have individual substance. But are not the significations here for all of us? Are they not public? I’m afrege this is true. Maybe not. Cannot the same be signified for more than one person regardless of psychological predisposition or disposition, for that matter? Even still, understanding the signification, grasping the individual substance of such a thing, is an act of cognitive individuation. So then it comes down to the occupation of a particular and singular, if not nameable or isolatable, psychological state for some meaning to be available or even possible. Alcohol.

This I thought while dead Billy sat at my table. We were drinking. I more than he. He was contained in a forest-green cremation urn wrapped with three tan stripes and a tan cap. It was shaped a like Russian nesting doll and maybe it was, because I never opened it. I would scatter you someplace, my friend, but I would not know where.

Thankfully, Billy did not reply.

We went through the keys together. Some were obviously door keys, others keys to either cabinets or locks. A couple were certainly padlock keys. None was marked in any way to yield to me its corresponding lock. Billy suggested that I take one short key and one long, or at least two keys quite dissimilarly shaped, and search with them alone until I discovered their mates in the world. This made sense. I would not confuse the keys and I could finally create a key to the keys. And then I would devise a plan for my keys.

And what is this one?

Odd, isn’t it?

Billy held the old rusty key and studied it. It must be a keepsake or a charm. It certainly opens no door around here.

Like Zeno to the roost, you are. When was the last time you visited? I know, I know, you just can’t seem to get here or there or anywhere for that matter. Half a step, half a step, half a step home. There is a nice nurse at the desk during the afternoon into the evening. I like her short hair because it does not make her look like a boy. I like her in spite of her taste in men. But because of her taste in men, I can know a little. A little about whens and wheres, goings and comings. And she keeps my secret, our secret, and so I guess that makes us accomplices and I guess that means we’re on the same side and I suppose that means we share the same enemies and I wonder if that means that I am all wrong about her taste in men.

I have been reduced to addressing parts of speech, as if they might answer and of course they do. I was thinking I might chat up nouns next when the short, copper-colored key with the rubber head cover opened the drug locker on the west building nurse’s station. I slipped the key into my pocket just as the nurse rounded the corner. It was in fact the nurse who had seen me in the orderlies’ break room. She gave me a suspicious look. I had seen her name tag many times, had known her name, yet this time the pin that adorned her breast spoke to me. Delilah.

Delilah Zorn was around twenty-five years old and beautiful, and as an old man, I can say this, having seen many, many people in my long life. She was graceful, light on her feet, though I would not say she floated, and her skin was a rich reddish brown that seemed to glow yet did not. She was too beautiful to imagine with Harley, so I chose not to, choice being an important activity that I seldom employed in my first sixty years of life. Choice is more complicated than it first seems. There is the axiom of choice that makes me happy just to consider but confuses me when I do, the notion that for every collection of nonempty sets there is a function that chooses an element from each set. I assume that we are each, at least, a nonempty set, even any of the Gang of Six, even Hitler, Cheney, or some other war criminal. So, I made such a choice and Delilah Zorn remained a flower, a star, a waterfall, a stand of aspens.

What were you doing back there, she said.

I learned long ago that the worst answer to any question is nothing, the word or no response. I said, I have a headache and was looking for something to take.

What kind of headache?

Sinus.

Here, take these.

Do you like working at this place? I asked. I had closed my hand around the two pills she had given me.

It pays the bills, she said.

Thank you for the medicine.

Why were you in there? she asked.

Why didn’t you give me away?

I’m not sure.

Do you like that man, that Harley?

Not particularly. Her answer seemed to surprise both of us. I didn’t tell him because I hate to see trouble.

I was looking for something.

I figured that much. What?

Something they took from Billy.

What is it? Maybe I can help.

I found it. But thank you.

It wasn’t keys.

No.

Do you have any children? she asked.

My son was born probably thirty years before you. You see, I’m a very old man.

Not so old, she said. You still have a twinkle in your eye.

Cataracts.

We were flirting. A sad activity. A bit of push. A bit of pull.

I have a second face.

Perhaps a third.

Access to separate worlds.

The awful and the fruit litter my worlds at the same time. Oh, January, dear Janus, Ianus Bifrons, guardian of doors and gates, looking both forward and back. Up past the pines someplace, past the aspens, is Zoagli, with its view of the sea. Behold the sign.

In a dream, in the repetition of the dream, the riddle is solved. I kill myself as my father in order to commit incest with myself as my mother, but as my father I prevent my own conception.

Leben wir oder werden wir gelebt?

Sheldon Cohen had been a doctor and he was proud that, unlike so many in his profession, he had lived well into his nineties. He also boasted an every-morning gotta-pee erection that I was privileged never to witness, but he talked about it unabashedly with anyone who would listen. Ninety-four with a boner, he would say at the breakfast table full of old ladies. He never mentioned it at lunch or dinner, I assumed because he had forgotten about it by then, but the ladies didn’t forget and so raced to his table at every meal. Since Billy’s death Sheldon had taken to sitting with me and therefore so did five women.

Who’s to say they won’t kill one of us next, said Maria Cortez. She was always dressed impeccably. She was still beautiful even though she was hunched over a bit. She knew she was beautiful and moved in that way. Billy was kind.

Billy was a sour cherry pit, said Mrs. Klink. I believe her first name was Mrs. I took to calling her Mrs. and she never objected. She was always extremely direct, even when she was flirting with an episode of dementia, as when she said to me at lunch, You’ve mown the grass horribly, Philbert. You’ve missed all the edges. You are a wretched man. All I could focus on was the fact that her husband’s name was Philbert Klink. I imagined him unhappy. But that’s not the point, she went on. They will kill all of us and rummage through our things.

We’re old people, Emily Kuratowski said. She was a small woman with piercing eyes that never seemed to point anywhere. What can they do to us that will really matter? We’re nearly dead anyway.

Hear, hear, said Mrs. Klink.

Billy did not die happily or happy, I said. They turned and stared at me because I was generally the quiet one of the newly formed group. We can make sure they don’t win. We can get even for Billy.

Yeah, right, said Emily Kuratowski. What will that do for us?

It might satisfy us.

We’re long past satisfaction, Maria said.

Okay, then it might amuse us.

The group paused at the word. They liked the idea of being entertained. Their old heads nodded, then nodded some more.

I’d like to be amused, Sheldon said. Lord knows I’m not getting any action around here.

Maria Cortez gave Sheldon’s arm a playful slap. Stop it, you.

What do we do? Mrs. Klink asked.

They all looked to me. I had already, fueled by an new and inconsonant desire for revenge and an even more uncharacteristic willingness to take action, decided to take the lead. Though I had no plan, I understood that our objectives would have to be clear, simple, and quick and without too much ambition, as my comrades were subject to sudden slips into other worlds and times and, for all I knew, so was I.

In my rooms I stood and studied my little kitchen area and was reminded of Cornell’s
Toward the Blue Peninsula,
imagining the steps from my little range to my little icebox, then marveled at how my use of the term
icebox
dated me so efficiently, so uncomplicatedly. It might be easier, I thought, it might be easier.

I sat in my living room without lamplight and pulled out a random book from my pile—a pile that throughout my life was constantly growing but was now steadily diminishing, my being well past mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—Dante’s
Inferno.
I opened it but did not read. I cried. About Billy. About your mother. About you. And it was not ugly music. Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrito. Forever the pounder of metaphor, the seeker of stretched connection, the pioneer of extended conjunction, I imagined the Gang or orderlies as the six wings of Lucifer, beating to free him from the ice and creating an icy wind that only creates more ice.

And so you’ve come to visit and you’ve written your visit into actuality or I have written this for you, once again, though none it matters a hill of whatever now, does it? You asked me once if I was postmodern and I asked you if your question contained a hyphen. I finally have an answer and I offer it here as it is apropos of my following dear Virgil down Satan’s shivering, hairy back. I finally have figured out I do not wish to deny being a modernist by trying to embrace all that is familiar while pretending to not be concerned with making something brand spanking new. I do not wish to create new clichés. But neither will I bare my soul to build the new machine that no one has seen just to have it do what the old machine did. So, what am I about, son? Dying, son. Dying well. Dying powerfully, vigorously, with might and main, to chop and change to suit my dying mission, to tie dying ever to life, to living, to breathing, to tie dying to the moon and the stars, to fix dying to light and darkness and rain and mist and arid winds.