Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (11 page)

It had drizzled that morning, but by lunch it was sunny and hot. We were all crouched on the brink of something, ostensibly the bank of the little pond on the grounds, but we knew it was much deeper than that. Mrs. Klink blushed painfully when she discovered that her skirt had been hiked very high up her wrinkled thigh and that Sheldon Cohen had been appreciating the view. Oh, don’t cover it, he said in a sweet way that did little to make her feel better or less conspicuous, though it was clear to me that she was enjoying herself. Maria Cortez said, Take a pill. And then we were all quite quiet. I had just revealed to my friends that one of the keys in my possession was to the pharmaceutical locker. Emily Kuratowski was not with us that day. She had been taken to the hospital with pains in her side, this after having to wait hours before an orderly came to help her to the toilet. They’re going to kill us all, Sheldon said, one by one. We’re near dead anyway, Maria Cortez said. That’s right, I said, that’s right.

Teufelsdröckh was set on thirty well-watered acres adjacent to a suburban calamity called Calabasas, a roadside mishap that stank of fast food and automotive puke. It was a better buffer than the chilling water that surrounded Alcatraz, for at least the water promised certain death. We residents, as we were called, discarding the more unpleasant designation
patients,
as well as the more accurate term
inmates,
were not discouraged from venturing out to play in the traffic, as it were. We were free to walk or catch the bus that was twenty minutes late regardless of one’s arrival at the stop. I walked three long, unshaded blocks to a mall the size of a small Iowa town. I had of course been in such places before, perhaps many times, though I had always tried to avoid them, so I should not have been surprised, stunned, by its massiveness or by the eerily familiar repetition of shops or by its complete uselessness in the face of its terrific promises. All I wanted was a locksmith, not even that, but a human with a key-making machine, my key on one side and a blank key on the other, a whirring, screeching noise, a spinning, buffing noise, and then two keys hopefully capable of opening the same lock. After exhausting myself with a walk the length of the place I learned by way of a directory map that Frenhofer’s Key-Ask was located near the door through which I had entered. The KeyAsk was in fact a kiosk set in the flow of traffic and it was manned by a boy dressed in all black wearing black lipstick.

Are you Frenhofer? I asked.

Are you stupid?

Yes, but that is beside the point. Is this the Key-Ask?

That’s Key-
Osk.

Of course it is.

It’s a pun.

If you say so. I’d like copies made of these keys.

His name tag read nicolas poussin. He looked at the keys. A couple of these keys say
Do Not Duplicate.

I realize that. That’s why I want only copies of them. Do you always obey rules? You don’t look like someone who follows all the rules.

Why do you say that?

Just something about you, a kind of death thing.

You’re really giving it a tug, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll make them.

Just like that?

Just like that. To advance your story. Tell me, old man, what are these keys to, eh?

One fits a closet full of controlled substances.

Cool. He paused at the very old key. I can’t do anything with this ancient thing. Is it real?

I don’t know. Let me have that one. He took the old key off the ring and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket.

His tag now read jan mabuse.

Jan Mabuse paused at the last and smallest key. This key is beautiful, he said, and as he said it the traffic around the kiosk slowed or at least appeared to slow. This key is perfect. He hesitated, as if afraid to attempt duplication of the last key, which was in fact the key to the drug cabinet, but he could not have known that.

I spoke to him, told him that the perfect key, like anything perfect, was but mere shadow, apparition, wraith. I told him that Orpheus should never have looked back. I studied his paint-darkened lips and said, Make the key.

His tag now read:
fernand léger
. He made the key, with the whirring, screeching, and buffing that I had wanted.

He did not charge me for my copies. He instead put down his protective goggles and prepared to leave. I asked him where he was going. He told me he was going home. No more keys for me, he said; his tag read
claude lantier
.

Sensuality, or more precisely lust, is the nonpareil Petri tureen for the breeding of ruinous and catastrophic miscalculation. I knew that, it having been a lesson I learned early in my so-called adult life, and so modeled my behavior, regarding all dealings with love and or lovers, actual and potential and imagined, on a robot I once saw in a movie when I was twenty-seven. I had smoked quite a bit of pot and the character might well have not been a robot, but I remember him as a robot nonetheless and his unfeeling and distant approach to matters of the heart seemed just about right. So, even though my short-afro-ed night nurse, her name will be now Clarabelle, made my heart flutter, or was it my medication, or worse? and even though she caused me to assemble a montage of some of my more fondly remembered erections, I did not and would not trust or confide in her completely. She had after all been intimate with Harley and loneliness and self-loathing can only explain so much. She had, on a purely animalistic plane, a plane worth noting and visiting, somehow bridged that experiential gap between the discrete and the continuous, between the distinct actuality of past conditions and the ephemeral, expanding, enduring, and untouchable attachment to those conditions, states of affairs, cases, hard-ons.

She was standing authoritatively behind her station desk, was Clarabelle. Her light-green smock covered with pastel smiley faces and the V-slit of her collar pointing seductively down to her, I assumed, nonexistent cleavage. I had already placed the original set of keys at the far edge of her desk and I believe she had pretended not to see me do it.

Finally, she looked at them. I wonder where those came from.

What?

Those keys.

Oh.

Are they yours?

Not mine.

Sarah, Sarah, are these your keys?

Not mine?

Anthony, are these yours? Clarabelle held them high and jingled them.

Nope.

I guess the owner will turn up, she said. She put them into her drawer.

Do you believe in time travel? I asked her.

I guess not.

It’s just as well. Apparently, given that the occurrence of time dilation, whether based on velocity or gravity, doesn’t allow backward travel, we could only hope to get you as old as me and that would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

You’re an interesting man.

I was once, I think. I’m pretty sure I thought so then. More fool me.

You know, I really don’t like Harley, she said.

I nodded. I wondered if she thought that was supposed to make me like her more. I nodded some more.

What do you see when you look at me?

This was a great question and it took me completely off guard. I looked up at the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the hallway. I see a river in Iowa, I said. The first place I saw my wife naked. All we did was swim that day.

That’s sweet.

I’m a sweet man.

My first self-conscious attention to a heading. I. A pronoun denoting the self. Me. It is also the letter representing an imaginary unit in math, the unit that lets the real number system extend to complex numbers. Me. I’m sorry, my best and favorite lover said to me, you are imaginary. I suggested that she multiply me by
i
and give me another look and try. But all of this to prolong a deferral, right?

I could see Billy fishing in some far-off stream or pond even though I did not know if he liked fishing or had ever fished in his what I imagine to be staid accountant’s life with his daughter beside him teasing him about something or another perhaps the way he said the word
apricot
and there he was reeling in empty hook after empty hook happy because his girl was there with him and maybe his wife but wasn’t it odd Billy thought there by that stream or pond how when a child dies all other relationships seem so so so dismissible forgettable shallow though he knew that she must have been around perhaps in a backyard garden with an older or younger version of their daughter she teasing her mother about the fact that she wore her rubber boots on the hottest and driest days but Billy was with his daughter and then he was not but instead lying deader than dead against that bank his arms and legs akimbo his eyes open and lost-looking in the bright sun because there was no heaven no stream no daughter to revisit though someplace along that stream bank that riverbank she lay like him so so so still veins and arteries and curious things-closed all kisses having been blown up a skirt hiked up just over her knee her hands looking like they had wrung the last water from a towel pots and pans piled up the bank waiting for Billy to wash after the last dinner the last supper conjuring that lie of a story where that Iscariot guy did the brave thing and pointed out a toga-clad Jimmy Swaggart to the goose-stepping authorities and some others who were tired of reading letters from living souls who had ceased or failed ever to recognize the difference between hopes and lies. So blow me a kiss sweet Jesus Billy said and I will let it light on my ass and my daughter will remain skirt-hiked-dead on a shore and friends will make tea make tea make tea and then visit in the cold dark of night Point Dume

And then there was you, me, us, red and black in the evening light lost to the wearing of hats and eager to return to stories that used to make some sense eager to recall easily demarcated boundaries of identity and designation and eager to resketch the likenesses of faces that were either familiar or desired wanting in the darkness of the wee hours which were no smaller than the rest to smell cooking that promised to free all of us from the chains of understanding yes ourselves and all those we loved or hated sought or dismissed the beautifulest of all visible things the lightning strikes of summer the stars the nebulae the nebulæ for only etymology’s sake some sea tempest and thus awaiting in an alley then to that day with a vacant hugeness of loss looming we counted our weapons one of us anyway and aligned with our comrades and lined the halls with maps of our plans and stretched all things to their limits the budding disleafing and felling of trees notwithstanding my skull a great blue vault with eyebrows and anger in its large awkward gianthood rustling like some human noise in a forest a howling wind with no place to go a Brobdingnagian with a clumsy ham-fisted gait pretended to seek refuge while raising a hammer stood in a doorway prepared to fight in rude corridors and terrible closets and on beaches from which south extended until it stopped left unexplained left untouched left strange like a glance through a glass pane without a frame without an agent for beauty is a witch and did not we feel it so that the wretched made for lousy company not cheerful at all while hell and purgatory and paradise blended like clay on one spinning table upon which also rested my peaceable disposition until rough and then far rougher weather upset that temperament and forced me into that perplexing jungle that deep root-riddled tangle of wilderness that was myself

In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.

A pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the sun.

Emily Kuratowski had in life been married to a mathematician, she liked to tell people. She had been one as well but seldom mentioned that. She told me once that she had spent her life working on projective limit topology and canonical projections and she even tried to explain it a bit to me, but my glazed-over look made her smile politely and pat my twenty-year-younger head. That is why I don’t think about these things anymore, she said. I would rather eat cherries and think about the wind. Emily was what kids in my day used to call walleyed, but was called later lazy eyed. In her case her left eye pointed slightly out and so she suffered exotropia. She and I talked about that and I told her that the condition sounded more like a nice place to visit. She told me that her husband had worked on ring theory. I didn’t understand his problem and neither did he, she said. And none of it served him in life. He died bitter and, finally, unsolved. She picked up her yellow cup from the tray in front of her and drank through the bendable straw. I’m feeling a little better now. God, I hate this hospital.

Emily had money problems, stemming, she told me, from her inability to balance a checkbook. Oh, I can explain the Hausdorff maximal principle or Banach-Tarski paradox, but don’t ask me to subtract seven from twelve. My husband was even worse, insofar as he had his head stuck so far up his ass he could smell his own breath.

You must have loved him, I said.

I suppose I did for a while. Then we just got wrapped up in life and work and love and the idea of it just fell away.

That’s sad.

If it hadn’t been for my constant affairs it would have been.

I laughed.

He never noticed. He never could have noticed. He never would have wanted to notice. If he had noticed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have understood.

Too much in the clouds?

Too stupid. Thank god we never had any children.

I thought you had a daughter.

I do.

Oh. Just how old are you, Emily? My question came off as indelicate, I think, but she didn’t mind.

I’m ninety-nine. Palindromic ninety-nine. At this age I look the same coming as I do going. And before you ask I have no sentimental or egotistical desire to reach one hundred for the mere sake of doing it. One hundred is not a terribly interesting number. In the Qur’an there are ninety-nine names for Allah. That’s a funny thing for a Jew to know, isn’t it?

We end up knowing all sorts of funny things. Imagine how many of them we forget in a lifetime.

Or two.

Or two.