Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (12 page)

The dining room was quiet and then quieter when Harley and his henchmen walked in. They made their noises and stood like weeds near the salad bar. Harley smiled. So, the keys have turned up, he said. I’d like to know who took them, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Anyway, thank you. But know that I am still angry. This is my kingdom. He rocked there on those words for a prolonged moment, then repeated, This is my kingdom. He walked out, his workers on his pheromone trail.

I looked at the faces in the room. None was terrified, but none was happy. They had all come to terms with the idea and the reality of death, but a change in the suffering along the path to death was unsettling. At their ages, they had a right to expect routine, even in pain, even in torment.

The regional inspector is coming tomorrow, Sheldon whispered to me.

The feckless, perhaps shiftless, certainly slothful regional inspector made four visits a year to our facility. If he was not somehow profiting from whatever the Gang of Six was about, then he was at least so incompetent that a complaint to him would prove meaningless. Also, the residents were just too intimidated by Harley and his thugs to be seen speaking to him. Yet, for some reason, beyond me and probably any sane person, I was going to have a conversation with him. Just looking at him, in his plaid jacket and chinos and oversized metal-framed glasses, I imagined him with his father, a hidebound pedant without knowledge of man’s nature or of a boy’s, giving lesson after lesson to this dutiful dolt, in some dead language of morality. In other words, he was a Christian, and not the good kind. He was a spit-hurling, brow-raking participle grinder. How are we doing? What are we eating today? Speaking of sleeping, are we sleeping well and doing our exercises and going here, there, hither, and yond?

We’ve got a problem, I said to Finley Snerd. I kid you not.

We’re having a problem?

Yes, some of the orderlies are abusive.

I’m seeing the problem. You’re telling me that some of the orderlies are abusing the residents?

That’s exactly what I just told you. I refused to be sucked into his participle gurgling vortex. We were sitting rather conspicuously at a picnic table on the lawn and I saw the brute Leon see us. He nodded his monster’s head.

What sort of abuse are the residents experiencing?

Neglect. Mental and emotional ill treatment. I suspect there is some extortion.

I’m listening and telling you that these are serious allegations.

I am aware of this.

Are you willing to name names?

Harley, Leon, Ramona, Tommy, and Billy. And let me not forget Cletus. I’d like you to write this down, all of it. They killed William Marshall.

You’re telling me they were responsible for him dying?

That’s what
killed
means.

Keep going.

They attacked his room, his life. They damaged a photograph of his deceased daughter, it was very special to him, an extension of his being, and that upset him so much that he moved too quickly, fell and hit his head.

Snerd thumbed through a folder, pretending to look at notes. I’m understanding that the orderlies were searching for some missing keys.

That’s what they claimed. What would ninety-two-year-old, nearly blind William Marshall want with the orderlies’ keys?

The regional inspector sighed. Well, I’m making note of all of this and we’ll be getting back to you. I’m assuming you won’t be minding if I’m popping in sometime so that we can continue chatting.

They are going to kill all of us and I want you to write that down. Would you write that down, please?

Okay, I’m writing it.

And date it.

I’m dating it, as per your request. He closed up his folders and packed up his briefcase. He offered me his spongy hand to shake and I shook it. Well, I’ll be going now.

Dear Son,

I received and read your letter of 30 May with great interest and I am sorry to be slow with my response. Thank you for it. Your letters are a staple of my continued soundness. I had hoped that my missive before yours might have allayed your concerns and fears, but I was evidently wrong. You appear to be as seized with panic as ever regarding my current state of affairs, but such obsessing serves neither of us. It hinders you from functioning properly, comme il faut, in the world and so undermines and negates my life’s work as a father. So, cut it out. The orderlies are disorderly and let’s leave it at that.

If there were others left in our family, I might write that they do not know me or that they have a wholly erroneous picture of me. This, whether they be brother, cousins, or grandchildren. Do not take the last in that list as a request or complaint. That ship has obviously sailed.

About my brother, your uncle. I envied him his life, simple and uncomplicated in its way. It perpetually seemed to me full of passion, if not love. Who knows which is better, or preferable. I would opt for the latter, but that is no doubt my artistic sensibility and penchant for the masochistic. But what does that leave one at the end? Some photographs? A few familiar tunes and scents? His death even seemed undemanding, easy, and uninvolved. All I have is involvement.

I do not expect another visit from you. I’m not crazy. That ship sailed with the other one. Not that I don’t believe you would like to be here, but, you know, physics, geometry, and all that. Time simply is not with us. We are out of time. I realize that one can read that in a couple of ways. I choose it to connote out of sync, as if my choice matters, and in the end just what is the difference?

Throughout my life I have found myself several times in so-called dire straits and I did not despair. Not so much because I was or am an optimist, but because I am prone to asking myself the question, just how bad can things really be? So, I ask you to not despair either; it is a little late for that.

At my age, with so many measures having been taken and being taken, no measures really seem extreme. It’s too bad, because sometimes extreme measures are called for. Extreme or not, measures have been chosen, if not yet employed. I remember hearing the cliché that one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater; that seems exactly the time to do it. But again, I am just Alice arguing with Humpty Dumpty.

The role of all this last act, as it were, is to provide a context for the impossible, a home for the contradictory, a bed for the irreconcilable. What I have planted, am planting, are like rhizomes, easy to put in, but you have to divide them before you know it. So much work. Come what may, we will do what we do and we will not stop or even pause for subversion or inversion.

All for now. I doubt we will see each when all is said and done, but who knows, really? Don’t pick up any wooden nickels.

Love,

Dad

Still, it was not all clouds and gray skies—there was some sunshine. As with Maria Cortez, who looked as if she had been soundly fucked. She sat beside a smiling Sheldon Cohen and so I knew that all of it had been more than mere bragging. They appeared casual and quite comfortable in the, shall we call it, the slipstream of their activity, the two of them naively trusting that they shared a secret. Well, Maria naively thought so, as everything in Sheldon’s posture and movement, he might as well have worn a display of bright feathers all around, was a betrayal of confidence.

Still, in spite of what I thought was rather barefaced and transparent, the fact of it was so incredible as to leave most, if not skeptical, then befuddled. I chose, quite reasonably, not to imagine the liaison and preferred to call it, in the privacy of my own head, though I did not consider it for any length of time, a bit of extracurricular activity. Of course, at their ages anything but using the toilet and going about the business of dying was extracurricular. If anyone had given Maria a cigarette, she would have smoked it happily. And I felt happy for her. And for him, however grudgingly. The two had just come wobbling and strutting, respectively, into my kitchen. Mrs. Klink was already seated with me, nursing her ubiquitous cup of green tea.

What’s wrong with the two of you? Mrs. Klink asked.

Nothing, nothing at all, said Sheldon Cohen.

Maria Cortez giggled, maybe chortled; I have never known the difference. She sat next to Mrs. Klink and stared out into my living room.

Emily Kuratowski was still in the hospital but was scheduled to return to us the next day.

Emily does not look well, said Mrs. Klink.

She’s ninety-nine, I said.

She looks beautiful. She’s a hottie, said Sheldon Cohen.

To a considerable degree, by the time we have reached a certain age, it varies for each of us, we have said all we meant to say. Everything else is either a reissue or an elucidation, a gloss. Some utterances might be reconstructions of some erased pages, palimpsests of sorts, but it’s mere repetition. There might even be supplement here or there, but our questions will have nothing more to seek but the texture of our texts, the colors of our recollections, but there will be no new colors and there will be no new tastes or sensations. The only new thing will be cessation, suspension, conclusion, and besides that we will have nothing to play with but the play within the shadows of whatever metaphors loom or we choose to have loom.

So there really was nothing for Sheldon and Maria to say and they said it. And so did Mrs. Klink in asking her question and so did I by sitting there and remembering the dream that I had, wondering if it was a memory.

In the dream I was back in the break room of the orderlies, the stolen keys already in my pocket, and I was hidden in the shadows of the lockers. I looked to the window that would be my escape and listened to the sickening huffing and panting of Harley and Caledonia or Clarabelle or Cissy or whatever I had decided to call her and on that same wall was a door, an old-fashioned wooden door that did not seem in keeping with the vintage or style of the building or any building on the campus. In my pocket was the old key. I had not placed it back on the ring with the others before leaving them to be recovered and it now occurred to me that this key might be important, that this key might be key. But the really strange thing about the door was that there was no corresponding door on the outside of that wall. I looked at the faces of my friends. They did not know that I was ever in the orderlies’ break room. They knew only that Billy and I had somehow come to have possession of the keys that had caused us all so much trouble. I would tell them about the door. What would it mean to them? What did it mean to me? I was not sure I had even seen the strange door I thought I recalled.

Deep, long past halfway, into the journey of my so-called life, I found myself in darkness, without you and you and you and you, a whole list of you, and stuck on this crooked trail, the straight one having been lost, and it is difficult to express how in this darkness, rough and stern, as bitter as death, but what I saw, what I saw there, out of slumber and wide-awake in that dark place, was the termination of some world and the beginning of another, a mountain maybe, a wind pressing against me, issued from some sea I could not see, and so I fled onward, thinking how lucky are the amnesiacs, when a panther addressed my presence and then a lion and then a love long lost, all three heads uplifted, but the last of them, she brought upon me much sadness, the kind that comes with fear, and she wept with me despite her hunger and we were cast back into some light, away from the cats, and I met a man whose silence was well practiced and he recited to me his lineage and I did not care and he told me he was a poet and about that I cared even less and he told me he would travel with me and then I was impressed. Who will be my Virgilius now?

This was how I thought as I dragged my sorry ass across that lawn, toward that wall, to that window and back to the orderlies’ smoke-sour break room.

A pistol in the first act and all of that. I could hear the plaintive cries of juvenile crows most of the time in that late summer. I wondered when the cries would mature. Would they one morning be the sounds of adult crows or would the change come in the middle of the caw? Would that adult sound be approached? There it is, there it is, almost, almost there, ahhhh, there it is. However it is, so it is with age. And when do two things that are in fact the same thing converge and negate any notion of their ever having been anything but one thing? When does Cicero become Tully? When does the morning star become the evening star? When does nobody in particular become nobody at all?

If I am to create you, me, them, or you create me, you, them, then you or I have to do something to allow that making, so that there is making, making, almost there, made. As long as an individual is traced out only in repose, in some milieu, its, his, her critical qualities and essential attributes can only be stated but not created. A lesson I learned from god in that story about the first and loveliest, and no doubt overly tended, garden. It was one thing to have A and E (possibly universal and existential statements, respectively) lying about, but finally somebody’s got to fuck up or fuck somebody or fuck the wrong somebody. Then you’ve got yourself a story. Then you’ve got yourself a world.

This whole business of making a story, a story at all, well, it’s the edge of something, isn’t it? Forth and back and back and forth, it’s a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with some logic, someone’s logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time. Like a good little wog. But, eh, don’t listen to an old man. I’m firing semantic blanks or, at least, filling them in. My son would laugh right about here. Or I would. Why do anything? That’s what I keep asking and then I remember I said to my son, or he said to me, that it’s not what you’ve made that will give you peace, that the only thing you get to take with you is having made it. Blah, blah, blah.

Sometimes I think about these things and I am taken back to my childhood. I perceived much of it as boring or painful, but that is growing up, isn’t it? I spent most of my time attempting to pass beneath the worrying radar of my mother. True that one cannot complain about such worry in any concrete way, but it was annoying and, more often than not I feared, a function of her narcissism rather than any real selflessness. Photographs of me then show a youth with red, tired eyes, not quite sullen but numbed eyes, perhaps. Boredom was my worst enemy, but not the kind that sprang from idleness, as I read and wrote quite a bit, but from a nagging lack of engagement with the world outside my thoughts, stricken every day by a tenacious noonday devil who would whisper from my shoulder that I should return to the sad, torpid world, as if I was some hermit who had left it. I ignored the devil then because he seemed too poorly informed and dressed; I had never been allowed to actually join the world. But then I did, first by climbing into it, then by walking into it until it was over my head and lungs, and a world with the
world
turned out to be as boring as a world without, only with more embarrassing moments and better jokes. The world seemed to me suited to people who smoked cigarettes, for they appeared to create their own weather.