Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (13 page)

Emily was in a wheelchair and that was where she should have been. Still, without being bossy, as that was not her nature, she got to wherever she wanted to go, and I was the one pushing her. She was not faring well and it was clear that her being lost in her head featured a return to her craft, namely, logic, and so she seemed to speak in riddles. As when she said to me while I poured my cup of tea, You would do well to remember Zermelo’s theorem.

I’m certain that’s true, I said to her. And what does that theorem state?

That every set can be well ordered.

Well ordered?

A set is well ordered if every nonempty subset of that set has a least element under the specified ordering.

A least element?

An element that is less than or equal to any other element in a set.

And so it went. I hoped that when dementia settled in on me that I would be as obscure and as interesting as Emily Kuratowski. So it went, until one morning she asked, Are we going? I ask because I am not afraid.

You’re not.

You should not be either. Make it what you want. Make it exactly what you want.

I nodded. Then I will not be afraid either, my friend.

The exterior wall in the orderlies’ break room. Turns out it was real after all and I held the ancient key that would open it. Emily Kuratowski sat in her wheelchair beside me, she having confessed to being sent by you to escort me through the door and, well, I might as well stop here. Emily is stopping me here, mainly because she refuses to be called a Virgil and because she, as I, we, simply cannot bring ourselves to play dumb enough to entertain any business about the circles of hell or about eternal torment, punishment, restraint, or whatever bugs and annoys the Christian souls that love to read Dante over and over. We will not pass through limbo or Limbo (is it a place with a proper name?), will not climb up and over any hairy-backed demons, wrestle with she-wolves, chat with Horace and Ovid, take joy in watching the anguish of our evil enemies. Nice poem, is all I’ll say. But hell? Abandon hope, all who think there are gates. We will only acknowledge that there is a door and then realize, rather rightly, that it is not set into that exterior wall but leaned up against it, waiting to be taken home by some simpleminded employee, probably Harley, who no doubt needs a door to hell in his basement, or maybe by Leon, who needs really big doors.

So, why are we standing here? Emily Kuratowski asked. Rather, why are you standing? I’m sitting of course.

Because tomorrow is my birthday, I said.

How old will you be?

Seventy-nine.

A baby.

What will they do to us if they find us in here?

They’ll ask us why we’re here.

What will you tell them?

I’ll tell them that we were wondering why they are such failures as human beings and that we were wondering also how such people live.

We’re anthropologists.

Of a kind.

Why did you bring me here? she asked.

A moment of weakness, I said. Sometimes fear can make you creep into one camp or another, can make you almost believe what you want to think you’re too strong to believe. I wanted to think there is a hell. I guess I wanted to think there is a heaven. I wanted to think that I would see my son again.

That’s not a bad thing to think.

I shrugged. It’s a stupid thing to think.

I cannot argue with that.

Do you think there is evil in the world?

I don’t know what that means. I think there are people who are cruel. I know there are. What about you?

No evil.

Good?

Oh, there’s good. No evil. No god or gods or devils? If there is a god, he’s not very good at much.

What about meaning?

Meaning? You mean, like, purpose?

Okay.

She shook her head.

I nodded. Justice?

Maybe. Justice happens just often enough that the myth of it persists. Funny how injustice doesn’t create its own mythology.

Hope springs eternal.

Hope.

Do you think we’re in hell right now, this place?

No.

That was simple.

Hell would be if I’d never seen the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a child or if I had never been able to understand Gauss’s
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae.
For you it would have been never reading
Huck Finn.
I’m guessing.

Close enough. So, we’re not in hell now?

However much it feels like it.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it hell for someone else.

If I were twenty years younger, I’d kiss you.

If you were twenty years younger, I’d let you. Shall we get out of here?

Emily Kuratowski nodded. On our way out, she sneezed and then said, The axiom of choice does not apply if there is a finite number of bins.

Of course, I said.

It had been my experience that the one thing thieves hate more than anything else is theft. And so Mrs. Klink and Maria Cortez and Emily Kuratowski and Sheldon Cohen and I took all of our valuables, as they were called, and hid them away behind my azalea bush. And then we, in turn, went to the building administrator and told her that we had been robbed. The administrator, as she was called, had no face and so she could have no expression when one or all of us came to her with our reports. She made notes and said what she would whether she was being told a faucet was dripping or a chicken bone was caught in the throat of a wheelchair-bound, blind man, I’ll see what I can do. This came as no surprise to us, but we made our reports nonetheless. We walked the hallways looking forlorn and lost, our lives’ prizes had been stolen, our keepsakes, our memories. We stumbled into each other, we were so despondent. We cut sidelong and angry glances at the Gang of Six, whispered in the hallways that we knew who had done the pilfering—the bastards. It turned out that what upset a thief more than finding an empty mark was believing that he’d been beaten to the mark. My watch that you gave me, my watch that kept decent time if I checked on it now and again, a glance at the big clock on the street or called up that number that there used to be just to tell you the time, that watch with the sweep hand (does anyone still call it that?) that was stuck in a little circle, one of three circles, one of the other two was for the date and that I never used and the third I have no idea about, but perhaps it was the most important one, perhaps it not only kept track of time but kept time and if I had only looked at it, if I had only understood it and used it, I might have some years some days some hours left, but not for myself because I really don’t need them, don’t want them, and wouldn’t know when to put them or keep them if I had them to keep or if I had a watch with a third circle that just happened to keep them for me. Rubato. My watch has been fakestolen, I will call it, but interred under the dirt as it is, not rendering its readings to me, tick tick ticking through the anything-but-friable soil to the wormies and the buggies and the seedlings, it might as well be stolen, so is there any real difference, except for the time that is stored in those springs, caught in them, twisted in them, warped, buckled, contorted in the skinny housing that looked so elegant when you gave it to me, a watch like the one I had owned before and a watch very much like a new one that I might have bought for myself, but it was from you, wasn’t it? And that made all the difference, all the difference when the leather wristband became stinky in the summer humidity, when sand would grind under it at the beach and I would wear it on and on because it was the time you have given me, time that just twiddled and peetled and staggered and tripped into the gloaming of everydayness, so that now my wrist feels so funny, outré, and not lighter, as one might expect, but denser, concentrated, like a head on Venus. My watch, your watch, sunk into the muck, laid to rest, inhumed with so much else, the wormies and the buggies and the seedlings and so much else, time, my time, because my time is all that’s left,
my
nonspatial continuum,
my
measures of change in position and temperature and velocity,
my
sequences,
my
durations,
my
repetitions
my
repetitions, I agreeing with Leibniz (happily, because he had monads) and with Kant (sadly, because he was so damn predictable) that we cannot measure this
time
and therefore we cannot travel this
time
and therefore we’re fucked and I’m an old man, so I can talk like this, say, say words like
fuck
if I want to, if I choose to, if the feeling moves me, if I have time for it, from time to time, but thank god and the devil for time, because if we didn’t have it, well, things would just stack up, wouldn’t they? Seconds piled on top of seconds on top of minutes on top of hours, with no place for them to go. What a mess. And this talk of eternity, it just won’t last, and besides, what an awful place to meet. I would rather count the hairs on a cat, the grains of sand in a desert, the lies America has told the world, than admit that eternity makes any sense. So, we buried a few things.

To save power in those late-summer months Teufelsdröckh’s turned off the air-conditioning an hour earlier and extinguished three of every four fluorescent panels in the corridors and so the evenings were warm and eerily lit, the flickering panels struggling to carve out small regions of shadowy light. By morning all the oldsters were shivering because to cope with the warmer early evening they had opened their windows and by daybreak the rooms were frigid. I never minded it so much, but it was no fun stumbling out in the mornings to be surrounded by bundled-up, yawning, and complaining residents of Limbo. Still, I was happier than I had been for my hours spent with my mathematician friend, her periods of hazy vacation and arithmetical flights of decampment notwithstanding.

You know what would be nice one of these evenings? I said.

A thunderstorm, Emily Kuratowski said immediately.

You’ve been reading my mind.

Or you mine.

Maria Cortez had told us at breakfast that she suspected someone had rummaged through her things again. But of course they found nothing, she snickered.

Emily and I were watching Harley and Tommy, involved in an animated discussion down the hall. I could not make out any of what was being said, but Tommy was scuttling left, the only way he scuttled, his head bent low, still high above Harley’s, but his posture was of contrition, if not fear. I could imagine the dialogue.

You didn’t find anything? You went through all of Kuratowski’s drawers? What do you mean you didn’t find anything? Harley glanced down at us and though I had a momentary fear that he was singling me out with his stare, he was not.

Nothing. And yes, I looked through every one of her drawers. It was like she’d been robbed blind.

Somebody around here is up to no good.

Us?

No, somebody else. Ramona, I’ll bet it’s Ramona. She’s a sneaky one. Leon’s hands are too big. And that troll Cletus never had an idea in his life.

What about Billy?

Who?

Just then one of the day nurses, the only one with any balls, her name was Gladys, made much noise walking toward Harley and Tommy. You! she shouted. Do you know how to use a key?

Harley watched her. He had no power over her and so fell into his short body and found his nest.

It seems you can unlock and open a cabinet well enough, but the real trick, the important part of using a key, is reinserting it and locking the cabinet. Do you understand me?

Gladys might have been an ally save for the fact that she hated any one of us as much as she hated Harley and the orderlies. She simply did not want waves. She stayed in her glass-walled office and sat behind her desk, completely visible during her few hours at work, and, ostensibly, worked. She was like a fish in a bowl, rather a reclusive crab in a cave in a bowl. This is the one responsibility you have, she said. To lock the cabinet once you’ve taken out the medication. Do you think you can do that?

Yes, ma’am.

She turned her attention to the residents and smiled. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a bit brisk, isn’t it?

I noticed one other thing, moreover, which struck me rather markedly and with a smattering of nostalgia, and that was that Harley’s voice reminded me of the voice of a man who had annoyed and harassed me when I was a youth in college, when I had fancied myself a radical, when I got high a lot, but the voice from back then was considerably more educated, maybe even refined, but perhaps not as musical as Harley’s, not to suggest a mellifluousness in Harley’s voice, but it was certainly more so than that of the blazon of a federal agent who hounded me, and even then I didn’t believe it because he seemed too young, but they had to start somewhere, didn’t they, in the shacks of backwoods Kentucky or in the public school system of New York City, they had to come from someplace and they probably did begin early, were sought out in their formative years because of some observed proclivity or other, a knack for languages or a way with people, but probably something far more base and useful in law dumbforcement, meanness, cruelness, the ability to easily turn their gaze away from mistreatment and pain, and a large, set jaw that was good at chewing gum for hours on end and it was his voice that I was reminded of, how he would follow me down Thayer Street during a rain and drink coffee at Spat’s while I tried to ignore him and talk to the waitress on whom I had a crush and I remember her well too, an American studies major of ambiguous racial extraction or derivation and even she was struck by how struck I was by the presence of my shadowy friend and his suit that might as well have been a sandwich-board badge and there I would sit trying to talk to the waitress, and I hadn’t yet even met your dear mother, trying to ignore the walking, skulking badge. I thought that maybe the waitress liked me, but it was all too much. And so I never even got a date or her phone number and suppose I had, suppose I had written her number down the back of my receipt, why, I might not have been interested when I finally did meet your mother or I might have been in a different place, maybe in a commune in cold-ass upstate New Hampshire with a coven of racially challenged American youths, and that is why you might well owe your actual existence to the government of this nation, because had they made up their minds sooner that I was not a threat to national security and the American way of life, had they not been there to cock-block my efforts with the cute waitress, then I might be in New Hampshire yet, making backpacks and fanny packs out of hemp and natural dyes, and I was just mere seconds away perhaps from becoming the reluctant dance partner of a much larger man in some federal penitentiary or maybe a milder correctional facility where they serve cake, as one night I turned the tables on the big badge, shadowy man, managed to lose him on campus, doing so by entering a basement washroom of a classroom building and exiting from a high window, and after that I waited for him outside, his body language told of his exasperation and anger, but I followed him then, became the hunter and tailed him, as they say, back to his modest apartment on, of all places, Federal Hill, a silly and sad-looking walk-up next to a popular Italian restaurant, what else, and I wondered briefly if he was really a badge after all and then I saw him visited by other badges, they were either cops or unsuccessful bankers, the cut of their suits being rough and just fitted, and I had a difficult time imagining why this badge or any badge or anyone would have any interest in me except that I was a black man in America who could read and because I had traveled to Cuba on a sailboat when I was nineteen, on a sailboat with some partying white boys who I was certain were not being followed, wherever they were living, but maybe that was enough to label me a commie for life, a red, a pinko, an enemy of the state, and how did I get here except a noticed and remembered timbre of a voice, not a deep voice, in fact a bit high for a man, even though I don’t suppose there is any range that a man’s voice is supposed to fall into and I wouldn’t suggest such a thing, especially not to that boxer who used to annihilate his opponents in the first rounds of all his fights until the geniuses of the sport figured out that he couldn’t render them unconscious if he couldn’tn’t hit them and the guy got so frustrated that finally he bit off a piece of another fellow’s ear, off, I don’t care how hungry I might have felt, I would never have done that, but he was not an enemy of the state, had never read Marx, though he was running around in short trunks trying to eat the citizenry, no, but I was such an enemy and it was because I had read Mao and Marx (Karl and Groucho) and Malcolm and I had been to Cuba. But back to voices and back to Harley, who reminded me of the big badge in no other way except that they were both white, but that was hardly a shared attribute that was in any way defining, unless of course either one of them had been a heavyweight boxer back then, now they’re all large Russian fellows that eat rivets and make tools from their fingernail clippings, and, like I said, you weren’t even, you know the expression, a twinkle in your father’s eye, in my pinko eye. The badge, his name was Wesley, I saw it on his mailbox, I saw it and then I did a terribly foolish thing, I sneaked into his apartment because I was certain he had been in my home and I wanted to know a little something about the fucker, pardon my Danish, and when I did sneak in, it was easier than it sounds, old doors and all that and a key under the mat, I found him in mid-buttfucking session with another man, perhaps another badge, but it was difficult to discern, what without his clothes and with him frantically ducking for nonexistent cover, and because I stayed perhaps less than a second, well, at any rate, I personally didn’t have a problem with his sexual preference, but I’m certain that his agency would have a problem with it, their using the don’t-let-us-find-outwe-won’t-burn-you-at-the-stake policy, and so I never saw him again and it was too bad because he was not an unattractive man, unlike Harley, and after that I felt sad for him, hiding in that way, worried all the damn time that someone might find out he was fond of men’s bottoms, and I imagined him later, having left the force, living in Michigan maybe or Indiana and trying to carve out a life in the home-security business and hiding from his clients the fact that he lived with a man who was perhaps a designer of public fountains, while Harley, ugly, grotesque Harley, invaded the open legs of that sweet little nurse and arched his appliance-shaped hairy back over her small frame like a camel-man and thumped away until he came and she finally collected her tiny white clogs and scampered down the dim hallway to later chat with me at the desk, without a stain on her smock, on her face, or even the slightest inclination to apologize to me for having sullied my image of her, but I could not have cared less, who was she to me after all, a pretty face. I was too old to be impressed or taken in by a pretty face or twenty pretty faces or two hundred but she had left that Harley back there in the break room, on that pathetic cot, that I had regrettably seen and so could picture, with circles of Pall Mall smoke coiled around his head like serpents, smiling and enjoying the coolness of the wet spot, and he glanced down at his glistening balls and beyond to his yellowed toenails and observed that they needed trimming, but waved off the major project, too much trouble, grooming, too much trouble, scratched his furry ass and gobbled up a few more villagers, gnawed on the heads of those below him and his enemies, wondered who was stealing his spoils before he could and I am sitting with Emily Kuratowski, my friend, and she is slipping ever further away, her eyes looking alternately cloudy and glassy more of the time, her voice, which is truly melodious, trailing off so much more often, Tychonoff ’s theorem states the Cartesian product of any arbitrary set of compact topological spaces is itself compact and many people say that this is an equivalent of the axiom of choice, but I just don’t buy it, Zermelo’s well-ordering theorem, yes, Zorn’s lemma, yes, but not Tychonoff ’s, even when considering the proof of the existence of non-Lebesgue measurable sets, she says this and then comments on the zinnias, they seem a little droopy, and then drifts off toward a syrupy sleep, only to awaken and look me in the eye and say, We cannot let them live in peace, and I nod and lament that my poor friend’s last lucid moments must be consumed with the cancerous worry over retribution and requital, but I can say that these goals are not attractive and not as strongly longed for by me, though I would claim that we are not vindictive or spiteful, we, I think, seek more to discharge equity, not so much to exact revenge as to satisfy justice, and I feel it is my responsibility, mission, to see her and my other friends satisfied in their final days and it comes as a two-pronged campaign, at once putting an end to the reign of the Gang and our taking control of what we have left, our exercising our power to act, the way I acted when first I met your mother, I’ve always loved that construction,
when first I met,
well, when first I met your mother I was in my late twenties, seems like just a thousand years ago, she was ostensibly white and I, as the badges pointed out earlier, was and remain ostensibly black and though it hardly seems to matter now, it did then, and the excitement of our difference and the electricity of our head-turning presence in certain venues, sometimes unexpected, the venues, not us, like in a little church in a podunk village in central Connecticut. We had wandered in to beat it out of a torrential rain, the hardest in fifty years we were told by the old custodian who couldn’t stop staring at us, then again by the little nasty pastor who found us equally odd, hardest rain in a half century, I thinking that it could have simply been that they didn’t understand what a beautiful woman like your mother was doing with a homely oaf like myself, but of course that wasn’t it. I was born at night but not last night, as I heard a UPS man once say, and boy was that a relief, wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I couldn’t smell anything off it I’m sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night I couldn’t rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see why I am so damned nervous about that though I like it in winter it’s more company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was only about ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes dressing her up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those mountains the something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with the little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing about in it then make a race back into the church because the storm had started up again as suddenly as it had ended and so we were caught there once more in the house of Jesus with the pastor and the custodian and the holy spirit, until the pastor asked your mother if her parents knew where she was, she did look young, and I appreciated the pastor asking questions first and planning on shooting later, but still I didn’t appreciate it one bit, and neither did your mother, but maybe she did, maybe we did and it gave our being together, our approaching union, a bit of that outlaw appeal. We left there, heavy rain and all, hail by now, I had never been so wet, so thoroughly soaked, but we felt none of it, but wandered as deep into the middle of that little depressed town as we could go and we kissed there in the dead, and I mean dead, center of Podunk, Connecticut, the name of the town I can’t recall, maybe it’s age, maybe it’s something worse, maybe it’s because I’m making up my past just the way every one of us makes up our past anew each time we visit it, what actually happens is always just a dress rehearsal for what you will report later, but it was undressed that your mother and I made you, if I can be so vain as to use that term,
made,
but god didn’t make you, nature didn’t make you, if we’re going by cause and effect, then the big gay badge from Federal Hill made you because I wasn’t off living in a commune fucking an art-school dropout instead of your sweet, blessed saint of a mother, me, son, aye, yer mother was a saint, a fucking saint who had an affair with that flyboy and even if she didn’t, she still considered it, lusted after him, but I loved her then and I loved her then and then and then and even now though she left me before even you did before even you did before even you did before even you