Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (7 page)

I’m not attacking you.

I know.

If Meg Caro was my daughter, what was I supposed to do? It was a little late for diaper changing and parent-teacher conferences. I tried to think what I would want if I were her and all I could come up with was knowledge. I guessed that she would want to know me, as a person, as an artist perhaps. She’d said she was a painter, told me the first day she’d come around, and I hadn’t received her too kindly. Still, she came back. She did not return to modify our initial meeting, to recast it or even to say something she forgot to say. She returned to punctuate her original request that I allow her to be my apprentice. Only now did I understand the apprentice business. But all interpretation relies in some part, if not all, on charity, I realized, appreciating (a generous term) that I had to dispraise or at least blink at some differences in our use of the term. Her notion of
apprentice
was layered in ways I could not have anticipated and, given the discongruity of our experiences, the inequality of our stati or statae or, splitting the gender difference, stata, it became clear that, though we were participating in the social activity of language, we were not speaking the same one. All this to say that we never know what the fuck anyone is saying to us, that the only legitimate and correct response to anyone uttering any sentence, even
Your pants are on fire,
is:
Excuse me?

Murphy? I’ll be Murphy again.

Lang?

How does one go about getting a DNA test to prove or disprove paternity?

I take it you’d like to disprove paternity, else you would not have said
prove or disprove.
Well, you don’t need me for this, you just get a kit from a lab and send in your samples.

Samples of what?

They’ll give you a kit.

You don’t sound particularly intrigued by my question. Don’t you want to know why I need such a service? We’ve been friends for a long time.

Long enough for you to know that I never care about other people’s business. I assume your pecker has come back to haunt you, or bite you, or whatever metaphor you find the most accurate.

I might have a daughter.

I guessed son. I had a fifty percent chance and blew it.

It could be that I’m pulling your leg and simply need this bit of information for something I’m writing.

You’re not that funny. And you’re not a writer. And I don’t care why you want to know the ins and outs of this, in spite of the fact that ins and outs must have been involved at some point to create this situation.

Situation
is right.

Before you go, let me tell you this joke.

I’m not in the mood.

Won’t take a second. The president is on a tour of this new hospital. There are Secret Service guys all around, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, the doctor leading the tour takes the president through this ward and there’s the House minority leader sitting in the corridor and he’s jacking off. The president shakes his head and says, Christ, what’s that all about? And the doctor says, That poor man has advanced semen over-production syndrome, ASOPS. His seminal vesicles and his testes are hyperactive and so he must ejaculate every ten minutes or he’ll suffer severe damage to his reproductive system. The president says, My God. And so they go up to the next floor, right, and there is the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and there’s this orderly and he’s sucking the chair’s penis. And the president says, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch in a cornfield, what’s the problem here? The doctor says, Oh, this is the same condition, ASOPS, but he’s got a better health-care plan.

Can I hang up now?

Not yet. I want to tell you one more thing, something Hippocrates said.

And what’s that?

He said, he said, he said that you can discover no measure, no weight, no form of calculation, to which you can refer your judgments in order to give them absolute certainty. In our art there exists no certainty except in our sensations. What do you think of that?

Now may I hang up?

You bet.

They have big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. This was the line that Nat remembered from somewhere as he considered his station as narrator. He didn’t want to be any kind of mediator, yet he understood that he had to murder the authorial presence and to do that he’d have to find the author and kill him, for it was all too clear to him that in spite of his station, there was yet another layer sitting on the world, like a blanket of volcanic ash, smothering meaning and, while changing meaning, covering meaning while making it. He would have to rise up with all others like him and slit the sleeping throat of the master. That this master would put an
eye
in his mouth was too much.

On the external wall of a liquor store in Southeast District of Columbia was some graffiti:
God was here, but he had to leave.
And below that was scrawled:
I was here! Wishing you all the best, God.

What was the thing in your career that irked you the most?

Funny you should have me have you ask me that question.

Strange.

Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don’t even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.

What did you say to him?

After I told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on, I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then I punched him. That’s why I had to leave my job at Iowa. That’s why we moved to Providence. Well, you and I did. Your mother went to Canada and married the flyboy. And the thing about your mother was that once gone, she could not look back, if I may segue in so non sequitur a manner, not that she would have become a pillar of salt or anything so horrible or fanciful or wonderful, but because in looking back she would be admitting that she was gone, that she had left something behind, and with that glance, with that admission, she would be doomed to recognize her memories as constructions of a left world, necessarily fictions, necessary fictions, because in looking back, she would see a reality to which her memories might be compared and contrasted and she would know that her memories were not that world and so all would be fucked, the world behind and the world awaiting. So, you see, it never pays to look back, maybe not even to the side. It’s almost like going through that whole mirror stage thing all over again, except this time you have to actually acknowledge the initial lack that must be present for the glance backward to be possible at all, and even if you don’t look back, the wall between subject and object, you and it, is already obliterated, but if you do, if you actually do look back, then god help you—and, I suppose, and as well anyone you look back at, if you will allow this clause to save this sentence from ending with a preposition. I might have blamed your sweet saint of a cheating mother for a very short time for leaving, but I never blamed her for not looking back.

Mom never left.

Says you. Says you. And yet there was a flyboy just the fucking same, just the same, just the same. There are many ways to leave; you’ll understand that better when you’re older and about to die and decompose into a blue oblivion. But let us finish off this Cyclopean egg, I’ll have mine scrambled. Its very shape suffices to suggest its vacuity, doesn’t it?

What are you talking about?

It wouldn’t matter if you understood.

You be Murphy this time. You’re sitting in your flat. You should be going over patient files and taking care of your tedious financial paperwork, but instead you are affixing the 135 mm lens onto your newly acquired Leica camera. Water is just beginning to boil in the kettle on your electric stovetop. The day outside your window is gray and overcast, but there is no threat of rain. You look into the face of the camera, then turn it around and stare at the viewfinder from a distance. The camera is in your lap. You want to look, but you can feel the kettle about to whistle. You want to look through the finder. You want to, but you must make tea first. You understand that you must make the tea first, don’t you? You need the tea because you’re going to be staring into this camera for a considerable while. You need to make the tea or at least remove the kettle, because if you don’t all the water will boil away and the kettle will get hotter and hotter until it bursts into flames and the kitchen will burn and the building will burn and Mrs. Hobble, the woman who hasn’t left her apartment in twenty-seven years, will burn up to death and so it really is better to just make the tea. And so you do. As you dip your bag in and out of the water in your mug, you imagine Mrs. Hobble, realize that you have never seen, but only heard, of her, sitting in her rooms like that, sheltered away perhaps preparing for something, passing her life in preparation for something that will never happen. The way we all do.

Martin, Ralph, Andy, Philip, and Nat were sitting at a round table in the hotel room. They were playing poker, but not for money, as Nat was opposed to gambling. Martin took two cards. Andy took one. Ralph took none. Philip took three. And Nat took four.

You’re not good at this game, are you? Martin asked Nat.

I’m better at other things.

I’m out, Ralph said.

Me too, from Philip.

Ditto, said Andy.

Call, said Nat.

Martin put down his hand and revealed two aces and two eights.

Nat stared at Martin’s hand and felt a chill. Then he simply placed his cards facedown on the table. I guess I’ll have to call it a night, he said. Tomorrow is the big day and I’m going to go look at the mall while it’s still empty.

Even on the twenty-seventh there were so many people around and arriving that it was difficult to know who was friendly and not. We had for some time known about Hoover’s desire and mission to undermine the movement and that he especially wanted to destroy Martin. What we didn’t know at the time was that Kennedy’s little brother had okayed wiretaps and who knows what other kinds of surveillance were employed. Regardless, we were all swimming or sinking in a glass bowl. I came from the SNCC meeting, still fuming that my lines in John’s speech had been excised, knowing well that they were probably right, but knowing also that I had been inserting just a fraction of the truth of what we all felt. Everything felt off, awkward, like a typewriter that would not sit level on a desk, like a toothbrush with one long bristle that you can’t find when you stare at it, like the smell of gun oil in a baby’s nursery, like a simile in the mouth of the man who is robbing you. Anyway, I sat down on the grass near the Washington Monument at about dusk to eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich and noticed a couple of suited white men walking the mall, chatting up people. They might as well have been wearing sandwich boards that read fbi and it was this very fact that made me doubt they were, but of course they were. They finally made their way to me.

What’s your name? one asked. They each took a knee on the grass in front of me, hiking their trouser legs up at the thigh in unison.

Puddin’ Tame, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.

No, really, what’s your name?

He apparently had not heard me. Puddin’ Tame.

Do you know who we are?

A couple of queers cruising the park at the early edge of some particular hour? Profoundly lost John Birchers?

He’s funny, the other said to his partner.

I’m going to eat my roast beef sandwich. If you want to arrest me for that, it does have mayo, be my guest. If you want my name, then you will have to arrest me. By the way, what are your names? I shouted. Who the fuck are you?! I made my voice as loud as I could make it. Don’t shoot me! Help! These bad mens wants to hurt little ol’ me! Somebuddy, hep me, please! Oh, lawdy! People turned and looked. Some men started to approach.

The agents stood.

See you later, I said.

Yes, you will. And though he didn’t actually say it, the word
nigger
rang out. Like a shot, it rang out. Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger NIGGER NIGGER. What they call the N-word these days, as if N-word does not mean
nigger.
Can’t you just imagine some dear old white racist blue-haired old ladies at the church picnic or bake sale? Claire, I heard that Strom has been sleeping with, well, an N-word. No, no, really. What is the world coming to?

Oh, lawdy, what do you mean by N-word?

Why, I mean NIGGER.

Well, why didn’t you just say that?

Claire, I did.

The following morning the chartered trains and buses started arriving. By eleven o’clock hundreds of thousands of people filled the grounds and faced a sitting Lincoln, appearing to wonder still if he really should have freed the slaves. A. Philip Randolph spoke first, listing the demands of the marchers. The day grew hot, humid. James Farmer wasn’t there so Floyd McKissick read his speech. John Lewis spoke. Josephine Baker spoke. Bob Dylan sang. Marian Anderson sang. Peter, Paul, and Mary sang. Mahalia Jackson sang. Martin Luther King stood to give his speech and there was obvious confusion. Martin looked at the paper in his hand and then let it float to the floor. The white-capped security didn’t seem to notice, but I did. Martin leaned into the microphone and gave his speech. It was not the speech he had written. It was clear to me that his written text had been stolen, probably by the FBI, and that it had been replaced by the pages he had let flutter to the stone of the Lincoln Memorial. He gave his speech and what a speech, as he constructed it as he went, built it as he spoke and moved all of us, startled all of us, but none so much as the FBI. When he was done and all had been changed forever, I found my way through the bodies and legs and feet and rescued the discarded pages.

It read: I have been asked to give a history of the motives which have induced me to undertake this insurrection. To do so I must return to the days of my infancy and even before I was born. In my childhood was a circumstance that occurred which would make an unrelenting mark on my being and laid the foundation for the zealotry that has led to this day and will end so fatally for so many, both black and white. I must tell you of a belief of mine, one that has grown with time, that I cannot shake, that I cannot ignore. I was at play with other children my mother overheard me speaking to the other children and she called me and told me of my great power, of my power as a prophet and told me that I was intended for some great purpose in this world. She told me that the Lord had shown and would show me things that others could not see and that I must take it upon myself to show the way to so many. My mother and grandmother and other religious men who visited our house and whom I often saw at prayer meetings noticed the singularity of my manners and my uncommon intelligence for a child and remarked that I would lead my people one day. To a mind like mine, restless, inquisitive, and observant of all around me, it was easy to see that religion would be the vehicle for my directed message.

I gasped. I recognized the text. It was the bogus confession that 85 had been attributed to me by that white devil Thomas Gray. The man who claimed to have sat with me in my cell days before my execution, but really had come in to merely taunt me, saying, So, you’re the killing nigger.

The text of the speech went on to outline how Martin Luther King had planned to steal away a portion of the nation’s constitution and subvert the charity of white America to his own monetary benefit, casting aside his own race and the poor people he claimed to represent on his way to great glory and wealth. Of course Hoover could not have imagined that King would have actually read the thing, hoping rather that he would have been so upset by it, confused by it, that he would have just stood in front of the three hundred thousand, speechless and dumb, but instead they received his dream speech, the world heard it.

Charlton came upon me as I folded the pages and shoved them into my jacket pocket.

What’s in your pocket?

Nothing, I said. Have you ever met Mr. Hoover?

Yes, I have.

He has a gun?

I suppose he does. He should have one. He’s America’s top cop. Americans, every one of us, should have a gun.

He is a giant, I am told. But not of fixed height. I understand that from time to time there is a nation dwelling inside his mouth, around his teeth.

What are you talking about?

Why, the Abbey of Thélème, Charlton. Can’t you just see the gate? Can’t you just see it? Grace, honor, praise, delight. And one clause to live by, Do what thou wilt. Do what thou wilt.

Dad, you say, Dad, shaking your head, why all this about civil rights? Ranches? Civil rights?

What civil rights? I’m telling you a story. I’m not talking about civil rights. I’m an American; I take my civil rights for granted, just the way I’m supposed to, and then when the government tries to take them away, I go out and buy something, make a purchase, to save the economy, and then I forget about what they’re stealing from me. What I am telling you is a story about Nat Turner and William Styron. This is my way of giving you my history, on this the eve of my visit to the gallows, and much of your understanding of my history, and therefore yours, relies on your acknowledgment that I am a prophet of sorts.

Like Nat Turner.

No, not like Nat Turner. Turner was a slave. Don’t take that from him. Did I ever tell you the way I had you circumcised when you were a baby?

We never got into that.

Well, anyway, I want to reassure you about my health. I’m actually quite well. I was eating with such gusto this morning that I surprised myself. I think I am even up a pound or two. Even with my limited exercise, I seem to have more energy. This is either proof of the value of what little exercise I perform or an argument that exercise at all is purely superfluous. I feel no stiffness or discomfort. My bowels appear quite normal, though I must say I do not look too closely. All this to say, my life goes on the same, monotonously. Even reading is tedious now, words go in one eye and out the other. This is often frustrating because the words land back on the page in the same order that they held before. Remember when I promised to write you a page a day to keep my mind quick and fluid, well, fluid at any rate? Fuck that. I haven’t been doing it. I can’t wait for senility. Bring it on. At least trying to find my way back out of it will give me something to do. By the way, thank you for the chocolates. And, about the current goings-on, if I cared any more than I do, I’d be apathetic.

You’re referring to politics.

Who cares? See what I mean? Why August 1963? Because even though Kennedy didn’t give a shit, because even though his brother allowed the cross-dresser to tap King’s phones, because even though compromise came to mean an under-the-table ass-fuck, somebody cared about something other than money or winning. On the other hand, I never thought I’d see this day.

Dad, you say, Dad.

And I tell you or you remind me that I have told you that nothing irritates me more than when wishful thinking takes the place of sound reason. Remember what I used to say to you when you were a boy, food for thought is no substitute for the real thing. It don’t take a possum in a swamp to figure that one out. And yet my cries are shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools—I could go on, but, lord, why? See what you get for visiting your old man?

At least you’re moderately amusing.

Could a duck swim? I raise my pint to you.

Oh, woe is me? Woe is me. I am practicing my woes. Nat put a hand on Charlton Heston’s shoulder and lowered his head. No, no, no, presently, present tense. Nat lowers his head.

Why the woes? Charlton asks.

The woes are my meal ticket. I am depressed. If only someone would listen. The river sweats oil and tar. Écoute de la presénte partie.

It became apparent to me that I had been undermined by the disease, even then resisting at every turn the employment of that word I hated, perhaps feared, so much,
depression.
I preferred the assignation
neurasthenia,
what William James called Americanitis, for I am so American, to my roots, my Southern, cotton-soiled roots. In fact, I would rather call it
shinkeisuijaku,
the Japanese term for it. Finding names for it would give me something to do on those nights when I felt so weak and lethargic, but lifted somehow by knowledge of my company in the disorder, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. It is sad that there are those who would want to reduce this disease of the formidable intellect to a bout of the blues, as if one might sing his way clear of the darkness that pervades every corridor of one’s dank and dismal castle. Unlike some, I never soared with my malady, but rather, continuing the annoying song metaphor, the music of my days was a treble clef, a mere drone of contrabass and the sickly slow thumbing of a timpani.

You’re quite angry with Bill, aren’t you.

That’s not the point. I ask only that you be mindful in due time of my pain.

Why is that familiar?

Then dived he back into the fire that refines them.

First, imagine a quale that which none more experientially intimate can be conceived.

What is this exactly?

This is the beginning of my ontological argument for the existence of qualia. I like it better than the inverted spectrum argument, don’t you? Hardly different, but it’s prettier. No reason to be locked into any one way of thinking. I think it’s a decent first step toward the establishment of my solipsistic construction of, well, everything.

That would make the rest of us zombies.

More or less.

You’re worried about me. That makes two of us. Have you heard any new ones? I’d love to hear a new one.

I don’t know any new ones.

That’s a shame.

The results from the paternity test arrived in an envelope that seemed so usual. I knew what it was and so did Sylvia. Meg Caro wasn’t there and I wondered if she should be present for the opening of either an opening or a closure. Meg Caro had left a number and had been patient enough to not call in the week that it took the test to be completed. I looked at Sylvia.

What? she said.

Should I call and ask her to come over?

Sylvia had not so much softened to me as she had to the idea that the young woman might have a father. Call her.