Authors: Percival Everett
Steimmel again subjected me to the same simple-minded puzzles she had put before me the first time. I put blocks into holes and just to amuse her, I put a square peg into a round hole. We played the memory game and I wrote out for her a string of two hundred thirty-five rapidly spoken words, phrases, and equations.
But still I could not completely control my waste functions. Boris did set me on the toilet periodically, but he would wait at the door instead of leaving me alone. Perhaps he thought I would fall in and drown. At any rate, probably indulgently, I blamed him for my slow progress. Finally, I did what I should have done in the first place, which was to write him a note asking for a little privacy. He complied and with a copy of
The Morphology of Meaning for Retarded Children
on my lap, I learned to do my do.
But back to Steimmel. She subjected me to the Kaufman Assessment Battery, measured me by the McCarthy scales of children’s abilities, the Wechsler scale of intelligence, the Stanford-Binet scale, testing my pictorial memory, my fluency, my ability to draw analogies, my ability to wind through mazes, my concept of geometric design, and in every case I scored either off the charts or as a complete moron. Steimmel, like my parents, was irritated by my refusal to speak. She examined my throat and checked my reflexes with her little hammer. She tried to startle me, hoping to cause me to blurt out something, but I didn’t. I was only immediately amused that her treatment was not so unlike that of the Kiernans. She pinched me, trying to make me cry out, but only left a silent bruise, which Boris yelled at her about. She tried to measure how quickly I read and how much I was capable of understanding. She tried to engage me in conversation, but was finally too impatient to await my written responses. She was convinced that I was terribly strange, terribly bright, out of control, a freak of nature, and she had no idea how it was I knew how to use language. Her chain-smoking got worse. She took to drink. She either slept all day or not at all. She asked me if I knew the devil. She asked me if I had ever seen god. She asked me if there was a god. She asked what I hoped to achieve by doing so many knee bends while she spoke to me. She told me she was lucky to have found me, that I was lucky she had found me, that she hated me, that she would lock me in a room with Ronald the chimp if I didn’t cooperate.
“What’s the first word you remember?” she asked. She had me lying on a little sofa while she sat beside me, her legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from the tips of her fingers.
I don’t recall.
“Did your parents talk to you a lot when you were first born?”
Not really. They talked to each other.
“Did you resent that?”
No.
“What would you call your first word?”
I don’t understand the question.
Steimmel looked away and out the window. “There must be something you remember hearing. Even if it wasn’t the first word. What was the first word you can remember making an impression on you?”
I don’t recall.
“Think!”
I thought. I thought to say milk or nipple just to pacify her, but either would have been false.
Iconicity.
“You’re pulling my fucking leg.”
Signification?
She stared at me and blew a smoke ring.
Paralanguage?
“Boris!” she called out.
Proxemics
Boris appeared in the doorway.
“Take this…this thing back to his
crib.
”
conceptio
confirmatio
connotatio
codex vivus
ARISTOPHANES: All war is unnecessary and finally ruinous for all parties, but yet I find that the notion of sincere reconciliation doesn’t appear as an option for humans, or for politicians either.
ELLISON: Perhaps. But the condition you call war is often the condition of life for many. We have in our time a musician who clowns before kings and queens, wipes down his sweating brow with a rag between creating the sweetest music with the same lips and breath that make a graveled growl of a voice. He is at war. Necessarily and perhaps forever. And his weapon is irony. The enemy loves what he does, but when they imitate him, try to make it themselves, they hate him because, not only do they fail to recreate his music, but they are terrified of becoming the one they mimic.
ARISTOPHANES: But why would anyone even be afraid of becoming the one who makes such fine music as you describe?
ELLISON: The surface answer is because of the color of his skin.
ARISTOPHANES: The color of his skin? I do not understand your time. Was he an odd color that spread like disease to those around him?
ELLISON: No. Finally, I think it must be because of the power of his art. His music, what we hope for words, strips away the illusory veil covering our culture, and leaves the world a painfully clear reality. The practice is beautiful, the vision often is not.
ARISTOPHANES: Back to his color. Is he a color other people are not?
ELLISON: No, there are many people who share his color and they are hated, too. But it has nothing to do with color. Don’t you see? The color is an excuse. It could be his god or his smell or his ideas. It could even be that he is an infant. Finally, it’s because living, for him and people like him, has become an art, just waking up and getting out of bed is an act of creation. This scares all the people of my time, even the ones who make the art.
ARISTOPHANES: Art has always scared people. Art always will. And it will always scare those of us who make it the most. I suppose I know why. Our intelligence, our reason, our dialectic comes, perhaps, from the gods, but art, art comes from us without doubt. The artist is self-elected and so there is no pity, no excuse, only blame. And, of course, people are more afraid of infants than anything else.
ELLISON: Of course, that’s true.
Everyone knew that I was the kidnapped baby from Los Angeles, but as Steimmel had pointed out to Boris, their crimes, though perhaps not as grave, were serious enough, and none of them had any interest in turning in Steimmel. Least of all, Jelloffe. His business hinged on complete confidentiality and his crimes, cumulatively, were no doubt the greatest. What he had condoned and so conveniently overlooked made him at least an accomplice after the fact.
Steimmel was becoming more nervous and crazier by the day, not because she feared what I have already stated was so unlikely, namely being given up to the police, but because she didn’t know how to proceed with her dissection of me. My answers to her questions, though frequently truthful, were proving unhelpful, and so she resorted to performing the same tests on me, once more, over and over again with results so varied that she even once broke down and fell to her knees crying. Boris and I watched her descent together and, as my reading had suggested, such mutual witnessing caused us to become close. Perhaps not quite friends, but more like two sailors, one from the galley and the other from the engine room, awaiting rescue while clinging to the same floating deck chair.
It was not a few times that I saw the face of Davis pressed up against the window of my room. I don’t how much she was able to see or how much she could have inferred if she had seen everything. She saw me doing my exercises and she saw me reading through one or another of the many books Boris had been bringing me from the institute’s rather nicely endowed library, but for all I knew she was aware only of my ability to turn a page. Perhaps, finally, that’s all I really did, having assumed that condition which was far too familiar, intense boredom. At least, at home I was sometimes amused by Inflato’s posturing and lack of self-consciousness about it, but Steimmel was the same, same, same every day, every hour. I hesistated to call her predictable, because that would have implied the possibility of something different. She was like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics. So, Davis’s face, and her ape’s, were actually somewhat welcomed. Finally, when it was clear that I was in the room alone or that Boris was sound asleep on his cot, Davis would tap on the panes and wave to me. And she would have Ronald wave, too. I just stared at them, realizing that perhaps the muscles of my baby face didn’t allow the range of expression I would have liked.
Boris sat at the desk, either making notes or playing crosses and naughts with himself. He was bored, the symptoms were unmistakable: listless sighing, absent scratching at the back of the head, overstated widening of the eyes as if to keep them open. It had been two weeks since our arrival and, though the communal meals had proven wooden, tedious, vapid, and stultifying, I, and apparently Boris as well, missed them, since Steimmel had decided that we shouldn’t attend because it was likely someone might figure out my real secret. Boris might even have been asleep and his hand working without him at the desk, because when a knock sounded at the door he nearly popped from his skin, then looked at the pencil in his hand as if to wonder what it was doing there. The knock came again. Boris went to the door and listened.
“Dr. Steimmel?” he said, softly.
“No, it’s me, Dr. Davis.”
Boris looked over at me and then put his ear back to the door. “Dr. Steimmel isn’t here.”
“I came to see you.”
Boris cleared his throat and grimaced. “Dr. Steimmel isn’t here and you really should go away.”
“Come on, let me in,” Davis said. “I’ve brought you a little something. And something for the little boy as well.”
Boris looked again at me, then wiped his hands on his trousers. “I’m going to open the door, but I’m telling you, you’ve got to get out of here before Dr. Steimmel gets back.” He opened the door and stood in the middle of the opening.
“Did I wake you?”
“Oh, no.” Boris smoothed his hair back with a hand. “I was just sitting and thinking.” He looked down and stared at Ronald. Davis was holding the chimp’s hand. “Hi, Ronald.”
“Wave to Boris, Ronald.”
Ronald was as subdued as I had ever seen him, but he did wave, then nonchalantly took in the rest of the room.
“Well, aren’t you going to let us in?” Davis asked.
“No.”
“Come on, Boris. You know, I’m all right. Besides, how can I give you your surprise if you don’t let me in?”
“Well, okay. But really, make it quick. If Steimmel finds you here, she’ll kill me, or worse.”
“What could be worse than death?” Davis asked.
Boris just laughed.
“Where is Dr. Steimmel?” She was in the room now, her eyes darting the way they did.
“I don’t know. Asleep, maybe. She hasn’t been in all day. She’s depressed.” Then Boris shut up as if he’d said too much.
“She’s kind of nervous.”
Boris nodded, staring at Davis.
“Oh, your surprise,” she said. She dug down into her large straw bag and came up with a small, wrapped box. “It’s not much, but I thought you’d like it.” She handed it to him.
Boris was visibly moved, perhaps his hands were even shaking a little. “It’s even wrapped. Thank you.”
“Go ahead, open it.”
Boris opened the box and though I strained my baby eyes there at the rail of my cage, I could not see what it was, but whatever it was made Boris blush. He squeezed out an awkward smile and didn’t quite look at Davis directly. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it.”
6
Boris closed the box and put the thing into his pocket. “You really shouldn’t have.” He smiled, directly at her this time. “You said you had something for Ralph.”
“Yes.” Back into her bag and she produced a banana, its yellow skin now nearly all brown. “I thought the little fellow might like some fresh fruit. Since you haven’t been in to meals lately.”
“Well, we’ve got plenty of food in here, but thanks. Ralph loves bananas.” Boris flashed a nervous glance my way. His expression moved toward panic as he saw me scribbling on my pad. “You’ll have to go now,” he said, trying to turn Davis around.
But the woman let go of the chimpanzee’s hand and the animal took off across the room. “Ronald, you come back here,” she said. “You come back here right now. I’m sorry”
“Well, just get him fast.”
Davis walked toward the ape, not looking at him but at everything else. “Come on, Ronald.” Ronald signed something at her. “Not funny, Ronald. Now be a good chimp and let’s go back to our cottage.”
Ronald dragged his knuckles toward my cage. I must admit that I found his size and evident strength somewhat intimidating. Still, though, I learned much as I observed the way the animal used leverage to move his body about. Ronald slammed shut the top of my cage and I fell to my butt on the mattress.
“Hey, that’s a cage,” Davis said.
“Not really,” Boris said. “Well, it is, but it isn’t. We couldn’t find a crib.”
Davis was next to me now, looking all around me, but not so much at me.
Boris was pulling her arm. “I think I hear Dr. Steimmel coming.”
“What’s this?” Davis asked, picking up my notepad.
“Some of Dr. Steimmel’s notes,” Boris said.
“I don’t think so,” Davis said. “This note says, ‘Boris, I like bananas as much as you like Steimmel.’ Did he write that?”
“Of course not.”
“Boris, he had to write it.” She stepped back and stared at me. “Oh, my god. Oh, my god.”
Hit cin rinny, rainy woony for jest su lung
end din ye laugh tew sewim.
Eat does ant reely mater ow! fest hit flews,
eeks wair zey pit ye end.
Steimmel was large by my estimation, hardly a giant, but her feet sounded as if they weighed hundreds of pounds each as we all heard her approach along the wooden walk.
“Oh, my god!” Davis said, but for a different reason, still staring at me.
“Hide!” Boris shouted in a whisper. “Hide someplace.”
Even Ronald seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, his monkey feet pitty-patting in place while his mother tried to figure out what they were going to do.