Authors: Percival Everett
“Under the crib,” Boris said. “And pull this blanket over you.”
“Okay,” Davis said.
Thud. Thud. Thud. The footsteps drew nearer.
“And Boris?”
“What?”
Davis kissed Boris on the lips. I watched the man’s eyes glaze over. Then he found himself and said, “Now, get under there and be quiet. Please, be quiet.”
The next step is more complex. It requires skinning the mules or the goats and making the shell of a balloon, which is then filled with hot air and raised to an altitude of some three hundred feet having tethered to it a basket constructed of bones and reeds and straw and chicken feathers and when it’s as high as it’s supposed to be, one shoots at it with a slingshot, trying not to bring it down, but to scare it higher. But who is in the basket to be frightened higher? It is Nobody. Nobody went up in it, there is Nobody in it to be scared, and it will come down with Nobody still in it. And Nobody will go up unless one of us does, however, of course, if I go up alone and someone asks you who is in the basket with me…
The Dura Mater
Dense and inelastic,
fibrous,
lining the inner wall
of my skull,
thick where the headaches
live.
The outer surface
is uneven, fibrillated,
clinging
to the inner veneer,
opposite sutures
there at the base,
the smooth insides.
Four processes
press inward,
into the cavity,
supporting, protecting,
prolonged to the outer skin
where the irrevocable
dreams evaporate.
“What in the world of psychoanalytic shit is going on in here?” Steimmel asked. She was, I believe, intoxicated. Her swaying and the way she held the empty bottle by its neck suggested it. She looked around the room suspiciously. “I know you, Boris. I know you like a book and something is up.” She stared at him. “You’re shaking. Talk, you little beetle!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Steimmel looked over at me. “Of course you don’t. And neither does our pint-sized lexicon over here.” She walked toward me. “I’m going to figure out how you work. Even if I have to literally cut open your head and peek into your brain. Little smart ass. I hate you.”
“Dr. Steimmel, you’re drunk,” Boris said, and none too assertively.
“Oh, you determined this on your own? That’s why you’re the great scientist you are, Boring-is.” She turned her back to me and started back toward Boris. “Your acute powers of observation. Tell me, what hidden clue tipped you off to my condition?”
“Please, Dr. Steimmel.”
“Boris, when I’m done with the little bastard, I’m going to take it upon myself to give you a spine. How does that sound?”
Beneath my crib, Ronald must have moved, because Davis whispered, “Shut up.”
“What did you say?” Steimmel said, turning back to me. Then she stopped. “You said something. Did you hear him, Boris?”
“No, Dr. Steimmel.”
“Well, I did. I heard him as plain as day. As plain as the nose on your face. As plain as that Davis-monkey-woman-doctor.” Steimmel laughed and approached me. “Say something else, tiny wonder.”
You’re mistaken. I said nothing.
She read the note, none too easily, holding it this distance and that, attempting to focus. Behind her, Boris looked about, ready to bolt. I could see that my note was of concern to him.
“You did, too,” Steimmel snapped at me. “You’ve been holding back.” Something inside her made a sudden attack and she fought to swallow. “Boris,” she said, “I’m going to my cottage to be sick. When I get back, be ready to get to work.” Then she staggered out.
Boris closed the door, locked it, and leaned against it. “You can come out,” he said.
Davis and Ronald reappeared. “She’s a lunatic,” Davis said.
Ronald was signing like crazy, but nobody was looking at him.
“I’ve gone along with this for too long,” Boris said. “I’ve got to get this child back to his parents.”
“Let’s calm down a little bit here,” Davis said.
“Are you kidding? Dr. Steimmel might just cut open that baby’s head. She’s that crazy.”
“Okay, okay, okay. I’ll help you. Tonight, you meet me in the parking lot with the kid. I’ll go pack up. All right?” Davis was bobbing and weaving, trying to catch Boris’s eyes.
“I don’t know, Dr. Davis.”
Davis stepped close to Boris and planted another kiss on his lips. “You know, darling.”
I thought Boris would faint. “I’ll be there.”
“At nine.”
Boris nodded.
I wanted to know things, though I was at a loss to say why. Perhaps because boredom was a constantly threatening, lurking enemy, though when it caught me, and it often did, it was hardly as fascinating an attack as might have come from a different enemy. It was boring. I tried to find the malevolence, the brutality, even the malignancy of it a curiosity, something at least to measure, but it was only and simply boring. And so, the enemy was the worse enemy, not even threatening harm, only attack. The anxiety produced by my anticipation of its onset was dreadful, and so the two accompanying enemies, anticipation and anxiety, were in their way worse, for they were present at all times the boredom was not. Books helped, but I was so voracious and ravenous a reader that I was hard-pressed to stay ahead of the beast. On occasion I would latch onto an idea that was all consuming, but the anxiety that the absorption would pass detracted from the full pleasure of the experience. Finally, I was a sad baby, frequently amused, often pleasantly puzzled, and intensely arrested by subjects, but sad, beaten-down by my own demons.
My mother was driven by a fear that there was something in her to be expressed that might not get out. She was not so much afraid that the thing yet to be expressed would fester and corrode within her if it remained. She was afraid she would be cheating herself, as well as that thing, that she would be cheating me by teaching me by example that there was nothing beyond the material world. Mo was noble in that way.
My father, on the other hand, though not without talent, and in spite of my ridicule, not without intellect, was afraid of not appearing as a figure on the
cutting edge.
Ideas were only marginally of interest, his primary need being community. And for whatever reason, he needed to be an elected official of that community, whether mayor or dog catcher. He claimed loyalty to the working class, but hated his roots so much that he could hardly conceal his disdain for blue-collar tastes and the manifestations of its values. He feared that he was to the intelligensia what a successful fast-food-franchise owner was to “old” money. He was sick with this, the disease being insidious and pernicious, and it was worse than my boredom because it was so absorbed with outward appearances.
Eve sat in front of a small canvas. She did not like working small. She felt confined, contained. She wanted to cry and so held her hands in tight fists on her thighs. She refused to cry, refused to leave the work alone. She picked up a large brush and covered the panel with ebony black, laid it thick and with abandon, then just sat there looking at it. There was no expression at all, save for her anger at not being able to create anything on that surface. She laughed. She considered covering all the canvases with black, obliterating everything because of her weakness, because of her lack of talent.
Douglas walked into the studio. “What do you say we go out and find some dinner?” he asked. He went and stood behind her, observed the canvas. “Hey, you’re up to something here, aren’t you?”
It goes without saying.
Steimmel must have returned to her room and fallen asleep or passed out or slipped and hit her self-perceived oversized head on a counter, because she never returned that afternoon. Boris pulled together his things and the few articles of clothing he and Steimmel had bought for me and several books to keep me busy. He then carried me out to the parking lot where we waited in the shadows. It was raining and we were being soaked.
Then across the way, dressed in a trench coat was Davis, looking like La Berma. The monkey was at her side and they were both looking this way and that, no doubt for us. Boris whistled to them, but the rain swallowed his noise. He looked back in the direction of Steimmel’s cottage and blew out a troubled breath. He put me down next to a piece of ornate statuary and told me wait there.
But I didn’t wait. I did what toddlers do, what I had been waiting to do. I walked away. I walked toward the lights of cottages that were not mine or Steimmel’s. My legs were strong and I was quick and before they knew it, I was out of sight, slipping along a wet gravel path and then onto a deck and through an ajar, banging-in-the-wind gate. I was too short to open any doors and too short to see through any windows. I sat under the awning of a doorway and tried to get dry. I could hear Boris and Davis calling out to me, trying not to be heard by anyone else. I wondered if apes had keen noses like dogs I had read about.
It was and is said of Byron that he was a genius, this in spite of shabby and substandard verse steeped in obvious sentiment and often garish, pretentious, and tawdry. I was a baby, as were you all, and even I not only saw through the transparent attempt at artificial elevation of self and experience, but also the insipid and childish need (I was an expert) for attention. There was no struggle for Byron, once finally free of his torturing mother and nestled within the walls of Newstead, save for the grinding self-pity over his limp and his self-knowledge of his intellectual limitations.
7
Byron would have had me believe in his time that he was ferocious, but his timidity was not so well hidden. He was not so much a cerebral storm in love with elemental sin as he was as pathetic and artless as Rousseau in his quest for simple virtue. Genius, I assume, does not recognize itself, having better things to do. At an age when parents are so quick to attribute genius to any number of pathetically simple accomplishments, I knew that I was no genius. I knew that mere acceleration held in it no truly remarkable merit. I had a headstart, only that, and like any headstart, it would be negated in the middle or at the end. What genius, I guessed then and know now, allows is the start of a new race. Genius means finding a way back to the beginning where the truths are uncorrupted and honest and maybe even pure.
The downpour diminished to a drizzle and I could hear the movements and voices of Boris and Davis more clearly. There was fear, genuine fear in Boris’s voice and for a second I considered that he might actually be concerned about my welfare. I didn’t know where I was going, but it was not back to the dissection table. And that’s what Davis had in mind for me. She had seduced Boris, but not me. In fact, she hadn’t even attempted to win me over, but had treated me like the object I no doubt was. I kept ahead of their voices and found myself again in the shadows of the parking lot. I walked through the lot toward the circular drive in front of the main lodge. Then a dark sedan came to a sliding, gravel-throwing stop beside me. The headlights must have been off because I had not seen it approach. When the doors opened the interior lights blinded me, but I heard men’s voices.
“Just grab him and let’s go,” one said.
And indeed I was grabbed and hoisted into the air and into the car.
“How do we know he’s the right kid?”
“He’s the right kid.”
My world, for all my stealth and quick movements, was getting smaller and I could see no light at the end of the funnel. The familar movement of the car upset my stomach as I was loose in the backseat and the discomfort was aggravated by whatever colognes the two men were mingling with their body odor and the smoke of their cigar and cigarette. All I could really see of their faces was behind the hot points of their smoking.
I threw up.
Brutum fulmen.
“Hey, he heaved all over the seat,” the passenger-seat man said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said the driver.
“It stinks.”
How could he know?
1
. Contact with which had become decidedly more limited before my abduction, especially the case after Mo came to realize that I was not a simple-minded, milk-sucking, defecation machine.
2
. What I saw as rather obvious symptoms of what the Kiernans would have called madness seemed to be lost on the others at the table. Leaving me to wonder what, in any case, irony actually signaled, doubt or certainty. And the more I looked at them, the stranger they became and likewise the more painfully, obviously bland and predictable. I imagined the two of them driving around Duluth in the middle of February, dizzied by their shared lunacy, picking up alcoholics from tavern parking lots, and dumping them into the waters of Lake Superior.
3
.
From Thomas Moore’s “The Fire -Worshippers”:
Oh! ever thus from childhood’s hour,
I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay;
I never lov’d a tree or flower,
But ‘twas the first to fade away.
I never nurs’d a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die!
4
. To say, “I do not care” requires an effort that truly being without concern would not generate. If John does not care that you have scratched his new car with your rusty nail, then he will drive away without a word. My apathy is to your apathy what our present notion of atheism is to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ notion of atheism.
5
. I wondered what would make a good name for a monkey. Especially since Steimmel did not even know the monkey. And so I wondered about my name and then names in general. I understood that my name was Ralph and that Ralph was my name and that there other people out in the world, dead and alive, who also answered to Ralph. Was it the case that my name
Ralph
was not the name of Mr. Bunch or Mr. Nader, but my own special
Ralph
, just as the
ball
of tennis was not the
ball
of Cinderella? Was the
Ralph
that all three of us shared a kind of ideal
Ralph
, Ralphness perhaps, a kind of denotation while my private
Ralph
was just a connotative manifestion of
Ralph?
Certainly by naming me Ralph, my parents had done something very significant. They had indeed
named
me, but what else had been done to me by my having been
named
Ralph? What did it mean for me to be Ralph, or a Ralph, or a Ralph against my will or by choice? Was I necessarily
Ralph
or only contingently
Ralph?
Would I have been me had my parents named me Kong or Bobo? And I suppose that if I changed my name to Bobo that upon finding me years later, my parents would say, “Yes, it is Ralph. See, there’s the birthmark on his tush.” And after I made it known to them that my name was Bobo, they would say, “Oh, no. You’re Ralph, all right. We’d know you anywhere.”
6
. “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle.’ No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at
his
beetle—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing—But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in people’s language?—If so, it would not be used as the name of that thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language game at all; not even as a
something:
for the box might be empty—No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.” (Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations
, no. 293) I pondered this as I stood on the designation that was my mattress, but realized that the object of that designation was irrelevant, and that mattress was not even the name of that thing. But what did I know of grammatical rules and language games, my having come to language without actually learning it? It was there in front of me and the thing I called language was not a thing at all, except when Steimmel wanted to know how it worked or when Ronald the ape tried to sign a covert message to me. I was in fact the beetle in the box.
“Why about
you!”
Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands together triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
7
. But perhaps Byron was great, like Napoleon (of his time and one of his idols), like Christ (like Byron, the Satanist, great by repetition of claim, or at least by privilege of birth), like Hitler (made so by violence and the stupidity of masses), but none were geniuses.