Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (14 page)

But on the way back home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him.

There was a rainbow over the hills to the north of campus. Maria Cortez stared at them. Gravity hates me, she said.

Gravity hates all of us, I told her.

I remember when gravity didn’t give me a second thought.

It was just biding time.

I heard that Ramona was fired.

I looked around for Ramona and didn’t see her. I saw Leon standing at the central building. He was wiping down a wheelchair, perhaps of someone who had died. He’d been wiping it for a good thirty minutes, nervously glancing about all the while.

I can’t say I’m sorry to see her go.

The last I’d see of Ramona was when she and Harley were having an argument that tumbled with them into the dining room.

I know it was you, Harley said.

I have to clean Chen’s toilet.

Leon and Cletus don’t have the initiative and I know it’s not Tommy.

I punched in at six just like every other day.

Just admit you’ve been doing stuff on your own.

What do you want to talk about?

I’m done with you.

Me? Me? You think I did it?

You might as well pack up. With that Harley stormed away.

Ramona followed. Billy, it must be Billy.

Who?

The question was whether there was some real value to which all of this, all our naming, thinking, speaking, breathing, wanting, loving, lusting, fearing, worrying, laughing, obsessing, liking, hating, changing, hindering, bringing, facilitating, curbing, retarding, tilting, running, sitting, looking, gazing, staring, listening, learning, ignoring, forgetting, misplacing, framing, distrusting, calling, naming, relinquishing, passing, entrusting, remembering, eating, drinking, sleeping, beating, hurting, contributing, basking, consigning, waking, stirring, losing, winning, drawing, informing, rigging, equipping, falling, disclosing, naming, administering, requiring, mustering, bathing, setting, washing, stalling, disguising, causing, ridding, masking, detailing, indicating, disposing, designating, clumping, breaking, counting, limiting, naming, eclipsing, assuming, flowing, tattling, tempering, flowering, veiling, dispensing, donating, teaching, helping, falsifying, disseminating, hurrying, dodging, naming, working, sullying, providing, succeeding, stonewalling, throwing, kicking, believing, uttering, serving, renouncing, attaining, venting, punching, treading, expanding, diminishing, devoting, hustling, stopping, dealing, allowing, qualifying, vacationing, showing, desiring, yearning, exploring, swearing, hedging, mining, raising, delivering, reneging, modulating, agreeing, betraying, naming, making, singing, whispering, exuding, burying, covering, occasioning, keeping, leaving, impeding, rising, clearing, deferring, sabotaging, executing, racing, balking, naming, stockpiling, sacrificing, distressing, coming, suppressing, slipping, inculpating, jacketing, shouting, lunging, frustrating, circulating, expressing, equivocating, flourishing, rotting, recoiling, repressing, emitting, impressing, collapsing, trusting, naming, thriving, trapping, pitying, depressing, convalescing, proffering, surrendering, renewing, hosting, slanting, stringing, ducking, knowing, deciding, lying, pussyfooting, challenging, doting, adhering, granting, hesitating, bequeathing, questioning, triumphing, obstructing, affecting, blocking, regarding, choking, grasping, delaying, inhibiting, shaping, milling, interfering, negating, reversing, revering, feeling, imploring, dipping, concocting, tergiversating, convincing, cherishing, naming, noticing, impugning, perceiving, camouflaging, arranging, tensing, evoking, sequestering, destroying, filling, sharing, healing, entwining, listing, steaming, petitioning, primping, separating, tainting, decentering, ambushing, refilling, becoming, sidestepping, sensing, emptying, steeling, calculating, identifying, smiting, converting, frolicking, achieving, adoring, refusing, dogging, constructing, clutching, stealing, extolling, quivering, faltering, menacing, imperiling, frothing, testing, abdicating, narrowing, opening, prospecting, directing, misunderstanding, judging, dividing, taking, producing, vacillating, hoping, indulging, tailoring, airing, atoning, sweeping, browbeating, repelling, surfacing, studying, reproducing, visiting, delighting, electing, copying, paralleling, creating, bracing, rattling, biting, reaching, taunting, functioning, obviating, gravitating, naming, turning, wavering, gambling, lapping, nailing, risking, discouraging, placating, divining, discerning, pushing, pulling, timing, preaching, spinning, yanking, processing, deducing, tracking, relying, lighting, preparing, referencing, stroking, understanding, substituting, facing, existing, portraying, moping, idling, furthering, sublimating, warning, hewing, darkening, petting, misdirecting, presiding, forcing, distancing, patting, rationalizing, alienating, elevating, putting, quibbling, caring, repairing, projecting, worshipping, apologizing, sizing, brownnosing, riddling, chancing, deploring, descending, prodding, skirting, orienting, asserting, gesturing, inserting, reducing, deserting, overtaking, righting, grating, echoing, fuming, torturing, insinuating, channeling, discounting, leaking, naming, diving, naming, practicing, deriding, continuing, sorting, laboring, interspersing, nodding, restoring, routing, situating, accounting, tightening, relaxing, doing, telling, occupying, uniting, ribbing, centering, releasing, revisiting, holing, pampering, losing, objecting, starring, appealing, doubling, positing, reviewing, giving, wobbling, referring, viewing, regulating, hooking, extinguishing, burnishing, encouraging, waffling, igniting, iterating, answering, reeling, naming, popping, recapitulating, shilly-shallying, dillydallying, refuting, disputing, blowing, tintinnabulating, conjuring, having, hunkering, rejecting, dithering, extending, undertaking, inhaling, exhaling, teasing, beating, scratching, defining, defaming, fooling, trimming, containing, cutting, nibbling, naming, attending, conforming, abiding, rerouting, lasting, taming, claiming, blaming, shaming, portaging, naming, ticking, kissing, tonguing, presuming, imagining, dreaming, graying, sectioning, lashing, jeopardizing, resting, meaning, testing, concluding, cresting, modeling, dragging, lifting, pickling, naming, inducing, tickling, slashing, licking, sticking, bounding, doubting, leaping, jumping, deeming, punctuating, naming, standing, tasting, spitting, swallowing, thumbing, fingering, naming, lounging, scrounging, hounding, resisting, clapping, waving, besieging, retreating, attacking, relenting, sucking, screwing, fucking, and naming, would lead to.

It was a small stage, but it was our stage, a kind of theater-in-the-round, we endlessly confusing each other with directions left and right and up and down, our backs always to our audience, our terrorists. Our terrorists had no names, no affiliations, would show up on no arrays of radar, and their insignificance in the world spoke grimly to our place in the world, even though the stakes of our performance were high, could not have been higher, and they, the stakes, were certainly not diminished by our temporal and physical proximity to that most supreme of all stakes. The fact that Billy was so old did not, would not, cause us to mourn his death any less, but no one heard us. The same with Dorothea Greene, Clarissa Madden, and Diego Jones. Considering the lost ones, the murdered ones, and the nature of administrative and familial reactions and response, the criteria for our selection became painfully obvious and glaring. We, each of us, subjected to the torment of the Gang of Six, had no one, no children, no friends, no spouses. We had outlived everyone and this was our reward, this was what we had found or what had found us.

Maria Cortez might have been smarter than all of us. Even after her interlude with Sheldon Cohen. She not only reported that her pearl earrings had disappeared one at a time and also her late husband’s pocket watch with the relief image of a horse’s head on the cover, but she told the floor administrator that whoever had done it left, on her dresser surface, three threaded needles.

Harley was hunched down on a pale-blue knee not too far away at the time of Maria’s well-rehearsed and brilliant performance, complete with plenty of hand waving and stammering, ending with the true bit of genius, And the thread didn’t even match any of my clothes. He was attempting or pretending to adjust the lower straps on a patient lift and his lack of reaction betrayed his seething anger. I could read his lips through the back of his square head, Leon, he said, Leon.

I followed as closely as I could or I should I did my best to keep up as Harley took his deliberate, appliance strides across the lawn, toward the central building. I went to the window of the breakroom window and caught the ruler in mid-rail.

Don’t lie to me, you overgrown, misshapen creature, you enormous hog with lips, you gorilla-mitted moron! Don’t you lie to me!

But, boss, I . . . I . . . I ain’t stole nothing without talkin’ it over with you.

Then who’s threading the damn needles!

Not me.

Do I look stupid to you, you hulking heap of hyperthyroidic heft, you bumbling bearish behemoth bedbug!

Hey!

Shut up!

Boss.

Shut up!

You don’t have a brain in your head. It just can’t be you. Somebody’s up to no good around here.

Harley came to the window and peered out. I was plastered back-flat against the wall. It was broad daylight. I was just hoping no one would see me when someone saw me. It was Coco or Cecily or whatever her name was, the lovely night nurse on her way to her shift, and she was strolling across the green in her white clogs, shaking her tiny bottom, the late afternoon sun making her appear alluring, ghostlike. She saw me and she waved, not to or at me, but to Harley, who was calling out and making what he took to be alluring animal sounds and perhaps were. She observed me as clear as the ass on Harley’s face but did not give me up or away or however that goes. Soon she was gone and I slunk off back to my rooms.

There I sat alone and fretted about what retaliatory measures Harley might take. It seemed clear to me that he suspected me and my comrades, but I was not certain of this and decided to not give myself or us away by either acting rashly or seeming nervous or wary. I read. I read Schopenhauer, perhaps as a kind of perverse self-punishment for something, I did not know what, but more for his sheer analysis of will and motivation. My friends and I had not articulated our final move, our finale, so to speak, but it was all too clear to us how everything must go. I turned a page and heard an administrator, oh those administrators, shouting at Harley for leaving open the pharmaceutical cabinet, Yet again! I heard this and smiled to myself and then bored myself into a deep and beautiful sleep by reading Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin.
I dreamed troubled and dysfunctional French dreams about first cousins marrying and about controlling and narcissistic aunt, uncle, father, and mothers and about artists who cannot find their own pathetic and pitiful voices amid the noise of family struggle. I dreamed like that and was glad for it as I was bored into deeper and deeper sleep, lower and lower into the abyss of myself, down into the rooted, fathomless, subaqueous heart of my psychosis, my abstruse, mantic core, where I knew there was something to find, but knew I would never find it.

The moon was in full gloom outside my window while I watched Harley, Leon, and Tommy tear up my rooms. I remained calm, peaceful even, somewhat impressed by my own steadiness. Perhaps if you tell me what you’re looking for.

Shut up, old man, this from Leon, who was markedly annoyed and choleric, he having been reamed and upbraided by his master. Funny how a good upbraiding can bring you down.

But I just sat there, my book in my lap, enjoying the clumsy display of their bodies. They really were stooges. As I watched them, as my fear of them was absorbed and shrunk by my newly realistic perception not so much of them but of myself. I was coming to understand that none of this was about them, none of our plans was meant to address their menace in our world. Our high and counterfeit hopes that we might save others from their evil drifted out my window into the gathering twilight. Our silly games with them had been fun, but just as the world discounted these ruffians, so would we, so did we, as, to a person, we all realized what precisely was at stake. By ridding ourselves of our keepsakes and so-called valuables before the approaching larceny, we had in fact shown ourselves how little anything material, regardless of sentimental and symbolic import, really meant. I was perhaps the last to know it, I being, if not the least bright, the least wise. I believed at that moment that, whether they could articulate it or not, my nonagenarian comrades had known all along just what it was we were doing, saying. Because finally every action is a statement, just as every utterance is an action.

Any of these books worth anything?

Yes, but in a currency you can’t spend.

Here’s a camera, boss. It’s old.

It’s a piece of shit.

Tommy threw the Leica across the room. It hit the wall.