Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (18 page)

I slept with him, she said.

Sleeping was not such a bad thing, I thought. Not much happens when asleep, but I of course understood and supplied the response she no doubt expected, wanted, and needed. I said, What the fuck?

Despite my education, profession, and disposition, that was all I could come up with. I was disappointed, but only as a means to feel something other than hurt, fear, shame, and any number of ugly and unflattering things. I recognized, even then, in my tarantella of overanalysis, that I had made the whole matter about me and at once was ignoring and acknowledging why she might have seen fit to
sleep
with someone else in the first place. So I said, I’m sorry.

And with that you stole away my mother’s moment. She went rigid, froze in the headlights of your apparent, seeming understanding. Your self-absorbed act of compassion, your unthinking gesture of solicitude, left her without a portal to reasonable outrage, indignation, or guilt. I’m sorry, you said.

I sat on the stairs, that standard cliché sitting place for a child listening to a parental argument. Even at thirteen I understood that you had usurped her power, taken away her position of hurter and abandoned your part as victim. Yet you managed to maintain the dance of being victimized while reducing her action to a mere response to your influence on her life. It was swift, deft, and finally cruel. And the worst of it was that you seemed oblivious to your own diabolical genius, but then I knew you couldn’t be unaware or incognizant, believed that you were too smart to not see what you were doing. Knowing that you were not evil, I came to believe that you were deluded. You’d convinced yourself that you were behaving nobly, showing kindness of a sort, acting magnanimously.

She had delivered her news to you in the morning. The sun had etched grooves of daylight through the window and across the wide-boarded wooden floor of the farmhouse kitchen. She turned her back to you and let the light strike her front.

Surely, you have something to say, you said.

That was when she spied me, still in my cotton pajamas, perched on the stairs. She spoke to you without taking her never-morebeautiful eyes from me. It won’t happen again, she said.

Then you saw me and no doubt you saw in my eyes my anger with you and you tried to make the necessary shift, tried to return her to her rightful role in the play. You began to cry.

She turned to you and held you while you sat at the kitchen table. She comforted you and while she did I caught you peeking to see if I was still there, then you returned quickly to your business, surprised to have found me. Watching you cry for her restored my faith in you, made me smarter. I knew that you were really hurt by what she had told you, but I also knew that hurt you displayed was completely artificial, manufactured for her and maybe just a little for me.

For you, by me, or for me, by you. The water is high and the mountain is blue. The children are screaming there’s nothing to do while the rain falls on many, but not on the few. I’m lightly sautéed with butter and thyme, turned over twice but never in time. The flame that you cook on is blue at its core. It’s hot, yes, it’s hot, but it will burn me no more. I’m there then I’m here. I’m near then I’m far. It’s too far for our legs; it’s too near for the car. The hills are too flat and the plains are too steep; the water’s too hard and the rocks are too deep. You loved me on Monday and on Wednesday again and up in the mountains but not on the fen.

Cucumber, I. Twitch a finger here. Twitch a finger there. Fuck with them any way you can. I’m dead, but they don’t know it. Forget the adage let sleeping dogs lie. How about we let dead men die?

You hold my hand.

I hold your hand.

I write this for you.

If I wrote, this would be it.

If you wrote.

Yes.

I will always be here.

And I.

I’m dead, son.

I know that, Dad. But I didn’t know you knew it.

PERCIVAL EVERETT
is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of more than twenty books, including
Assumption, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, The Water Cure, Wounded, Erasure,
and
Glyph.