Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (3 page)

No, I gave him a bit of feel-good, so he’ll be all right for a while. You could come out and check on him a couple of times throughout the night, make sure he’s still standing.

And if he’s not?

Call me, I guess.

I nodded. Eight fifteen.

Have some coffee made, she said.

Okay, Doc. I saw her to her truck and watched her fishtail away along the muddy track.

The muddy track. Are these stories, any stories, your stories, mere neurotic repetition, perhaps a function of the resistances discovered or exposed through the transference space? The madman on the playground? Histories converge as serendipitous overlap, a pamphlet and a book, a folk song and a speech from a fascist ruler? You all know well, it will begin, suggesting how reluctant I am to speak and all of it will sound frightfully familiar, as I cite a hundred cases of being wronged, of being slighted, hundreds of instances where we were taken for granted and merely taken and I will speak to you of the power of our solidarity and our steadfastness and of our polished and pointy bayonets at the ready, repeating my lie, our lies, over and over and over until they are true, as true as anything can be.

And why are we here?

Having bones to pick is not the same as picking over bones. Son, have you ever had sex with someone you don’t love?

I’m afraid I have.

Good answer.

in point of fact

some things start in very odd places, like tertiary mud, instead of the primordial kind, like the middles of charred and discarded 23 bodies, not necessarily bodies that once lived, but that’s where you went, isn’t it, read here a question mark, isn’t it, and the peninsula on which we hide is pocked with craters from the bombing or should be, if we weren’t so safe in our cozy pajamas and fuzzy slippers, with our bowls of green grapes and fruit candies, very odd places indeed, and there’s my first teacher over there, she’s waving, beaming, strolling backward toward the sea, but dead, dead, dead because things don’t go on forever, things go on for thirty-eight years, eight months, a week and three days and then it’s something else, an interest in dinosaur skulls or in monkeys or Thomas Paine and time to light new fires and if any of the others have seen my fire, they haven’t tried to approach it and I would know because all I’m doing is sitting here watching, letting my beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and dungaree pants and a dungaree hat, hell, I’m just dung, in dung, overdung, sitting here watching the animals go by, the badgers and wolves, the ants and gulls, the capercaillie and the tarantula hawks, the peregrine falcons and the marmots all parading to the whining music of bagpipes, if you can call that music, all parading in a circle to help me wait for the end of the next thirty-eight-year-eight-month-one-week-and-three-day cycle and the rest of them can sit cross-legged on a hillside eating bread and link sausages for all I care, but the cycle is the cycle and nobody can stop it, not even you, not even I

in point of fact

Back in the house, I tried to get dry. I kicked off my boots and peeled off my wet socks in the mudroom. I stepped into the kitchen and dried my head with a dish towel. I switched on the radio, listened to some pitiful pleas for donations, and then killed the sound. My house was stone quiet. The drone of rain on the roof made it feel even more like a tomb. The spaces that had been filled by my wife before she left were still there. Sight of her was gone. Her sounds and smells were gone. But her spaces, where she’d lean against a doorjamb, her end of the sofa, her bathroom sink. She’d left me and that was fine. It seemed clear that we had run our course. I’d have left her months earlier, I just didn’t have the sense or maybe the guts to leave. What I hadn’t anticipated was the loneliness, that I would be so affected by the quiet. I wasn’t as tough I’d thought, but then who is? I never quite cried in the shower, but I thought about it, and perhaps that’s the same thing.

As I brushed my teeth I considered again the horse’s nasty wound. My thinking covered the same terrain. An intentional shot from a deadly weapon? An errant bullet of someone shooting at a ground squirrel on a fence post? Neither thought was comforting. The rain let up a bit. I sat up in bed and opened the novel I’d been trying to 25 plow through, reading having become my new attempt at dealing with the repetitive, empty nights.

The following morning the rain had eased up only slightly. A shift in the wind brought colder air and the effect was basically miserable. I was in my boots and jacket waiting at the back door when Laura rolled up and stopped near the foaling shed. I stepped out into the yard and met her at the back of her truck, where she pulled open a cabinet and grabbed a vial and a couple of syringes.

I looked at the sky, at the expanse of gray. Very far to the west there was a bit of bright blue. So, we’re going through with this, I said.

She regarded the rain and sky as well. I’m here anyway.

That you are.

She followed me through the shed and to the barn, where the gelding was still standing, in spite of my failure to come out in the middle of the night to check on him. While she prepared the shot I attached a lead rope to the halter, rubbed the horse’s nose, talked to him.

All right now, buddy, she said to the horse. This is going to make you pretty stupid, and then we’ll fix you up. She administered the injection. That should have him drooping in thirty or forty minutes. She looked at her watch and then at me. You got that coffee?

Some breakfast, too?

I never turn down a meal.

Oatmeal? I asked.

Wow.

Unless you’d prefer bacon and eggs.

I think I might, she said.

We walked back past Laura’s pickup truck and into the house. I used the bootjack to slip out of my Wellingtons. She sat on the bench seat in the mudroom to unlace her paddock boots.

You don’t have to take them off, I said.

Sure I do, she said.

Help yourself to some coffee, I said. Mugs are in that cabinet.

Thanks.

I dropped a skillet onto the stove and switched on the burner, then opened the refrigerator and grabbed the eggs and bacon. I laid the strips of bacon out in the pan. You like your bacon crispy?

You bet. She sat at the table.

I’ll try. I was used to the kitchen, to cooking, but I was wasn’t used to someone watching me and so I not only felt clumsy, I was clumsy. Each strip of bacon I put down into the pan I had to straighten out with the fork and my fingers.

I got left, too, Laura said.

What’s that?

My husband left me. At least I think he did. I’m never at home long enough to know.

Sorry.

He said I worked too much. Why’d your wife leave?

I was at once horrified and refreshed by the woman’s candor and apparent disregard for decorum. The oldest story, I said. Another man. Richer, better looking. I flipped the bacon.

She nodded. Sounds rough.

I suppose. But it’s better now, you know? She wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. Best to get happy.

That’s very Zen of you.

Strictly speaking and I love to speak strictly, there are no utterances in the world but only sentences, cut off from the actual world by their beginnings and their periods, question marks, or nothing but the fact that they end, cut off even from any real exchange between so-called speakers. Very Zen of me, indeed, in deed. Stay with me, son, there is no moral to this tale.

I laughed. I was pretty angry and broken up at first, for a while. But you get better.

Laura sipped her coffee. Funny.

What?

The two of us. Both of us left.

Yep, I said, not sure why it was funny but somehow understanding. I pulled the bacon from the pan and laid the strips on some folded paper towels.

Listen, she said.

I paused, just about to crack an egg.

It’s stopped raining.

I looked out the window and saw the sun was trying to break through. How about that.

Not bad.

How would you like your eggs? I asked.

Scrambled.

Pausing at this word, as you knew I would, must. A story Gricetold. To make some distinction between the standard utterance and its conversational implicatures is at best folly, at most malicious. I have looked through diaper after diaper for some standard utterance and all I have found is shit.

That’s easy enough. I cracked four brown eggs into the skillet and stirred them up.

I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable.

You have, but I think it’s okay. I don’t need much help lately to feel uncomfortable. This kind of uncomfortable is probably a good thing. What do you think?

She nodded.

We ate without saying much else. She asked me about my horses and I asked her about her practice. We talked about the increasing amount of traffic and about how rarely we made the drive all the way into Los Angeles.

All this concern about the evenness of things, the weight cast forward or back, to this side or that, the flow, the wash, the balance. Alluvial patterns etched into the cheeks of old people, really old people. Now that’s an appetizing image, wouldn’t you say? Channels for what? I want to know. Tears? Traffic? Wisdom? The uncontrolled, incontinent plastic buckets of stale piss that I seem to have stored up in myself for the past seven decades; because no one apparently ever completely empties his bladder?

She looked at her watch. He ought to be feeling pretty silly by now.

Let’s do it.

This shouldn’t take long, but it won’t be pretty.

As we walked back across the yard I looked up at the broken clouds. We stopped at her truck and she collected her equipment. The sun was doing little to make the day warmer, but it was good to see the end of the rain. We found the horse with his head hanging low and his eyes glassy.

Oh, yeah, she said.

I held the lead rope, though I probably didn’t have to. She pulled a little battery-run razor from her pocket and shaved the hair away from the wound. She then washed his neck with a Betadine solution. She probed into the wound with a long forceps and came out empty.

It’s in there, but I can’t find it, she said. I’m going to have to cut him. She made a vertical incision across the bloody hole, and the horse neck spread open as if being unzipped. There was less blood than I expected, but his meat lay pink and exposed. She found the slug. There it is. What do you say? She held it up for me to see at the end of the forceps. A twenty-two?

I shrugged. I wouldn’t be able to tell.

Me neither, she said. She irrigated the gash, the stood back to look at it. She began to pack up.

Aren’t you going to sew him up? I asked.

No, let’s leave him open. Irrigate it the next couple of days with the Betadine, but not too much. Let it granulate over. It’ll be ugly for a while. But he will heal up right nice.

Healing up right nice would be a good thing, don’t you think, son? Or should I have you think that I think it so, your old man? Your old man posing as you in a voice that is at once yours and at once mine and at once neither? Your hands are my hands are my wands are your magic. And where is Meg Caro? Where is my daughter that I never knew I had?

Thanks. What do I owe you?

I’ll tell you at the truck.

I can’t believe somebody shot him, I said.

Hey, would you like to have dinner sometime? she asked.

I laughed. Yes, I think so.

You look at me. Why the ranch life?

Why the ranch world, Dad?

And to me he says, Why not?

The ranches are not mine, he says, the ranches are not mine.

But they would be, I tell him. In a different world and time. Imagine the horses. Imagine the landscape. Imagine Murphy. Be Murphy. For one extended breath, be Murphy. Or let me.

Why the ranch world, Dad? For now, you say, for now.

But first:

There are no realities that are more real than others, only more privileged. Often the presence of my own body comes back to me like a sort of electric thrill. I would say that my spine is tingled, though that is a feeling I have always sought after, never achieved, but sought after. Who knows, perhaps I have felt the tingling spine and was just too distracted, oddly self-absorbed (how self-absorbed must one be to forget one’s self ?), or simply too stupid to recognize it. I had a friend once who so immersed himself in the study of quantum field and string theories that he might as well have hanged himself. He would talk endlessly about particles absorbing this or that and things spinning this way or that way, of polarizations and 31 symmetries, of photons and fermions and space-time and curvatures, that he failed to realize that his wife was fucking everybody in town and taking what money he had. I think her final words to him were, Polarize this well-defined spin, you stupid fuck. Anyway, as much as I felt bad for him, I could muster little sympathy, a bit of pity, but little sympathy. What did you expect to learn from your gauge bosons and circular polarizations and your vector particles? I asked him. If you had paid a bit more attention to her dilation and your angular momentum and your transverse polarization, she might still be lying under your worldsheet. Then I added, because it’s too late for renormalization now, You stupid fuck, for punctuation and my enjoyment. So it goes with those of us who think there is something to know of the so-called real world. Not to be anti-intellectual, but my knowing that a photon might look like a long strand that stretches with time direction with an angle toward some other direction will not help me avoid the oncoming bus, especially if that bus happens to have agency, like my friend’s wife, who by the way I was told was terrific in bed.

I had another friend who was so certain that the only way he could identify himself was through language and further by losing himself as object within language that he lost his mind, possibly within language as well, but I never knew what the hell he was talking about. I asked him once why he needed to identify himself. I also asked him, quite sincerely, well, as sincerely as possible, what he meant by
identify
anyway. Our conversation made for bad music. It sounded like this:

ME
: What does it mean for you to identify yourself ?

DAVE
(
staring earnestly at my eyes.
): It means to establish myself as separate from others.

ME
: Really. (
Mild, benign, rectorial, I rise up from my coffin.
) Wiping your own ass doesn’t accomplish that for you?

DAVE
(
quickly
): What do you mean?

ME
(
gazing on him, impassive.
): You tell me. What do you mean by
identify
?
(I pull myself out completely and take the minutes he is lost in thought to make myself a soft-shelled crab sandwich.)

DAVE
: What is manifested in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.
(He cries.)

ME
: So, you don’t wipe your own ass? What’s wrong with you? You know, language is very simple. I say something and you either understand it or you don’t. If you don’t, you stare blankly at me and say, What? (
I decide that I have lost my appetite and push my sandwich away.
)

DAVE
(
almost angrily
): The function of language is not to inform but to evoke.

ME
: Well, it’s working. You talk about language like it’s actually something. (
I realize that I don’t know what I mean by
something.)

DAVE
: Language is not immaterial.
(Nods, smiling and laughing.)
It is a subtle body, but it is body. Words are bound up in body images that hold the subject. They may impregnate the hysteric, be identified with the penis envier, represent the urinary flow of urethral ambition, or represent the feces retained in greedy
jouissance.

ME
: Your mother doesn’t like you, does she?

DAVE
: You can’t turn a response into a reaction. It’s all about desire, isn’t it?
(Still smiling.)
If I press a button and the light goes on, there is a response only to
my
desire. If to turn on the light I must go through a whole system of turns and circuits that I don’t know, then there is a question only in relation to my expectation. And that question will be gone once I know how to make the thing work.
(Hands up as if to say, Voilà.)

ME
: You’re just a big bag of words. Immaterial words.

DAVE
(
smugly
): I’ve upset you, it seems.

ME
(
quite sincerely
): Do you know where your wife is?

What I didn’t tell him was that my wife was crashing in an airplane somewhere in western Canada with a pilot whose penis she would later fondle. I chose not to mention it, not only because it was embarrassing, but because it didn’t serve my side of the argument, if I had a side in the argument, if it was an argument. But it was all, if nothing else, immaterial.

Then there was yet another fellow that I knew. He had this theory that there was no such thing as race, refused to acknowledge the subject even. Some low-level academic took him to task about his so-called theory. Like most theories, about most anything, it was all beyond me, leaving me feeling like I was looking at a clock with three hands. The whole idea of coming up with a theory about something that didn’t exist was, however, of great interest to me. But this guy I mentioned, the hack academic, his name was Housetown Pastrychef or Dallas Roaster, something like that, wrote that my friend was essentially full of excrement and that, furthermore, race was not only a valid category but a necessary one. This may or may not have been true. Like I said, I didn’t understand any of the discussion, but my friend dismissed the academic, his name might have been Austin Cooker, by saying that of course he believed such a thing, since he made his living and career out of being the ethnic, you know, cooning it up. They nearly came to blows when they encountered each other in a bar in DC. My friend said, This nigger believes in race as a valid category. The insult made little, if any, sense, but language’s function is not to inform but to provoke.

You had quite a few friends.

I did. More or less. In fact, I knew yet another man, still. Well, he was more of an acquaintance than a friend. I encountered him on my walk to campus. He was a nice-enough-looking fellow but had large blue cubes where his arms should have been. I stopped and stared, as you can well imagine. I looked at him and nodded to his blue cubes. He said, Oh, these. Yes, I said. You see, I found this old pewter lamp. When I rubbed it a genie appeared. He was large, muscular, much taller than us. He told me I could have three wishes. Well, I wished first for a beautiful and comfortable home. You can see it behind me here. He gestured with a cube. And indeed behind him, on a short hill, was a beautiful Victorian house, large and clean, colorfully painted. I told him it was a nice house. He nodded. It is, he said. And then I wished for a beautiful wife. There she is on the porch back there. He gestured again with a blue cube. The woman on the porch was in fact quite striking, gorgeous, long dark hair, dark eyes that I could appreciate at even such a distance. And then, I asked. And then, he said, something went horribly wrong when I wished for blue cubes as arms.

Do you have a point here?

It’s just a story.

But it’s clearly not true.

And?