Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (8 page)

One of us, or both, as we were and are equally present and, more or less, equally culpable, answerable, if not out of duty then at least by way of sheer good taste or decency, should have taken it upon myor yourself or ourselves to be more observant of what we were about, what we were doing when we put me here; recognized that not only were we setting a stage for the next stage of my life, but that we were also preparing a platform from which any rational being would find a plummet, forced or otherwise, not only unfortunate but sadly necessary. Had we weighed and measured the particulars, the specific details of the matter at hand, at least in hindsight, a drastic move, we might have proceeded accordingly, toward some other capsheaf, namely, the act that shall remain unnamed. I have lived a lot longer than seems to me necessary or in good taste or form, only to arrive at this point, this
place,
this truth, that it takes a lot more effort and comprehension of the inherent and ubiquitous structures of meaning to construct nonsense than it does to utter the plainest of mundane assertions, and that once set into motion, the cleanest and clearest of one’s nonsensical masterpieces does nothing but highlight everyone else’s incapacity to understand 103 anything at all. Though they will think they understand. The devil himself sometimes shall not drive them off the notion that they “get it.” The final irony is, beautifully, that they think they perceive the irony. And what was my question the day you drove me to this wretched place? Why, it was, Do we need gas? It turned out that we did and so you stopped, I believe, at a Shell station and somehow I found that significant, if not terribly interesting.

There was nothing behind my concern that you needed gasoline except that I sought to prolong our drive to
this place.
I had never known you to need gasoline before, had in fact remembered that you never let the indicator drop below half empty (
half empty
being a quite conscious word choice), though I’m certain that on some occasions you do actually
need
gasoline, but it was also a car thing to say, a car-ish thing. Do we need gas? I could just as easily have asked if we needed air in the tires or water in the radiator and, though every bit as car-ish, those utterances would have had no chance to pause us.

You, we, did finally deliver me, along with my one mediumsized wheeled duffel and a few boxes of books, to be carried inside in short order by a couple of short orderlies with names so cliché that it hurt my feelings to commit them to memory. And I could see on your face, as we strolled by the queued-up bags of used-up blood and tissue, feelings and thoughts, that would be my neighbors, my dining mates, and finally my avenue to inevitable resignation, that you, like me, could not imagine that they comprised and were composed of the same endless strands of amino acids as me, that they shared the same skeletal base, the same basic musculature, the same chemistry. You tossed me a sidelong glance like the son I never had and you desired very much to leave me here alone in my new rooms to read Cicero.

There are those who understand and those who do not. The way you tell the difference is easy. The ones who do not understand have not yet killed themselves.

Not to complicate matters, as if I give a fuck about that, but I’d be remiss if I did not make clear the complete absence of clarity regarding one pressing and nagging matter, that being: just who the fuck is telling this story? There are readers, dear readers, and I use the plural modestly as to really mean possibly only one reader, counted repeatedly on different days, that require a certain degree of specificity concerning the identity of the narrator. Is it an old man or the old man’s son? Not that I am by nature disposed to behaving deferentially to any reader, or anyone, but I will clear up the matter forthwith, directly, tout de suite.
I
am telling this story.

I was brought here on a Tuesday, the second Tuesday, to be precise, of the month of March. Or May. It was an
M
month. Driven to
this place
or
that place,
depending on whom you’re talking to and when. It is no bit of privileged information that a man born on my birthday, at the same hour, in the same state, Virginia, only two years prior to my birth, died in the corridor of
this place
the morning I was moved in. The frighteningly unfrightened staff whisked the man away to an airless room out of view and the flow of traffic (however slow). That is worth knowing.

That night, shortly after your departure, I was taken or led by a cheerful aide named Billy away from my apartment, to the dining hall, where I sat at a round table across from a fossil named Billy while I was sized up by a gaggle of blue-hairs at the next round table. Nothing could have scared or upset me more than this scene. It was that evening, while I sank into my rooms, and listened to
Die schöne Müllerin,
and you know how I hate Schubert, that I was, in a manner of speaking, reborn. I was reading Eliot or a sports magazine when my renewal took effect. This was the grim evening of that second Tuesday of that
M
month. I resolved that I would be the music while the music lasted.

And so, yes, I was brought forth into this fate worse than life, my hands still atremble at my memory of my passage through that canal, the way the light hit my eyes, the way the first dose of that disinfectant-painted air worked its way into my not-yet-acclimated and surprised lungs, but unwilling to accept that this was the air I was meant to breathe. Not yet ready to become one of the drooling zombies, I resolved to work with the resistance.

O diem præclarum! shouted Billy, my dining mate, not the orderly, upon learning that we would be served French toast instead of our usual gruel for breakfast.

I looked at him and tilted my head. This was the first time in a week of breakfasts that he had said anything other than, My name is Billy.

So, you are an educated man, I said.

On the contrary, he said, and then proceeded to eat his French toast in large syrup-heavy bites. It’s just that so many things are
and just so on.

Meaning?

And just so on, he said. Und so weiter.

Strangely, the German helped, but I was still stranded by his non sequitur.

It’s like this, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and so on.

I found what he had just done terribly irritating and I said as much. Why don’t you go ahead and say Z.

I got tired and didn’t feel like it.

Z takes up far less room and energy than
and so on.
It is one syllable as opposed to three.

Still.

Still what?

I didn’t feel like finishing.

Did you forget the
Z
?

No. Don’t you like French toast?

Not so much. It’s not bad.

In order to find anything good one must first know what sort of thing that thing ought to be. You have to have a concept of it. You need to think about breakfast for a while, then consider the French toast. You’re an old man. I am an older man. When you reach my age, you’ll find that pleasant becomes good. At least, pleasant and good are always bound up together.

Kant.

You too are an educated man.

On occasion, Billy, on occasion.

Billy, who had taken so long to tell me anything but his name, finished his French toast and pushed himself to standing. Muhammad was a Hegelian, he said, and then left the table and me to be studied by the women as old as he. At seventy-eight, I was a stud in the henhouse, if that is not a mixed metaphor.

And so Billy, all ninety-two years of him, became my first friend at
this place,
Teufelsdröckh’s Retirement Village.

As if any of this matters, this business about friends in that place. This place. Just this afternoon, Billy said, pushing his lunch aside, The bread here is flavorless, there is no salt in it. It is like the bread in Tuscany. If only I had some Tuscan olive oil to bathe it in, then it might be edible.

I said nothing in response but had to agree with him.

He had an ongoing feud with the orderly named Billy. Called him Silly instead. This irritated the young man and so he always took his time when Billy rang his call button to go to the toilet. Billy, ever smarter, would take care to ring his bell long before the urge came on him but pretended to be in dire straits when the grinning orderly strolled in. Do you know what that Silly is? Billy asked. Silly is an accidental circumcision. As funny as it sounded I didn’t quite understand.

The fact of the matter, how that phrase has always bored me, along with
it all boils down to this
and
I didn’t want to say anything but,
the fact of the matter was that you have always felt guilty for pursuing your own life, feeling that some of that distance from us, your parents, temporal, spatial, or emotional distance, was a bad thing, a shameful thing, pudendum, that you were failing as a son. Let me clue you in to something, it’s all failure, we’re all failures, as sons, as fathers, as mothers, siblings; it is a necessary truth. There are no rules and yet we feel bound to them, there are no duties that need be carried out, there are only expectations, unarticulated and arbitrary and formless and ever-changing expectations, expectations that exist as fistfuls of gelatinous blobs that we try over and over to nail to the walls of our houses and what they do is drip and collect and pool and ferment and turn into guilt and some other things. Oh, Jeremiah 3:24. Take the Baal and run with it, boy. Just remember, son, that your father has not labored all that hard.

Billy, one day in the garden, told me that he had been shot in the balls in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge. It was bad enough, he said, to receive such an injury at all, but to have it happen at a battle so named was to add insult. When I wrote to my wife and attempted to describe the damage to her, she assumed that I was joking and indeed said as much. Stop joking, she wrote on perfumed paper, and when I restated my condition, ever more bluntly, this too she took to be facetious, until finally I gave up and returned home with the surprise. She got to see with her own eyes what was in fact not there, that part of a man who so few glimpse and even fewer care to. Luckily my daughter had been conceived and born before my departure to participate in that awful war.

This was the most that Billy had ever said to me at one time and after he said it he was as silent as ever for about two days, the silence ending as we stood back-to-back peeing separate arcs in the twilight. Let’s blow this pop stand before the walls cave in. He then added that I should never challenge him to a pissing competition because somehow his lack of testicles had left him with remarkable urinary projection, some threefold normal. I asked why he thought to tell me that and he said, I just thought you should know.

A point is considered one of the fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry. Without depth, breadth, or dimension it is a part that has no part. It is represented by a dot or period that has some dimension but is not a point, but must cover the point infinite times over. The point in the two-dimensional world is the intersection of lines and in three dimensions of another line as well and on and on. A point is only location. And isn’t that what we are? Mere points? Some points suggest beginnings, some ends, all divide, and when they connect or divide, where they are defined, it is always because of a turn, an angle, a shift toward another plane. How else could we see a point? The point is. The point made. Getting the point. Pointing the way. Points out. Points in. Point terminus. Point Dume. That was where Billy and I decided we would go. A wonderful misspelling that had gone uncorrected, there even being a grade school there by the name. What freedom those children must feel, Billy said. They should spell
school
with a
k.
I asked him why he wanted to go there and he told me that there was no land due south of it until you hit Antarctica. You would see only ocean until you hit the ice if you could see that far. You might remember it from
Planet of the Apes.
Charlton Heston was in that, wasn’t he?

I don’t mean for you to have this thing that you are writing or should be writing or would be writing if . . . to be your
Ayenbite of Inwyt,
as I would never expect from you either remorse or conscience. Guilt is such a vain and useless emotion. First of all, that one should be so sure of one’s responsibility for the pain or misery of another, well, you can be no more sure of a thing like that than you can be certain that Algarsyf and Cambalo fucked Canace.

And about this numbering and about this lack of naming. Oh, I am not any man’s everyman and neither are you. I have a name. I named you. Well, your mother, bless her soul, named you, claiming that since you would wear my last name, she had the right to supply your first. So, she named you but spelled it differently, funny if you ask me, not exactly a display of imaginary prowess, but, in fact, an exercise of imaginary prowess, not that I mean to sound harsh and condescending, but rather I am harsh and condescending or at least you accuse me of being so. Your name, any name, such a magical thing. Others are called by your name. Actually, not your name, but the name that a word that sounds like your name names.

Billy,
the absence of balls notwithstanding, showed little if any fear in the faces of the orderlies, who, outside the view of family visitors and any caring staff, could be anything from mildly neglectful to physically abusive. Those of us who could still communicate effectively were spared the extreme treatment, but the mild neglect could be employed in such a way as to discredit our accounts, anything from miraculously locating missing items in places where we claimed to have looked to the more basic having one of their stories corroborated by another orderly. The brotherhood of orderlies was in fact a tight order, but Billy was resolved to destroy them. I did not need much convincing to join his cause and as the younger of the two of us, I knew that I would be called upon to perform the trickier missions. The precise speculative tenets of the brotherhood were not available to us and the workings of minds so primitive and brutish were just plain mystifying and therefore it was not only difficult to predict what they were going to do, but downright impossible to even comprehend the motivating principles behind their seemingly involuntary, automatic cruelties. There was, at the very least, a pecking order within the herd of ruffians, if not a formed and ritualistic scale of rank. I can name them for you here in disposition of power.

Harley.
Could I have chosen a better name myself ? He was the shortest of them but easily the most vicious, but probably not the most dangerous, at least in close quarters. I am hard pressed to say that this is a necessary trait of a leader, but I would listen to any argument supporting the theory. He was nearly as wide as he was tall, not fat, but built like a front-loading washing machine and, as with such a machine, it was easy to see that things were turning within, though one would be challenged to identify any one article of clothing, save for perhaps a shoe. Unlike the bleached white smocks and slacks of his comrades, he was clad in powder blue, a distinction that quite discernibly pleased him. He, at times, could appear almost handsome, or at least not ugly, no doubt a function of his functional, if only utilitarian, intelligence. His head was square, in thematic concert with his body. His hair was receded and regrettably long in the back. He had meeting eyebrows, not so much almond as Brazil-nut-shaped eyes, large and round and closeto-his-head ears, a large convex nose with turned-down nostrils, a short mouth with straight lips, a square and jutting chin, and no facial hair to speak of. I suppose the same is true of all of us, that a mere catalog of our physiognomy sounds rather unprepossessing and repulsive, but somehow all of his features were worn in the right places and in more-or-less standard proportion and so the overall effect was not too terribly bad. He walked with a slight but conspicuous limp; the favored side seemed to change periodically, leaving Billy to conclude that his shoes were too tight and hurt his feet and that particular pairs caused diversely distributed pain. I admonished Billy about his tasteless alliteration but had to concur. Harley was complex enough that the mere acquisition of the property of others was not the sole motivating principle behind his odious behavior, though it was in no way insignificant. It was the power dynamic within his herd that drove him and I believed that it was finally sexual, that lording over his subordinates actually gave him a boner. What came of that erection, and for that phrasing I apologize, I did not know and I did not care to imagine. Harley was also fond of a particular cologne, the name of which I did not know, and it was either extremely potent or he bathed in it.

Tommy
was a beanpole with two left feet. Literally, he had two left feet. When he faced north both of his big toes pointed east. It turns out that it is true what they say about the clumsiness of dancers so endowed. Merely walking was a challenge and made for a sideways, crablike gait that was both noisy and profoundly ugly. I believed that his constant shuffling and stumbling kept him in his nasty, contemptible mood. On his most pleasant days he was dismissive and scornful. On his worst he was hateful, black hearted, and monstrous, rolling over slippered toes with wheelchairs that he was shoving at life-threatening speeds through congested hallways. It may well be that there was not an honest bone in his sinister, leftleaning body and I never once heard him say anything that was factual, even in response to the most mundane and seemingly simple questions, even when the facts were unmissable, staring him and whomever else in the face. When asked by a day nurse if Abraham Chen’s prosthetic leg had been left back in his rooms, he responded, No, I put it on him before we left, leaving the nurse and Abraham Chen to exchange confounded glances. But I’ll take him back so that I can tighten the strap, Tommy then said. If such a thing was possible, I was of the opinion that the man had two left eyes as well, a condition that manifested in a barely perceptible but constant pull of his face to that direction. There was a rumor that Tommy liked to sneak sly ganders at the old ladies when they were being bathed or taken to the bathroom. Though I never (Allah be praised) saw him doing so, it was easy enough, however sickening and repulsive the picture, to imagine his depraved and salacious, distorted, lefteyed squint around this corner or that.

Cletus.
Cletus was a troll of a man, Nordic in appearance, with a patch covering, I think, his good eye, and he possessed upper incisors that presented like tusks. His hair in troll fashion was thick and uncombable and Billy thought on more than one occasion that a tail was hidden in his white britches. He wore a gold cross on a cheap gold chain around his neck, no doubt the source of his power. He had lived near humans long enough to have learned many of our ways and so he was conscientious about pleasant greetings but always managed to make us regret it in short order. Though not as short as Harley, he was far slighter, weighing perhaps as much as a woman of equal height, his protruding ears like wings. If he had not been so repugnant in appearance, he might not have been frightening at all, but there was a sneakiness about him that one could almost smell. It wasn’t that it seemed he wanted something, but it seemed he was going to take something. Though none of us carried wallets or purses, we clung to them anyway in his presence. He smelled vaguely sweet but not good. Whenever he skipped down the corridor, and he often did, I could hear Grieg’s
In the Hall of the Mountain King.
Now, I knew that trolls are not naturally evil, only misunderstood and, of course, primitive, but he was, if not evil, then he might as well have been evil.

Leon
was truly the brute of the lot. At over six and a half feet, he lumbered about like the giant he was, broadshouldered, deepchested, stronglimbed, and brawnyhanded; his ridiculously large feet, hard like hooves in the most padded of gym shoes, announced his approach in oddly syncopated
whumps
upon the linoleum tiles. He always sounded as if he’d just stopped and then another footfall would shake the floor. Whether he was Fafner or Fasolt, it didn’t matter; he could have been both, but he would never have been lithe enough to catch Freyja. He was ungainly beyond reasonable belief; so inelegant was he in movement that Harley would not allow him to be in the same space as Tommy and his two left feet, perhaps for consideration of safety, more, I like to think, for aesthetic reasons. Leon’s hands were too large for many common tasks, though he was strangely adept at threading needles, which I saw him do twice. Once for Regina Brown, who was working on an embroidery, and then for a temporary night nurse upon whom he held an obvious crush and with whom he held not even the slightest chance. His head was shaved, but he was lazy and so his head was only nearly smooth, but not smooth enough to appear clean, plant matter and lint and dust seeming to find its static charge irresistible. Six cubits and a span in height, Billy would say of the man, referring to biblical Goliath. I used to be a religious man, a real scripture reader, he said, and then my balls were excised by German shrapnel. My faith went with them. Leon, like Tommy, could sneak up on no one. In fact, none of the already-mentioned thugs had stealth as a weapon, Harley being always announced by his fragrance and Cletus being subject to involuntary fits of giggling.

Ramona.
The only woman among the terrible tribe, but one would hardly have known it. Stealth was in fact her first and most striking power. She was a creeper, having the annoying habit of materializing at one’s shoulder out of the crystalline blue. Ramona was of medium height and build and of a bit less than medium intelligence. It seemed that she ran with the boys because they were the only game in town, so to speak. In some raggedy village on the steppes of Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan, she might have been considered mildly appealing, what with her exaggerated but not so well-defined biceps and broad back. The K-Swiss gym shoes she wore were always impossibly white and unblemished, even after bouts of mopping up diarrhea, blood, or vomit. She wore a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, though I did not believe her to be married or even attached to another living human animal. When she spoke it was always a loud whisper, a deafening hiss that went unmissed by anyone within a range of thirty or more feet. Ramona spoke in apparent non sequiturs, but her utterances were actually always just a few minutes behind everyone else, if not her actions. Tommy and Cletus were once trying to get an administrative office door unstuck, having just come in from their smoking break with Ramona. Ramona watched for a few seconds and when asked for a flat-head screwdriver from the box, she said, I don’t have any cigarettes, but she passed along the tool without pause. The oddest thing was that from her cavernous mouth, a mouth that remained slightly open for breathing, came the warmest breath, breath one was prepared to find foul but it was not, yet neither did it smell good. It was merely warm.

Finally there was the unfortunately named
Billy.
The old Billy did call him Silly but also referred to him as Billy Dud, a more appropriate nickname, as Silly almost made him sound interesting. Billy Dud was so frightfully bland that mosquitoes refused to stick their proboscises into him, treated him as if he’d been soaked in DEET. He was pure, unadulterated background, complete camouflage, a sort of ninja of boredom. If he leaned against a wall, he became the wall. If he carried large cartons, he became a carton. His voice was white noise. He was a chameleon, fading, receding, into the back of any room as if on greased rails, smoothly, effortlessly, a complete forgettable slide to some corner or other. He was a member of the wicked crew only by passive attachment. It was not clear that the others were even aware of his membership or him. They probably wondered on occasion while smoking in the courtyard, just to whom did that sixth shadow belong? The strangest thing about Billy Dud was that once you did catch a glimpse of him you realized that he was beautiful, damn beautiful. But then he would open his mouth and then the mind-numbing, characterless, vanilla static would wash over you and the room and you would be left wondering what you had seen.

If you live long enough you come to understand that the only terrifying thing is not knowing when a thing is going to happen, whether good or bad. And the older you get, the more you count on knowing when things are going to happen. Bad things, uncomfortable things, death things, are only unsettling and dismaying when they fail to comply with the schedule, the scheme, the plan. The scariest thing about the Gang of Six, as Billy had dubbed them, was that they had no obvious schedule and no apparent goals. One evening, after dinner, after Billy Dud had blended into the salad bar of the dining hall, Harley came in to check the pockets of everyone for suspected illicit drugs. The only staff there were the orderlies, the food workers having been escorted out by the giant Leon. Many of the residents, especially the blue-haired old women at the next table, always accused old Billy of being paranoid and therefore a nuisance, but tonight all were on the same dismal page of shared humiliation. The Gang laughed when a condom was found in Sheldon Cohen’s pocket. Cohen had been a medical doctor and I did not know if he was having sex with anyone, but he wanted at least to be safe and prepared if the opportunity and other things arose. I never saw a man over seventy so embarrassed; it’s really not something we feel. Finding no banned substances, the goons left with whatever cash they could find. Billy stood and shouted out his displeasure. Do you hooligans know no shame!

Even I had to admit that his word choice was antiquated and therefore undercutting of any gravity he hoped to convey.

Hooligans? Harley smiled and stepped up face to neck with Billy. Sit down, old man.

I will report you.

Go ahead. Tell them what the big bad hooligans did. He looked around the room, Just remember, all of you, that it will be weeks before any action is taken. Weeks. With that he pressed his meaty palm into Billy’s chest and forced him back down into his chair.

Had you followed Billy back to his apartment after the abovedescribed confrontation with Harley that took place at the end of the insane ratification of his rants against the Gang, you would have seen him open that briefcase that he kept stowed on the bottom shelf of his bookcase and take out hand-drawn maps of the community complex and grounds that he had composed and amended over his ten-year residency at Teufelsdröck h. Then, as he placed himself over the spread-out papers, you would have seen him scratching crazily at the back of his head and pulling on his thumbs the way he always did when excited or nervous. But it was not specifically this night that had Billy pondering over his charts. He did so every night, his pencil making slight and subtle alterations to tables and diagrams and even graphs, tracking the comings and leavings of the Gang members, their combinations, what they were carrying. Billy never seemed to know just what he was looking for, but that night, he pointed at me with end of his number two pencil. It’s up to you, he said.

What’s up to me?

You have to sneak into the break room and take Cletus’s keys.