Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (9 page)

Excuse me?

I would do it, but I’m old.

I’m seventy-eight.

I’m glad we’re on the same page. This is how it has to go.

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Except that the sun had set hours ago and no rest was to come to my storm-tossed heart. I was to put on my darkest clothes and time it all
just right.

The orderlies’ break room was set at the southeast corner of the central building on campus, a square, characterless block of palered bricks that housed the dining facilities and the administrative offices, such as they were. That the break room was on that particular corner was hardly of any consequence, since I had no sense of directional orientation, but to Billy it was the linchpin of the entire operation. He reasoned that as I was setting out at dusk the fact that that side of the building would be darker would be to my advantage. In fact, it did not matter at all, and I didn’t point it out to him that the whole perimeter of the building was fairly well lit. What was useful were Billy’s markings of the security guard’s nightly rounds, of which there was essentially one. At six, upon arriving for his shift, he would make a leisurely circle about the building and then settle in behind his desk at the front door and watch blue movies on his player under the counter. He thought he was being covert in his activity, but he was hard of hearing and so the sound was turned up just loud enough that even we, those with a bit of deafness, could hear the moaning. I imagined the movies to not be hard-core, as they said, but rather the kinds of movies I had see advertised in my town newspaper when I was a kid, the ads saying to call the theater for the title. Billy and I had agreed, read Billy had explained, that entry into the break room was to be best achieved through the window on the south wall that seemed to always be open and also offered the cover of some star jasmine bushes. That was reasonable enough. My mission, my assignment, was to collect as many keys as I could find, we would figure out to which locks the keys matched and how to best use them later, and to bury them behind the azaleas outside my apartment. My heart was racing as I leaned against that exterior wall, not so much out of fear but because I had just performed my version of a sprint across the hundred-yard lawn. The sprinklers came on just as I slapped my back against the bricks, either luck or bad timing because I had told Billy that I could make the run in a third the time. A look into the room confirmed that it was empty and the sound of the sprinklers covered my prying of the screen loose from the window. The plan was working beautifully. However, there is nothing quite so inelegant as an old man climbing through a window. A thousand sprinklers could not have masked the noise I made knocking over a table with a hot plate and plastic dishes and a chair on which had sat a large metal mixing bowl that now served as a bouncing gong. Luckily the guard could not hear it or was otherwise engaged, an image I tried to instantly expel. At any rate, I stood there, frozen, wondering why I would choose to freeze in plain view instead of hastily trying to hide or to crawl right back out the window through which I had just come. But I paused there for many seconds, as much to let my back ease into uprightness as anything else, until I was satisfied that no one was coming. I put back the table and chair and bowl and then I searched surfaces, lockers, and pockets and found a ring with eight keys, seven rather conventional and one old skeleton type. I was just about to exit when I heard movement in the corridor. I ducked into a corner beside the row of lockers and behind a chair draped with an orderly’s white uniform.

The first thing I thought of as I crouched there trying to control my breathing was something my father once said to me. Never trust anyone who has not read
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
He said it to me one night at dinner. He pointed his fork at me while he said it. I heard someone grip and begin to turn the doork nob. I thought about proper names, specifically the question of whether proper names have senses, a question I came to again and again. Can
your father = your grandfather’s son,
if true (if I can let these descriptions stand in for proper names, be names of names), differ in analytical value from
your father = your father? Your father
and
your grandfather’s son
have the same reference but perhaps possess different senses.

I recalled when I was adult, it was 1965 and in the paper was one of those ads for a movie that required a telephone call to the theater to learn the title. Just like when I was a preteen, though we weren’t preteens back then but squirts and punks, I called the theater and was told that the title of the film was
High Yellow.
So, I went to it and it turned out to be pretty much the same as that Louise Beavers and Claudette Colbert film
Imitation of Life.
It could have been called
Imitation of Imitation of Life.
Even though I was an adult by this time, I had still come to a movie the title of which I had obtained by calling the theater, and so I waited and waited for the blue part, the sex. It never came. I think some skinny white guy who got kicked out of West Point for maybe being gay kissed the light-skinned black girl who was passing for white and perhaps that was the blue part, the scandalous part, but I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I returned home that night and tried to save myself by reading Tully. Was that the same as reading Cicero?

I recalled Plutarch’s account of Cicero’s death. Apparently he was difficult to find until Antony’s soldiers caught him leaving his villa in a litter. How hard would it be to find a man in a litter carried by slaves? From his own villa? According to Dio, not known for his accuracy, Antony’s wife ripped out the tongue of the alreadydetached-and-nailed-to-the-Forum-wall head of Tully and poked it repeatedly with a needle or some other ignominious sharp instrument. Empires. Civilization.

And then I thought about
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
and remembered that on the end of my father’s fork was a bit of linguiça.

Balled up there as I was, time having sadistically stood still to allow the locking of my ankles, knees, and back, I was not prepared to have my heart somewhat broken. The nurse who every day dispensed my Losartan, Cissy, whose name I found as intriguing as her short-cut afro, walked into the room with Harley. There was an unadorned cot in the break room and to my dismay, mainly out of disdain for cliché, they sat on it. Cissy kicked off her white clogs and thank goodness for those clunky shoes as it was her footfalls that alerted me to their approach. Her beige feet were beautiful and they wore jeweled toe rings and beside her sat that camel Harley. He reached back to the switch on the wall and killed the light, mercifully sparing me the actual sight of young Cissy so compromised. Now, the only light was outside and around that square portal that was my way out. I could hear them and therefore all too well imagine the progress of their activity and I was reminded for some inexplicable reason of the mandibles of grasshoppers. This was some motivation to make a snappy exit, but more pressing was the pressure that I was experiencing in my lower abdomen. A quick and undesired glance at the huffing animals showed me Harley’s hairy back and Cissy’s bejeweled toes pointed toward the sprinklers on the ceiling. The cot was rickety and squeaky and Harley was an unselfconscious, grunting swine and so I made as little noise as possible as I set the metal bowl on the floor and used the chair to climb up and back through the window. I could not help but cast one more glance back at the cot and when I did I saw that Cissy was observing me. She offered a small smile and almost nodded and for the briefest second I imagined that she had come there to help me, but I knew that couldn’t be so. I found myself smiling, glancing askance at her mocking eye, but she was not mocking me but nodding or nearly nodding her complicity in my escape. I knew it couldn’t be so. The smelly beast was inside her and she closed her eyes and let her head fall back. The odor of their sex was like burnt flesh and the dung of storks and flamingos and mouthfuls of tea. I wanted her to hate it. I wanted him to be a pathetic lover. I wanted Cissy to suddenly push him off and away and say that she had come to her senses and was going home. Instead, she moaned. And I believed her.

Good idea that, the getting away. It was quite dark out now save for where I was standing, bathed in a spotlight between two jasmine bushes. The heady fragrance of the little white flowers was welcome as it served to wash the insides of my nostrils clean of the stench of that horrid and unholy sex. I found myself blinded momentarily by the flood lamp and then I started my sprint back across the lawn. Mind you, I could have been timed with a calendar, but I moved as fast as I could and no one saw me and no one saw as I used the trowel I had left behind the azaleas below my window to dig a hole for the keys.

The keys were in the hole behind the azaleas and I sat sweaty in a fake leather recliner in Billy’s bedroom while he laid out a set of nice clothes, dress clothes, a gray suit with vest, a red tie with a thin gray stripe down its center length, a crisp white shirt with French cuffs, cuff links, and tie clasp set neatly on the tie, black socks that had never been worn. He did this every night and every night the outfit was slightly different, he believing and stating that every day he was a different man and the day he awoke to find that that was not true would be the day he was dead and these clothes that he had laid out would be his coffin garb, his funeral wear, because he didn’t trust anyone else to pick out what he would be cremated in, yes, cremated, he said, You don’t bury a man with no balls and that holein-the-ground thing reminded him too much of foxholes in the war anyway, reminded him of the particular foxhole where he had left a favorite part of himself. This tie was a gift from my daughter. It is a terrible, terrible thing to outlive your child.

Yes, I know.

The Chinese call it the curse of the gods.

I know.

I was never the same again. I’ve lived two lifetimes longer than my beloved child.

No metaphor ever replaced thought or so was my judgment until a metaphor did become thought for me, the metaphor not only replaced thought but organically pushed thought back to the most basic and functional areas of life and existence. The metaphor did not derive out of an extension of some thought and so relied on nothing really for actuality, substance, or even tenor, but appeared, arrived complete, like one of Leibniz’s monads and like a universe unto itself the metaphor was forever collapsing in on itself while giving the appearance of expansion, a good trick if you don’t mind cleaning up a mess. When I was a kid I realized that if I chopped off all of my fingers, I’d still have hands, not very good hands, not quite functional hands, but hands. What happened to your hands? some insensitive and pathologically honest child would ask me. A lot, I would say. And if I chopped off both hands to my wrists, they would still ask, What happened to your hands? but mean something else.

How farther art this in headland, hellhole, be the same. Die keen drum dumb, die kill beat drum, dawn dearth ass with ill den even. Rive dust gist weigh dour gaily dead, sand relieve just tour dress patches, alas we relieve clothes due dress patch relent gust, kin leave rust snot unto our nation, cut shiver lust from Melville. Core dine in this thief dome and the sour and the gory, endeavor, endeavor. End it how you like.

I was never much with prayers, but all superstitions have their place.

My wife did not fall in love with me because of it, but she did turn my way when I noted that she was wearing a Watteau. It was red satin and she looked nice.

What’s a Watteau?

A French Rococo-era painter. And a style of formal dress, popular in the early eighteenth century.

And she was dressed this way because?

It was a costume ball, some museum event or other. Sometimes you’ll see a Watteau train on a wedding dress these days. It’s pleated down the back.

And how were you dressed for this ball?

I went as Nat Turner.

How did you know what a Watteau was?

My education, I guess. The irony of Nat Turner recognizing a Watteau was not lost on her.

I’ve never been to a costume party.

How do you know?

You should tell stories from now on without my interruptions.

The way
you
tell stories.

The way
I
tell stories.

The Gang of Six strode into our building chanting, but not in unison and so it made for loathsome and hard-featured music. The gist of their rant-chanting was that we were in trouble, all of us and of course we knew they were coming, as all the custodians had disappeared and as well as the night nurse.
Keys
seemed to be the key word in their chorus. All the residents shrank away and gave sidelong glances that made every one of them look as guilty as hell. All except Billy, who barked into the air, not directly at them, If you can’t keep up with your toys, maybe you shouldn’t have them. Billy did in fact have balls. I stood firm. Though frightening, they could not match so much that I had seen in life. I noticed a bit of dirt under one of my nails and shoved my hands in my pockets.

Memetne adloqueris?

Sprichst du mit mir?

Tu me parles?

Du taler til mig?

Stai parlando con me?

By some dissymmetry, the underlying reasons of which elude me, however much constructed, affirmed, and validated by the very structure of the language that allows at least a pretense of making meaning, I am able to reveal my story without locating myself in the telling, at the time of the telling. Perhaps not even whether I am in fact the narrator at all. It would appear, at least on the surface, that I am necessarily, logically committed to choosing either past, present, or future tense for my narration, but I will demonstrate that was not true. There is nothing instantaneous in these or in any pages you will ever read. If it is written down, it was written down, it is dated and it turns out that measurement is neither important nor possible. For example, this sentence was or is being written one year and a day after the composition of the preceding sentence. I am lying. I wrote the second sentence first, two days prior to the first, or was it two minutes? at the same time, one with my left hand, the other with my right.

Harley winked. His eyes twinkled. All right, all right, forget all you know. This is a new day. Come out of your fog, old people. Adopt this new day. Give me my keys and the storm will be but a drizzle. If we search and find the keys in your possession, there will be hell to pay.

There was no talking among us old people. We were being inconvenienced. We were not terrified. Not one of us had had a normal bowel movement in years. We kept track of wellness by measurements and marked the progress of days by counted-out pills. We had seen death. We had buried children. They could not scare us. All we had left was our dignity.

Only Billy and I knew the whereabouts of the keys and no one would find them. The thugs sought more to make messes than to perform thorough searches and so they did. We old people did not care. Cleaning up gave us something to do. They concluded with Billy’s apartment. The brute Leon and Harley entered shoulder to elbow and we listened from the corridor.

Cletus and Ramona blocked the door. I stood with Billy, held his hand. I looked at Cletus’s head. It was a strange-looking machine with a huge set of gears that did not mesh, connecting with a series of drumlike rollers. I turned to Ramona and observed on her shoulder a small woman, dressed like her host and using a shovel to scoop up brown crystals from a pile in the hollow of Ramona’s clavicle and pitch them into Ramona’s dumbstruck open mouth.

Ed ella a me: Nessun maggior dolore,

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.

A crash of glass. Glass crash. Crash. Billy and I knew. The fuse had been lit and Billy let go of my hand. On the wall of his living room had hung a framed photograph of Billy as a much younger man and his daughter. She was twenty-five at the time of its taking. A year later she would be gone. It was one of those color portraits that you hate unless you love the people in it. She was positioned just behind her father, just over his left shoulder. She stood. Billy sat. Her hands were on him, her left on his left shoulder, her right gently, just barely, touching the right side of his collar and neck. Together they stared at the camera but somehow gave the impression of staring at each other, as if looking into a mirror. Billy’s hands were not in the photograph, but I felt the tension of his wanting to reach up and touch his daughter’s fingers, her face. It was that framed picture that had crashed to the floor. Billy shouted something I could not make out but understood all too well and then started toward the door of his apartment faster than his ninetyyear-old legs were capable of moving. He fell, not in slow motion, but quickly, and that was the real horror of the sight, a man who always shifted so slowly through his range of positions was now moving rapidly. I think his head hit the baseboard, but whatever, all became immediately still, especially Billy.