Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

She favors you slightly.

You go from not talking to this?

I’m not attacking you.

I know.

If Meg Caro was my daughter, what was I supposed to do? It was a little late for diaper changing and parent-teacher conferences. I tried to think what I would want if I were her and all I could come up with was knowledge. I guessed that she would want to know me, as a person, as an artist perhaps. She’d said she was a painter, told me the first day she’d come around, and I hadn’t received her too kindly. Still, she came back. She did not return to modify our initial meeting, to recast it or even to say something she forgot to say. She returned to punctuate her original request that I allow her to be my apprentice. Only now did I understand the apprentice business. But all interpretation relies in some part, if not all, on charity, I realized, appreciating (a generous term) that I had to dispraise or at least blink at some differences in our use of the term. Her notion of apprentice was layered in ways I could not have anticipated and, given the discongruity of our experiences, the inequality of our stati or statae or, splitting the gender difference, stata, it became clear that, though we were participating in the social activity of language, we were not speaking the same one. All this to say that we never know what the fuck anyone is saying to us, that the only legitimate and correct response to anyone uttering any sentence, even Your pants are on fire, is: Excuse me?

Murphy? I’ll be Murphy again.

Lang?

How does one go about getting a DNA test to prove or disprove paternity?

I take it you’d like to disprove paternity, else you would not have said prove or disprove. Well, you don’t need me for this, you just get a kit from a lab and send in your samples.

Samples of what?

They’ll give you a kit.

You don’t sound particularly intrigued by my question. Don’t you want to know why I need such a service? We’ve been friends for a long time.

Long enough for you to know that I never care about other people’s business. I assume your pecker has come back to haunt you, or bite you, or whatever metaphor you find the most accurate.

I might have a daughter.

I guessed son. I had a fifty percent chance and blew it.

It could be that I’m pulling your leg and simply need this bit of information for something I’m writing.

You’re not that funny. And you’re not a writer. And I don’t care why you want to know the ins and outs of this, in spite of the fact that ins and outs must have been involved at some point to create this situation.

Situation is right.

Before you go, let me tell you this joke.

I’m not in the mood.

Won’t take a second. The president is on a tour of this new hospital. There are Secret Service guys all around, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, the doctor leading the tour takes the president through this ward and there’s the House minority leader sitting in the corridor and he’s jacking off. The president shakes his head and says, Christ, what’s that all about? And the doctor says, That poor man has advanced semen over-production syndrome, ASOPS. His seminal vesicles and his testes are hyperactive and so he must ejaculate every ten minutes or he’ll suffer severe damage to his reproductive system. The president says, My God. And so they go up to the next floor, right, and there is the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and there’s this orderly and he’s sucking the chair’s penis. And the president says, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch in a cornfield, what’s the problem here? The doctor says, Oh, this is the same condition, ASOPS, but he’s got a better health-care plan.

Can I hang up now?

Not yet. I want to tell you one more thing, something Hippocrates said.

And what’s that?

He said, he said, he said that you can discover no measure, no weight, no form of calculation, to which you can refer your judgments in order to give them absolute certainty. In our art there exists no certainty except in our sensations. What do you think of that?

Now may I hang up?

You bet.

They have big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. This was the line that Nat remembered from somewhere as he considered his station as narrator. He didn’t want to be any kind of mediator, yet he understood that he had to murder the authorial presence and to do that he’d have to find the author and kill him, for it was all too clear to him that in spite of his station, there was yet another layer sitting on the world, like a blanket of volcanic ash, smothering meaning and, while changing meaning, covering meaning while making it. He would have to rise up with all others like him and slit the sleeping throat of the master. That this master would put an eye in his mouth was too much.

On the external wall of a liquor store in Southeast District of Columbia was some graffiti: God was here, but he had to leave. And below that was scrawled: I was here! Wishing you all the best, God.

What was the thing in your career that irked you the most?

Funny you should have me have you ask me that question.

Strange.

Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don’t even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.

What did you say to him?

After I told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on, I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then I punched him. That’s why I had to leave my job at Iowa. That’s why we moved to Providence. Well, you and I did. Your mother went to Canada and married the flyboy. And the thing about your mother was that once gone, she could not look back, if I may segue in so non sequitur a manner, not that she would have become a pillar of salt or anything so horrible or fanciful or wonderful, but because in looking back she would be admitting that she was gone, that she had left something behind, and with that glance, with that admission, she would be doomed to recognize her memories as constructions of a left world, necessarily fictions, necessary fictions, because in looking back, she would see a reality to which her memories might be compared and contrasted and she would know that her memories were not that world and so all would be fucked, the world behind and the world awaiting. So, you see, it never pays to look back, maybe not even to the side. It’s almost like going through that whole mirror stage thing all over again, except this time you have to actually acknowledge the initial lack that must be present for the glance backward to be possible at all, and even if you don’t look back, the wall between subject and object, you and it, is already obliterated, but if you do, if you actually do look back, then god help you — and, I suppose, and as well anyone you look back at, if you will allow this clause to save this sentence from ending with a preposition. I might have blamed your sweet saint of a cheating mother for a very short time for leaving, but I never blamed her for not looking back.

Mom never left.

Says you. Says you. And yet there was a flyboy just the fucking same, just the same, just the same. There are many ways to leave; you’ll understand that better when you’re older and about to die and decompose into a blue oblivion. But let us finish off this Cyclopean egg, I’ll have mine scrambled. Its very shape suffices to suggest its vacuity, doesn’t it?

What are you talking about?

It wouldn’t matter if you understood.

You be Murphy this time. You’re sitting in your flat. You should be going over patient files and taking care of your tedious financial paperwork, but instead you are affixing the 135 mm lens onto your newly acquired Leica camera. Water is just beginning to boil in the kettle on your electric stovetop. The day outside your window is gray and overcast, but there is no threat of rain. You look into the face of the camera, then turn it around and stare at the viewfinder from a distance. The camera is in your lap. You want to look, but you can feel the kettle about to whistle. You want to look through the finder. You want to, but you must make tea first. You understand that you must make the tea first, don’t you? You need the tea because you’re going to be staring into this camera for a considerable while. You need to make the tea or at least remove the kettle, because if you don’t all the water will boil away and the kettle will get hotter and hotter until it bursts into flames and the kitchen will burn and the building will burn and Mrs. Hobble, the woman who hasn’t left her apartment in twenty-seven years, will burn up to death and so it really is better to just make the tea. And so you do. As you dip your bag in and out of the water in your mug, you imagine Mrs. Hobble, realize that you have never seen, but only heard, of her, sitting in her rooms like that, sheltered away perhaps preparing for something, passing her life in preparation for something that will never happen. The way we all do.