Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Viewfinder. Charlton Heston is playing backgammon with Nat Turner. They are sitting on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial. Black men are collecting the trash left over from the day’s activity. They are tired black men, hunched and wearing white coveralls.

Turner shakes the dice in his maroon cup. He does it near his ear so he can hear the bones rattle. Double sixes.

Lucky bastard, Heston says.

That was some speech today, don’t you think?

I really liked the part about little white boys holding hands with the little black girls.

Double fives.

Lucky bastard.

Lucky, my ass. I cheat. I always cheat. I cheat whenever I can. I have to cheat. Slaves have no luck.

Of course they do, Heston says. It’s just all bad.

They laugh, Heston and Turner.

Have you observed any changes in yourself because of today’s march? Turner asks.

Why, yes. What about you?

I’m letting Styron off the hook.

That’s big of you.

Rather white of me, he’d say. And you?

I do want to keep my guns. I want more guns.

Really?

Guns. Guns. Guns.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

I wish I’d had a few back in the day.

Stampings, Smitings, Breakages

I was living in New York City at the time, writing a novel. In fact, I think I said that. Maybe I didn’t. It was an okay novel, not great. I knew the world would not be changed by it, was quite certain of that. You had not yet been born. I had just met your lovely mother and we saw our having sex together as some kind of social or political action, statement. We loved each other also, but that wasn’t the real turn-on. Then you were born. We lived a very long time together after that and then she decided to die. I’m not sure I ever forgave her for that decision, but I never loved her less for it. Then there was you.

A Perambulation

Meg Caro asked if I was going to open the envelope. I looked at Sylvia, then back at Meg. I took it from the table and placed it unopened into my pocket. I know what it says, I said.

Sick of all the you be ’s? Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me? What do you say? We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead. We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street. We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly. We can listen to the whistling of the bombs. We can listen to each other.

I do not want to know about the human heart.

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.