Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

5

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.

6

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.

7

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.

8

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.

9

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?

10

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.