Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

13

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.

14

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.

15

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.

16

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.