Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Yours ever so truly,

I have been reduced to addressing parts of speech, as if they might answer and of course they do. I was thinking I might chat up nouns next when the short, copper-colored key with the rubber head cover opened the drug locker on the west building nurse’s station. I slipped the key into my pocket just as the nurse rounded the corner. It was in fact the nurse who had seen me in the orderlies’ break room. She gave me a suspicious look. I had seen her name tag many times, had known her name, yet this time the pin that adorned her breast spoke to me. Delilah.

Delilah Zorn was around twenty-five years old and beautiful, and as an old man, I can say this, having seen many, many people in my long life. She was graceful, light on her feet, though I would not say she floated, and her skin was a rich reddish brown that seemed to glow yet did not. She was too beautiful to imagine with Harley, so I chose not to, choice being an important activity that I seldom employed in my first sixty years of life. Choice is more complicated than it first seems. There is the axiom of choice that makes me happy just to consider but confuses me when I do, the notion that for every collection of nonempty sets there is a function that chooses an element from each set. I assume that we are each, at least, a nonempty set, even any of the Gang of Six, even Hitler, Cheney, or some other war criminal. So, I made such a choice and Delilah Zorn remained a flower, a star, a waterfall, a stand of aspens.

What were you doing back there, she said.

I learned long ago that the worst answer to any question is nothing, the word or no response. I said, I have a headache and was looking for something to take.

What kind of headache?

Sinus.

Here, take these.

Do you like working at this place? I asked. I had closed my hand around the two pills she had given me.

It pays the bills, she said.

Thank you for the medicine.

Why were you in there? she asked.

Why didn’t you give me away?

I’m not sure.

Do you like that man, that Harley?

Not particularly. Her answer seemed to surprise both of us. I didn’t tell him because I hate to see trouble.

I was looking for something.

I figured that much. What?

Something they took from Billy.

What is it? Maybe I can help.

I found it. But thank you.

It wasn’t keys.

No.

Do you have any children? she asked.

My son was born probably thirty years before you. You see, I’m a very old man.

Not so old, she said. You still have a twinkle in your eye.

Cataracts.

We were flirting. A sad activity. A bit of push. A bit of pull.

Der ganze Strudel strebt nach oben:

Du glaubst zu schieben, und du wirst geschoben.

27

I have a second face.

Perhaps a third.

Access to separate worlds.

The awful and the fruit litter my worlds at the same time. Oh, January, dear Janus, Ianus Bifrons, guardian of doors and gates, looking both forward and back. Up past the pines someplace, past the aspens, is Zoagli, with its view of the sea. Behold the sign.

In a dream, in the repetition of the dream, the riddle is solved. I kill myself as my father in order to commit incest with myself as my mother, but as my father I prevent my own conception.

Leben wir oder werden wir gelebt?

28

Sheldon Cohen had been a doctor and he was proud that, unlike so many in his profession, he had lived well into his nineties. He also boasted an every-morning gotta-pee erection that I was privileged never to witness, but he talked about it unabashedly with anyone who would listen. Ninety-four with a boner, he would say at the breakfast table full of old ladies. He never mentioned it at lunch or dinner, I assumed because he had forgotten about it by then, but the ladies didn’t forget and so raced to his table at every meal. Since Billy’s death Sheldon had taken to sitting with me and therefore so did five women.

Who’s to say they won’t kill one of us next, said Maria Cortez. She was always dressed impeccably. She was still beautiful even though she was hunched over a bit. She knew she was beautiful and moved in that way. Billy was kind.

Billy was a sour cherry pit, said Mrs. Klink. I believe her first name was Mrs. I took to calling her Mrs. and she never objected. She was always extremely direct, even when she was flirting with an episode of dementia, as when she said to me at lunch, You’ve mown the grass horribly, Philbert. You’ve missed all the edges. You are a wretched man. All I could focus on was the fact that her husband’s name was Philbert Klink. I imagined him unhappy. But that’s not the point, she went on. They will kill all of us and rummage through our things.

We’re old people, Emily Kuratowski said. She was a small woman with piercing eyes that never seemed to point anywhere. What can they do to us that will really matter? We’re nearly dead anyway.

Hear, hear, said Mrs. Klink.

Billy did not die happily or happy, I said. They turned and stared at me because I was generally the quiet one of the newly formed group. We can make sure they don’t win. We can get even for Billy.

Yeah, right, said Emily Kuratowski. What will that do for us?

It might satisfy us.

We’re long past satisfaction, Maria said.

Okay, then it might amuse us.

The group paused at the word. They liked the idea of being entertained. Their old heads nodded, then nodded some more.

I’d like to be amused, Sheldon said. Lord knows I’m not getting any action around here.

Maria Cortez gave Sheldon’s arm a playful slap. Stop it, you.

What do we do? Mrs. Klink asked.

They all looked to me. I had already, fueled by an new and inconsonant desire for revenge and an even more uncharacteristic willingness to take action, decided to take the lead. Though I had no plan, I understood that our objectives would have to be clear, simple, and quick and without too much ambition, as my comrades were subject to sudden slips into other worlds and times and, for all I knew, so was I.

29

In my rooms I stood and studied my little kitchen area and was reminded of Cornell’s Toward the Blue Peninsula, imagining the steps from my little range to my little icebox, then marveled at how my use of the term icebox dated me so efficiently, so uncomplicatedly. It might be easier, I thought, it might be easier.

I sat in my living room without lamplight and pulled out a random book from my pile — a pile that throughout my life was constantly growing but was now steadily diminishing, my being well past mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — Dante’s Inferno. I opened it but did not read. I cried. About Billy. About your mother. About you. And it was not ugly music. Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrito. Forever the pounder of metaphor, the seeker of stretched connection, the pioneer of extended conjunction, I imagined the Gang or orderlies as the six wings of Lucifer, beating to free him from the ice and creating an icy wind that only creates more ice.

And so you’ve come to visit and you’ve written your visit into actuality or I have written this for you, once again, though none it matters a hill of whatever now, does it? You asked me once if I was postmodern and I asked you if your question contained a hyphen. I finally have an answer and I offer it here as it is apropos of my following dear Virgil down Satan’s shivering, hairy back. I finally have figured out I do not wish to deny being a modernist by trying to embrace all that is familiar while pretending to not be concerned with making something brand spanking new. I do not wish to create new clichés. But neither will I bare my soul to build the new machine that no one has seen just to have it do what the old machine did. So, what am I about, son? Dying, son. Dying well. Dying powerfully, vigorously, with might and main, to chop and change to suit my dying mission, to tie dying ever to life, to living, to breathing, to tie dying to the moon and the stars, to fix dying to light and darkness and rain and mist and arid winds.