Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

I don’t know if readers will like your novel, if you choose to write your novel or take credit, perhaps blame, for having written your novel, I don’t know, just don’t know if they will like the turns it takes, the turns you find so pleasing, its comedy, its fantastic elements, the pones you consider passably original, its relaxed and natural transition, except where abrupt and intentionally jarring, the curious, unconventional mixture of different styles that gives the work a distinctive air, leaving you to hope that you entertain, perhaps upset, maybe frighten a reader. . but what a bad preface I have written for you, leaving you nothing to do but tenaciously cling to your conclusions; this is a funny book with natural transitions, except where abrupt, with original fantastical elements; and if all that is true, then your work is beautiful; says who? How bizarre a reader you construct, because you do construct her, him, it, don’t you? How bizarre that reader must be to ingest your preface and believe it or at least not abandon your projected desires concerning your so-called novel. However, in fact, your book might seem to begin in the manner of a definition dialogue, setting out to identify rhetorical stratagems, but concludes, as perhaps all things conclude, appearing as little more than an attempt to discern how one can best find some happiness in this life. Whereas we might be moved to plausibly regard the novel as just this, we would still be wrong, wouldn’t we? Because all it is, all it ever will be, all it ever can be, is an effort at saying how much you love your old man. And a day late at that.

Our visits are always so short.

30

It had drizzled that morning, but by lunch it was sunny and hot. We were all crouched on the brink of something, ostensibly the bank of the little pond on the grounds, but we knew it was much deeper than that. Mrs. Klink blushed painfully when she discovered that her skirt had been hiked very high up her wrinkled thigh and that Sheldon Cohen had been appreciating the view. Oh, don’t cover it, he said in a sweet way that did little to make her feel better or less conspicuous, though it was clear to me that she was enjoying herself. Maria Cortez said, Take a pill. And then we were all quite quiet. I had just revealed to my friends that one of the keys in my possession was to the pharmaceutical locker. Emily Kuratowski was not with us that day. She had been taken to the hospital with pains in her side, this after having to wait hours before an orderly came to help her to the toilet. They’re going to kill us all, Sheldon said, one by one. We’re near dead anyway, Maria Cortez said. That’s right, I said, that’s right.

31

Teufelsdröckh was set on thirty well-watered acres adjacent to a suburban calamity called Calabasas, a roadside mishap that stank of fast food and automotive puke. It was a better buffer than the chilling water that surrounded Alcatraz, for at least the water promised certain death. We residents, as we were called, discarding the more unpleasant designation patients, as well as the more accurate term inmates, were not discouraged from venturing out to play in the traffic, as it were. We were free to walk or catch the bus that was twenty minutes late regardless of one’s arrival at the stop. I walked three long, unshaded blocks to a mall the size of a small Iowa town. I had of course been in such places before, perhaps many times, though I had always tried to avoid them, so I should not have been surprised, stunned, by its massiveness or by the eerily familiar repetition of shops or by its complete uselessness in the face of its terrific promises. All I wanted was a locksmith, not even that, but a human with a key-making machine, my key on one side and a blank key on the other, a whirring, screeching noise, a spinning, buffing noise, and then two keys hopefully capable of opening the same lock. After exhausting myself with a walk the length of the place I learned by way of a directory map that Frenhofer’s Key-Ask was located near the door through which I had entered. The KeyAsk was in fact a kiosk set in the flow of traffic and it was manned by a boy dressed in all black wearing black lipstick.

Are you Frenhofer? I asked.

Are you stupid?

Yes, but that is beside the point. Is this the Key-Ask?

That’s Key- Osk.

Of course it is.

It’s a pun.

If you say so. I’d like copies made of these keys.

His name tag read nicolas poussin. He looked at the keys. A couple of these keys say Do Not Duplicate.

I realize that. That’s why I want only copies of them. Do you always obey rules? You don’t look like someone who follows all the rules.

Why do you say that?

Just something about you, a kind of death thing.

You’re really giving it a tug, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll make them.

Just like that?

Just like that. To advance your story. Tell me, old man, what are these keys to, eh?

One fits a closet full of controlled substances.

Cool. He paused at the very old key. I can’t do anything with this ancient thing. Is it real?

I don’t know. Let me have that one. He took the old key off the ring and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket.

His tag now read jan mabuse.

Jan Mabuse paused at the last and smallest key. This key is beautiful, he said, and as he said it the traffic around the kiosk slowed or at least appeared to slow. This key is perfect. He hesitated, as if afraid to attempt duplication of the last key, which was in fact the key to the drug cabinet, but he could not have known that.

I spoke to him, told him that the perfect key, like anything perfect, was but mere shadow, apparition, wraith. I told him that Orpheus should never have looked back. I studied his paint-darkened lips and said, Make the key.

His tag now read: fernand léger. He made the key, with the whirring, screeching, and buffing that I had wanted.

He did not charge me for my copies. He instead put down his protective goggles and prepared to leave. I asked him where he was going. He told me he was going home. No more keys for me, he said; his tag read claude lantier.

32

Sensuality, or more precisely lust, is the nonpareil Petri tureen for the breeding of ruinous and catastrophic miscalculation. I knew that, it having been a lesson I learned early in my so-called adult life, and so modeled my behavior, regarding all dealings with love and or lovers, actual and potential and imagined, on a robot I once saw in a movie when I was twenty-seven. I had smoked quite a bit of pot and the character might well have not been a robot, but I remember him as a robot nonetheless and his unfeeling and distant approach to matters of the heart seemed just about right. So, even though my short-afro-ed night nurse, her name will be now Clarabelle, made my heart flutter, or was it my medication, or worse? and even though she caused me to assemble a montage of some of my more fondly remembered erections, I did not and would not trust or confide in her completely. She had after all been intimate with Harley and loneliness and self-loathing can only explain so much. She had, on a purely animalistic plane, a plane worth noting and visiting, somehow bridged that experiential gap between the discrete and the continuous, between the distinct actuality of past conditions and the ephemeral, expanding, enduring, and untouchable attachment to those conditions, states of affairs, cases, hard-ons.

She was standing authoritatively behind her station desk, was Clarabelle. Her light-green smock covered with pastel smiley faces and the V-slit of her collar pointing seductively down to her, I assumed, nonexistent cleavage. I had already placed the original set of keys at the far edge of her desk and I believe she had pretended not to see me do it.