Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Finally, she looked at them. I wonder where those came from.

What?

Those keys.

Oh.

Are they yours?

Not mine.

Sarah, Sarah, are these your keys?

Not mine?

Anthony, are these yours? Clarabelle held them high and jingled them.

Nope.

I guess the owner will turn up, she said. She put them into her drawer.

Do you believe in time travel? I asked her.

I guess not.

It’s just as well. Apparently, given that the occurrence of time dilation, whether based on velocity or gravity, doesn’t allow backward travel, we could only hope to get you as old as me and that would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

You’re an interesting man.

I was once, I think. I’m pretty sure I thought so then. More fool me.

You know, I really don’t like Harley, she said.

I nodded. I wondered if she thought that was supposed to make me like her more. I nodded some more.

What do you see when you look at me?

This was a great question and it took me completely off guard. I looked up at the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the hallway. I see a river in Iowa, I said. The first place I saw my wife naked. All we did was swim that day.

That’s sweet.

I’m a sweet man.

33

I

My first self-conscious attention to a heading. I. A pronoun denoting the self. Me. It is also the letter representing an imaginary unit in math, the unit that lets the real number system extend to complex numbers. Me. I’m sorry, my best and favorite lover said to me, you are imaginary. I suggested that she multiply me by i and give me another look and try. But all of this to prolong a deferral, right?

I could see Billy fishing in some far-off stream or pond even though I did not know if he liked fishing or had ever fished in his what I imagine to be staid accountant’s life with his daughter beside him teasing him about something or another perhaps the way he said the word apricot and there he was reeling in empty hook after empty hook happy because his girl was there with him and maybe his wife but wasn’t it odd Billy thought there by that stream or pond how when a child dies all other relationships seem so so so dismissible forgettable shallow though he knew that she must have been around perhaps in a backyard garden with an older or younger version of their daughter she teasing her mother about the fact that she wore her rubber boots on the hottest and driest days but Billy was with his daughter and then he was not but instead lying deader than dead against that bank his arms and legs akimbo his eyes open and lost-looking in the bright sun because there was no heaven no stream no daughter to revisit though someplace along that stream bank that riverbank she lay like him so so so still veins and arteries and curious things-closed all kisses having been blown up a skirt hiked up just over her knee her hands looking like they had wrung the last water from a towel pots and pans piled up the bank waiting for Billy to wash after the last dinner the last supper conjuring that lie of a story where that Iscariot guy did the brave thing and pointed out a toga-clad Jimmy Swaggart to the goose-stepping authorities and some others who were tired of reading letters from living souls who had ceased or failed ever to recognize the difference between hopes and lies. So blow me a kiss sweet Jesus Billy said and I will let it light on my ass and my daughter will remain skirt-hiked-dead on a shore and friends will make tea make tea make tea and then visit in the cold dark of night Point Dume

And then there was you, me, us, red and black in the evening light lost to the wearing of hats and eager to return to stories that used to make some sense eager to recall easily demarcated boundaries of identity and designation and eager to resketch the likenesses of faces that were either familiar or desired wanting in the darkness of the wee hours which were no smaller than the rest to smell cooking that promised to free all of us from the chains of understanding yes ourselves and all those we loved or hated sought or dismissed the beautifulest of all visible things the lightning strikes of summer the stars the nebulae the nebulæ for only etymology’s sake some sea tempest and thus awaiting in an alley then to that day with a vacant hugeness of loss looming we counted our weapons one of us anyway and aligned with our comrades and lined the halls with maps of our plans and stretched all things to their limits the budding disleafing and felling of trees notwithstanding my skull a great blue vault with eyebrows and anger in its large awkward gianthood rustling like some human noise in a forest a howling wind with no place to go a Brobdingnagian with a clumsy ham-fisted gait pretended to seek refuge while raising a hammer stood in a doorway prepared to fight in rude corridors and terrible closets and on beaches from which south extended until it stopped left unexplained left untouched left strange like a glance through a glass pane without a frame without an agent for beauty is a witch and did not we feel it so that the wretched made for lousy company not cheerful at all while hell and purgatory and paradise blended like clay on one spinning table upon which also rested my peaceable disposition until rough and then far rougher weather upset that temperament and forced me into that perplexing jungle that deep root-riddled tangle of wilderness that was myself

In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.

34

A pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the sun.

Emily Kuratowski had in life been married to a mathematician, she liked to tell people. She had been one as well but seldom mentioned that. She told me once that she had spent her life working on projective limit topology and canonical projections and she even tried to explain it a bit to me, but my glazed-over look made her smile politely and pat my twenty-year-younger head. That is why I don’t think about these things anymore, she said. I would rather eat cherries and think about the wind. Emily was what kids in my day used to call walleyed, but was called later lazy eyed. In her case her left eye pointed slightly out and so she suffered exotropia. She and I talked about that and I told her that the condition sounded more like a nice place to visit. She told me that her husband had worked on ring theory. I didn’t understand his problem and neither did he, she said. And none of it served him in life. He died bitter and, finally, unsolved. She picked up her yellow cup from the tray in front of her and drank through the bendable straw. I’m feeling a little better now. God, I hate this hospital.

Emily had money problems, stemming, she told me, from her inability to balance a checkbook. Oh, I can explain the Hausdorff maximal principle or Banach-Tarski paradox, but don’t ask me to subtract seven from twelve. My husband was even worse, insofar as he had his head stuck so far up his ass he could smell his own breath.

You must have loved him, I said.

I suppose I did for a while. Then we just got wrapped up in life and work and love and the idea of it just fell away.

That’s sad.

If it hadn’t been for my constant affairs it would have been.

I laughed.

He never noticed. He never could have noticed. He never would have wanted to notice. If he had noticed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have understood.

Too much in the clouds?

Too stupid. Thank god we never had any children.

I thought you had a daughter.

I do.

Oh. Just how old are you, Emily? My question came off as indelicate, I think, but she didn’t mind.