Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

I’m ninety-nine. Palindromic ninety-nine. At this age I look the same coming as I do going. And before you ask I have no sentimental or egotistical desire to reach one hundred for the mere sake of doing it. One hundred is not a terribly interesting number. In the Qur’an there are ninety-nine names for Allah. That’s a funny thing for a Jew to know, isn’t it?

We end up knowing all sorts of funny things. Imagine how many of them we forget in a lifetime.

Or two.

Or two.

35

The dining room was quiet and then quieter when Harley and his henchmen walked in. They made their noises and stood like weeds near the salad bar. Harley smiled. So, the keys have turned up, he said. I’d like to know who took them, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Anyway, thank you. But know that I am still angry. This is my kingdom. He rocked there on those words for a prolonged moment, then repeated, This is my kingdom. He walked out, his workers on his pheromone trail.

I looked at the faces in the room. None was terrified, but none was happy. They had all come to terms with the idea and the reality of death, but a change in the suffering along the path to death was unsettling. At their ages, they had a right to expect routine, even in pain, even in torment.

The regional inspector is coming tomorrow, Sheldon whispered to me.

The feckless, perhaps shiftless, certainly slothful regional inspector made four visits a year to our facility. If he was not somehow profiting from whatever the Gang of Six was about, then he was at least so incompetent that a complaint to him would prove meaningless. Also, the residents were just too intimidated by Harley and his thugs to be seen speaking to him. Yet, for some reason, beyond me and probably any sane person, I was going to have a conversation with him. Just looking at him, in his plaid jacket and chinos and oversized metal-framed glasses, I imagined him with his father, a hidebound pedant without knowledge of man’s nature or of a boy’s, giving lesson after lesson to this dutiful dolt, in some dead language of morality. In other words, he was a Christian, and not the good kind. He was a spit-hurling, brow-raking participle grinder. How are we doing? What are we eating today? Speaking of sleeping, are we sleeping well and doing our exercises and going here, there, hither, and yond?

We’ve got a problem, I said to Finley Snerd. I kid you not.

We’re having a problem?

Yes, some of the orderlies are abusive.

I’m seeing the problem. You’re telling me that some of the orderlies are abusing the residents?

That’s exactly what I just told you. I refused to be sucked into his participle gurgling vortex. We were sitting rather conspicuously at a picnic table on the lawn and I saw the brute Leon see us. He nodded his monster’s head.

What sort of abuse are the residents experiencing?

Neglect. Mental and emotional ill treatment. I suspect there is some extortion.

I’m listening and telling you that these are serious allegations.

I am aware of this.

Are you willing to name names?

Harley, Leon, Ramona, Tommy, and Billy. And let me not forget Cletus. I’d like you to write this down, all of it. They killed William Marshall.

You’re telling me they were responsible for him dying?

That’s what killed means.

Keep going.

They attacked his room, his life. They damaged a photograph of his deceased daughter, it was very special to him, an extension of his being, and that upset him so much that he moved too quickly, fell and hit his head.

Snerd thumbed through a folder, pretending to look at notes. I’m understanding that the orderlies were searching for some missing keys.

That’s what they claimed. What would ninety-two-year-old, nearly blind William Marshall want with the orderlies’ keys?

The regional inspector sighed. Well, I’m making note of all of this and we’ll be getting back to you. I’m assuming you won’t be minding if I’m popping in sometime so that we can continue chatting.

They are going to kill all of us and I want you to write that down. Would you write that down, please?

Okay, I’m writing it.

And date it.

I’m dating it, as per your request. He closed up his folders and packed up his briefcase. He offered me his spongy hand to shake and I shook it. Well, I’ll be going now.

36

Dear Son,

I received and read your letter of 30 May with great interest and I am sorry to be slow with my response. Thank you for it. Your letters are a staple of my continued soundness. I had hoped that my missive before yours might have allayed your concerns and fears, but I was evidently wrong. You appear to be as seized with panic as ever regarding my current state of affairs, but such obsessing serves neither of us. It hinders you from functioning properly, comme il faut, in the world and so undermines and negates my life’s work as a father. So, cut it out. The orderlies are disorderly and let’s leave it at that.

If there were others left in our family, I might write that they do not know me or that they have a wholly erroneous picture of me. This, whether they be brother, cousins, or grandchildren. Do not take the last in that list as a request or complaint. That ship has obviously sailed.

About my brother, your uncle. I envied him his life, simple and uncomplicated in its way. It perpetually seemed to me full of passion, if not love. Who knows which is better, or preferable. I would opt for the latter, but that is no doubt my artistic sensibility and penchant for the masochistic. But what does that leave one at the end? Some photographs? A few familiar tunes and scents? His death even seemed undemanding, easy, and uninvolved. All I have is involvement.

I do not expect another visit from you. I’m not crazy. That ship sailed with the other one. Not that I don’t believe you would like to be here, but, you know, physics, geometry, and all that. Time simply is not with us. We are out of time. I realize that one can read that in a couple of ways. I choose it to connote out of sync, as if my choice matters, and in the end just what is the difference?

Throughout my life I have found myself several times in so-called dire straits and I did not despair. Not so much because I was or am an optimist, but because I am prone to asking myself the question, just how bad can things really be? So, I ask you to not despair either; it is a little late for that.

At my age, with so many measures having been taken and being taken, no measures really seem extreme. It’s too bad, because sometimes extreme measures are called for. Extreme or not, measures have been chosen, if not yet employed. I remember hearing the cliché that one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater; that seems exactly the time to do it. But again, I am just Alice arguing with Humpty Dumpty.

The role of all this last act, as it were, is to provide a context for the impossible, a home for the contradictory, a bed for the irreconcilable. What I have planted, am planting, are like rhizomes, easy to put in, but you have to divide them before you know it. So much work. Come what may, we will do what we do and we will not stop or even pause for subversion or inversion.

All for now. I doubt we will see each when all is said and done, but who knows, really? Don’t pick up any wooden nickels.

Love,

Dad

37

Still, it was not all clouds and gray skies — there was some sunshine. As with Maria Cortez, who looked as if she had been soundly fucked. She sat beside a smiling Sheldon Cohen and so I knew that all of it had been more than mere bragging. They appeared casual and quite comfortable in the, shall we call it, the slipstream of their activity, the two of them naively trusting that they shared a secret. Well, Maria naively thought so, as everything in Sheldon’s posture and movement, he might as well have worn a display of bright feathers all around, was a betrayal of confidence.