Percival Everett - Erasure

“Yeah, it’s shit. I know that, but it sells. This is a business, Thelonious.”

I didn’t say another word, just set the receiver down in its cradle and stared at the phone.

While I was staring at the phone, it rang again. It was Lorraine and she was very upset.

“Is it my mother?” I asked. “Lorraine.”

“No, it’s Dr. Lisa.”

‘What about Lisa?”

“They shot her.”

“What?”

“Dr. Lisa is dead.”

I put the phone down because I didn’t know what to do. My stomach was cold on the inside. I could feel my heart beating. I struggled to recall my brother’s telephone number and dialed it.

“Bill, I just got a call from Lorraine.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“See you at the house.”

Often, I would simply cut wood. The smell of it, the feel of it, the sound of the saws, manual or power, tearing through it. I would practice bevels with the router, miter cuts, add to my pile of tapered legs. I wanted to turn on the table saw and rip a plank, but I had to drive to the airport. I had to go see what Lorraine had meant when she said that my sister was dead. I had to meet Bill at Mother’s and figure out why Lisa wasn’t there. I’d get on the plane knowing virtually nothing. If the passenger beside me were to ask the purpose of my trip, I’d have to tell him I didn’t know. Perhaps I would say, “Lorraine said they shot my sister” and then the person beside me would know as much as I.

It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention. Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change. Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present. Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning. Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical. Even if the language is unknown. Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content. Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.

A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.

It wasn’t difficult to conclude that Bill was a homosexual, whether it was true or not. He liked being with men in a way different from the way heterosexual men liked being with men. Effeminate behavior, I learned when young, served as no measure of sexual orientation. My gym teacher, whom I imagined eating rail spikes for breakfast, was gay and I knew it not because he held his hands a certain way, not because he made a pass at me, not because he would park himself by the showers and listen to us bathe, but because I saw him late one night walking hand in hand with another man. At first I was shocked, but I caught myself. What I really felt was envy. He seemed so happy, holding his friend’s hand, enjoying the evening. I wanted to hold a hand too, albeit a girl’s hand, but a hand nonetheless.

Bill would date girls, but was cranky the while. I don’t know if Father and Mother ever suspected anything. If they had I’m sure the scene would have been ugly. My parents talked rather badly about the queens that paraded the street near my father’s office, but, more than anything, thinking of sexual preference, or that there was sexual preference, didn’t exist. My father had a term, which I heard once, for a homosexual man and that was Eye. I never did discover how the word came to mean anything.

I was driving up Highway 395 on my way to fish the South Fork of the Kern. At the junction of 178 and 395 I stopped for a bite. It was summer and dusk was coming on and so it was late enough and still eerie enough for the weirdos to be out. I sat in a booth and was called “sugar” by the middle-aged waitress while a couple of guys spoke French to each other in the booth behind me. When traveling, it is best to eat without regard to health or one might not eat at all. I was carving into what was called a chicken fried steak and was unable to detect chicken or steak, but it was clear that it was indeed fried, when a couple of stringy, gimme-capped, inbred bohunks came noisily into the restaurant. Their keen hearing, though it did not allow them to know it was French, picked up the annoying cadence of a “fern” language. They sat at the counter and cast more than a few glances toward the French-speaking men, until they could take it no longer and walked over to them.

“You boys funny?” The skinnier and taller of the two asked.

“Funny?” one of the Frenchmen asked.

“You know, queers,” from the second long-fingernailed, backwoods, walking petri dish.

“Ah, queers,” the Frenchman said. “Oui.”

“Oui,” from bumpkin number one, who looked at his buddy and shared a laugh. “Come on outside so we can kick your ass.”

“I don’t understand,” the second Frenchman said.

Bumpkin two must have stepped or leaned closer. I registered the alarmed expression on the face of the waitress, who then called out that she didn’t want any trouble.

“Outside, faggots. You ain’t chickens, are you? It’s two against two. That’s fair.”

“Actually, it’s two against three,” I said. I put the bite that was on my fork into my mouth.

Bumpkin one stepped over to look at me, then laughed to his pal, “I think we got the nigger riled.”

I chewed my food, trying to remember all the posturing I had learned as an undersized teenager.

“You a faggot, too?” he asked.

I pointed to the fact that I was chewing. This confused him slightly and I could see for a split second his fear. “I might be,” I said.

“So, you want to fight, too.”

I didn’t want to fight, but the fact of the matter was that I was already fighting. I said, and still I am proud of it, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it. Just remember that this is one of the more important decisions you will ever make.”

I’d overshot my mark. His fear grew and turned into rage and he hopped back and yelled for me to get up. I was afraid now that I might really have to do something I didn’t do very well, throw punches. I stood and though I wasn’t a skinny wire, I was not much larger than either of them. The second bumpkin yelled for the gay men to get up, too.

They did and I wished I’d had a camera to capture the expressions of those two provincial slugs. The Frenchmen were huge, six-eight and better, and healthy looking. The rubes stumbled over themselves backing away, then scrambled out of the diner.

I was laughing when the men asked me to join them, not at the spectacle of the rednecks running out, but at my own nerve and audacity, to presume that they needed my help.

C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.

I imagined my sister treating a patient, a little girl with a name my sister despised, looking into her ears, joking with her, asking her if purple was her favorite color because that was the color of her throat. The child laughed and my sister said something stern to the mother, wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. She walked the mother and child down the corridor to the front, where a scared teenager fidgeted in her chair on seeing my sister. The receptionist said something to my sister and handed her a chart. She took the pen from her jacket breast pocket and checked a couple of places, initialed a couple of places. Then the little girl tugged at my sister’s skirt and all sound stopped while my sister offered the child a raised-eyebrows glance. The sound came back. Broken glass, screams, the squawking of chairs against the floor. My sister’s mouth formed words that even my imagination cannot make out and then she was gone.