Percival Everett - Erasure

I apologized. “I was somewhere else,” I said.

“I don’t like flying either,” she said. “You look low.”

I nodded, not wanting to chat, but I had already been rude once.

“Yeah, you look low, all right. You seem like you wanna put your head in a croc’s mouth.”

“Is that an efficient method?”

She laughed. “Clean off,” she said, then leaned back to regard me. “You’re all right, mate.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I like you. Course if you go off and kill yourself, then I’ll say I liked you. Past tense, you know.”

“I know.”

“You should come to Australia,” she said. She was not a large woman, but she sounded big. “There are some places in the desert that you’d think are just hell. Then you could come back here and everything would be right as rain by comparison.”

“You think so?”

“My daddy used to say, There isn’t anything so bad that seeing something worse won’t make better.”

“A poet, your father.”

“A bit of a bastard, he was. Made me love life though. Just by being there, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do.”

She again offered me a mint and this time I took it and thanked her. She said, “These are just god-awful,” as I put the thing in my mouth.

“Not so bad,” I said.

The phone discussions with the judges turned out to be disheartening, infuriating and stultifying. To a person, they had all fallen in love with Stagg Leigh’s Fuck.

“The best novel by an African American in years.”

“A true, raw, gritty work.”

“So vivid, so life-like.”

“The energy and savagery of the common black is so refreshing in the story.”

“I believe it will be taught in schools, despite its rough language. It’s that strong.”

“An important book.”

Of all them black-faced crewThe finest man I knewWas our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.

The house was cold. Mother was the same. Life was the same. I had a new book out, but no one, thank god, knew it was mine. And the damn thing was doing well, very well, enormously well. I read many books that I thought were fine, but my fellow judges would hear none of it. Because we had to, we came to five finalists.

They were:

(1) Traditions, by Zeena Lisner.

(2) Monte Cristo, by J. Thinman.

(3) Exit the Moon, by Jorge Jarretto.

(4) Warrior’s Happiness, by Chic Dong.

(5) Fuck, by Stagg R. Leigh.

We would sift through the finalists and shake out a winner at a final meeting right before the awards ceremony in New York in February.

Das Seitengewehr pflanzt auf! The scream came to me in a dream, but as much as it frightened me, I did not wake, but instead continued dreaming, understanding in fact that I was dreaming. The idea that Nazi soldiers were after me was scary enough, but my fear was compounded by my knowledge that I was aware of it all being a dream and my inability to actually awake. I was hiding in dense brush at dusk. There was a French farmhouse in the distance, across a pasture, and beyond that was an orchard of some kind. The Germans were coming through the orchard, bayonets fixed as ordered. They burned the house and came across the meadow, poking their weapons into mounds of hay. A woman ran from the burning house, falling, crying. I could not see her face, but she was carrying a canvas. I could see the picture well in spite of the distance and the failing light. It was Starry Night. The soldiers took the painting from the woman and lanced it. I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it covered with blood. But I kept telling myself, “This is a dream. This is a dream.” Behind the soldiers a male chorus sang “The Horst Wessel Song.” Then the painting was aflame and the heat I felt made me scream out and the soldiers heard me, reckoned my position and came toward me. I then realized that I was sitting in a foxhole with a.50 calibre machine gun. I forgot my bleeding and my burns and started shooting, mowing down the soldiers like so many cans. One soldier, though shot, crawled bleeding all the way to my foxhole while “Horst Wessel” was replaced by “Stars Fell on Alabama.” The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, “Wie heißen Sie?” And I didn’t know.

I called Bill, but Bill was not home. Bill was never home, never at his office, never anywhere. He never called back, never left a message, never wrote. I wondered if Bill was dead. I wondered if it mattered.

One Tuesday, Mother seemed herself for a couple of minutes near the end of my visit. She gazed up at me from her darkness and said, “Monksie, we are all such vain creatures. The hard part is seeing myself, what I’ve become. I see for a couple of seconds and then I don’t know where I am. I wish I could tell you I’m in here looking out. Thursday I plan to have a good day. Be sure to be here on Thursday.” The nurse told me as I was leaving that a couple of Mother’s old friends had come by to see her.

“They stood at the foot of her bed, but she just stared past them out the window,” the woman reported. “Then they left. One of them had been by before. Same thing happened.”

“Does my mother know who you are?”

The nurse nodded her head. “Much of the time. That’s not unusual though. I don’t mean anything to her. I’m just furniture.”

On Thursday, just as she predicted, she smiled to me with a smile that was indeed hers, asked me to put on some music. “Something nice,” she said. “Some Ravel.” She floated her hands in the air. “Ravel is so dancey.” I put the music on and she closed her eyes. “At times, I believe your father was bored with me. I think I annoyed him. But he never said anything, never let it show on his face or in his tone, but I believe I saw it. In the way he moved, the way he would turn a page. I know he loved me, because why would he have hidden his feelings so. Oh, we had good times, Monksie. Your father and I got along beautifully, but still there were those moments, moments when I felt so small.” She sighed, but kept her eyes shut. “Once I mentioned to him that I thought he was wearied, but he shook his head and smiled and wondered where I got such an idea.” She breathed in a deep breath and smiled sadly. “I always promised myself I wouldn’t become old and smell of mentholated spirits. But I do, don’t I, Monksie.”

“I can’t smell it, Mother.”

“You’re sweet. Like your father.”

“We promise ourselves all sorts of things during our lives,” I said.

“What have you promised yourself?”

I looked at her quiet face. “I promised myself once that I would not compromise my art.”

Mother’s eyes opened and she said, “What a fine promise. Are you sure I don’t smell of mentholated spirits?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Mother’s eyes closed again.

I tried Bill again. Left a message. No response.

So, I had managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work, two bodies, no boundaries yet walls everywhere. I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away. Somehow I had whacked off my own