Authors: Percival Everett
Colonel Bill paced the shag carpet of his Pentagon office, muttering, swearing, swinging a putter. He held his pipe clenched in his teeth and the words swam around it. He walked to his desk, slapped the button on his intercom, and shouted, “Gloworm! Get in here!”
The colonel’s aide, Lieutenant Gloworm, stepped into the office and cowered by the door as the head of the putter narrowing missed his brow.
“Gloworm!”
“Sir?”
“What else have we heard from that goddamn maximum-security joke they call a prison out there?”
“Nothing, Colonel. The guard is missing. His house is empty.”
“The guard, eh? What do we know about this man? I saw him when I was there, but I’ll be a cow’s teat if I can remember him. That’s a bad sign. Not about me, but about him. Must be an enemy agent to be able to blend in like that.”
“His name is Mauricio Lapuente. He’s married to a Rosenda Paz. He was born in El Paso, but as far as we know he has no living relatives.”
Colonel Bill pointed a finger at Gloworm. “See, there’s a red flag. A fucking Mexican with no living relatives? Am I the only person who thinks around here? What about the wife?”
“We don’t have anything on her. She might be from Mexico.”
“I don’t like this, Gloworm. You know what it makes me want to do?”
“What, sir?”
“It makes me want to fucking break somebody’s neck. So, you get on the horn with those bastards out there in La La Land and you tell them to set up road blocks and send up heli-choppers and call out the dogs. But I want my little boy back! Do you read me, mister?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what could happen if that little spook fell into the wrong hands and became a little spook for them? Why, it would be the end of the world as we know it. Now that anybody, no matter what they look like, can go anywhere they damn well please in this country, nothing’s safe. And he’s a fucking machine, Gloworm, a genetic freak. He’s a baby who can read. He reads! That’s enough reason, baby or not, to kill him. In fact, I want you to issue an order to our field operatives. I
want
that baby back. But if we can’t have him,
nobody
can have him. You reading me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Colonel Bill slipped his putter back into his golf bag in the corner of the office and muttered, “Goddamn monster baby on the loose. This is bad. Do you really understand the gravity of this, Gloworm?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“And call Camp David and have my jet readied.”
“Shall I call March and tell them you’re coming, sir?”
“Hell, no. I’m not going to California. I’m flying down to Miami for the President’s orgy. Didn’t you get an invitation? Of course, you didn’t. You’re just a pathetic slug in the pecking order of life.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, get out of here!”
up periscope
There once was a man named Tod
Who believed he’d spoken to god.
He rode into town,
Spread the word around
And slept with a hooker named Maude.
There once was a hooker named Maude
Who slept with a disciple of god.
She did him up right,
Straight through the night
And when she awoke he was
tod.
Q: Why is thought like money?
A: Because you can’t take it with you.
1
I had no problem with the Other, myself the Other, myself, or any bold line drawn between myself and the world, between signifier and signified and certainly, not for one second, was I troubled by a notion that in considering my conscious I-self that I was inhabiting or obscuring the line of any division between any of those things or my perception or conception of them. Blah blah blah.
If language was my prison house, then writing was the wall over which I climbed for escape. But climbing the wall either way meant, finally, the same thing, and so language was the prison and the escape and therefore no prison at all, any more than freedom is confinement simply because it precludes one from being confined. Indeed, my much regarded and remarkable relationship and facility with language had caused my incarceration, but also it had freed me, though I was still confined in the car of my new adults. I was still a prisoner to my size and to my inability to fend for myself. I was called a genius, but I was not. A genius, as far as I was concerned, was someone who could drive a car.
2
Ahead of us, cars were stopping and becoming a puzzle of steel. This made Mauricio very nervous and so he left that road and drove along a smaller one. Rosenda was terribly frightened and kept turning around in her seat to look past me out the back window. Then she looked at me.
“We have to stop and feed the baby,” she said.
“We’ll stop soon.”
“And we must stop at a Kmart or a Target so we can buy him some clothes.” She tilted her head and smiled. “He is a pretty baby. What are we going to call him, Mauricio?” She reached over the seat and touched my cheek. “We have been trying for so long to have a little one and here you are. It’s a miracle, Mauricio.” She looked at her husband. “So, what are we going to call him?”
Mauricio shrugged.
“Pepe,” Rosenda said. “I think we should call him Pepe. How does Pepe sound, Mauricio?”
“Pepe,” he said and nodded.
The likeness of their skin color to mine made us a proper-looking tribe. I could have been their baby. Mauricio drove us over a winding road, craggy slopes on either side, until we emerged from the hills before a plain of human activity. Cars swarmed and collected at intersections and at the mouths and anuses of parking lots. The afternoon sun was intense through the glass of the back window.
There was a shopping center and Rosenda was telling Mauricio that we had to stop. “Stop, honey, stop. We need things for our baby boy.” Looking back at me. “Our sweet little Pepe.”
I must admit that there was something like love in her eyes, but I was sickened by it. There was no subtlety, no understatement, no refinement, just wide-eyed, sloppy, indelicate adoration.
“Go,” Mauricio said.
“Aren’t you coming in?” Rosenda asked.
“We’ll wait here.”
“No, Mauricio, it’s too hot in the car,” she complained. And she was right. I was sweating on the vinyl seat. I was thirsty. I was hungry. I had to pee. Rosenda added, “Little Pepe probably has to go potty.” What an unfortunate expression. She was out and opening the back door. “Come on, li’l Pepe.”
You don’t know Polk County lak Ah do.
Anybody been dere, tell you de same thing too.
My mother was crying somewhere and not entirely for the loss of me, but for every wrong turn of her life, my father being the most glaring token of her misguided journey. She was sorry she had ever had me, but loved me no less for the regret. She would not have given up my life to negate her mistake, and she would have given her own to have me back again with her. Instead of my face serving as a painful reminder of her unfortunate encounter with the man she so despised, his face conjured feelings of loss and guilt as it made her think of me. She was crying somewhere because she thought she was a monster. She was crying somewhere because she was not sure she wanted me back. She was crying somewhere because time and space and language had cheated her badly. And finally, she was crying because, since my loss and since her severance of connection with my father, her painting had gotten good.
ergon
eidos
emic-etic
event
everywhere
Mauricio pushed the cart while Rosenda toted me through the aisles of the store. No one gave us a second look, though a few women offered the customary baby-waves to me. I returned my customary sneer, which I had resigned to believing was seen as simply an odd smile. The people passing were set phrases, mechanically repeated every few seconds and becoming comic for it. Finding it funny, I started to smile and as I started to smile, more people paid attention to me, pointed and smiled also and so it became funnier…You get the idea. Until the whole store was abuzz with talk of the good-natured baby in the toddlers’ clothes section. People came over just to see me, playing peekaboo behind racks of down parkas for teenage girls, waving to me with wiggling fingers over displays of towels. All of this made Mauricio very nervous. Rosenda, however, loved it, and bounced me conspicuously against her ample teats. It was hilarious and I couldn’t stop, what constituted for me as laughter, smiling. The scene in the store had become a revolution of sorts. Clones of clones chasing the three of us through the aisles, Mauricio pushing the cart filled with a set of pajamas, a little toothbrush, some big-boy underpants, six T-shirts, three pairs of sweatpants, and a pair of sneakers, Rosenda trotting behind him, hoisting me back into position every three strides. Mauricio was perspiring and Rosenda was by now nervous as well. I was tired of it all and no longer smiling. And so, people took to making faces, attempting to return me to my good mood. Instead of sneering and running the risk of being misunderstood, I turned away from them all and buried my face in Rosenda’s neck.
Mauricio fumbled with the keys once we were back in the car. This time I sat in the front on Rosenda’s lap.
“Hurry,” Rosenda said.
“Okay,” Mauricio said.
“Hurry,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Mauricio,” Rosenda said.
“Okay.”
Conversation is a messy business at best.
1
. Delacroix, Delacroix, Who’s Got the Delacroix?:
More than in any other European country, the slant toward didactics and the self-righteous was present in French painting. The predilection toward sermonizing in art appears early in the seventeenth century. Nicolas Poussin led the column through the trees and into the swamp. His painting
Et in Arcadia Ego
is a token of the amorphous. It depicts weary herdsmen reading the inscription on a grave marker, “I too am in Arcadia.” The
Testament of Eudamis
is an examination of prudent submission; the dead citizen of Corinth leaves his friends the chore of feeding his mother and daughter. Antithetical epigrams of such preponderance could only have come from the French. The formal character of Poussin’s art is Italian, though no Italian would have been so clumsy. The moralizing materializes in genre painting as well; Louis Le Nain’s serfs are stiff and probably stupid, unfortunately not at all like the ruffians of Brower and other artists of the Netherlands. Religious paintings became very different from those done in Italy and Spain. The new direction in France was toward the spiritual life of the individual and the redemption for which no sane person could hope.
Grand goût
was riddled with self-righteous arrows and so too was the academic spirit of France at the time—the fundamental concepts of truth and right somehow having been shamlessly tied together. Reason and this desire to pontificate formed the
méthode classique,
represented in the seventeenth century by Poussin and the writer Corneille.
In contrast to this heavy-fisted, ostentatious pose of the Wearisome is the second current, the Trifling. The Trifling was founded simply on
taste.
Of course, one is hard-pressed to say what a definition of taste might have been, but we can be assured that, in the final analysis, the taste prevalent in the Trifling was just as pompous and self-important as that of the wearisome. Early in the 1700s, there was a movement to make sentiment the criterion for artistic judgment. This was an escape from reason and morality, from the academic tradition, but of course it fell short of emotion or anything so genuine. What was of interest was the surface of reality.
Charme
and
esprit
were unthinkable, pure essentials of a taste, the refinement and elegance of which could only have been fashioned in any of the world’s more chic ghettos; both slaps in the face of reason and morality as well. By so-called definition, they are amoral. This absence from the sphere of moral sense was misread as frivolousness, bawdiness, and pornography, but actually it was only silly.
The appetite for the superfluous and inflated triggered the production of so many works of art that it is hard to get around the cumbersome of the whole of
esprit
to the rest of French painting. Watteau, Lancret, and others saw their paintings on the
rocaille
walls and ceilings of Parisian hotels in the first half of the 1700s. They were the delights of connoisseurs; others admired the floors. This decorative art, overstated as it was, was thought to be a fleeting trend. Watteau, a front-runner of the school, was considered an accident, a deformed offspring of the Wearisome.
Certainly, the characteristic reasonless and unfathomable personality of the French people and their artistic sensiblilities beat with great life, but they cannot suppress the pompous components of French spirit. Rather, the play and lackluster battle between these contrasting elements give rise to French art. Between Poussin and Rubens lies a stretch of ground covered with the bodies of Frenchmen having fallen to bitter diatribes. We see a battle between tight-minded puritans on the one side and slovenly and probably alcoholic bohemians on the other. Ingres and Delacroix met in the dark alley of the nineteenth century, Ingres being convinced that Delacroix was a scout of the devil, and he the self-elected Norman Mailer of linearism and classical tradition.
Of course, essentials of the Wearisome and the Trifling could not resist spilling into each other and this is in major part responsible for the growth of French artists. Many of the artists, because of this, were severely impaired by paranoia and fits of multiple personalities.
Poussin and Corneille were long finished as symbols of French thought. Art had been muscled into submission by Louis XIV and company. The result: artistic impotence, limp brushes failing any effective strokes. The Academy strangled artistic life. The reaction, the revolt, was to seek complete freedom from academic shackles. But this illusion of emancipation or undisciplined and unrestrained speed-painting was soon prostrate on the battlefield of art history. Watteau, Lancret, and Pater faded early in the eighteenth century; they had exhausted all the
rocaille
walls and ceilings, the oppressive climate of self-righteous pomposity squelching them.
The vicious fascist tendency that now confronted the loose, speed-sketching mentality of the
petits maîtres
was essentially a reversion to the Wearisome, the self-important sermonizing art that had infected France in the classic period of the seventeenth century. This might have been termed neo-classicism or neo-Poussinism; the
grand goût
was back. But it had been tainted by a half century of subjection to the irrational and it was in need of the centurial dose of riboflavin and iron. Diderot said, “First move, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged—only then regale my eyes.”
In the nineteenth century the winds of two old schools could be smelt blowing out of the past, the linear and the coloristic, though taking on new meaning because of the addition of Romantic and sentimental elements. While both schools incorporated these elements they continued to grow significantly apart. The coloristic and shamelessly ornate, by the 1830s, was manifested fully in the work of Delacroix; the French Romantic school. Opposed to this was the neo-classicistic movement with its narrow insistence on line and structure, different from the classicism of David in that it moved toward the saccharine and mawkish. Ingres led the way. The rudimentary difference between the new schools is not actually discernible, but the struggle between them was even sillier than the struggle between the Poussinists and the Rubenists of the seventeenth century.
2
. As the converse of that would be “to think to someone else.” Perhaps this makes no sense when discussing telepathy, but that is, how do the
philosophers
say it, a special case.
3
. Thank you, Mr. Kelly.