Authors: Percival Everett
But this time Steimmel responded. She said, “Of course you have a bad feeling, you dope. We just kidnapped a kid. But it’s for science. Hell, we might even be saving the planet.” Steimmel laughed a hoarse laugh. “At the very least, this little bastard is going to make me famous. He’s the link, Boris. He’s the link between the imaginary and symbolic phases. I’m going to dissect him and then it will be Freud, Jung, Adler, and Steimmel. And to hell with Lacan. He’s just Freud in an spray can.”
“The kid can’t be that special,” Boris said.
“The fucker writes poetry. He writes stories.”
“Are they any good?”
“Shut up.” She turned in her seat to glance back at me. “The little worm is listening to us right now. He probably believes he understands what we’re saying. Right, Ralphie?”
I wrote a note, crumpled it and tossed it in the direction of Steimmel. She found it and read:
So that I don’t die of boredom back here would you explain to me what Lacan means by the sliding signified and the floating signifier?
Steimmel began to laugh wildly. “I’m going to be fucking famous. Those professors of mine back at Columbia will choke on crow now. The pigs. Boris, who is the greatest psychoanalytic thinker you know?”
“You are.” Then, slightly under his breath, he added,
“Unsere letzte Hoffnung, meine Führerin.”
“Be careful, Boris.”
I was concerned about my mother. I could see her walking into my room and finding me gone. At first, she would not believe it, then as she heard my father stirring in the bedroom, it would sink in. She would scream and my father would come running into the room and figure out what was wrong. And they would stand there holding each other, not out of love but fear, not to support but to remain standing. They would search the house, then Inflato would call the police while Mo continued the search outside in the yard and garden, maybe even moving down the street, house to house. I did not like the expression I imagined on my mother’s face.
I knew of cinema only what I had read. I had never seen a movie, though I knew the stories of many. And I believed I understood the narrative structure of them, but there was one device that escaped me. It was the montage. And though my first example
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of it was poorly done, I could still appreciate the possibilities, especially the camp ones. I knew that I would have to employ the technique in my dreams and even in my recollections. The montage seemed to me at the time a kind of sideways game, a parade just begging for metonymic substitutions and displacements. I entertained my mind with the construction of montage after montage while Steimmel and her lackey tried to sleep.
a) the doctor pulls me from the womb
b) my mother and father smile at each other
c) the clock on the wall registers the passage of an hour
d) my mothers is putting a question to a nurse, who gestures for her to wait
e) the doctor talks to my father in the waiting room, puts his hand on my father’s shoulder
f) my father sits on the edge of my mother’s bed, tells her something that makes her cry
g) I am tiny and encased in glass, my little hands squeezing nothing, wires and tubes everywhere
h) outside, birds fly through a park and children play with dogs
Ezra Pound said, “Every word must be charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” Let it be the case then. But words need no help from anyone. Bet thew ords kneeknow hellip freeum heinywon. Context, story, time, place—don’t these work like Bekins men, packing the words like so many trunks? But finally, words are not cases to be packed at all, but solid bricks (and, of course, like a brick, even a word’s atoms are not motionless).
To me, Steimmel and the Steimmels of the world were jackals. I grew, irrationally, angry with my parents as I watched the jackal sleep. My parents might have worshipped my bones, I thought, but my flesh they were willing to give over to wild beasts of the land. I viewed myself as dead and left on a platform for weather and birds to tear apart.
Steimmel and Boris slept fully clothed, the doctor’s dark tennis shoes on the floor by the bed. She snored slightly and by the light from the television I could see her parted lips and her tobacco- and coffee-stained teeth. She and her accomplice were so peaceful as to appear dead. I wondered what might come and eat them. I thought that perhaps we would be found and presumed dead, only to awaken and find that we had been sentenced to the gibbet. And there, while on display for passersby to gawk at our corpses and count our crimes, we would open our eyes and scare the life out of all the onlookers.
Down the close and up the stair
But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief
Knox’s the man who buys the beef.
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Only an efficient net or spray of myopia could have kept Steimmel or Boris from realizing that transporting me was going to be a conspicuous matter. Although, being a baby, I had been spared the realities of racial attitudes in the culture, my readings in genetics and history and current events made it clear that the people on the street were going to find the discrepancy between my skin color and my abductors’ at least notable and perhaps worthy of some explanation.
2
Have you to this point assumed that I am white? In my reading, I discovered that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom,
5
live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone. White characters, I assumed they were white (often, because of the ways they spoke of other kinds of people), did not seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimization, to exist on the page. But you, dear reader, no doubt, whether you share my pigmentation or cultural origins, probably assumed that I was white. It is not important unless you want it to be and I will not say more about it, but a physical description of one kidnapped baby would have to be released to the police and that description, being delivered by my parents, would be more or less precise and therefore, two, rather pale, white people traveling up the California coast with a baby possessing at least one of the attributes of the rendered portrait might have a problem.
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I had never seen my parents on television. The mere sight of them moving in two-dimensional space was so compelling that I nearly missed what was being said. The caption beneath their worried faces read: Parents of the kidnapped baby. The reporter gave my description and even put on camera a photograph of me, however unflattering, and added that I was extremely bright. I did not like seeing my picture there and as I entertained the thought that many people were seeing it also, I felt violated. But finally, what I was left with was a sick feeling because of the tears in Mo’s eyes. Even Inflato’s face showed grief that I found affecting.
“Do you think they know about us?” Boris asked.
“How could they?” Steimmel barked. “I told them at the office that I was taking my long overdue vacation. So, my absence is explained.”
“How are we supposed to go anywhere with him?” Boris pointed to me, then crossed the room and peeked out the window at the morning sky. “It’s raining. Maybe that will give us some cover or something.”
“We only have a few more hours on the road and then we’re home free.” Steimmel started to pull off her shirt.
“What are you doing?” Boris asked.
“I’m going to take a shower. I suggest you take one, too. It’ll calm you down.” She finished pulling her shirt over her head and then removed her bra. Her breasts were ugly and unappetizing, though they did serve to turn my mind to food. Her nipples were very pale pink, hardly more pronounced than goose bumps, and surrounded by exaggerated areolae.
Just as the good Judge Woolsey had written in his judgment of
Ulysses
, so I wrote to Boris as he sat on the bed of the motel room listening to Steimmel’s shower:
The effect of Doctor Steimmel is undoubtedly somewhat emetic.
Poor Boris looked at my note. Such an expression I could not have imagined, as it became clear that, although I had written several pages in the car and a couple of notes to Steimmel, Boris did not know my secret, or at least had not believed it was true. He stared at me and began to hyperventilate, his thin lips puckering as he choked himself on his own carbon dioxide. He pulled himself to his feet and ran into the steamy bathroom, leaving the door wide open for me to see inside. I guess the steam exacerbated his problem because he fell to the floor, grabbing the shower curtain on his way down, and exposing Steimmel who was touching herself in a manner not unlike my explorations with my willy.
Steimmel let out a short scream and snapped at Boris, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Can’t breathe, Dr. Steimmel,” he gasped.
“Good lord, man,” she said. “Sit up and put your head between your legs and try to breathe slowly.”
Boris followed her instructions while the doctor dried her body.
“These motel towels aren’t worth a fuck,” she said. “Are you okay?”
Boris nodded.
“What happened?”
“That baby,” he said and he pointed through the doorway at me sitting on the bed. “That baby.”
“What about that baby?”
“That baby wrote me a note.”
“Of course, he did. I told you he could. Why else would I want that shit machine with us?”
“I thought you meant he could make letters. But he used the word
emetic.
And quite properly, I might add.”
Steimmel sucked her teeth and took a step toward me. “Yeah, the little bastard’s got some fucking vocabulary. He’s what I’ve waited my entire professional life for. Fuck Piaget.”
Steimmel had some mouth on her. And it was no response to her or any of her antics, but no one had placed me for some time on the pot and I did what babies do.
“What’s that smell?” Steimmel asked. She looked at Boris. “Damnit.”
The story is told of Leibniz that he never actually gave gifts as wedding presents, but instead offered brides rules of conduct and advice, the final bit of wisdom being that the woman not give up bathing after having found a husband. He was, of course, Voltaire’s Pangloss, but this Leibniz was the approval-seeking, optimistic, and shallow Leibniz and the more interesting Leibniz remained stashed in the backs of his desk drawers and under his bed. It occurred to me as I considered the man, sitting in my high chair, listening to Inflato hold forth, that the likes of my father might say that it was sad that Leibniz kept the good work under the bed. I thought that it was lamentable that the work did not remain there, safe from the ravages of fame seekers, of name builders, of dogma feeders. Tell your ideas not to talk to strangers. Don’t let your ideas play in the street. Don’t give your ideas any toys with pieces so small that they might choke on them.
Pink and white oleanders lined the long drive; the rain that was falling heavily during most of the trip along the highway was now a drizzle. The wipers of the car struck a sick, intermittent cadence, hard to count and unsteeling as I contemplated just how far from my home I was. It didn’t matter that I was in the same state and not on the other side of the globe. What mattered was that my mother didn’t know where I was. What mattered was that my mother was clinging desperately to the hope that I was still alive, a little baby in the world of bad weather, people, and ideas. I imagined my mother wailing, sitting on the floor of the room where her child once slept, screaming unintelligible sounds through the night, disturbing the sympathetic neighbors, and exciting a few far-off coyotes. Inflato might be holding her, or standing away, leaning on the doorjamb, wanting himself to cry out, but not having the presence, the security, the lack of self-consciousness, lacking the femininity for such pure response, and wanting to help his wife but feeling lost to the task.
The drive was neat, maintained with precision, no doubt, by little professional men who came every other day in pickups held together with baling wire. The tires of the sedan kicked up pebbles and threw them wildly beneath the undercarriage. The estate, the hospital, sanitarium, criminal retreat was soft pink stucco nestled in a stand of palms. The main lodge and its outlying structures were roofed with red tiles, all the buildings showing the curves of archways and balconies. It looked like a secret place. It looked quiet and covert in spite of the several people who walked about, invidious, pernicious, sinister. I could sense in Boris an apprehension, but Steimmel was beside herself with excitement, almost bouncing in her seat.
“I’ve reserved three buildings for my work,” she said. “The subject will sleep in the lab. We’ll use the remaining two as living quarters.”
“This place gives me the creeps,” Boris said. “All of those turns and dirt roads. I would never have known this was here.”
“That’s the point, Boris. I’ve spent every cent I have for this secrecy. And it damn well better remain secret. Do you catch my drift?”
“Yes, Dr. Steimmel.”
“That means no calls to that little girlfriend of yours. That means no calls to that little boyfriend of yours. And that especially means, no calls to your mother.” Steimmel stared at him.
“I get it. I get it.”
Dear Bertrand,
Imagine that I ask you to take the kettle from the stove. You look over and see steam rising from its spout. It will whistle shortly. You understand my request and you walk over and remove it from the burner. If you have initiative, you will make the tea. But suppose further, that there is no kettle and that indeed there is no stove. Suppose that we are sitting at a tennis match and I say, “Would you please remove the kettle from the stove?” There are those who will claim that you understand the meaning of my words, but not the
meaning
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of my words. When, in fact, you do not understand anything. You might look at me and think, “Did I hear Luddy correctly?” or you might look about to see if another spectator also heard me. So, you ask, “What did you say?” and I say the same thing again. Unless you defer to me in all matters or unless you know that I have a habit of setting up a portable gas stove and making tea in inappropriate places, you will think that I have flipped my wig. You will not say to anyone that of course you know what it means to take a kettle off a stove or that you know what kettle, but you will say, “Help! My poor friend had snapped a vessel in his brain!”
Anyway, I thought I’d share that with you. Love to the wife.
Yours,
Ludwig
Dear Ludwig,
I didn’t even know you liked tennis.
Yours,
Bertrand