Glyph Read online

  PRAISE FOR PERCIVAL EVERETT’S PREVIOUS BOOKS

  Praise for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell:

  “Everett is one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers.…His work takes hold of us and won’t let go.”

  —Alan Cheuse, NPR.org

  “Though funny, the novel also possesses a terrible and still sadness, concerning as it does not only William Styron and Nat Turner but also aging and death, the tragic hatred of racists, the depth of solitude at life’s end.…The book, though it’s frequently philosophical, is not in the least boring. Dear reader, how that impressed me! For there are times when philosophy can be less than action-packed. This is not one of them. Therefore, I heartily commend this book to you.…Percival Everett numbers among his very best.”

  —Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times

  “[A] stark, shattering novel.…The splintered stories keep their urgency even as they lose their drift. The note of sadness struck in the dedication swells and echoes through the wreckage of narrative, reaching a pitch of extraordinary anguish. This meta-fiction is deeply moving.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “A potent and thoughtful exploration of the bonds between fathers and children.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Funny, insightful, and unpredictable.…Everett is a master of his trade.”

  —Time Out Chicago

  Praise for Assumption:

  “Everett casts his line, as it were, pretty far, and some of the things he reels in, along with a few red herrings, are weighty indeed: racism, anomie, disillusionment, the meaning (or lack thereof) of one man’s life—the American nightmare, in brief, at the end of the line. The setting, the protagonist and the eccentric and pathetic cast of characters will haunt you long after you close the book. I haven’t read anything like it since Georges Simenon. And, as in Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels, the prevailing mood is one of existential despair.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “[Percival Everett] is so original and ingenious that he defies categorization.…[Assumption] is a quick, bracing and ultimately enigmatic work about the deception of appearances—anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “[Assumption is] made up of three sections, with each one overturning its opening premise and taking us out into deeper waters.…All we can do is hang on and go along for the intellectually stimulating and genre-bending ride, in which bodies and assumptions fall quickly by the wayside.”

  —Alan Cheuse, “All Things Considered,” NPR

  “You think you know things about Ogden [Walker], and the killers he’s pursuing, but Everett will chip away at every one of your assumptions until, in the very last pages, you’re in an entirely different, much more unsettling story. Imagine sitting down with a Tony Hillerman novel and suddenly finding yourself in a Jim Thompson nightmare, but it’s so compelling that you can’t turn away. That’s the ride Percival Everett takes readers on, and the one disappointment may be that there’s absolutely no chance for a sequel.”

  —USA Network, “Character Approved”

  “Well plotted and utterly unpredictable.…As always, this Everett novel is unsettling. Readers who prefer gift-wrapped endings should stay away. All other readers should enter.”

  —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  Praise for I Am Not Sidney Poitier:

  “[I Am Not Sidney Poitier] is a freewheeling coming-of-age of sorts…and one of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years. Everett has written a delicious comedy of miscommunication. From his narrator’s unfortunate, hostility-inducing name to Ted Turner’s constant non sequiturs, confusion reigns in this journey through the perception-warping, soul-twisting badlands of race and class.”

  —National Public Radio, “Books We Like”

  “With more than twenty books to his name, Percival Everett is not only one of the most prolific modern American writers, but one of the most diverse, tackling just about every genre there is, and freely mixing them. He is also one of our best: I Am Not Sidney Poitier is further proof of that.…It’s also funny as hell.”

  —The Believer, The Believer Book Award

  “The wickedly funny Everett prods the reader to question issues of identity, prejudice, race, class and any other core beliefs about the South that might be lying around.…An unforgettable trip to a funhouse where nothing is what it seems.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “The funniest book I have read all year, if not ever.…There was not a page of this book that didn’t have me smirking my face off and wishing I was a funnier person, even as I recognized the sad realities of racial issues in our country that made this kind of satire possible. Everett is razor sharp throughout, and Mr. Tibbs could have no better tribute.”

  —The Rumpus, Drew Toal, “The Last Book I Loved”

  “One of the most talented contemporary novelists writing in English.…[Everett] is wildly inventive.”

  —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Everett effortlessly entertains…and refuses to be shy about speaking his mind.”

  —Time Out New York

  Glyph

  Also by Percival Everett

  Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

  Assumption

  I Am Not Sidney Poitier

  The Water Cure

  Wounded

  American Desert

  A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid

  Damned If I Do

  Erasure

  Glyph

  Frenzy

  Watershed

  Big Picture

  The Body of Martin Aguilera

  God’s Country

  For Her Dark Skin

  Zulus

  The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair

  Cutting Lisa

  Walk Me to the Distance

  Suder

  The One That Got Away

  Glyph

  A Novel by

  Percival Everett

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 1999 by Percival Everett

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-667-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-086-4

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Paperback, 2014

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946923

  Cover design: Kapo Ng

  For my dear friend and editor, Fiona McCrae

  RALPH

  A

  différance

  I will begin with infinity. It was and is the closest thing to me. I am a child and all I see is infinitely beyond my grasp, my understanding, my consciousness. But my unconsiousness is what my father and mother were just sick with anxiety over. They paced and worried aloud to each other about what I might sense in their tone, in their manner, but failed at every turn to attend to the very words they spoke, saying anything they pleased in fro
nt of me, wondering aloud to each other whether I had Uncle Toby’s ears—they’re just so huge—, commenting on my slow rate of attaining a full pate of hair, and above all else, paining at my seeming inability to adopt language. But while they stewed, I watched and contemplated potential and actual infinities and interestingly I found that there is no space between the two, that the arrow may indeed halve the distance to its target until the cows come home,1 but the target and the arrow situated together in my field of vision were therefore in the same place and so the arrow was there and not there, making Zeno both right and wrong. My parents, however, clawing at speech like sick cats, could not fathom my lack of interest in parroting their sounds. They put their smelly mouths in front of my face, somehow assuming that without an ability to express offense, it could not be experienced, and formed words slowly, carefully, allowing me to observe where the tongue is placed for t’s and how the lips peel apart for b’s. They pointed to the table and said the name of that thing, assuming that I would learn not only to say it, but to recognize it. However, I did not see table. I saw where the plates were, what occupied the space beside my high chair. Bless their hearts, they were trying to teach me, to show me tableness, though I am lost as to why they did not simply say that.2 But they were what they were, sadly, and that was speakers and for them infinity only moved in one direction and so it was only faith that had them believe that it actually existed. They peered ahead at the horizon and decided that the limit of their vision was merely the limit of their vision, accepting that the edge moved away with each step toward the horizon, assuming that their inability to define or delimit the limit itself did not negate the actuality of that limit. And so they kept looking at something that was not there, but that was also there forever, a kind of double gesture, la double séance, if you will, and they called it beautiful. If not insane, then they were at least dangerous.3

  pharmakon

  1

  My father was a poststructuralist and my mother hated his guts. They did not know—how could they have known?—that by the age of ten months I not only comprehended all that they were saying but that I was as well marking time with a running commentary on the value and sense of their babbling. I lay helplessly on my back and stared up at their working mouth parts, like the mandibles of grasshoppers at work, mindless in their activity.

  2

  One evening, my father looked down at me, my mother standing beside him. He was not a fat man, but he was bloated, moving as if he were larger than he actually was. His face looked pulpy and I wanted to, and often did, squeeze his fleshy cheeks and pull. He hated that, and my insistence on doing it, coupled with my lack of speech, led him to say, “Maybe he’s mildly retarded.”

  “Maybe, he’s just stupid,” my mother said and so stationed herself in my thinking as the brighter of the two. I smiled my baby smile at her, unnerving her on a level that her speech4 kept her from knowing. “Look at him,” she said. “He’s smiling like he knows something.”

  “Gas,” my father said. “He can’t be stupid.” He was bothered by the thought. “Look at me. Look at us. How can he be stupid?” What an imbecile.

  “Lots of geniuses come from people of average or even less-than-average intelligence,” she said.

  Never were truer words spoken and they hung in the air like a tenacious perfume. My father fanned his nose and stroked the thin beard of which he was so proud and for which he cared like a garden. I looked away from his pudgy cheeks to my mother’s soft features. Oedipal concerns aside,5 I preferred the company of my mother, not simply because of the comfort of her softness and somewhat more compassionate nature, but because she possessed a native intelligence, a subhuman mind, though nothing negative is meant by that, an ability to abandon cohesion to what my father would call the signified. But he, for all his gum-bumping could not begin to understand not only the disconnection, but the connection itself, falling repeatedly into the same trap, the thought that he not only could talk about meaning, but that he could make it.

  unties of simulacrum

  Although they were well on their way to separate ways,6 I moved things along one evening. I lifted my father’s fountain pen from his shirt pocket as he was putting me down for the night. I was nearly one year old at the time and I used his pen to write the following on my crib sheet (pardon my pun):

  why should ralph speak ralph does not like

  the sound of it ralph watches the mouths

  of others form words and it looks uncomfortable

  lips look ugly to ralph when they are

  moving ralph needs books in his crib ralph

  does not wish to rely on the moving lips for

  knowledge ralph does not like peas

  ralph is sorry he stole da-da’s pen

  The following morning I awoke to my mother screaming. “Douglas! Douglas!” she called to my father.

  Inflato came running to her, his mouth frothy with teeth cleaner.

  “Look,” she said. “Look at that.” She pointed into my crib. I scooted over so they could see better.

  “It’s not funny,” Inflato said.

  “I know it’s not funny.” She looked at him looking at her. “I didn’t write it.”

  “Enough already. It’s not funny.”

  “Did you write it?” she asked.

  “No, I did not. Does that look like my handwriting?”

  “Well, does it look like mine?” she shot back.

  He stormed out. I could hear him spitting into the sink in the other room. My mother remained and she was staring at me. She believed that my father had not written the message and she knew that she had not and, barring some very strange intruder from this realm or another, I was the only other suspect. She left the room and returned quickly with a book, which she opened and handed to me upside down. I turned it over and began to read. She took it back and again gave it to me with the words turned over. Again, I righted the book and read.

  “You understand?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  A weird giggle escaped from her throat and she swallowed it as quickly as it had been issued. She looked as if she were contemplating calling my father back into the room, but she didn’t. “And you can read?” she asked.

  I nodded once more.

  She took the book and read aloud from the first page. At least, she pretended to read from it, as she made up some drivel about bears and a blond girl. I shook my head. She then read, “‘One: The world is all that is the case. One-point-one: The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”’7

  supplement

  1

  And so my mother became my supplier. She gave me magazines and novels and philosophy books and history texts and volumes of poetry. I consumed them all, trying to at once escape myself and stay as close to my own thought as possible, feeling more pure and freer with each turned page. Nothing in my mind became untied from the world, though I did experience a kind of self-erasure, a becoming transparent, and so allowed the words8 to present themselves as what they were, referring to nothing other than their being. I was a baby fat with words, but I made no sound.

  2

  Books and nipples. Nipples and books. My lips were good at closing about that sweet red circle. The food had long ceased to be interesting, though it was far better than peas, and so the sucking, though routine (and not), is exercise in being. To say that it was like a raspberry is both inadequate and inaccurate, as I had no experience with anything but raspberry flavor. The breast itself was nothing, the nipple was everything. Once I spied my parents engaging in sex,9 and I saw Inflato sucking away at my favorite nipple. I was not jealous, did not consider that he should not be there, but he was doing it all wrong. I was fascinated by the texture of it, like a relief map of another planet, perforated as it was by numerous orifices, apertures of the lactiferous ducts. He, with his clumsy tongue, was not treating it badly, but neither was he serving it justly. When they caught me staring, they stopped and began to laugh.

  bedeu
ten

  Boredom is the baby’s friend. I would giggle when Inflato decided to toss me about like a sack of flour only to see if I might trigger some kind of gag reflex and so spit up on him. Boredom is not blind to anything, and certainly not to amazement. It is nothing close to amazement and I am not suggesting that somehow the meaning of one circles around to find itself almost that thing of which it is believed to be the opposite. Boredom is a high hill, a crow’s nest, a hunter’s blind (to use the word blind yet again), from which everything can be seen. And what better place to stand in observation of one’s self, to be free of sensation and confusion.10 Taedet me ergo sum.

  spacing

  Inflato yaks about the ongoing critique of reason, feels he is a part of it. I suppose he is as much a part as anyone else.

  About rationality and Leibniz and Aristotle’s conception of a principle of reason: Grog was being chased by a snake and so he leaped from one side of the stream to the other. Trog was waiting on the other side and said, “How did you ever get away from that snake?”

  “I leaped,” said Grog.

  “Oh, that is leaping,” said Trog. And though he had cleared the stream many times before in a similar manner, from then on he leaped. What was more, he could tell someone he was going to leap and tell them afterward that he had leapt.

  Inflato took me to his office. I rode in a carrier on his back and observed, during our walk through the parking lot, the thinning of his hair. He kept talking to me and asking if I was “all right back there” and calling me “buster” and “little feller.” We met a woman at the mailboxes and the back of his head took on a different spirit. He used me shamelessly, talked to me sweetly, but did not mention, mind you, that I was either mildly retarded or flat-out stupid.