Telephone Read online

  TELEPHONE

  Also by Percival Everett

  So Much Blue

  Half an Inch of Water

  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

  Grand Canyon, Inc.

  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

  re: (f) gesture

  Abstraktion and Einfülu0ng

  Swimming Swimmers Swimming

  Trout’s Lie

  TELEPHONE

  A Novel

  Percival Everett

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Percival Everett

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” Words by E. Y. Harburg. Music by Harold Arlen. Copyright © 1939 (Renewed) EMI Feist Catalog Inc. Exclusive print rights administered by Alfred Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Many thanks to the Creative Capital Foundation for support during the making of this book.

  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. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  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 978-1-64445-022-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-120-5

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 C

  First Graywolf Printing, 2020

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948742

  Cover design: Kapo Ng

  Cover art: Anastasiia New / iStock / Getty Images Plus

  For my sons

  I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.

  Søren Kierkegaard

  TELEPHONE

  Duck Duck Goose

  1

  People, and by people I mean them, never look for truth, they look for satisfaction. There is nothing worse, certain painful and deadly diseases notwithstanding, than an unsatisfactory, piss-poor truth, whereas a satisfactory lie is all too easy to accept, even embrace, get cozy with. Like thoughts that carry with them a dimension of attendant thoughts, so actions have attendant actions, with unpredicted, unprompted intentions and results, good or bad, and things, things themselves, have attendant things in unforeseen perspectives and dimensions. An unsatisfactory truth? Like Banquo’s ghost, such thoughts sit in the king’s place, literary allusions being all the rage. Such thoughts. It is slavery that inaugurates the path to freedom.

  hic et nunc?

  I am Zach Wells. Wells is a good name for a geologist-slash-paleobiologist, and so I was one. I knew a lot about fossils and caves, especially the bones of creatures left a long, long time ago. I would tell my daughter that we had to take care of our bones because finally that would be all that was left of us, all that was left to tell our stories. I knew an awful lot about one particular hole called Naught’s Cave in the Grand Canyon and the bird life that once lived in it. How arcane is that? Well, I knew more than most people. To make it all clear, I should point out that most people knew more about nearly all other things than I did. All of this was and is of little significance, or perhaps transcendence, except that it clues you in to my profound and yawning dullness. It lets you know that I could spend endless hours with bones, rocks, and sediments, and, not only that, but in one very particular cavity in one very particular red wall some forty-four meters above the Colorado River, in a spot that no one can get to except by helicopter or, at one time, a tough-hulled boat. That says something about me, I suppose, if there is much at all to say about me. A friend of mine died in a helicopter crash trying to get to that very particular cave. Asshole that I am, I have returned to the cave again and again and have thought of him only briefly each time. That tells you something, though it’s none too flattering.

  Before graduate school I was in the Marines. It was a mistake that I never had to regret. I served in no war and maintained no relationship with the corps after I left. I made good friends that I never saw again. I never got a tattoo.

  I lived in a town called Altadena in California. It was north of a town called Pasadena. Altadena means “higher dena,” as in Pasadena. I do not know what Pasadena means. Apparently no one does. There are many things that no one knows, which is comforting, up to a point. At the time of this writing, I do not know whether I will live much longer, and you don’t know what I’m talking about. I was led to this point by a simple note, marks on an odd scrap of paper, words that could have meant nothing, that I could have allowed to mean absolutely nothing. But that’s not really possible, is it?

  Sicut in spelunca

  Aechmorphorus occidentalis. Two fragments found in pack rat middens. Pieces were too small to allow measurement and subspecies identification. The grebe is a common transient and winter resident.

  I had a family, a wife and a daughter, Meg and Sarah. I tried to tell my daughter, while she could understand, that women are hunted in this world. I tried to tell her without telling her, without saying it in plain language. I did not want her to be afraid in life. Finally she was not, but that was only because she knew no better. It was a sad, good thing.

  Across the long and very old Stanton Street Bridge from El Paso, Texas, is a not-so-little town in Mexico called Ciudad Juárez. Friendship Bridge, Puento Rio Bravo, Puente Ciudad Juárez-Stanton El Paso. Hundreds of women had been hunted there, on the other side of that bridge, pursued, raped, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. They were mostly dark haired and of slender build, as was my beautiful Sarah. Believe it or not, that story is, in a shapeless and vague way, a part of this story.

  Some said that two hundred young women had been killed or disappeared in some twenty years. Others said it is closer to seven hundred gone. People are like that about numbers. They will say it is not seven hundred, but only three, two hundred, as if one hundred would not be truly horrible, fifty, twenty-five. No one knew who killed and kidnapped these people. Maybe drug cartels, some said. Maybe roving gangs of sexual predators. Devil worshippers. Perhaps invaders from space. Men. It was men. It
was always men. Always men.

  The numbers were so very large, obscene, fescennine. Olga Perez. Hundreds of women have no name. Edith Longoria. Hundreds of women have no face. Guadalupe de la Rosa. Names. Name. Maria Najera. It was so uncomplicated, safe, simple to talk about numbers in El Paso, a world away. Nobody misses five hundred people. Nobody misses one hundred people. In Juárez, it was one. One daughter. One friend. One face. One name. Somebody misses one person.

  De Corpore

  Some people are just no good at being happy. And by some people I mean me. It was not that I was forlorn, not that there is anything wrong with being miserable, or that I wanted to be wretched or blue, but I was not really contented, whatever contented meant, means. That I was not satisfied in life was odd, as I fairly had much of what one would think would be happiness-making. I had a smart, lightsome partner whom, though I was not completely in love with her, I valued and with whom I was satisfied to share the daily, mundane business of life. I appreciated the fact that I should have loved her completely, but being the unhappy wretch I am … I had a beautiful child with whom I was completely in love, more every day. Still I had this palpable swath of melancholy that ran through me that I simply could not shake. Our house was warm, comfortable, and, if not big, it was big enough. I had a job studying what I had chosen to study, dry as it was, working with people who were more or less interesting and decent, dry as they were. I was proficient at my work, was recognized for it on occasion, couldn’t imagine doing anything else. And yet I would come home now and again, sit in my car in my driveway, and quietly contemplate, coldly measure that most selfish of acts, suicide. The guilt that these suicidal thoughts stirred in me was enough in itself to make me want to kill myself. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The mornings after having these self-centered, idiotic, indolent thoughts were always extremely bright, or at least I was, or tried to be, wanting badly to mask any trace of my despair and self-loathing, a show for the family, for my daughter. I considered that I might have been clinically depressed and rationally understood that there was nothing to be ashamed of were it so, that it was a medical problem, a matter of brain chemistry, but I thought, finally, So what? So what if I was not happy? My happiness was overrated. My daughter was happy. My wife was unworried. But I moved through my life with caution, and caution in love is the most fatal to true happiness.

  Teratornis merriami. Three specimens of this giant teratorn were discovered: a partial right humerus and two crania. The crania were obtained in the main room in the 25–50 cm stratum, which is late Pleistocene. After casts were made, the humerus was submitted to the Department of Geosciences at USC for radiocarbon dating. The age was approximately 14,000 BP.

  It was a careless, not even reckless, but simply unguarded, move, not in the least like her. She was never unguarded in her play. I studied my daughter’s face, observed her brown-eyed focus, recognized it, having seen and marveled at her intensity so many times before. Her gaze was bright, aureate, penetrating, and yet this unmindful move seemed somehow important. Easily, clearly a mistake of inattention, one that I would have made over and again, but it was sufficiently uncharacteristic for her that I actually asked if she was certain about making the move. It had been a couple of years since I had put to her such a question and she was puzzled by it, or at least mildly indignant. She watched as I captured her knight with a hardly difficult-to-spot bishop.

  “I didn’t see that,” she said.

  “Clearly.” I held her captured knight in my palm, not wanting to amplify the event by placing it on the table. “Not like you.” She had for a year been a better, much better, chess player than me. “Anyone can miss something. Take me, for example, I employ such nescience as a tactic.”

  She didn’t look up from the board.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so,” she said. She glanced at me, gave the board another steady look, and then resigned, removing her king rather than toppling him, as was her custom. “What the hell is nescience?”

  “Tossed it out there just for you.”

  “Nice word.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “Are you two nearly done?” my wife asked as she passed through the room, her way of saying that someone should start dinner.

  “That’s my cue,” I said.

  Sarah followed me into the kitchen. “How could I miss that bishop?” she asked, of herself more than me.

  “It happens. We all miss stuff. You probably haven’t noticed how handsome I am today. It’s because I forgot to shave.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I opened the refrigerator. “So, what are our options? Is it going to be lamb, or will it be lamb?” I grabbed the paper-wrapped rack.

  “Anything but lamb,” Sarah said.

  “Then lamb it shall be. The due date should be duly noted.” I gave the package a sniff, then pushed it toward her. “What do you think?”

  She pulled away. “I hate the smell of lamb.”

  “I think it smells just bad enough to eat. Broccoli and rice to go with?”

  “Sure. Might as well live it up. I’ll make a salad.”

  I placed the lamb on the heavy cutting board we bought during vacation in New Mexico, then turned to grab a pan for the rice. “The lamb will be good,” I said. “Not oversalted and overcooked the way some people make it.”

  “I won’t tell her you said that.” Sarah opened the back door and called Basil. The big mutt wagged his away inside. “Who’s a good boy?” She loved him up and reached for a treat for him in the cabinet.

  “Something little,” I said, nodding toward the dog. “Basil-boy is packing on a bit of a tire there.”

  “Just following his master’s example.”

  “Hey, I resemble that remark,” I joked.

  Basil wiggled and waited. Sarah asked him to sit for his treat, then handed it over. “A Rathbone for Basil.” A family joke that was never quite as funny as it sounded, but it refused to die.

  Meg joined us in the kitchen. “Now this is more like it.” She sat at the table and watched us. “So, sassy sister Sarah, how was the social studies test? My, that was a lot of s’s in one sentence.”

  “Easy peasy.”

  “I remember eighth grade,” Meg said.

  “Oh no,” Sarah said.

  “I hated eighth grade,” Meg continued.

  “Why was that?” Sarah peeled a carrot.

  “Mrs. Oliphant. We hated Mrs. Oliphant. We called her Madame Elephant, but it wasn’t so funny because she was a rail.”

  “And why did you hate her?” Sarah asked.

  “Well, if you’re just going to make fun of me …”

  “No, really, I want to hear it.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Please tell us about Madame Elephant.”

  “I hate you both. I’ll just sit here and enjoy my tea.”

  “You don’t have tea,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah, about that.”

  “I’ll put on water,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  As happens, just as I was about to say something like that knife is really sharp, Sarah nicked her finger. It was easy to forget that she was twelve until moments such as this, when the pain was actually fear. She held her finger in the air in front of her face, staring at it as if in disbelief, her eyes welling.

  “Come over here and let’s rinse it off. Let’s see what we’re working with here,” Meg said.

  I stood back and let her handle it. Meg was good at mothering.

  “Oh, it’s just a scratch. It’s good to bleed a little every now and then, lets the bad stuff out of our bodies.”

  “It hurts,” Sarah said.

  “Well yeah, it’s going to hurt a bit. A little pain is not such a bad thing. Hurts less already, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess. Yes.”

  “I’ll get a bandage,” I said and turned to the medicine drawer.

  “Just a little pressure and then the band-aid,” Meg said.

  “It�
��s only a band-aid if it’s made by Band-Aid,” Sarah said. “Ours are made by Curad, so they’re not band-aids, they’re bandages.”

  “Do you and your father rehearse this stuff?”

  “Your bandage, mademoiselle.” I peeled the paper free.

  “Merci, monsieur.”

  “May I?” I asked.

  “S’il te plaît.”

  “Très bien,” I said. I wrapped the strip around her finger.

  Meg took over preparation of the salad.

  Cathartes aura. At least five individuals were recovered, one of those being a juvenile. Cathartes appears to become increasingly common at the end of the Pleistocene, perhaps with the extinction of large scavenging birds such as Gymnogyps and Teratornis.

  So often stories begin at their ends. The truth was, I didn’t know which end was the beginning or whether the middle was in the true middle or nearer to that end or the other, one being the beginning and the other the end, but, again, which end, or if the ends connected, like a snake eating its tail. So, here I have begun with my daughter, my family, a right place to start, logical and in all ways the center. Though my end is here, was there, my telling unfolds here. Much like the sounds of the birds in the dark outside my tent when I am alone near my cave, my story never hushes. I would lie in my bag and follow their songs one to the next, owls and corncrakes, nighthawks and poorwills.

  resulting from autosomal inheritance of mutations in the gene CLN3

  I watched my wife perform her nightly yoga routine. My routine was to watch.

  “There’s something wrong,” Meg said.

  “What?”

  “I have a bad feeling.”

  “I can’t talk to you during downward-facing dog.”

  “Sorry.” She switched smoothly to warrior pose. Slightly better. “Just something in the air.”

  I nodded. Such a statement would not have meant too much if I had not been feeling the same thing. I didn’t tell Meg as much. She was already worried.