Free Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett Page A

was nowhere near sleep, I glanced under the covers at my dick and it looked so innocent, harmless, and at that particular moment, pathetic.
    How could I have let him, you, lie there so miserably and do that to his, my, wife? He would have to have gone out to his studio and stared at a painting, one in progress, or one that he thought was finished but really wasn’t. A large canvas with reds and yellows. Goldenrod, corn silk, chiffon, cadmium yellow, lemon, bismuth yellow, Indian yellow, ocher, Naples yellow, jaune brilliant, burnt sienna, transparent maroon, Venetian red, Indian red, cadmium red, quinacridone red, rose madder, permanent red, alizarin crimson. None of the colors mattered anymore and so I looked at an experiment of sorts, a medium-sized canvas nailed to the wall with whites, zinc white and transparent white and foundation white and Cremnitz white and flake white (lead based as it is). I looked at the surface, which yielded no entry, and tried to imagine something to say about, to, myself or anybody else. I supposed I could claim that the narrative arc of the painting was intentionally contentious, that rather than culminating in a conventional denouement, resolving matters and seeking order, I was employing a highly metaphoric mise-en-scène, so obvious a thing and yet . . . Or perhaps I was saying that the painting was becoming its own wish, the white transforming white into a metaphor that stated its own essential self until the metaphor itself became an essential fact. All of that meant something to me and also nothing at all and so, in a way, I became my own wish, I became a dead artist. Self-pity bred such thinking, I fear. After a failed attempt at working on a new, blank canvas, I returned to the house, sat in the living room, and watched a mindless movie on one of the channels I didn’t know we received. I would have offered a description of the film, but the hand making this story apparently couldn’t come up with it. It was when watching the worst movies that I found anything close to rational clarity, but on that night nothing was clear, as my definition of myself was shifting, changing, and this was disconcerting because until this point, until my confrontation with this possibility of fatherhood, I had never imagined that had any sort of self-definition.
    A brief pause here while we address this whole single-fatherraising-a-son story. To say that I raised you is not quite true, as by thirteen I believe we are pretty much completely developed and completely fucked up. After that it’s just a matter of refinement.
    Dad, Mom never left us.
    Not literally.
    How do you mean? Mom lived with you until she died.
    You know me. I’m just trying to make a point, to illustrate something, to explicate, demonstrate, elucidate, adorn. Literally, everything I utter is a metaphor, if you know what I’m trying to say.
    And what’s that?
    Where’s the joy in saying anything flat out?

Physis / Nomos
    I am motivated by affections that make me hunger for a connection to some entity. If as a frail man I am too prone to errors of judgment and impression, replacing, as I go, riches and power for what I should better seek, how am I to consider a mind that performs another kind of substitution? I may desire absolute being and imagine that the desire itself is an expression of attainment.
    Is this the ranting of an old man?
    We will all be old.
    Will we?
    So it is everywhere and so it will ever be, till all the semen is finally discharged and all the eggs are finally spent or all of everything is reduced to dormant matter in dormant organs on dormant islands, till a talented and zealous architect is hired and all are persuaded to sit around in communities and stare numbly at each other until all rank gives way to reason and reason gives way to feeling and all feeling gives way to simple human need and soldiers stop following orders and the orders stop coming in. Some of us seem to have perished, that is the bleak,