Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett Page B

Caro was my daughter, what was I supposed to do? It was a little late for diaper changing and parent-teacher conferences. I tried to think what I would want if I were her and all I could come up with was knowledge. I guessed that she would want to know me, as a person, as an artist perhaps. She’d said she was a painter, told me the first day she’d come around, and I hadn’t received her too kindly. Still, she came back. She did not return to modify our initial meeting, to recast it or even to say something she forgot to say. She returned to punctuate her original request that I allow her to be my apprentice. Only now did I understand the apprentice business. But all interpretation relies in some part, if not all, on charity, I realized, appreciating (a generous term) that I had to dispraise or at least blink at some differences in our use of the term. Her notion of apprentice was layered in ways I could not have anticipated and, given the discongruity of our experiences, the inequality of our stati or statae or, splitting the gender difference, stata, it became clear that, though we were participating in the social activity of language, we were not speaking the same one. All this to say that we never know what the fuck anyone is saying to us, that the only legitimate and correct response to anyone uttering any sentence, even Your pants are on fire, is: Excuse me?
    Murphy? I’ll be Murphy again.
    Lang?
    How does one go about getting a DNA test to prove or disprove paternity?
    I take it you’d like to disprove paternity, else you would not have said prove or disprove. Well, you don’t need me for this, you just get a kit from a lab and send in your samples.
    Samples of what?
    They’ll give you a kit.
    You don’t sound particularly intrigued by my question. Don’t you want to know why I need such a service? We’ve been friends for a long time.
    Long enough for you to know that I never care about other people’s business. I assume your pecker has come back to haunt you, or bite you, or whatever metaphor you find the most accurate.
    I might have a daughter.
    I guessed son. I had a fifty percent chance and blew it.
    It could be that I’m pulling your leg and simply need this bit of information for something I’m writing.
    You’re not that funny. And you’re not a writer. And I don’t care why you want to know the ins and outs of this, in spite of the fact that ins and outs must have been involved at some point to create this situation.
    Situation is right.
    Before you go, let me tell you this joke.
    I’m not in the mood.
    Won’t take a second. The president is on a tour of this new hospital. There are Secret Service guys all around, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, the doctor leading the tour takes the president through this ward and there’s the House minority leader sitting in the corridor and he’s jacking off. The president shakes his head and says, Christ, what’s that all about? And the doctor says, That poor man has advanced semen over-production syndrome, ASOPS. His seminal vesicles and his testes are hyperactive and so he must ejaculate every ten minutes or he’ll suffer severe damage to his reproductive system. The president says, My God. And so they go up to the next floor, right, and there is the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and there’s this orderly and he’s sucking the chair’s penis. And the president says, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch in a cornfield, what’s the problem here? The doctor says, Oh, this is the same condition, ASOPS, but he’s got a better health-care plan.
    Can I hang up now?
    Not yet. I want to tell you one more thing, something Hippocrates said.
    And what’s that?
    He said, he said, he said that you can discover no measure, no weight, no form of calculation, to which you can refer your judgments in order to give them absolute certainty. In our art there exists no certainty except in our sensations. What do you think of that?
    Now may I hang up?
    You