These pages are my undertaking. I am guilty not because of my actions, to which I freely admit, but for my accession, admission, confession that I executed these actions with not only liberation and premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose, above all else purpose, that I clearly articulate without apology or qualification, and so I find myself merely a sign, a clear sign, and like any sign I am indifferent to the nature of the thing that I designate or, for lack of a better word, signify, while scratching at the fried blood beneath my nails, my voice rough and hoarse from disuse, for no matter how articulate my confession, it takes few words to utter it, the truth always requiring fewer words, and generally smaller words, than lies and half-truths, and they are never called half-lies, and this is instructive, the way so many things are instructive, and it all comes back to the indifference to the marked thing, the way nouns and names behave badly and play loose with meaning, the way language resists the tightening of screws and the sketching of schema and the way the angle of incidence complements the angle of reflection: the whole mess of language yearning for a decent visual metaphor to connect it with the world toward which it is so indifferent. The true answer to your question is shorter than the lie. Did you? I did.


A dead face is no face at all, at all no face, no face it is not cold, not plastic, no longer flesh, all dream, all thought, it is all too human and animal and human and even expressive, but it is no face at all and one can hold a living face in one’s hands, but a dead face sifts through fingers, leaks, drips, no face, a living face gives back even when sleeping even when unconscious, but a dead face absorbs one’s gaze, stretches that search for connection to infinity, the familiar functions of connection, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division do not work for dead faces, as they do not work as arithmetical procedures for infinite decimals, a dead face, like an infinite decimal, corresponds to nothing in the real world, a dead face is a concept, and so one cannot hold it in one’s hands, and so I hold my daughter’s living face, her once-living face, that face that I loved and, with my then-wife, made, as a reality in my mind, resisting the common, persisting, unhelpful belief that memories are every time newly constructed, cultivated, harvested, no face at all my daughter’s sweet sweet face is a real living thing inside me, abstract and real, never gone so never in need of reconstructing and somewhere there is a thing in this world, my world, the only world that is her sweet dead face, no face at all, perhaps a symbol, a sign, a directional beacon, a denoting or connoting marker but no face at all.


Ce n’est que jeu de mots, qu’affectation pure.


“Hey, did you hear the one about the . . .”


For me, salvation is not a place of comfort, however good that place might feel, but a place of safety, contentment, a place, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual, that is free of external voices and couple of internal ones as well. Salvation, it turns out, is a couple of map-folds away from serenity. Salvation might keep you alive, but it won’t make you happy about it.

From The Water Cure. © 2007 by Percival Everett. All rights reserved.