Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  I believe in many things, none of which comes to mind. I am in arrears pillwise.

  I am a demographer in the demopolis. I am of a fragile solidity, like Aristotle. I—

  Lord, how time flies when the tourniquet is on. Little Tod M.’s big old hog breathes idle in his garage. I been down but not like this before. You don’t shoe horses without their walking on your back. The bluebottle fly is a thing of the past. Tawdry sentiments dress like women. People behave like their mothers. I’m down to my last dime. Forever is a chute of bugs in a thimble of sense. Sweeteners go to hell. Be patient, my pretty, the sandman uses the postal service just like everybody else wears his pants. Downtown it is holy. Before the Lord has had his way He will have slept. Before time began there was no money. Now they say time is money. I refute that. Anybody could.

  Anybody could do anything, and sooner or later everybody has. It’s a mess and I’m hungry. The womb has to dilate before people can get out. They in there saying “Hep me!” behind a sphincter. My knowledge of medicine does not exceed that of the average layman. Of this I am proud. I know doctors whose knowledge of medicine does not exceed that of a layman and I would as soon not be associated with them. If anyone suggests there’s a goddamned thing wrong with eating soft bread, he is not a doctor. I fell hard as a child for the fiery hot non-chewable gumball, or it wasn’t a gunball—gumball—must have been called a jawbreaker. They were a fine invention on the plane of human nonnecessity, on which plane we need more play. I am probably a classical anarchist, but have no classical education or manners. Blue porcelain that is not too delicate is a good thing. A hayride with a buxom laughing lass of East European stock is a good thong, I mean thing. Drinking some wine and ravishing her should she want that, also. If she does not, hail fellow well met and get out of the wagon in a good homey spray of moonlight and be of good cheer. She should be, too. If she is not, attribute it to the rotten modern world along with everything else that rightly displace. The stray straw on your person brush incompletely off entering the solid, below-grade, amber-lit tavern that warmly invites you to its bosom for the night. Say practical things, and not an abundance of them, to the company of the evening. Do not discuss annuities or topics such as that. Be hearty and agreeably tired, like everyone else behaving himself. That is a good mantra, not just tonight but always: I want us all to behave ourselves (chuckle).

  I am withering on the vine of the afternoon of my afterlife, having consumed my afterbirth. Et my own. Became perennially hungry. Mrs. M. I am afraid is at the door. Glowering:

  —What is the matter with you?

  —Madame, what is not?

  —You a pederast? Throws hip out.

  —I have many faults, and some I do not know about, but that inclination is not among the known or the unknown, I fain. (She appears mollified, to soften; I am encouraged to issue some more.) Though we would be remiss not to entertain what Coleridge intended to say when he spoke of things visible and not in the universe: people, he tried to say—but couldn’t because the Romantic Age disallowed the diction, let alone the sentiment—people are much more a piece of shit than not a piece of shit—

  Mrs. M. has slammed the door and left. I can’t afford to worry the matter of her errant accusation, truly ungrounded, any more than one can afford to worry the matter of exclusion from jury duty. Whatever else may be said about the modern world, you can securely say that if you are seated on a jury today there is something irretrievably wrong with you and at least one team of lawyers, who are troubled themselves, knows it.

  Had dog, dog died. Been in stir, got out. I think sometimes of lovely things, the slender turquoise glass on a white table in the black room. There is nothing else in the room. There is not the mateless sock, the canned-ham can in the plastic garbage pail, the torn mail, the carpet, the lowering ceiling, the mortgaged walls, the crudescence of life, the chaff of slow daily dying (unsolicited credit-card applications). Only the aqua vase on white on black, no flower necessary to behold its beauty. A large fire needs be set around the vase. That is house-cleaning beyond the tolerances of the bourgeois.

  —Then why don’t you ask me out!

  Mrs. M. has burst back in. And burst back out before I can answer. Which is good: all I have in mind to utter is How’s Tod’s bike? Which for all I know Mrs. M. is eating piece by piece in her Genie-guarded hot garage. There is a fine long red hair hanging from the doorknob. It lifts gently away and around the room in its random reach, not unlike a tentacle. A tentacle of rosy doom from the nice lonely octopus across the street. It is time, perhaps, for burglar bars.

  Because once you decide anything, nothing is possible. Because…So I decided to hit the dusty trail, which is not dusty and not a trail but a web of human snail paths of mucus in the considerably lapsed garden. I had an appointment of sorts at the halfway house, where the sheriff expected me to surrender myself after I watered my plants, or some such nonsense I’d made up during the incarceration pro tem. I took some pills someone had prescribed and called Safety Cab and was met at the curb at dawn by the curiously agreeable purring, smoking cold cab driven by the curiously agreeable, smoking, cold cabdriver wearing his leather jacket and sporting his earthly wisdom. “I am supposed to go to Tacachale, but take me to the airport.”

  “I got you. Wouldn’t go to Taco Charley’s my own self.”

  And with chuckles all around, stopping at the Sprint store for coffees so large it takes two hands to negotiate them so my man at the wheel has to use a straw, we head for aeroporto. We pass the very hospital they expect me at: a fully respectable mental hospital once called Sunland now uplifted by the Amerindian moniker—is the suggestion here that Indians had mental problems? That they deserve to have large holding pens of adult retards named after them?—Tacachale. In two minutes it was renamed on the street of political skepticism Taco Charley’s. I was altogether calmed by my resolve to disregard.

  “Naw,” my driver is saying, shaking his head and sipping his straw as we pass the compound. “You don’t look like no burrito to me.” The fix is in: Why do I not go to Mexico? Isn’t that the place for me? I do don’t see why not.

  Allow me to explain a few things. It is not altogether unfitting that They want to have a look at me in the burrito bin. That much even you know given the little…dog trotting down the street. But I argue that once you let Them single you out, arbitrarily electing not to lock up every other person in the world today, all of whom necessarily belong in there with you, including Them, of course, which is why They have positioned Themselves at the front of the room with the clipboards and the whistles, you have allowed a gross injustice and you should not go gentle into that nightie. So go to Mexico. That is where I want to go.

  “I want to locate me a fifty-pound Chihuahua,” I tell my driver, Nat. “Nat, I could stop the world I had me a fifty-pound Chihuahua.”

  “Know you could.” He laughs. “Definitely stop it wid dat!” We are tee-hee tee-hee in the getaway car, enjoying the odd, scant pretense of racial harmony. (“Some cracker bust out Taco Charley’s get in the cab today? He gone go to Mexico, he say, get him a fitty-poun’ Chihuahua dog!” “What you do?” “Put him on the plane!” “Heard that!”) The whole goddamned world has gone into ten-four good buddy, give or take some melanin. I am not a Royalist, but I would not mind being the King. Is all. Have me some purlieu around the castle, and these lurcher dogs what hold the trespasser down, without hurting him but scaring the potty training out of him until the King’s men get there with the Pampers and the cuffs. In those days this lurcher dog hold down a man trying to get your deer; today a man will break in to eat your potato chips. Well he will certainly break in to eat your deer also, if you have it, but more likely you don’t. More likely you are not the King. The King more likely has marital problems, or something, a hole in the trailer floor. I have tried to live a good, clean, cogent life, but it has been hard, and I do not think the fault lies with me. Some people seem to know things, and I am not among them. Not among th
e people who seem to know, not in the seeming know. Not. Airport. Brokers, for example, lawyers. Don’t they just ooze with knowing? Their entire Being says, You don’t know. You take your psychoanalyst, by contrast a learned man who at least has the dignity to say, Tell me about it, there’s some things in your messed-up head I don’t know. And well, once you blubber them he of course knows all about it and then is paid to ooze his knowing in controlled dribble all over your prostrate grateful form, fishing out your money, but still he does not answer the phone: “Freud, Jung. Will you hold?” AeroMexico. Via Fort Worth. Get me some spurs en route. Spurs and sunblock, all I need, and a copy of Dog World.

  Got me a set of sandals made from tires, arc of tread and some rubber-coated cable, look good for about another twenty thousand miles. Got these from a man in Matamoros walked on his knees on the same sandals; I know these are good sandals. I have sold my wardrobe by haggling with a boy over the price of a carved bird and a yo-yo while another boy selling his sister ran off with my valise—one calls it a valise if of European extraction and relieved of it in non-Europe. This I know, even if the odd American on the run from Taco Charley’s hardly qualifies. I got a red-striped shirt, or undershirt, that invokes a comic character in low Italian opera. I have never seen an opera. Does that matter? I am on the lam and it feels good. I dyed my hair red. Actually, I put a bottle of peroxide on it and before I got on the bus good it was red and seems to have arrested there. I look not unjustly like Mrs. M.’s husband, had she one. She has sent her deprived need warping after me. She’s in for a certain disappointment, for this husband looks distinctly homosexual. And I already have wondrous searing hallucinatory dysentery, a truly fevered poop. I feel like Zebulon Pike, of whom I know not one fact, and that I say I feel like him has as much to do with me and his ghost as with any nitpicking biographers who want to challenge us. Those who choose to are free to challenge a dead man with his name on a mountain if they want to. There is not going to be a lot of challenging me from here on in. I am bound for Chihuahua with a icee on my knee. Don’t you cry for me, I am bound for Chi-hoo-wa-wa with my Dog World on my knee.

  There are more important matters than Chihuahuas, fifty pounds or otherwise. I like the open window and a breeze. Inclemency is important. Dolls and their effects on children, not to mention adults. Fiscal policies, particularly those that oppress the indigent, are “more important” than the fifty-pound Chihuahua. Violations of human dignity in general and in all forms are “more important” than a dog, however spectacular it may be with its apple-dome cranium and wide-set bugged eyes and tiny feet and nervous happy prancing mince, looking, at fifty pounds, like a Doberman on nicotine and steroids. Yet for me no human concern is worth a damn next to the matter of a fifty-pound Chihuahua. Only my wanting one is on scale, in terms of human gravity, with the fifty-pound Chihuahua itself.

  The bus I ride with my rubricated hair is all colors, I noticed getting on. It appears to have been perpetually painted, like a ship, but unlike a ship the bus is painted with whatever is at hand. It looks industrial hippie, naturally a tad garish but not deliberately so, in the interest of preservation rather than political statement. It is a scrambled color chart shambling and rusting withal down the dusty trail, which here is a dusty, mighty dusty trail, yessirreebob. Even the chickens in the good seats are hunkered down in their necks looking to be having difficulty breathing. The five men who entertained me by indiscreetly passing a switchblade back and forth among them are now not disapprovingly passing among themselves, taking swigs after studying the label, my bottle of peroxide, which I offered by way of greeting. Calloused feet abound, and the bloodshot eye, and the patient mostly overweight Madonna, and the knotty, fly-on-sore, rather-more-mucusy-than-not Child. And the squinting Chicken. And the open-eyed Me. Yes, Me, a virtual sunflower of perceptive acquisitiveness bouncing in full mental jacket on the bus with everybody else destitute enough to be in northeast Mexico without any prospects of visiting the beauty parlor or clocking in or calling the travel agent or writing the proposal or calling the agent or going to the doctor or the theater very soon. No, we are riding the bus; for now we are riding the bus. The Switchblades will find a 99-bottles-of-beer-on-the-wall pulque bar, the Chickens aroost in the dark where they will keep one eye open, the Madonnas a place to bed the sluggish Children and conceive some more. And I want a Dog.

  There was a time when I was not this way. But: was there not such a time for us all? Do we not all claim a moment before which we were not the ruint sons of bitches we have become? Do you want or need to hear of my unfallen state when you have your own? I think not. Let us get on with it. I like a rigorous schedule of mental and physical exercise which cannot be adhered to, and good cotton socks and good leather boots. That is all I need, and the dog. Mysticism is a sport that any good failed scientist of the West can be a good amateur in by simply breathing his normal empirical air and not worrying too much about his (inevitable) failure (at science). I have found a candy bar in my seat on the bus and am looking around to see what might be the consequences of eating it. I feel like I’ve found a case of cigarettes in a penitentiary. The bus is cool and the candy firm. I do not recognize the brand. It is probably Nestle in disguise. Or Coke. Nothing is simple. Capitalist raptors fly at seat level through the people’s bus. I fall on my candy bar like a hero falling on a grenade. It’s not bad, nutty with a bouquet of gasoline and lint.

  We had a bus break and I got two chocolate-drink soda things, like the Yoo-Hoo in the States, but these look less, well, homogenous, more cacciatore. When I got back on the bus, one of the switchblade fellows was across my seat, with his feet in the aisle and his eyes slitted open to watch me react. I made a hand gesture that meant nothing, but amused his peers, and sat with a woman I know now to be a nurse. I offered her one of the coagulate Yoo-Hoos and to my surprise she accepted it, and to my further surprise she palmed me a pill, and to my further surprise I downed it, and to my further surprise it made me high in a solid quality oxycodone way. I was sorry to see the last of my runny Yoo-Hoo go. The bus was now winding precariously up into hills, and the livestock was restless, some of it running under the seats, and the tired civility of the folk was degrading into a workaday funk lending less charm to their colorful polyester clothes than you might have perceived had you been, say, a housewife from Oshkosh watching them get on the bus back in Matamoros and not getting on yourself but crossing back over the border in your rental car and sleeping the happy sleep of the well traveled in the TraveLodge with the sleepy-bear logo outside in calming neon and trademark-registered, waking once in the night when your husband suddenly was not beside you but relaxing immediately when he emerged from the bathroom, knowing it was his one nightly relief and that one at his age indicates no prostate alarum unless you are talking to the Cancer Society people, who tend to go overboard, but understandably, you suppose, and the nurse leaned to me as if falling asleep, and in fact had her head on my shoulder for a moment before she said, “Joo can come home me but do not see me your thing.” I nodded vigorously at this suggestion, oddly cheered by her directness, and very suddenly rather depressed by the paucity of my knowledge of Mexico and the paucity of my business being in it. What I knew: the name Zapata, which I was not sure was Mexican; the name Bolivar, ditto; Santa Ana, definite, but a large loser; Cortes wrecked somebody (Peru?) (Where does Pizarro fit in?); Aztec-Mayan mess, some Egyptian-like outfits without mathematics and not sure where they were; one word: perro, dog, but I also thought it might mean but (and I dearly hoped not, because finding a fifty-pound but was going to be at once easier and more complicated than finding a fifty-pound dog); and that Trotsky had been assassinated in Mexico City, which I got, with an ice ax, which I did not get. That was the sum of Mexico as I sat going home with a nurse in my quest for a large Chihuahua. All in all, it was a fair fix. If I kneecapped the first switchblade boy off the bus with my Yoo-Hoo bottle it might command the respect of the others. Then I could make a dignified retreat to the pill-filled la
ir of my wanton health-care professional and have a very nice evening at home. I could relish her want of material overcomforts, her spare rooms free of the blued noise of TV, her hard mattress, one sheet, two cups, two plates. Her red table and matching yellow chairs. Her one strand of beads, her butt.

  If she saw me it. I could go out late for two more Yoo-Hoo, who knew. The world was opening up at this pinched lost end of it, opening up about a centimeter, but opening up.

  We de-bused and the knife brigade came out, too, but were stopped by a vigorous look from the nurse, and one of them muttered Strega or something and they took off arunnin’. There was one other thing I knew about Mexico: some of the villages are inhabited by the dead. This I knew. Instinctively at first I hoped this village was not one of them, but then thought maybe that would be perfect, whatever that means, and what I think it means is you catch yourself in a dread common emotion and momentarily revolt: who in his right mind would prefer a village of normal Mexicans to one of the dead, on a purely anthropological basis, or perhaps forensic basis; the pill and the Yoo-Hoo had me going, and I put my arm around the nurse and we walked homeward looking like Mickey Rooney and a new wife. The thing is, I was feeling like Mickey Rooney with a new wife, and what I do not know about the emotions of Mickey Rooney is considerably less than what I do not know about those of Zebulon Pike, so we are on pretty firm ground. Mickey Rooney is the fifty-pound Chihuahua of actors, and that will do.

  As casually as I could, I asked the nurse as we neared her place, “Is this a dead village?”