Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  “Berry dead,” she said.

  Inside, it was exactly as I had pictured it, except for the presence of a complex and shining Cuisinart on the red table. The nurse turned to me and blinded me in a rush of cinnamon and chocolate tones. I had no chance to show her my anything. I felt vaguely unfaithful somehow to Mrs. M. and specifically furious with myself for such a sloppy emotion. I owed Mrs. M. nothing and certainly had repaid Tod a thousandfold for the use of his lost trike. How, I wondered, supine on a hard, comfy pallet looking at a moonlit countryside outside a window I expected a zombie to window-peek us through any minute now, for we were gloriously naked and ashine with exertion, my health-care professional resting her head on the hollow of my neck, how could a grown man’s casual ride on a borrowed tricycle come to haunt so much of his life?

  “Aches ’n’ pains?” my nurse said.

  “Oh yes,” I said with the conviction of fatigue.

  She got up and dragged a suitcase to the pallet and opened it on at least five thousand loose pills.

  “What are they?” I combed my fingers through them. It would take several college freshmen good with their PDRs several days to key this load out.

  “Berry good,” my good nurse said, and picked one for me and placed it on my tongue. Where had I been all my life? How had I not been on a Chihuahua quest until now? What had been wrong with me? Why had I even passively plodded along on the group hiking trails? Why had I listened to Park Rangers whom I knew to be pederasts? I had paid my bills and stopped at my stop signs, and it suddenly looked as if I need not have. I may have tied my Reeboks a little looser than my peers, but I had strode the mall all the same.

  At this precise moment a ghostly face did appear in the window, scaring a very modest little spurt of something out of my behind. The face was as quickly gone.

  “Who was that?”

  “That was Zeus.”

  “Zeus? The real one?”

  “There is more than one?”

  “Well, no, I—”

  “Zeus.”

  I took a deep breath and swallowed hard: okay, I was through with all this Ranger Rick paint-by-the-numbers living and Cartesian logic and conservation of this and that and paying for what you get and getting what you pay for and being careful what you ask for because you might get it and vengeance is the Lord’s and however many commandments and one and one is two and a circle is perfect and this is unique or not but not somewhat unique and the other million and one ways of staging yourself to the as if you were in possession of a street map and a schedule of trains. Since you were finally not in possession of a map and a schedule, who is to say that Yoo-Hoo and pills and Zeus making a bed check on you and your brown nurse is not the True Way? “Just tell me what is wrong with that!” I yelled at the ceiling.

  “Shhh!” My brown good trained professional friend got me another pill and delivered it and calmed me with her cooing and we slept the sleep of sheep.

  I lived in a sea of varicolored pills and brown flesh and pasty faces peering in the window. Not all of them were Zeus. I was left in the day to…to do with it whatever I chose. No discussions of purpose or plan oppressed themselves into our simple time. María went to work and at night we did pills and whoopee. We had no problems because we had no conversation. That clearly is the major undoing of relationships. I advise heartily against blather. There must be minimal communications of course, but in the battle of the sexes, as in any war, the communiqués should be tactical, brief, and if possible in code. María and I managed a coded brevity that was exquisite. I loved her breasts, her smiles, and her Percodan, and she liked my fox-colored starchy hair and that I did not strut around in banty swagger, I think. In the mornings when the poor thing had to ride the bus to work, I sat in the town square having mango and strong coffee and dark brown unlabeled beer. I pondered the absence of the kinds of problems one would be pondering Stateside. I pondered even this absence gradually less and less until I pondered the immediate: a mango without a bar code and wax on it, a coffee more coffee than water, a beer without a team of circus horses and a baseball team attached to it. I decided to name my fifty-pound Chihuahua Trotsky, or Mr. Trotsky.

  On the lam in Mexico after a preposterous dog I have occasion to think of how sane childhood is, even its extreme moments and venues, compared to what we make of adulthood. This is why we go around chanting mantras about the value of maturity. We could not go on without this constant hypnosis. Of course—and I am living proof—if you do undo the hypnosis and prove capable of handling it, as I did when I mounted up on Tod McGillicuddy’s noble blue trike with my carton of chocolate milk, They will bind you over for the nuthouse, where everyone has had a vision of childhood and loss of the garden.

  Dirt floors, sandals, foot baths in gaudy plastic tub. No deodorant. High-quality tortillas at every house. Butter and salt and roll into a cigarette! Eat it! A pig wanders the village and everyone knows whose it is! If someone took it everyone would know who! The pig knows whose he is, and who he is! Very little garbage because it is all valuable! Ice in an icehouse, abundant if you ask for it! Fruity drinks ladled to you and drunk from the vendors glass, which he hands you, you drink, you hand back! One glass the whole operation! Want new clothes? Find a stand, take off your old, put on the new on the roadside at the stand, and walk off! Get a hat! Buy an owl! Amulets, spice, dolls! Birds, yo-yos, sisters! Sun, dust, rain! Heat, wind, cool! Day, dusk, night! Living, breathing, dying! Drinking, fighting, screwing! Laughing, weeping, not saying a thing! Flies, spiders, ants! Fresh, stale, pickled! Taking a shit, feeling fine, delirious with fever! Happy! Sunglasses! Naturally losing weight! Happy!

  Answers are to be found, when they are to be found, in the dirt. Questions of self-actualization would seem to be moot when you find yourself in Mexico in lazy pursuit of an improbable dog. There are no angels on our shoulders after a point in life, and I’ve reached mine. I eschew prescribed medication. I sometimes contemplate cotton candy. I can tie my shoes. I cannot sing or talk spontaneously anymore. I can hardly even lust on impulse, if lust may be verb intransitive, and the world is vulgar enough now, at least in the sense of crimes against English, that I do not see why it may not be verb intransitive.

  The beauty of mountain living continues unapace. I do nothing and nothing does not strike back. I tidy the house of an odd morning, though with the dirt floor the operation is one of judgment. You want the broom marks either all in one direction or describing a pleasant and regular pattern; the two cups together here, the two plates there, or a cup on a plate and a cup on a plate, as you prefer. The crow in the window is not to be teased with a shiny object. A gecko on the hearth is to be steered around: he will eat his translucent weight in flies. Then a coffee and a pill of choice about mid-morning, about the time you’d sit down and watch a rerun of Lucy in the States. I continue to fret the non-abandonment of Mrs. M.

  The people here are friendly, whether dead or alive, mortal or god. The switchblade boys appear to have been an aberration, mostly. I do sometimes long for the odd breakfast cereal, but this passes with a good eye-to-eye with the crow.

  I more and more display a contemplative nature, except that little in me inclines to elevated matters. Of occasion I take exquisite pleasure in a good tooth brushing and face scrubbing with a marvelous soap that they make themselves somehow from hogs and that smells of oranges. Grooming seems important when you walk about on your twenty-thousand-mile sandals. I am going to go soon in search of the fifty-pound Chihuahua, and I want to look good. If I am to be laughed at, I prefer an impeccable countenance. There is comfort in being deemed a neat lunatic. And less vainly there is the matter of being thought well of by the fifty-pound Chihuahua should one be found. One does not ordinarily credit dogs with discriminating in the matter of the master’s dress, but this will not be an ordinary dog.

  One day I washed my face well and got on the bus to go and find him. I felt very secure in myself. I did not care what happened. That is how everyone should feel every day
, but in my case I need the artifice of looking for something that should not exist and, should it, that will make people laugh at or run from to feel “normal.” As I grasp the nuances and vagaries of psychological disorders from my early brushes with the science, there is not much wrong with me.

  In Chihuahua I found plenty plenary kennel. I found dogs the size of country rats with eyes the size of shooter marbles, with tiny, heavy-nailed feet that clicked on tile. I smiled at all these dogs and asked the breeders, “Más grande?” I have no idea if this locution was correct. It seemed that it was taken to mean something more like “More greater numbers?”—i.e., more dogs?—because I was invariably shown more (small) dogs.

  It was my first day away from the house in some time, and my feet hurt, and I couldn’t tell if I was being regarded unfavorably because I wasn’t buying any of the hundreds of dogs I was shown or for less obvious reasons; these people in Chihuahua seemed alive and maybe I was back in the realm of common human indecencies, the dogs made me nervous in ways I was certain a big one would not; it got dark and I got tireder and lost, black-cave-nightmare lost on a trail on a hill that may not have been a trail and may have been not a hill but a fullblown mountain. Things got black and steep and I missed my María and the cool sheets and warm cinnamon and good cheer of a woman congratulating you for doing nothing beyond being there. I began most naturally howling like a wolf. By “most naturally” I mean it—these noises issued from me without a lot of thought. I did not say, Okay, we are in extremis, estranged from our friendly dead village, thing to do here is act like wolf—I just started rather groaning about my feet and María and the dark and then I began kind of singing the moaning and then I thought I was sounding like a wolf but don’t really know what they sound like, but even that idea—maybe I sounded like a bad idea of a wolf—did not occur and I kept at it, it felt right and meet so to do, amen. And out of the darkness walked unto me, looking terribly uncomfortable yet happy to see me, as might be said of any dog under circumstances like these, a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua, though its weight I did not determine then, I simply knew it was close enough. It was my dog. I had not believed in my lunatic quest until I saw its object before me in hesitant devotion.

  Already it was surrendered to me, leader of our two-dog pack, and my self-esteem, which comes and goes, came. A fifty-pound Chihuahua, a mythical dog, surely a holy dog that I sensed was as old as the Aztec-Mayan mess I knew nothing about, was addressing me as Master on a lost mountain in Mexico. I shut up and said, “Home, boy,” and wanted to name him but only odd names arose—Algernon, Cremator, Dungeonballs, Turk (not bad—he looked Ottoman), Oldsmobile, Tampax, Terwilliger, Tweezer, Toulouse, I got stuck in the Ts until I hit Trotsky, perfect, and remembered I’d decided to name him that, and Trotsky led us home.

  There we were put to bed like a couple of boys. María wagged a finger at me and said “Muy grande!” to either me or the dog and put him on a pallet in the kitchen, where he stayed, and we went to bed as usual, fond and hot. She smelled great and was firm and heavy, I should say solid, “heavy” misreads but should be taken favorably. María is the forty-seven-pound Chihuahua of women. I was to have been the hundred-and-forty-seven-pound eunuch of Taco Charley’s. My dog is the forty-seven-pound Chihuahua of Chihuahua. My head is a blunt instrument, a blunt instrument, and I don’t care. María is a good person.

  A good person is a can of worms. A can of worms is a ball of wax. Sexually speaking. No. I do not mean that. I do not mean anything. If that were possible. I submit it is not. One may not mean nothing, never. One may amount to nothing, “be” nothing, and nothing may exist in a philosophical sense, but one may never mean nothing. This is, I think, obvious: What do you mean? Nothing. Oh?

  So I mean something. A good person is a can of worms. That is what I mean. I am not good, probably. But the measure, the measuring, is…well, a can of worms, I believe is the expression. The expression seems almost universally applicable. Even a can of worms is a can of worms. Everything, however, is not a fly in the ointment or a wrench in the works. Shoe polish is not either of these, but shoe polish is a can of worms, clearly. Shoes themselves, wearing them, not, securing the proper size, the proper support, tying them—just what about shoes is not a can of worms? Nothing is not a can of worms. QED.

  I took to taking the long, regular walk with my short, irregular dog. We went everywhere and nowhere together.

  Perhaps a word about my past is in order. I have one. As they go, it is not astounding, probably, or outstanding, certainly, I would think. But as soon as I make such a claim, or claims, I wonder what I mean. You know about the episode involving Mrs. M. and Tod’s trike and my halfway-house time I have rather avoided. My presentation of these facts has not been altogether linear, I admit. I have said Mrs. M. is in indiscreet pursuit of me, and that that pursuit I have rebuffed. Something of the opposite might be the case. Or let us put it this way: I confess I was winder-peekin’ before I rode away from the window on Tod’s trike. That much I allow. Winder-peekin’ is as old a crime and harmless as they come, and in my book if you have the urge to winder-peek you’d best go ahead and winder-peek. The suppression of this impulse can bottle up into a nuclear mushroom of desire if you do not just go ahead and do it.

  But my entire life, this is what I want to say, has not consisted of winder-peekin’. It has consisted in other enterprise. I have had jobs, good and bad, mostly the latter, mostly indoors, mostly involving paper more than people, and I have pension funds in place, etc. Much like anyone else, except those folk in lesser-developed countries where trades are still well thought of and you can be, for example, a fisherman for a living without having to join the Ku Klux Klan. I have observed Christmas at the appropriate time. I have browsed racks of greeting cards and been unable to bring myself to select one idiocy over the others. In many ways, I am approximately exactly like everyone else in the human predicament. But lately I am not: not everyone is walking the hills of Mexico unchallenged with a giant Chihuahua at his side for protection and a giant-hearted woman in his (her) bed at night for balm. I have seen my dog eat cacti, how tough he is—flowers skins needles and that ornery fiber-glassy down that really hurts, much more than the needles outright. He gives, I suppose, a cactus-eating aura and nobody messes with a cactus-eating aura, off a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua or off a mouse. I bask in this aura, drinking the occasional Yoo-Hoo, making the occasional sketch of hillside, whistling the occasional tune, inspecting the shoes I occasionally notice on my feet, the twenty-thousand-mile sandals, wearing well in the unpaved desert. My life, you might say, lacks definition. I had definition looking in Mrs. M.’s window, riding Tod’s trike, drinking that chocolate milk.

  Yes, so I have, as any modern burgher citizen denizen fool census-mark does, annuities and a litter of wives and lesser mistakes in my wake. But something distinguishes me from those doing their time, workaday halfway-house cons who do not take inspiration from a black cabdrivers insolence and flee country of origin. Let’s just not go into it. I have made some phone calls and effected a cleaner getaway than it might have looked. There are realtors in red jackets showing my house. My modest man fired from Merrill Lynch for not pushing company stock on me is now holding my holdings at Smith Barney and observing my “conservative” investor-profile status, all interest and dividends on auto-rollover mode until such time as I need cash down here, which does not seem to be imminent. María does not know of course that I could buy us anything at all, and I find it agreeable not dwelling on it myself. I sometimes do wish I had Tod’s Harley down here, but that would elicit more notice than is healthy. Halcyon as it is, there are still the switchblade boys in the hill and dale. My dog and I have done some naughty spelunking—unobservant of safety precaution, I suppose I mean—in old silver mines. These have a greasy groped feel to the walls that tells you the last thing you will ever locate within is silver, and this seems to excite us as to the possibilities of finding truer treasure. We don’t know what, my bug-eyed hyper pal a
nd I, but we look. Deep in a mine, too dark to see rock before you nose it, I can hear my dog pee from excitement in the soft guano. We squish on. This is life, perfectly put: go not you know where, except down, for reward already removed by those cleverer than you, sliding agreeably in ammoniac excrement, and “give up” and turn around with a sigh of resigned cheer with your boon companion, who does not complain. In Cincinnati, drink beer with grumbling colleagues until you all get DUIs going home to abuse the family. In untamed Mexico, drink a Yoo-Hoo with your dog and walk home and have a pill and a nurse. Altogether better way of life. Another thing: an egg down here is either in a nest, and usually not a formal one but one of convenience, such as a drawer, or it is in a pan acookin’, or it is in someone’s hand going to the pan. It is not in a box on a shelf in a store or on a truck going to the store or on a belt going to a box to go in a truck to go to the store to go on a shelf to go on a belt to go in a bag to go in a car to go in a house to go in a refrigerator to go from the box to go in a pan. I rest my case. Let your mind swell with the implications of the horseshit attending an egg in the United States and see how far you get. Gedouttahere is where you get.

  I was allowed to work—the term is inaccurate: to get in the way—at the local panadería, and so was my dog. I hung out and flopped flour around, and punched it, and heaved it, and cut it, and kneaded and rolled and just generally had a sexy time of it. My dog was called Dusty. I contemplated his nature as he apparently contemplated me having relations with dough. He was allowed on the premises because it was believed he was the world’s greatest ratter, but I do not think he is. At any rate, I have never seen him look for a rat or act like he wants to locate one. It seems rather more correct to regard this dog as a gentleman, albeit a tense one who does manifest a nervous eye toward my welfare. If I cough in a cloud of flour, he edges up, prancing a little, to my side, until the fit is over and he retires to a cool pool of flour on the floor. If I slip in guano as we mine lost silver, and whimper from the slick ammoniac turf, he licks my face. He is a kind of bodyguard, but through no wit or will of his own—people are generally terrified of a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua.