You & Me: A Novel

by Padgett Powell

  The ghost of Julia Child is a powerful force.

  Yes. You once used the ghost of Crazy Horse to similar effect.

  I think of them together. Julia cooks prodigiously, drinks, accepts photographers. Crazy Horse sups succinctly, plans military campaigns, eschews photographers. They both die. Life has collapsed.

  I can’t continue to pretend to be your manservant. Or catamite.

  It challenges me too.

  You addressed me as “Charles.”

  I was thinking of Ray Charles, who has also died and contributed directly to the collapse of Life as we thought we knew it.

  You pour a little wine for me tonight.

  Will do.

  &

  Have you noticed . . .

  Have I noticed . . . what?

  I am certain that you have noticed. I was pausing because of that certainty. I was relocating the emphasis to my question. Have you noticed, any time lately, the phenomenon by which when you meet someone whose personality you object to that your own personality is shifted to a counterpersonality, as it were, to which you also object, arguably more than you object to the offending personality of the other?

  Is the classic instance of this when you visit your parents and are thrown into the ghosts and contours of yourself when you were, say, a teenager and in full combat against their lunatic officialdom?

  That might be the classic instance of this phenomenon, yes. But I think there are more frightening instances of it. I met a man recently who came on like a car salesman when there was no commerce between us and it put me into a guard, an almost Royalist snootiness that I very much did not like. What I did not like about it, beyond being made into a false personality, a boor, was that I could see he was oblivious to it, to my being a snob, because he was continuing on his program of taking advantage of me, or of the world in general, of which I just at that moment must have appeared to be a part of in front of him.

  What put you off about this fellow?

  He was smiling effusively and kept repeating my name. He was positioning me to like him by affecting to regard me as special. It put me into the role of a loan officer, or a hawk sitting a branch watching a mouse on the ground, or an off-duty prison warden.

  Nothing wrong with the off-duty prison warden.

  Come to think of it, you are right.

  You should thank the man.

  I’ve been ungenerous.

  As usual.

  Yes. You’re no Christian, Senator. I knew Christian.

  &

  Rosy turtles. With green eyes and yellow hair.

  Yes?

  I see them.

  Hair?

  Yellow hair.

  Does it seem strange, hair on turtles?

  No. Some of them are cropped short, like tennis balls, some spiked-out and gelled-looking, some just look like boys with yellow hair. Or girls.

  So it’s unnatural-looking hair?

  Well, it does look bleachy, but I think that is a conclusion we draw faced with yellow hair, on turtles or no, and in this case, for some reason, I am inclined to think this bright yellow hair is natural.

  Custer was said to have—

  Famously. Custer was a boorish happy ass. These turtles, my friend, are serious and somber, responsible . . . citizens. I nearly said dudes.

  Where are these turtles?

  In my mind. In the province of my mind.

  Is there any kind of natural surround for them or are they—

  They are just there, turtles, without props or context; nor do they weirdly float about or appear deliberately isolated. When you see turtles with hair, with agreeable expressions, rather friendly-looking dudes, you don’t examine the area around them overmuch, I find.

  A reasonable position, with hairy turtles in view. No prob from me here. I need to get out, get a little air, purchase a small quantity of sugar from a vendor, snack on it as I idly perambulate, whiling away what little remains of my little and inconsequential life, of my dear dearth of time on this hallowed planet.

  I am sorry I have set you off. With my turtles.

  Not at all. I feel just excellent. I am fond of your turtles and live vicariously through them and have a sunny disposition for your having seen them. These visions sustain us. They are all we have.

  Amen.

  They make us religious, almost.

  &

  What is the big picture?

  Please. Don’t.

  Don’t what?

  Start. I can’t. Today. No more big-picture mauning. Your yellow-haired turtles is a big-picture maun at an acceptably veiled, small-picture scale. That I can take.

  You have invented this word, maun.

  Maybe I have.

  What does it mean?

  I can’t take that either. You’re asking me things you know. You know what it means.

  I suppose. Studio Becalmed mauned, then he met Jayne, she died, and he mauned some more, differently from before, and when your dog dies you maun a little. And so forth.

  It’s a rather warm-soup and somewhat philosophical kind of longing. Studio was not free of mauning even when he knew Jayne, of course.

  Of course. I was speaking hastily and sloppily, of course.

  There is no pressure upon us not to be sloppy.

  But there is pressure that we not be too sloppy, lest we not strike the happy-accident monkey keys and say something that pleases us.

  Do you think often, or ever, of Miles Davis doing all that dope and blowing into his horn until something flies out that pleases him and everyone around for miles and miles?

  That is why they called him Miles.

  If we are not too sloppy they will call us Inches.

  &

  Why do we talk?

  Why would we not?

  I suspect that is why we talk: what would we do if we did not talk?

  Precious little else, darlin’.

  My point.

  Your point is that we do nothing but talk . . .

  And that if we cease, we do nothing, are nothing.

  Well, given how little we talk about, we are next to nothing already.

  I dispute you not.

  You brought this up, suggesting you might dispute it—I’m sorry, here I am talking inaccurately, doing the next-to-nothing thing we do sloppily. I mean to say: your bringing this up might suggest you are concerned with how little or nothing we are.

  No, I am content to be nothing. It might be argued, for example, that a secretary of defense talks about matters that are far from the nothing end of the gravity-in-talk spectrum. I would rather we talk as we do than as secretaries of defense.

  We are not con men, whatever else we are or are not.

  And if we are, we con but our own self, and we have occasion to think of things to say that we don’t say, and think even of, say—I do this, I don’t know about you—I think once in a while, say, of the stray dog Jesus, wending His handsome way, turning down girls.

  I see Jesus in his mind alone take the T-shirt off a nubile with his teeth and shake that shirt as a dog does a rag.

  Shake the life out of it!

  Shake it, Jesus buddyro!

  Does the girl stand there admiring Him?

  She stands there with her arms crossed modestly over her desert-chilled chest, smiling enigmatically, patient with the Savior in His paroxysm, saying to herself, I’ll never tell, I’ll never tell . . .

  Oh! Don’t you long for the days when discretion reigned?

  I long for the days when it existed at all.

  Do you prefer to fish from the bank or from a boat?

  I prefer to fish from wherever fish are less likely to be taken. I am fond of the fishing show on television.

  Is this too a quiet vision of Jesus?

  It is probably something of the sort, yes.

  Could you dig a Flood?

  You mean another big one?

  Yes.

  Yes. I’m in. Two of everything on the boat, the rest of us die. I am in.

/>   &

  There are some people who should die before the Flood.

  Who?

  Well, all these regimes that make refugees of millions of their own people, these regimes that bomb other countries to set them free, these gangs in Toyota trucks gunning down barefoot people, of course they all need to drop off right now. Just crumple over into the mass graves they have prepared for someone else. Then there are some others I want to see gone.

  Are you talking about the phone virus?

  I am. A person talking on a cell phone in his car, when he switches off the car, crumples over on the seat right there, just like a regime war criminal. Anyone dumping trash not at a dump gets the virus and crumples over on top of the crap he dumped; he will be found there by the sheriff if not by buzzards first.

  People that throw shit out of a moving car chap my ass as much.

  And mine. When so much as a plastic wrapper goes out of that car the perp will vomit prodigiously into his own car, and when he pulls over to address the issue and switches the car off, phitt! For that matter a person walking who tosses a paper cup to the ground will go down on his knees and have about five seconds to contemplate the cup before he too joins the unrighteous dead and improves the world that awaits the Flood.

  &

  What if we called the Salvation Army and had them come over here and clean us out?

  Like, strip the joint?

  Take everything here except us and what we’re sitting on.

  What would be the point of this?

  I am not sure.

  Do you have any relatives living?

  I must. Somewhere.

  Me too.

  Are you essentially alone?

  Yes. It’s you and me. You and I.

  God.

  Tell me. Does this relate to having the Salvation Army come over and take our shit?

  I think so. I have a vision of our sitting here, rather nattily somehow, in a clean place unbothered by biographical detritus and other riprap.

  I love that word. After the Salvation Army comes and rescues us, though, we cannot make a cup of tea, or sleep well.

  This is true. Maybe there is something wrong with my vision, technically. But . . . holistically—is that really a word?—I think I am onto something. If we could sit in these chairs unperturbed while everything was taken and have nothing then around us but the air we breathe and a thought or two, and our monkey chitchat, we would somehow be very superior.

  I think you are having a monastery vision.

  Maybe I am. I am a monast, or want to be. May one say that? Or is it monk?

  Totally out of my ken, monking and all its affairs.

  I heard a child once counting to one hundred to prove that she could, and when she said “forty-four” she stopped herself and said, “I love forty-four!” and then resumed counting. It was funny, and only a child could have done it, and only once. It was a unique moment in that child’s life, and in mine.

  Are you going to cry?

  I might.

  Go ahead. Don’t call the Salvation Army while you are blubbering. And don’t be blubbering after they come and take our shit.

  Of course not. We’ll need a stiff upper lip after that.

  Mr. and Mr. Stiff Upper Lip sat in their chairs stoically as the Army of Salvation invaded their home and made natty and uncomplaining monks of them. The bums who toted their belongings past them could smell the fine cognac in their snifters.

  That is a fine vision—you’ve put a Degas touch on my original pedestrian idea. I’d call the Army right now if it did not require my finding the phone book. Do you think if I called 911 they would refer me to the Salvation Army?

  You could tell them you need emergency salvation and see.

  Is it possible that we do have some cognac?

  Not.

  That’s the funniest thing kids have come up with in forty years. Before that it was the Jim Thorpe thing, I guess. It was similar, syntactically.

  Man, there was a horse.

  Apparently.

  Cowboy up. Let’s go to the liquor bunker and get cognac and evade the angry brothers and get back here and be damned glad we have chairs to sit in and beds to lie on and toothbrushes to perfect our smiles with, and like that. I am not ready to sit for Degas yet.

  &

  A dark thing.

  A dark thing what?

  I had a vision of a dark thing—

  A dream?

  No, not a dream, just a sense of something dark, a dark place or effect, an ominousness . . .

  And?

  And I can’t develop it. The nearest equivalent I can think of is that alleged cold space said to obtain in haunted houses. It had that, but it wasn’t overtly paranormal or threatening or weird; it was just a sense of some muted thunder under a place or a time, a set of emotions that was like a dark curtain, ever so slightly foreboding. I thought I was going to be able to get up and seize it and make literal sense out of it, you know, a set of objects terminating in sensory experience, but I can’t.

  Are you quoting Trouser Snake?

  Indeed I did.

  Don’t. Anymore.

  Okay.

  Quote Studio Becalmed or quote no one.

  Studio, bless his short mortal soul, did not say enough for us to ferret out quotes. He was, after all, Studio Becalmed, not Studio Blather. I don’t think Studio could have ever been troubled by a “vision of something dark” that he couldn’t put his finger on.

  No. In our mythology of Studio, he went fishing or walked around in the woods and then saw Jayne one day and romped thereafter in the Alps of Heaven, dead or alive. He was not given to analysis of figments of his imagination.

  More importantly, he was not confused. I am confused. And getting confuseder.

  I am getting wonderier about our mental welfare.

  Well, you should be if I cannot get up from the bed and recover the wanton emotions of the night. It’s very cold outside. I saw this mechanic wearing a pair of overalls into which he had inserted a heating pad and he had plugged himself into a power strip and was working comfortably. We could make rigs such as that.

  If we got a generator and put it in a red wagon we could make it to the liquor bunker warmer and making more noise than all the brothers’ Buicks combined.

  We would never be fucked with hooked up to a generator.

  Are you making some roundabout insult?

  I am just having a vision of us wired to a loud Honda generator, smiling in our superwarm jumpsuits, and carrying large unbreakable bottles of vodka unmolested through the ghetto. That is all I will confess to.

  It is not a bad vision.

  It is a happy vision. It is not a vision of a dark place I cannot rescue from abstraction. I am done with all that. This Red Flyer walk in heated suits is a Studio-Becalmed vision, and I am going totally with it.

  I want orange electrical cords and orange suits, like jail suits.

  That will be our very best protection, if we look to have escaped and are not in a panic to conceal our prison garb.

  We will be bad. Unspeakably bad and loud and bold. One of us stays with the generator while the other goes in the store.

  Right on.

  I can see Studio camped in a pup tent beside Lake Rosa. He gets up at four in the morning under a moon and casts a Dillinger on the lake and catches bass the size of fire hydrants. His uncle remains asleep. There is coffee later, black coffee boiled in a black pot over a fire. An easy morning.

  What is a Dillinger?

  Torpedo bait, propellers fore and aft, striped like a zebra.

  Is this a joke about primitive bass fishing?

  Well, it was a funny bait and the fishing was primitive—the bass back then hit anything in the water, as near as I can tell. Water snakes—there were enough of them that they rained from trees into the wooden rowboats.

  You are on a full-on nostalgia roll now.

  I am. I am about to envision drinking the tangy water from the orange metal t
umbler and petting the rogue water moccasin.

  Do we have any heating pads?

  No.

  Jumpsuits?

  No.

  Metal tumblers?

  No.

  Dillingers?

  No.

  &

  Did we party last night?

  Not, to my knowledge, beyond the usual, the genteel talktail party we always hold. Why?

  Because I notice that all the knobs to the stove are off the stove.

  They are gone?

  No, on the kitchen floor.

  Neatly or scattered?

  I would say they are in a configuration that is between neat and scattered. As if they fell from the stove behaving like apples falling from the tree are wont to behave: not far.

  That is an interesting idea, stove knobs as fruit of the stove.

  Well, the fruit is on the ground.

  I am without answer.

  A stove-knob burglar came in and was frightened off the booty by something?

  One of us sleepwalks and likes to pull appliances apart? Were you punished for playing with the stove as a wee?

  Did another appliance molest the stove—did the toaster oven pull her knobs off?

  Did a bull come into our china shop? I would like to know who coined that conceit, the bull in the china shop, it is not bad at all.

  I wonder if a bull has ever actually got into a china shop.

  I would think, in the long reach of time, it not unlikely, at least once. A bull running, say, down a street in Spain could easily detour into a fine shop. Remember your laws of thermodynamics. I’ll say it was Dickens, Sterne, one of those guys.

  I am a little depressed.

  I am too.

  Nothing novel.

  No.

  We should reknob the stove.

  I’m going to. I left them on the floor only for evidentiary purposes. The crime will not be solved, we might as well sweep up the evidence.

  That could be our motto for Life. Life will not be explained; sweep away the evidence.