You & Me: A Novel

by Padgett Powell

Nulls.

  Yes.

  I find that even if I have a coaster to hand I will rarely put my glass on it. I carelessly damage the surface of tables.

  This is who we are.

  I regard this carelessness carefully. I am industrially idle. This defines me.

  There is no point to us.

  I will not need another new swimsuit in my time.

  We never needed a new swimsuit. We just thought we did.

  What do you actually call a swimsuit?

  Does one, or does I?

  Do you.

  I call it a bathing suit.

  Would you ever have said trunks?

  Never. Sounds preposterous, and I can’t say why. My trunks alas are in my trunk.

  Once I am in my trunks I will get in the water.

  Still, I can hear Jayne say, Studio, put your trunks on, love, let’s go for a refreshing dip in the Gulf.

  That is the dead speaking, we cannot challenge them. And before they were dead they were neat and brave and not afraid. They can say what they will. I am having a cramp in my gut.

  They can say that?

  No, I am having a cramp. Now.

  You are strange.

  Make us a colorful drink with a sugary liqueur. Would you? I feel like a famous lost heroine.

  But you are not famous and not a heroine. You are just lost.

  Yes, I am comfortable enough. I would like to have a gun.

  Not suicide.

  Of course not. I would just like some oiled steel, just to behold.

  A symbol.

  I suppose. Of something. Perhaps not a symbol, but a thing.

  The old Ding an sich!

  I think so. We have finally gotten one, one we comprehend.

  A good oiled pistol on the table.

  To hell with the coasters and where the drinks park themselves, we have oily steel already on the table!

  We are making progress.

  I did not think that we would, in our time.

  &

  When I wake up in the mornings the impulse to cry is almost sufficient that I start.

  Why do you not, then? As that little imp put it—do you recall this? Throw up right here, Mother.

  You are referring to that child in the Sokol gymnasium.

  Yes.

  That was genuinely funny.

  Why was he saying that?

  Because she was complaining of having eaten too much spaghetti and said she might be going to be sick.

  And they were kneeling on the gym floor.

  And the child got tired of her threatening to throw up and tapped his finger on the mat and said, Throw up right here, Mother.

  Politely.

  Very politely.

  No one took any notice.

  That is what was so funny.

  I recall it now. I am the same woman. I feel like crying.

  So do. I will be the same imp. Cry right here.

  I am embarrassed at how much weeping I have done in my life, and think that not one more tear is in order, to salvage what I can of . . .

  Of what?

  That is the question. Just what is this operation about? In preserving dignity or anything else, what is served? I think I do not quite get it all.

  We’ve been over this.

  Yes, and still, and this is what gets me, I feel that I should not cry anymore, even though intellectually, if we should call it that, we know one may as well cry as not if he’s as lost as we are.

  Lost in the nonwoods.

  The closest we are to lost in the woods is lost in the woodwork.

  I like it.

  Anyway I am unstable until I get the coffee and by jacking my nerves up a bit calm them down.

  Is that how it works?

  Yes, it’s irony, fairly traded and artisan-roasted irony.

  Juan Valdez and Joe DiMaggio are taking care of you.

  They are the same person except for the kind of women they ran with. They both help me keep on keepin’ on. I love that idiocy.

  Did Crumb do that? Was it a big Crumb foot marching in the air, leading the fool attached to it?

  If it were not Crumb I don’t know who it was.

  Crumb left us here. He moved to France.

  We would too, if we could. We would leave ourselves here.

  Why does Crumb get to leave and we don’t?

  Because we are talking to the dead? Because we are weeping? Because we miss our dogs more than our parents? Because we are the subject of Crumb? It’s a hard one.

  Speaking of rocket science, do you recall hearing children of the ghetto proclaim they were going to be corporate lawyers? Plain lawyer wasn’t enough?

  Is that not unlike wanting to be a brain surgeon?

  Whence this zeal to specialize when they are so far in the hole?

  Doesn’t it mean they know it’s fantasy so why not go ahead and make it sound fantastic as well? Is it really any worse or different than painting a car June-bug green?

  Am I following you?

  Can any of us follow Crumb to France? That is what I am talking about. If you cannot, paint your car green or cry all day, it does not matter. Tell people you are going to be a rocket scientist when you grow up. They cannot hold it against you. Shoulder to shoulder we look abroad and pray for Crumb to send drawings of feet and thick women.

  We know he can because he’s eating good cheese.

  &

  Variegated terrain.

  Yes?

  I am thinking about it.

  What about it?

  Is it all it’s cracked up to be.

  This I trust is not a pun.

  No. I think that I am attracted to the idea of variegated terrain, or to the thing itself, and then I wonder what is wrong with a smooth plain—

  The sound of wide water! We finally got to use that.

  I have never heard that.

  Then you are under-read or I am stupid because I think it’s Yeats.

  Was Yeats a card?

  Yes.

  Would he have liked variegated terrain or monoterrain?

  That is close to monotrain.

  Yes it is.

  I don’t know. All those guys, they drank, they did not want the ground playing any more tricks than it had to. I am thinking they’d go for monoterrain. Your poets with broken noses are unbecoming.

  The mail just came.

  It is not worth the powder it would take to blow an ant an inch to go get that mail. I knew a jolly woman in Georgia who would say stuff like that. She had terminal psoriasis at the end. Do you recall when you could get letters from girls?

  Those were the days in which hormones ran like gurgling brooks in our veins and melted our knees with need.

  Yes, those days, and those days are not these days, and that mail contains nothing.

  Moreover, I shudder now to realize it is not Yeats but Trouser Snake Eliot who coined the sound of wide water. I apologize. I have rued the day.

  Ease up. The day was rued when we came upon it, or when it came upon us, and beheld us marring the horizon, sitting here like unconquerable savages, men missing their dogs and talking pointlessly unless talking to the dead. Let’s sharpen something.

  Do you recall the Mexicans sharpening the big knives on the concrete abutments under the bridge and cutting up the sharks?

  I will never forget it. They were not big knives, they were outright plain old simple all-they-could-get machetes. Slicing up sharks with machetes!

  Hand to mouth.

  Mouth to hand.

  Hand to hand.

  Mouth to mouth. They were not bums sitting on their hands and complaining.

  We are good at it, being bums. In our way we have made something also of a desperate situation. It is true that we are not carving up monsters of the deep with farm implements, but—

  And that guy writing on the sharks with the charcoal.

  I am not sure it was charcoal. It might have been a piece of asphalt. From the road.

  This is making d
o: cut up the fish with something you find in the field, establish ownership with something you find on the road, and go home to something that is not properly a home, I am sure—

  And not a word of complaint. Heroes!

  We should go to Mexico and shut the fuck up. It’s the least we can do.

  That is funny. It is the most we can do.

  All right. If the least you can do is congruent to the most you can do, is it an argument to do it or to not do it?

  This requires more math than I have.

  Is the age more mean-spirited than previous ages?

  Except for the Middle Ages, as near as I can tell.

  Then I think we should do the thing that is the least we can do even if it is congruent to the most we can do. Board this shack up and head out.

  The thing I hate about travel the most is not being able to command a space and relax when you have to go to the bathroom.

  That is your chief concern?

  Yes.

  We go, then.

  All right.

  Good boy.

  I am a good boy.

  I am too. And Studio. And we are gone.

  Do we terminate the mail, cut off the—

  No. Do not even lock the door. Turn something over. We will be the suspected victims of Foul Play.

  The bus-driving pedophiles got us.

  Our play was foul, and it came home to roost. We will be like John Effing Kennedy.

  Except no Marilyn, we did not try to do in Castro, nobody knows what happened to us—

  Yes, and nobody cares.

  We are free men.

  We were always free, it just took us some time to see it.

  Do you feel free?

  I feel as free as a green jujube being wedged from its red brothers in the box.

  Spring forth, jujube.

  Jujube the man!

  Studio, Jayne, Jujube One, Jujube Two, ghost dog, gone.

  &

  What is a concrete abutment?

  Something that butts out made of concrete.

  Yes. And this the Mexicans sharpened the knives on. But architecturally, what is an abutment, technically?

  I do not know. And you know that I do not know. You are indicting me early in the morning.

  I am indicting us.

  Fair enough. We know nothing.

  We are innocent of knowledge.

  We are innocent period.

  Guilty.

  We are guilty of being innocent? Do I smell the big Iron?

  No, it is not the Iron. Of being innocent is what men like us are most guilty. It is our central guilt. There is no excuse for it. Here: do you have any idea what is meant by one currency weakening against another, or one nation seeking to duplicate its own government in another country by invading it? I am saying, Can you read a newspaper and understand what you are reading?

  No.

  Because you are innocent. Here’s another form of the questions: if you were to sally forth onto variegated terrain and had the option of putting on your Sunday pants, your sunder pants, or your underpants—some song lyrics I think I misheard—which pants would you select?

  My underpants.

  We are men who find the silliness of that idea attractive. We are innocent. We are guilty.

  Of being innocent.

  Precisely.

  This song said . . . what?

  I swear it said, “Put on your Sunday pants and . . .” But it sounded like sunder pants or underpants finally.

  It was not sunder pants, that’s too archaic and good.

  It was not underpants because that does not take itself seriously enough for a million-dollar-making industry-backed recording. Ronnie Van Zant is not going to sing “underpants” dead or alive.

  &

  Isn’t what we are innocent of, beyond not knowing what “weakening currency” means, this: knowing who we are? Of knowing who and what we purport to be? Of having a secure sense of our histories and our desires and our—

  Yes, we are outside the gravid circle of adults.

  We are not burdened by purpose.

  We are not even obliged by point.

  Yet we are here, and from a distance of five yards look not unlike those inside the gravid circle of knowing who they are and what they want.

  This is not quite true. I have just seen photos of Chinese telecom executives. They look exactly like Chinese communist big shots from forty years ago. They look like American auto executives, in their posed confidence. We do not look like these men from even a hundred yards. Either they are terrorists or we are terrorists.

  Are we what is called “nihilists”?

  I do not think so. Nihilists live inside an even graver circle more certain of itself.

  Head for that taco stand.

  There’s grease ahead.

  That grease will make it so that you do not give a shit where you take a shit, and shit, my friend, you will.

  This I understand. I am an imminent defecator in a land foreign to me.

  And this precisely defines us: The others are in a land familiar, at all times, and they are not going to be seized by inopportune bowels. They have a plan for pooping. That is the difference between good CEOs and us.

  We are bums, then.

  Yes, we are talky bums with decent clothes and odor under control but bums all the same, innocent of survival.

  The tacos are a quarter and they are shaved off that cone of meat and flies there onto a piece of wood. We will die.

  We certainly will. We are afraid of life but not of death.

  Hello.

  Hello, good-bye. We must learn to say, Double tortilla, no onions.

  Tasty!

  &

  I’m having a hard time.

  Why is that?

  I do not know.

  I mean, what is the complaint?

  The complaint is I am having a hard time and I don’t know why.

  You are testy today. You know that we believe a man not in the hospital or not in jail is not really having a hard time.

  We say we believe this, and superficially we do, but deep down we complain like children.

  We need to be beaten then, like children, until we straighten up.

  Probably so. Then we could complain about the beating.

  It would be a specific and tenable lament, unlike this I-am-having-a-hard-time shit. Just what does your hard time today consist of? Can you put a finger on it? Isn’t that a lovely expression?

  To put my finger on it, something is percolating in my bowels, my life insurance policy has lapsed because I did not make the payment in time, my tax return is not yet complete, it awaits word from my broker whom I believe I have offended with a joke about his deplorable politics, I await word from a colleague at work whom I have offended by calling a nitwit, a willing young woman is to visit with whom I cannot see having carnal relations, with her is an unwilling one with whom I can, yesterday I did not eat anything, and apparently do not wish to today, though this coffee is nice, thank you; I miss my dog, I am in this foreign country and do not speak, I miss my wife, I live under the constant low roiling purple soft cloud of divorce about ten feet off the ground and tracking a man like a dog with a better nose than the dog I miss had. There. For starters.

  I do not see that you have a problem. You just have a whining problem.

  This is true. Thank you. I feel better. Much better.

  Don’t go getting carried away.

  No. Do you know the difference, by the way, between France and India?

  I do not.

  If you look out the window for thirty minutes in France you will see a dog take a shit; in India, a man.

  Why would a man capable of or interested in an observation of this caliber think he has a problem?

  You have been most helpful to me today, sir.

  &

  Do you see this hazard of steel appearing—

  What is a hazard of steel?

  I don’t know. But it appears to recede into infin
ity, rails of steel or a channel of steel, somewhat like a steel trough, except it is heavy and precisely machined—it is like a giant pistol action the size of a railroad, you might say.

  All right. Let’s say I might say that. It is not clear to me why I am saying it or why you are saying it. What about the hazard of steel?

  Well, I see it. In my mind.

  You see in your mind a railroad-sized pistol action receding out of sight. To the exclusion of all else?

  Well, no. I don’t see exclusively the hazard of steel all the time, but when I do see it I will say that at that moment I see nothing else. It fills the screen as it were.

  So you don’t see, say, cedar trees and rabbits marching also into infinity beside the perspective of steel.

  No. And that is a good word, perspective. It is a perspective and that is what occupies your mind, not the surround, just as in seventh-grade mechanical-drawing class they never had you draw in the parking lot and trees around the building that also I might note seemed poised to recede into space.

  So what you have is like a seventh-grade vision of a giant pistol action stretching let us say from New York to Moscow.

  Or beyond. The steel looks so polished, so well cut!

  Nicely oiled?

  Finely oiled!

  And when you behold this vision, you are disturbed by it, or—

  No! Made completely, utterly content. I love the hazard of steel. I want to work the giant action!

  Do you think it tenable that our brains have gone?

  Yes I do.

  &

  Have you had further occasion to view the hazard of steel?

  No. It has been replaced by a vision of flowers.

  Giant flowers issuing from the giant pistol action?

  No. A field of gladiolas. Tended by a blind man. On a three-wheeled ATV. The glads are sold from a jar in a shed by the road on the honor system. The honor system tends to stick in the mind when you see it.

  I will never forget seeing a refrigerator full of Orbit beer sold on the honor system at a motel in the Florida Keys. I wish I could recover that moment.

  Isn’t it wanting to recover moments that undoes us?

  Yes, I suppose that is what undoes us.

  How should we seek to not wish to recover moments, then?

  I propose two ways: repudiate the recovering of moments as childishness and embrace the covering as it were of the present moment in such a way that the recovery of a moment past seems moot.