Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

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?”

“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.