Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Many things are not allowed. People can have as many people as they wish, whether they can afford them or not, and consume as many cars as they wish, but they may not drive them as fast as they wish. This would reduce the number of people. And so forth. María and I had tequila sopaipillas following my brush with the Revolution, and got dizzy and bloated but otherwise felt very good. I saw more than the usual number of dead folk glance in our window while my tequila -sopaipilla buzz wore off, and waved at them all. I have not had, and not missed, socks since I’ve been south of the border. María slept nobly, flat on her back and breathing smoothly, which may be what attracted inordinate dead, after our biscuit buzz. It is possible my mother is in the hospital. No Son of Sam or anything, but my dog told me this, if in fact I have been “told” this at all. Told, “told”—it is not so suspicious: when you are told nothing — no phone, no mail, no Western Union, no pigeons — you find that you are nonetheless, necessarily, told something. This neat little fact is what, I suspect, really separates man from animals. Animals can do without, man must be told something. I doubt he can think one whit better, or has an ounce of soul or mind more, but he must be told something some of the time or he goes nuts. But a dog does not care if you keep the deepest secret on earth from him forever. You have never seen a dog longing for the news, and you never will. Yet somehow my world-stopper dog told me my mother, for whom I care not much, was hospitalized. I’m almost certain. He’s forgotten it, of course.

One day the sky was albemarle. One day it struck me that the sky, which looked like pink and blue marble, should be called albemarle, and I left. Without telling anyone. I went back to my house, which was unharmed and did not look particularly vacant, and I wanted to go have a peek at Mrs. M. but she was not home, I could tell, and I wanted to see my mother, but I did not know where she lived. I took these impulses to be bad signs — wanting the unknown. An observer would hazard that I was regressing. I would not presume to know, but I nonetheless did feel — particularly in the matter of wanting to see my mother, whom I had no clue the whereabouts of and had not known and had not cared to know the whereabouts of for twenty years or so, but not so much in the matter of wanting to winder-peek Mrs. M., whose fiery red hair and supine openness constituted the kind of thing any rational sport might want to spy on if he could — I nonetheless did regard myself as displaying bad signs in some of this. Next you know I’d be turning myself in for my observational stay at Taco Charley’s, which stay had probably compounded punitively in my AWOL into a term at the penitentiary, all for looking at a redhead and borrowing a boy’s trike, and a couple of other things — I suppose there must have been something else. But I hardly see that a man in the modern world could be expected to play the role of a daily historian of his own or anybody else’s activities, what with all that is going on and all the people and all the deficit this and riot that, and, well, the whole radio band of nonsense broadcast by everyone on earth of which it might be said there are even in a conservative reckoning about ten times more than we need, and I rue the day the Soviet Union collapsed and therewith the plausible threat, or promise, of annihilation of this 90 percent human excess we are suffering. I found some frozen bologna and bread and made myself a fried bologna sandwich with yellow mustard and ate it with a quaff of reconstituted powdered milk with a goodly stream of Hershey’s in it, sitting on my porch watching for Mrs. M. and wondering why I was not in María’s arms. She would be getting home about then and seeing my dog would know I would be coming back — a man does not abandon a fifty-pound Chihuahua. Or does he? I had suddenly to ask, looking at the facts of the case, where I was, after all, sitting. And the sky up here was merely blue.

I was held on what is called “72-hour mental hold.” I was released on “personal recognizance.” I was to report to the psychiatric hospital for a look-see. I got home and pondered my face in a mirror and decided that I did not recognize myself personally and was therefore not bound to observe the terms of my bail. I had no personal recognizance as I perhaps too narrowly or just too dumbly grasped the term: a bond had been put up for me by the court in good faith that it (my personally recognizing myself) existed, but it did not, and therefore they had no hold on me and I was free to “jump” bail, of which there was no actual collateral or security. So I did. As you know. And now back, inexplicably, I am very worse. I should not have left my dog, my grotesque dog I do not myself believe, but over whose leaving I feel like weeping, as if I were nine and the thing had been run over, is not merely “waiting” for me in “old Mehico.” “Why” “am” “I” “doing” “these” “quotation” “marks”? In all truth, comrades, I do not feel well. I am tempted to say “not myself,” but it is precisely that amorphous — lovely word I do not know the meaning of — that amorphous not feeling oneself as I looked in the mirror for my personal recognition of my personal self that got me “fleeing” “the” “law” in the first place. I’m all amuddle. I sometimes have occasion, and this is one of them, to think about how extremely difficult it must be for homosexuals to pursue and secure the affection of their kind when it is so truly extremely difficult to pursue and secure the universally approved affection between heteros. Then again, I don’t know of anything harder than your footprints being found under a Lucille Ball look-alike’s window and you and your muddy feet being found on her son’s tricycle, the getaway car. And you are actually charged with attempting to avoid arrest because of your use of a “vehicle.” A Chaplinesque high-speed chase, and you to see real headshrinkers who do not possess the class to kill you before they begin the arduous process of diminishing your head. I once saw an ornithologist preserve a bird by stuffing its body cavity with cornmeal. Shouldn’t that rot, or something, the meal itself, I mean, not the bird? I mean not the meal, the meal I mean not, I do not mean the meal. I become moxied on some pepper vodka and try to find my mother by calling city after city information, and think about giving up and turning myself in, except I am afraid to because I figure I will be charged with whatever unsolved serious crime has gone down here since I last saw my…my what? Who was I to have seen to establish…I am confused and will retire to write another day. I wonder what Roberto Duran could have done as a writer.

A Little Founders and The Iron Rescue —these are titles that have come to me, whether from Mars to a part of my brain or from one part of my Martian brain to another. I’d be disingenuous if I did not tell you that I have just gotten out of a loony bin of considerable more swat than Taco Charley’s. I have been to Chattahoochee without a banjo on my knee. Something happened to put me there which I do not remember, and most of what happened there I do not remember, but I do recall the later innings and the being polite and eating my Thorazine and the entire public-relations campaign you wage to get them to let you go. Convincing hawk-eyed authority whose job it is to find something wrong with you that there is nothing wrong with you is about like convincing people to vote for you for President — harder in the case of the loony campaign, because you are not heroic even when you win. You are at best, in AA parlance, a dry nut. A nut bar with the wrapper (temporarily) back on.