Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“You need to chill.”

“To what?”

“Chill.”

“Are you black?”

“Do I look black?”

“My point is, let them have their baby cardinals. Don’t put them on your paddle,” Mr. Albemarle said.

“Oh, brother.”

“Are we having a fight?”

“No, babe. We are going to bed. You’re a case.”

“Well, bully for me.”

Dale Mae smelled of gun oil, and Mr. Albemarle kissed her recoil shoulder, imagining it slightly empurpled from her shooting, but it was not. Her shoulder was pale and strong. She cleared his head of broken saws and wheeling gulls and writhing blue baby birds and misplaced dogs.

He put all of what was left of his desire, dumb or twisted or not, on top of and in this Dale Mae, and went through the motions, which is to say, vulgarly, made the motion, the curious in-out yes-no which all primates figure out or they the out, and it was a more or less standard bedroll except that not only did Mr. Albemarle’s astral body levitate above them but two astral bodies levitated above them, and impersonally looked at him doing this personal thing. This always happened with his one astral body, but with these his two astral bodies the impersonal viewing of his doing the personal thing, yessing noing yessing, was in stereo, as if he were a card in the trombone slide of a stereopticon.

As happens in that moment when the illusion of three dimensions obtains, Mr. Albemarle felt himself deepening, receding, going in. He lost himself in the picture a bit, or altogether, and lost himself in the personal thing, in the vulgar, in the sublime, in Dale Mae, in a hallowed and haunted way that 3-D pictures viewed this way can be hallowed and haunted, more rich-seeming than the flat life that their two separate views depict. He left his common dimensions. He got into it.

His mind decamped. He thought he saw the sodiers for a moment on his left, the aliens to his right, in tiered banks and waving at him as if he were on a float in a parade. He looked at Dale Mae but did not see her clearly — more precisely, he saw clearly into her pores if he saw clearly anything at all. The watchtower was getting softer, he thought, absurdly. The brick was turning to mush, his mind was turning to mush, he did not much mind. Had he been in the tiers of parade watchers waving, he would happily have waved at himself going by, or rather down, the street, or the tunnel, down whatever, wherever he was going, happily, down. He had waited a long time for once-was-lost-now-am-found, and he had no reservations about its general oddness or peculiar particulars. Dale Mae herself was already behind him, a warm soft old way of being. He was a new man, even if that meant, as it seemed to, not being exactly a man. That — exactness — was exactly what was being lost. It was being lost with an inexact agreeableness that felt at once intellectually irresponsible and shrewd. Mr. Albemarle was gone.

WIFE, CHILD GONE, PHONE-TREE confirmation, 1-800 FAM GONE. I shall eat this pork chop and wine. Breakfast of chop and wine, blue wine pink chop, sweep the floor, clean house. Dust-free environment in which to begin breathing. Down. Wine and chop. Chop. Wine. Purple.

I have some credit in the women bank, but not in the child bank. Never heard of the child bank. There is no solace for the lost child. There is solace for the lost woman. There are lost more women. You eat chop, call woman, sweep floor. Rooms full of bears and books cannot be swept. Remain in the public open spaces, sweeping light dust, not heavy artifacts, nothing so heavy as the stuffed animal just now. Leave them be. Maybe forever. Put on apron and sing. Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah, someone’s in the kitchen, I know, ho, ho, and it’s you.

REPENT

FINAL

WARNING

A road sign like this, invariably nailed to a pine tree, high and aslant, you never pay more heed to than it takes to chuckle.

WINE

FINAL

CHOP

I am in recovery. From what is not precisely known. From life, mostly, about covers it. Everything is dependence and abuse or denial of same. Everything is a cover for something. Booze covers for your boring, lack-of-inner-resource self (mothers accuse you of that lack, and you may hate your mother according to her being wrong or, usually, right, but mine never so accused, and I hate her anyway, or at least a girlfriend says I do, a girlfriend of whom I may not be altogether fond herself). Recovery from the “discovery” which every moment in your existence past about age five has been pointing to, but for which you had not properly sat the jury so managed not to notice, that you are an ass. I am in recovery from that revelation. My dung heart reels. I stupe. Ass wipes nose, has sniffles. Regroups. Wine, chop. Floor, clean. Dust. Sun. Phone. Who?

A clean room in a unlit place. A green breeze and salt. Time. Time ticking, grasshoppers. Dry-cured bacon and big-time blues. Mean to dance, mean to call a girl. Mean to affect the effect of getting my effects in order. Mean to dizz out.

I want a girl impervious to harm, petty or grand. An industrial model disguised for home use. For the contractor masquerading as home owner.

A day at the dump to provide some distraction. I have come with Driggers to the dump. Driggers has been to the barbershop and smells like a woman and is as pretty and is very proud of his grooming and is smacking gum and doing okay until he reports, “Flashback.”

“Flashback of what?” The way he’s all pretty-boyed and dancing from goner appliance to reparable appliance, stopping to look at girlie magazines blowing in the flyblown breeze, I expect him to say, “Pussy.”

He says, “Vietnam.” He stands where he is with a truly vacant, sick look on his erstwhile smiling face. Much of life, for me, resides in moments in which you might not too absurdly use “erstwhile,” but Driggers is not so idle or full of shit.

What around us — gales of seagulls preying on garbage, the predominate strains of which are these torn-up Penthouses, and inexplicable case lots of Skoal — could remind him of Vietnam?

“Vietnam? What the fuck out here is like Viet—”

“That bulldozer.”

For the first time in my dodger life, I see the horror, the horror. The bulldozer is an anemic yellow in hot white light and diesel pestilence moving tons of waste with flies on it. I don’t want to know more. This is frightening in a way that Tales of Charlie are not: or pungee sticks, or dried ears, or tunnels, or the saps who went being better than those what did not.

“We have to stop drinking, Driggers, but it doesn’t have to be today. Let’s go.” He is in the truck, white. It starts.

I want to love but know I never will. Or is it that I want to be loved and know that that, too, I can prevent? Or must prevent? I can locate the object, it is in the method I fall down. Do not quite have the hang of it. This is a difficult idea to get your brain on, in the truck with Driggers, who is calmed into an earthly earthy mania. You could not hold the idea in your head that you did not quite get the hang of, say, eating. On the face of it, the idea is absurd: who doesn’t get eating? But once you look at it — bologna, Miracle Whip, tofu, “cheese food product,” the diet industry, the food industry, for that matter — it is tenable that many people do not have the hang of eating. So how difficult the notion they do not know how to love? Simple idea, really. We are drunk and do not have the hang of drinking.

Driggers will get so drunk tonight I will have to prevent him from killing someone. Driggers has the hang of killing. He is now most agreeably sampling the tins of Skoal I pressed him to take. There were so many of them, with sales literature and still in case boxes, looking not only unopened but otherwise unharmed, that we know something is wrong with them. But short of cyanide injection — and why would a killer put his killer Skoal in the dump ? — we can’t figure what is wrong with them. Driggers is tentatively tasting multiple tins, sampling flavors he has never bought. He’s getting happy. Comparatively. Tonight that ’dozer and that Nam will hover about the pool table, and I will have my work cut out for me. Those of us who did not go can yet be Good Boys.