Padgett Powell - You & Me

Did you avail?

I took a bite of the apple before it occurred to me I was not free to bite with abandon. Husbing.

Ah, you had the old husbing-still-looks-at-his-wife delusion.

Yes. Well, I was after all in a dream state. And this apple was worthy of inspection, which is why I straight off took a bite.

Why can we not live real lives?

I don’t know.

We are done?

It would appear we are.

I have noticed this morning that my shins have grown thin and sharp.

We have bird brains, why not bird legs?

I suppose. Still, when your leg feels like a knife, it is sad and alarming, quietly.

I can accept that.

I want some bread pudding.

Let us locate the best bread pudding within our reach and get on with dying.

Do you know what cabildo means?

No.

It’s a miracle.

What’s a miracle?

Nothing.

Why’d you say something was?

Felt like it. It felt like the time.

You’ve waked up mindless again?

Yes. Just what is wrong with that?

I have tendered no criticism of mindlessness.

You better not.

I merely seek to verify.

Isn’t something a miracle, though?

I’m sure something is.

I am too.

I don’t see one at hand.

Well, they’re rare, that’s inarguable. If they were common, they would not be called miracles.

Your logic is sound. It is not altogether mindless.

Coffee bean.

What?

Would not a coffee bean be a miracle?

Easy now.

Why is not a coffee bean a miracle?

Because then, ah, so is a cup of coffee and an idiot, or two, drinking it. Why not say a bird, or for that matter, a bird’s leg, is a miracle?

Not a wing?

Wing schming. A bird’s leg came off a dinosaur for God’s sake. A scaled powerful appendage shrunk to one five-hundredth of its original size and attached to an animal that can fly . Where would miracles cease if we allow coffee beans and birds’ legs? Miracles would not cease. They would never, properly speaking, not begin, never not have begun .

Everything is a miracle.

Exactly. And a minute ago you said nothing was a miracle.

A minute ago nothing was. And you said I was mindless.

You were. Now you’re not.

I am happy. Are you happy?

No I am not happy.

I wish you were.

I do too. I am happy that you are happy.

If you were happy too, it would be a miracle.

Yes it would. It would it would it would.

Look: here’s a coffee bean, a bird’s leg, and your happiness. Is it so far-fetched?

You remind me of the halcyon time when my father camped out on Lake Rosa with his strange uncle Jake. I envisioned Studio doing this earlier, but really it was my father. They did this on private land. There were so few people then, and the few people knew each other, so that camping on private land did not then, as it does today, constitute trespass and grounds for prosecution and trouble. They camp out on somebody’s land who does not mind and they catch giant bass by throwing the lure called a Dillinger. A Dillinger looks like a small wooden cigar with propellers at each end and it is painted to resemble a zebra. Actually it is painted to resemble a convict suit, black-and-white striped, hence its name. This caught fish in that miraculous day of absent litigation, friendliness among people, and large and plentiful game. I feel like weeping.

I am weeping.

We are fools to even try to be alive now.

We are not, really, alive now.

No, we are not.

We are not miracles either.

No. I can see my young father and this odd fellow Jake having coffee they have brewed over a small fire in one of those agate coffee boilers that look in profile like a laboratory beaker, sort of—

Triangular-shaped.

Exactly. Bad coffee badly brewed, overbrewed, boiled probably, actually ruined-ass coffee that they find delicious, that is delicious if you are lying there on that clean ground under the live oaks on the slightly painful acorn caps apprising the morning and the fourteen-pound majestic monsters you have caught on such a ridiculous artifice as the Dillinger, which is at rest suspended from a rod and reel leaned against the live oak they are under. My father will go into World War II as a marine and suffer hardship that is somehow not different from this very pleasure he and Uncle Jake are enjoying now.

I don’t see how you make that connection but I do not dispute it.

Dispute nothing.

Disputing nothing is the first step unto miracles.

Disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness.

I’d like to find a pill and go back to bed. I’m wore out.

Go on. I’ll tidy up and look out the window some. I’m tired too, Helen.

I wish Helen had slept with Tim.

Tim’s whole life might have taken a different course if she had. Oh, Tim, I’m tired. I’m tired too, Helen. It was brilliant.

But it did not make her get untired and sleep with him.

She was young.

She was tired.

We are all tired. Who is ever not tired?

I know, but she was young.

I have been waked up by one of my stupid nightmares.

There is another kind?

Yes. There are real nightmares that are inventive and psychologically telling and entertaining to recall and that demonstrate all manner of deep-seated truth etc.

That you pay people money to interpret and so forth.

Right.

That you never forget.

Right. These I am talking about you cannot remember for five minutes, if that. They operate just long enough to get you out of bed, which apparently is their purpose.

Give me an example.

Okay. Say you are divorced after a long period of chilly relations and there is no prospect whatsoever of reconciliation. A stupid nightmare would have you envision very sentimental carryings on between you and this estranged wife and imminent desire to get back together develops, and great wistfulness, in fact tearfulness, at such a prospect, and you would wake up crying, gently.

Someone you pay money to might tell you that is psychologically telling etc.

Yes and he would be an idiot. Here’s a better example: You are fishing with a fly rod on a dock and hook a very large panfish, monstrously large, trophyesque, and call your serious fishing buddies over to have a look before you release it. They are casual about it because this panfish is not prize game in their view. You somehow wind up at the transom of a running boat with the fish still on, and have to set the rod outside the boat because the fish is hung up and cannot now be properly released, and as you try to climb back over the transom and the outboard motor to free the fish these buddies start the boat forward which will chew up your rod and the fish and quite possibly you once this cartoon develops fully in its improbable way.

These guys are assholes?

Well yes they are but that is not the major import of the action. There are weird pieces of lumber or dockage or trees or something that keep you from freeing your rod and the fish that are so improbable that these guys cannot be faulted for not comprehending the restrictions you are encountering; you cannot actually comprehend them yourself. There’s a two-by-four across the rear of the boat that keeps you from stepping out to get your rod which is at the fore of the boat.

They are moving the boat forward toward your rod?

Yes, sort of.

How did it get up there?

I know not. It’s a dream.

I’ll say.

This is what I was telling you: It’s a stupid dream. It does not make sense, and it does not make the perfect nonsense a real dream makes. It makes only this stupid-ass sense.