Padgett Powell - You & Me

Doesn’t it seem that there used to be more to it?

How so?

Maybe, more to people ? So that a passing had a larger moment?

I suppose even now there is the occasional grandee. You saw Kennedy.

I mean on a private plane, though.

I know what you mean.

You, for example, you even wrote some of the books this daughter will handle. What is she to do with them?

She should put them with the others and be done and they be gone. I was a sad sack, end of chapter. I like that. I’d like a drink.

I would too. We can at least not be maudlin on top of everything else.

Let’s air hump to the store and repair our spirits.

My little red shorts is already down.

We are not yet dead.

Not yet.

At some point we will stop joking about it and become afraid.

We do not have the inner resources that would allow us not to be afraid.

Nor the wit to say that we are in the antechamber to heaven.

We will be in the wheelchair circle, where we said we would never be.

That expression where the mouth is frozen open — is that what is called a “rictus”? Is that Latin? Does it refer to that expression only after death? What is it called when one is in the wheelchair circle still alive enough to drool?

Dude. Slow down.

I was getting worked up.

I could tell.

My Latin was now like sixty years ago. Caesar did not do rictus.

Caesar got out neatly before the wheelchair circle.

I cannot see older civilizations having had wheelchair circles, somehow. What did they do with the old folks too afraid to die?

They stoned them. They never let them collect in corrals, high-profit corrals that offer dignity.

We really are going to be afraid and we really are going to also refuse to die and we will give away the free dignity and purchase the other expensive dignity. I have known this since I could not even put my dog down. Fortunately he was eaten a little bit by a cougar.

That was a stroke of luck.

You are telling me.

PADGETT POWELLis the author of five novels, including The Interrogative Mood and Edisto , which was nominated for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Little Star , and The Paris Review , and he has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.

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