Padgett Powell - You & Me

I am in full sympathy with you, as much as I will miss looking at the little creek, and pointing out as I must that there is not a famous cathedral within five thousand miles of us, or ten.

What is it about the little creek?

Its forlornness, its slightly iridescent stagnation, its unsupport of anything alive that one can see, its dubious mission, its helplessness, its pity, its bravery, the miracle of it withal in even remaining wet —

Which sometimes it does not—

— Exactly.

You see in the creek us .

Yes I think I do.

It is our mirror.

It is.

Well let us not be so vain.

All right. We shall cease going to the creek.

Our hair is also not good but I do not see that we can stop it. Our hair is us but we must have it. We are not good and we must admit it.

I think we do a fair job of that. As good a job as might be asked of anyone.

I hope that you are right.

Will it matter, in the end, if we have been good, done well, etc.? Whence the very idea that it will have mattered?

Whence the very idea of good ?

Yes, you playhouse playboy, you nine-year-old Tarzan, who came up with the idea of goodness?

It is one for the sages.

Do you ever feel you’ve left your heart in San Francisco?

Yes, all the time.

Not there of course but—

Of course not there, but yes, this is what we have done, left it somewhere.

Or did we perhaps not really have a heart, and have come to know it?

This is perfectly tenable.

Do you think hand-wringing now will effect a recovery?

No.

We shall regard our absent hearts as total losses, regardless of whether we had them once and lost them or never had them at all?

This is the prudent course, I think.

I’m with you, then. Is wanting to go see the creek or not go see the stupid anemic ditch we have to call a creek in trashed-out suburban America part of this losing of the heart and not knowing whether it is a loss or a congenital absence?

I think it is related, somehow.

Okay then. The issue is settled.

We could do with some ice cream though. Makes the boy-man feel good, heart or no.

It’s a cold, brutally unhealthy comfort.

The very best, most honest comfort.

Ice cream is like maggots in a field wound.

Tell that to the codgers.

It would stop them for a moment in that calm stream of strong silent knowingness they so gallantly ride.

Those codgers get you worked up.

I am a cat to their dogging. I admit it. I am delicate and vulnerable and I must inflate and arch and spit or they will have me. I admit it. Mine is the weak strength of bluster.

You are a good man nonetheless, in our tribe of weaklings.

Thank you. To say that requires of you a heart, which you have momentarily retrieved from San Francisco. I see steam on the mountains across the way.

We have mountains across the way?

We do now. They flowed in overnight.

I did not know we were on a fluid landscape.

To my knowledge we are not, there is no such thing, yet there are mountains with clouds strafing them gently, looking cottony and kind and the mountains inviting not looming or threatening as big ones might look. No Everestage, I mean. These are junior mountains, with trees on them, big hills properly speaking I suppose, I am most innocent of mountain terminology and taxonomy.

The clouds are moving across them, prettily, as if on the way to San Francisco. Folks’ hearts are in those clouds.

Godspeed.

I am tired today.

We are tired every day, are we not?

We are. But one can suddenly tire of tiring, and move down a quantum level.

Let’s get to absolute zero and see what happens.

This we may be doing, if we perceive the land out the window to be flowing. Your poor little girl’s shack may have been whumped into the next county by a mountain, the distressed creek now a noble rushing cold cataract of clear and gurgling and clean strength. Running over smooth rocks, harboring sturdy fish, appealing to bears.

It’s too much to hope for. I am going to bed. Rompoid Sturgeon.

What?

Nothing.

Where exactly are we?

A very good question, requiring care in the answer. Geographically we have no idea. In the geography that has no place, that which obtains when the there is not there, can you dig it, we are between Jacksonville, Florida, and Bakersfield, California. I have never been to Bakersfield so I will tell you that I imagine chain-link fences in strident disrepair, all manner of paper and plastic blown into these fences, the asphalt and concrete expanses they once purported to contain crumbling and earthquake-looking, a scree of rubble and grit blowing about as if on the floor of a pizza oven the size of Baghdad, if you will excuse me an excess, a glare that signals white heat, anyone you run into want to beat you up, for money or for sport, and no way that anyone like Frank Gifford is ever going to come from there again, if he ever really did, and even the kind of indigents in country-western songs about it are noble compared to the riffraff coursing through its collapsed streets now. And now we go downhill to Jacksonville.

That’s where we get the girl in the shack and the piddly creek that disturbs you so much.

Yes. That creek. It has that orange shit in its shallows that is not shit but that conveys every impression of sewage that can be conveyed. It looks like rusted cotton. There is not outright mud but dirty sand. Not outright water but enough to support seven minnows, two crayfish, one mud turtle, one giant water bug, half a leopard frog, a third of a garter snake passing through, and no water bird but a flyover by a depressed songbird just keepin’ on keepin’ on, trying to find a concrete birdbath for a decent drink. Add a rubber or a Fritos bag, maybe a purse, and you about have it. Pair of panties. This is where we are.

You shouldn’t have to feel the way you feel.

No, I should not. But have you ever heard of feeling insurance?

The premiums would be impossible, the actuarial tables a nightmare.

And this is why Lloyds does not offer it. Blues insurance. Quite an idea.

Verification tricky. Who would not claim?

Precisely.

Let’s go down to the creek and stare Despair down.

All right. Fortify ourselves with some Kool-Aid? Chocolate milk? Morphine? Lip balm? A Dr. Bronner’s peppermint shower? Sit-ups? Read this article about adult-retardation hospitals being phased out of existence by progress? Put on clean underwear? Promise ourselves a shoe-shopping trip after the creek stroll?

You are incoherent, almost.

The edge of incoherence is a strong position, militarily speaking. Not incoherence outright, but the selvage as it were, affords a bidirectional moment between dissolution and precipitation, liquid and solid, that can absorb about any assault, any direction, gross or subtle, acid, base, land, sea, or air. The mind properly speaking is in a condition suggesting pickle relish, or chow-chow as it gets called. I am in chow-chow readiness for the creek. Head full of chow-chow I could go on and watch you watch the girl in the shack and not be over disturbed.

You don’t get disturbed there. You did not climb the rope with Kathy Porter’s parts in your fetid brain and a hawser burning through your crotch as the earth spun to meet you and drive your weakened knees into your chin. The true difficulty of such a maneuver is of course avoiding the terminus on the end of the rope, board or large knot. That is why you have to clear away from the rope. Getting away from a rope as you slide down one is a subtle athletic proposition, because of course as you get free of it, it is weightless and can offer no resistance to your push, so you are pushing an object that affords variable, decreasing resistance, and if you push it too hard once your weight is clearing it you will introduce into it a curve that will wave down the rope and whip the end of the rope, which is what your push is designed to enable you to avoid, into approximately your genitals by towing your buttocks through them. Thus you can see why I could no longer afford to perform this trick for Kathy Porter once she had informed her father of our inclinations in the playhouse. I could never have successfully negotiated the rope escape had I had to worry also about him staring down at me once I hit the ground in my tumescent exhaustion from the climb and fall. Can you imagine the difficulty of sticking a landing for Bela Karolyi if you’d been diddling his daughter?