Padgett Powell - You & Me

And we think that he has actually a superior position in this refusal.

Yes. He would not then also say, for example, “I support our troops.”

That would be one dimension but there are many dimensions to this lunacy that is not lunacy, you mean.

Yes, I do so mean.

I wish that you were a woman sometimes.

I do too. That you were.

Because we could make love instead of talking all the time.

Yes.

We could make love as it is, but…

I just can’t see it. I like the political dimension of it, the nose-thumbing, but God, the actual thought of it…

Why don’t we find us some split-shot-saving women?

It would be better if we found some who would not themselves save split shot but who would humor us in our saving split shot. I would really like to have a girl who would hold open the little Take a Boy Fishing Today tin while I carefully pressed the knife into a used split shot and then let me put it safely in the tin, looking briefly to see if you can tell the difference between the used and the virgin split shot, and then say to me, “Come to bed, sugar, them split shot are safe and sound.” Wouldn’t that be grand?

I think that would be the best thing in the world. Since “It Opens with Two Fingers” she could slide the tin shut with two fingers! You could be a perfect idiot with a girl who wanted you in bed.

And with the perfectly preserved little lead hinge! That is really what the split-shot question seeks to discover: Are you a perfect idiot or are you some kind of custodial correct adult ass? Isn’t that the idea?

Yes. That is the idea.

I wake up trepid. Do you wake up trepid?

I fear I do. What does trepanning mean? Maybe I wake up trepanning. I wake up trepanning if it means shaking from trepidation.

Are we but recently afraid, or were we always afraid but too slow or blustery or full of hormones to know it?

We have always been afraid. We are only now sufficiently feeble to visibly shake. We quaked all along but were steadied by testosterone and received bravura. We looked fine.

We stood firm.

We shouted, “Hello! Stand and deliver!” If it were a man before us, we said, “Cross me and I will kill you!” If it were a woman, we said, “Take off your clothes!”

Now we jump off the trail and hide in the woods if anyone approaches.

Lest a woman say unto us, “Cross me and I will kill you,” or a man, “Take off your clothes.”

What goes around comes around — is that not the way it is popularly put these days?

I believe so. You may also say that the chickens have come home to roost, frequently said by people with no knowledge whatsoever of chickens, when chickens do not leave home to begin with. It is apt for their enemies to say upon the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for examples, that the chickens have come home to roost, and no one will question the utterance.

Such people are people not yet trepid. We should not be uncharitable with them. They will come in time to tremble and shut up.

Out the window I not infrequently see chipmunks.

A chipmunk is professionally trepid all its life.

A chipmunk is a cute and honest poor soul that does not presume.

What do you know about the desert?

Nothing.

Okay. End of subject.

Should we go?

Yes. We should go.

To revel in our not knowingness.

To be put off by the desert because we do not understand its desertness and are frightened by it and disgusted by our not knowingness.

But then is it not the case that after we are frightened and disgusted we will fall under the illusion that we have learned something about the desert and be less unhappy with it?

Yes. Our tiny growing familiarity alone, as we sit there or walk around parched and frightened, will convince us we now know more than we did before the onset of the fear and the disgust, and we will feel better about the desert.

Veterans of an hour in the desert, we will like it, a little bit.

Yes. When you see a Gila monster emerge like a bizarre beaded purse you will love him as if he is your own mother. You will imprint on him as does a gosling on the first thing that it sees move and you will have a mother and not be sore afraid as you were even though they say your mother can kill you if you let her chew on you.

Or a sidewinder! I was born to love a sidewinder. Do you remember Studio Becalmed?

I will never not remember Studio Becalmed.

Nor I.

What is your point?

I believe that Studio Becalmed had a sidewinder in his pants.

That is vulgar and senseless and juvenile and almost funny. God, in His infinite wisdom, has seen to it that our mothers do not chew on us when we are infants but wait until we are older and can take it.

Or at least can resist it and issue poisons of our own.

What if Studio Becalmed in the Final Alps of Heaven repudiated Jayne Mansfield and took up with Jejune Longing?

It disturbs me to think of that, even if by that point Jayne is headless, as I suppose she would be, even in the final alps of heaven.

You don’t think that things would be restored to some kind of corporeal pristinity in heaven, or perhaps be noncorporeal?

I cannot say. If things are noncorporeal will it be meaningful that Studio “repudiates” one woman for another? Do we not mean by saying “repudiate” that he would eschew Jayne and lie down with Jejune Longing? In your view will there be no intercourse in heaven? Is it worth going then?

You have a point. Somehow I do not see rutting and grunting in heaven. Nor can I see it allowed exactly in hell. This very prospect is somewhat like the desert to us. Will rutting and grunting be allowed in the afterlife?

What would happen in heaven were Studio to say, “Jayne, be okay if Jejune Longing came over?” and Jayne were to say, “Sure, babe”?

A sidewinder touches the ground with only ten percent of himself, if that. He does not get burnt and he does not bog down in all that sand.

He knows the desert.

He knows no fear and no disgust.

Do you ever have a longing for a good, fast car?

Sometimes. I like the restored hot rod.

I saw a man on television presented with the surprise gift of his junk car fully restored. He wept before it. The mechanics who did the work laughed, gratified and sympathetic, to see this man weep before his new hot rod. All he could say was, “It’s everything,” and sniffle. He opened the hood and beheld the specialness under there and fell back in a whole new paroxysm of ecstasy.

He’s an idiot. I envy him.

I regard him a larger idiot than you do and I envy him more.

He is a kind of sidewinder, is he not?

Well, that seems a bit of a stretch, metaphorically, but I will call the weeping idiot we admire a sidewinder if you will. What harm could lie in that?

I am particularly drawn to advanced technology in spark-plug wires and to the arresting colors they now make them in. They are not black now. They are orange, chartreuse.

Wires the color of liquor!

People the color of dogs!

Why did you say that?

I don’t know.

In what environments should a man have it together? In a chamber of surgery, with a scalpel in his hand?

Yes. There he should have it together in the extreme.

Are there other venues where he should really have it together?

No. Let us say he is holding on to the back of a garbage truck and stepping off it as cans of garbage on the curb are approached and swinging these cans of garbage into the truck and setting them down empty, or tossing them any old way, and stepping back on the truck (which has not come to a real stop) as it progresses toward the hundreds or thousands of cans remaining on the route — he does not need to have it together for this, and this is essentially not unlike any other human endeavor on earth just now, except for surgery.