Padgett Powell - You & Me

By “just now” do I detect that you believe that at one time more men had it together?

You do detect that suspicion. I cannot call it a full-on belief. I just think that given the near total dissolution upon us now that it, our dissolution, could not have ever been greater, not even when we were crawling from the cave, and that to have survived this far we must have had it together more back then than now. People did not always eat sugar and talk all day on cell phones and go to war simply because they were told they were unpatriotic if they did not.

I am not unsympathetic to your position. I wonder though if the case may not be made that people would have always eaten sugar and talked on cell phones had they had access, and that what has alarmed you is the novel number of idiots now upon us. The base percentage of crackpottage remains the same but the absolute numbers have shot through the roof. For example: you can wrestle yourself to the ground weighing solicitations for you to contribute funds either to save an endangered paucity of animals or to feed an endangering surplus of starving people, who are the primary endangerment to the animals, but nowhere does anyone solicit funds from you to limit the numbers of the starving people.

That’s an example, exactly, of what?

I don’t know. I do not have it together well enough to have any idea.

I thought so.

Here’s another example: I heard recently of a bear eating cherries off a suburban cherry tree, who, the bear, then killed the tree.

And this news serves us how?

It serves my thesis: In earlier times the bear never would have wrecked the tree. A bear is no less survival-savvy than a man, and is as smart, etc., as anyone who has ever seen one ride a bike in the circus without killing everyone concerned can attest. Were this bear not subject to the same forces that have made men the trivial fat loose cannons they are today, he would never have harmed the tree that feeds him. He is a symbol of modern man in modern times.

He’ll eat anything?

He’ll do anything.

I myself am frequently visited by an odd vision which is possibly not germane to whatever you are talking about. I see myself drinking tepid and not very satisfying water from a tangerine-colored aluminum tumbler in extreme ambient heat, I see a water moccasin, and I hear the noise of cicadas or some other leg-sawing racket-specializing insects in pine trees, or at least in the bush all about, a noise that rises and falls in volume and possibly pitch in a way that seems to resonate with my very head at moments, or within my head, I don’t know precisely how one speaks of resonance but think I grasp it, physically speaking. It is possible that this noise even gets the rather yellowy orange tumbler I am drinking the hot water from to vibrating in a way that shocks my teeth and makes the water taste bitter. The water moccasin is a benign, sturdy, calm presence in all this, not, as it were, holding his ears or calling for ice water. The water moccasin alone, I now realize, has it together .

It is germane to whatever I am talking about.

It would appear to be.

That surprises me.

Me too.

I did not think even what I was talking about was germane.

To what?

Well, to anything at all in general and specifically to what I was talking about.

Can one talk about something and have it be not germane to itself ?

Well, yes, I think this may be the quintessence of not having it together.

Talk that is not germane to its intention — in other words, the nattering of the mad.

Yes, if the mad have an intention.

They probably do. They have just lost it.

I wonder if your water moccasin would allow himself be petted?

I could put my hand inside the otherwise useless metal tumbler and stroke his neck and find out. My sense is that he would not mind.

Can you, in your vision, be careful so that he cannot get a bite in above the tumbler on your wrist?

Yes. I will present him the bottom of the tumbler, slowly, right to his chin, and stroke him under the chin if he assents.

The caterwauling bug song will abate as you do this.

I will momentarily not hear it. The sound will be there but I will have pushed the “attenuate” button. I have seen one of these on a fancy car radio. My mind will be with the mind of the moccasin.

You will forget the bad tangy water and the stupid metal cup and the bug song.

I will be somewhere else.

Will we be able to cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees, is what I am wondering.

You mean as opposed to wondering if we should, or if it will occur to us to want to do that, or—

No, I mean, precisely, Will we be able to cross a river and rest in the shade of the trees. I grant that we are too daft to have it occur to us. Perhaps you have not noticed, but the river is a concrete ditch now, usually, if it is not altogether underground beneath roads, and the trees are an automobile dealership. A man would need say today, after his arm is blown off, Let us cross that water-control canal there and repel the salesmen and crawl under the F-150s, where I wish to die.

We are living when before we would not have lived, and now we are dying where we would not have died.

That is almost epitaphic. When he should have not, he lived. Where he should have not, he died.

It will perplex the cemetery goer.

The cemetery goer, in my experience, is already perplexed. I see no harm in keeping him that way. I need some coffee, my friend.

I am in want of recreational drugs, untattered clothes, psychological counsel, carnal affection, a dog, and a child upon which to lavish trinkets and advice.

I fear for this child.

Not more than I.

What is Life like once it fully collapses around you, sir?

Has it fully collapsed around me?

You were averring this last night after your thimble of wine.

My thimble of wine has made my head hurt.

I refilled it for you several times, imprudently. At your insistence.

I insist on nothing anymore. I don’t have it in me to insist.

That’s what you say, sir. But after a thimble you will insist on another.

I dispute it, and it is not in me anymore to dispute, either.

You said, “My trumpet of vino is exhausted, Charles, fill it quick because Life has collapsed around me. Julia Child is dead. Fill it before I join her.” I felt unable not to comply with this request, sir, as you had phrased it and supported it.

The ghost of Julia Child is a powerful force.

Yes. You once used the ghost of Crazy Horse to similar effect.

I think of them together. Julia cooks prodigiously, drinks, accepts photographers. Crazy Horse sups succinctly, plans military campaigns, eschews photographers. They both die. Life has collapsed.

I can’t continue to pretend to be your manservant. Or catamite.

It challenges me too.

You addressed me as “Charles.”

I was thinking of Ray Charles, who has also died and contributed directly to the collapse of Life as we thought we knew it.

You pour a little wine for me tonight.

Will do.

Have you noticed…

Have I noticed… what?

I am certain that you have noticed. I was pausing because of that certainty. I was relocating the emphasis to my question. Have you noticed, any time lately, the phenomenon by which when you meet someone whose personality you object to that your own personality is shifted to a counterpersonality, as it were, to which you also object, arguably more than you object to the offending personality of the other?

Is the classic instance of this when you visit your parents and are thrown into the ghosts and contours of yourself when you were, say, a teenager and in full combat against their lunatic officialdom?