Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Was there an opportunity for you to have had your first sexual encounter before you actually had your first sexual encounter? Was it the case that you didn’t realize it was an opportunity for your first sexual encounter? If you could, would you return to that opportunity and remove whatever prevented your realizing what an opportunity it was? Or, if you did at the time perceive that it was an opportunity, but there were other obstacles to the fulfillment of the encounter, would you have those obstacles removed and proceed with this first sexual encounter earlier than the first one you actually did experience? If there is a missed first sexual encounter in your past, do you recall the name of the person it might have involved? Would you be willing to share that name and the particulars with me?

Do you ever buy tea already brewed in bottles or jugs? Wouldn’t it be sporty and fun to carry around a riding crop and whip things with it? Do you think of yourself as a quitter, and, if you do, was there a time you did not think you were a quitter? If there was a time you did not regard yourself a quitter, and you do now acknowledge that you are a quitter, was there one event or a series of events that persuaded you that you are actually now a quitter? In this context, or perhaps not in this context but in any pertinent context you would like to supply, do you ever call yourself, specifically, “a pussy”? If you do call yourself a pussy sometimes, or all of the time, what I think is interesting is that there must have been a time in your life, as in everyone’s life, that you did not call yourself a pussy, either because you did not yet have cause to believe you were a pussy or because the very notion of one’s being a pussy or not being a pussy had not yet entered your consciousness — and what I want to know is exactly when did this sound barrier of self-regard get punctured or broken for you? Can you believe that I once knew a girl a couple neighborhoods over who was precociously blond and developed who had drawn the attention of older boys and who succumbed to their carnal wolving but who would apparently have nothing to do with younger boys like me, and that brashly as we hovered about her house while probably an older boy was actually inside it with her or soon would be I told another of the younger boys that it might be the case that we could not have her but that I would have her before he would have her, and that this boy somehow relayed this utterance to the girl, who later confronted me with it, without scoff, with in fact a note of interest or invitation to stand and deliver, which note I did not pursue, embarrassed to have had this brashness transported to her and certain that she found me inferior to an older boy…do you have time for this?

Do you ever burn loose threads back into place rather than snip them? Were you tormented as a child by perhaps a grandmother’s saying to your mother that she thought you needed to have a “bm,” by which she meant bowel movement? Have you seen a cormorant fly by your window in the early morning? Can you see me, when Jean Baker says “Jimbo said you said you’d fuck me before he would,” say “Yeah, I did” and ride crisply away on my banana-seated stingray bike? Have you ever milked a cow or seen a milking machine attached to a cow or seen the udder washed with that iodiney solution called, I believe, Pro-teat, swabbed up under there sloppily with a rag while the cow stands there placidly, if not a hint impatient for the machine to be already on her? Can you credit that I never went back to Jean Baker’s house again?

Did you try to learn to play the guitar as a child but fail to learn, and can you now not account for what happened to the pawn-shop guitar you tried to learn on, and are you a little mystified that it did not occur to you that perhaps you needed lessons instead of just diddling around with the thing without even a book? Is all of life clueless, or is most of it clueless with momentary bursts of clueness, or is it a spectrum of cluelessness to clueness on which people reside at various points, and are the points at which people reside on the spectrum of cluelessness fixed or variable? Would you expect if you have not been there that the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is predominately brown? What I meant was can you slide up and down the spectrum of cluelessness to clueness like a trombone or do you toot your one more or less dumb note all the livelong day? When people elect to not speak to you, should you not speak to them or deliberately continue to speak to them? If you elect to continue speaking to those not speaking to you, should the motivation be to pique them or to repair relations? If you could live on top of a mountain and grow coffee and not be rich but not have any real economic worries either and once or twice a day bury your face in a big basket of coffee beans to assay the quality of the product and otherwise eat good fruit and slowly read a book or two and wear good locally spun cotton clothes and enjoy seeing the weather come in over the mountains and sleep right there on the porch in a hammock and have a good number of dogs who maintain themselves without your having to mess with them and not be too bothered by your continuing to not speak Spanish very well, would you do it?

Are you familiar with a certain sort of hard-drinking woman who insists on driving nothing but the largest and heaviest car that can be had at the time? Have you seen a fox run gingerly by on its pencil-thin legs so elegantly that you love the fox and want him to stop so you could say something to him? Have you had very many forms of venereal disease? Do you know that the bark around the base of the limbs of a tree is substantially different from the bark on the trunk of the tree — one of its chief differences, if not the only difference, being that the base-of-limb bark will produce more of itself to cover the wound created should the limb break off or be sawn off at the trunk of the tree? Would the base-of-limb bark be called caudal bark?

Have you ever maintained a swimming pool? Have you ever been bitten by a rabbit? Have you ever studied the green shredded-wheat-like biscuits that come out of tortoises? Can you waltz? Is there in your opinion life after death? Is there death then before life? Wouldn’t it be possible to get life and death mixed up and not be exactly clear what is what and when when? Will you use enamel paint even though latex is so much easier to handle? What is your favorite material in cookware? Would you rather deal with a man or a woman wearing overalls, and with which is it more disturbing to discover he or she is wearing nothing under them? If you could attend an execution, would you? If you could slate a class or sect of people because of its behavior alone for execution, who would it be?

ARE YOU GOING TO be happier in the future? Do you understand what is meant by cavitation? Are there dogs in your dreams? Do you have politochnaceous impulses? Do you have a polemical bone in your body? Can you tell which of the two preceding questions is fraudulent? Will you be exercising today? Can you recall the last time you saw, if you ever have seen, a woman in a girdle? Wouldn’t you feel pretty smart if you were the one who worked out the equation for gravity? If a skirt were said to be hemmed with “tertiary hemlock balls,” would you have a visual image of it? Do you know what mahjong is? Are you familiar with the apes that are very much like chimpanzees but either less or more violent, and are you sure there are not two such apes similar to chimpanzees, and if you are uncertain about any of this, does this particular uncertainty bother you more than other uncertainties you might possess?

Have you ever seen sparks issue from a wall socket? If you saw a large model train set and the engine issued smoke, would you say “That’s cool” or just be silent about it? How many pairs of eyeglasses have you ruined in your life by sitting or rolling or lying on them? Have you ever seen a cork tree? If you were a creature who lives underground, would you prefer to be a creature who lives in a tree or would you hold your ground as it were? What do you make of the word tinkle ?