Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Has your experience with bankers been positive, in general? How often do you go for an undirected walk? If you could be made taller nonsurgically, would you go for it? If you were part of a pilot/gunner team on an aircraft, which position would you prefer? Is the chief function of the doily protective or decorative or both? Do you know what is signified by “boomlay,” possibly “a boomlay”? Would you eat toe soup? If told your house was to be painted either “arsenical green” or “cupric yarng,” which would you pick? Do you synchronize all your clocks? If so, are they set correctly, fast, or slow? Have you ever taken a beating? Would you like one?

If you find an unopened stick of Juicy Fruit gum on the sidewalk, will you chew it? Do you talk to squirrels? Do you like to passionately argue for a position or an outcome or a gain of any sort about which itself you are indifferent? Do you lick stamps or envelopes with your tongue or wet them less directly?

Are you familiar with the joke in which billeting is sought for “a hundred soldiers without Peters”? When a trellis collapses, with a rose on it, do you cut back the rose or keep the rose entire as you rebuild the trellis and tie the rose back up? Have you ever seen an owl so large you mistook it for a man in a sport coat sitting in a tree? Is there anything better than snow outside and fire inside? Can you identify tuille? Would you rather play a board game with a child all day or go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Have you ever fished with niblet corn? Do you care for Laurel and Hardy? If you were to be incarcerated in a mental institution, would you care where it was and what kind of place it was? Do you collect your old license tags? Are you partial to peppermint, and if so, do you best like it in soap, in candy, or in a pie? Do you know how gyroscopes function aeronautically? Do you have the patience to upholster a chair? Are you big on pudding? Is a catfish likely to get more sympathy from you than a fish with scales? Between the fox-trot and the waltz, at which are you better? Could Oswald have done it alone? Are you familiar with the joke that features a female soda jerk asking a boy brandishing two new toy pistols, “Do you want your nuts crushed?”

Will you be taking a constitutional today, perhaps thinking fondly of your beloved? Will storm clouds not fret your brow? Have you ever built a boat, or a model boat? Do you die in your dreams? Do you shop credit-card offers for lower interest rates and higher rewards? Have you eaten dung? Does the prospect of going to Africa instill in you any willies? Do you find the three-legged milking stool charming? The three-legged dog?

Would you watch cricket all afternoon before you would watch ice hockey? Do you have aspirations for things getting better? Are these things, if you do have aspirations for their getting better, specific or vague? If you do not have aspirations for things getting better, did you once? If you do not have aspirations for things getting better but did once, can you say what ended your aspirations for things getting better? Have you ever made car payments? Do you have life insurance? Do you know the suicide clauses of your life-insurance policy, if you have one? Have you ever seen lava flow? Would you like to be momentarily in a jail cell with a man who keeps repeating that he does not take survivors or take no for an answer? Would you like to eat soft-serve ice cream beside a municipal pond colored that fetid green from goose shit and paddled upon by uncivil ducks? Would you like to go to a stock-car race? If she’s dead, would you like to send word to your mother? Do you ever say to yourself, “Lay me down to sleep”? Doesn’t that have the nicest little music to it?

Now that we near the end, do you find yourself swelling with misgiving? Did you say enough smart things and few enough harebrained, and did you stand up and fight at least once? Did you live rooted or were you off your pins all the livelong day? Do you blame your failures on yourself, on someone else, or on no one at all? Is it jelly you like, smooth and easy, or is it preserves with that tincture of grit? Is you stupid, do you think?

ARE YOU SURE OF yourself? Do you use the word coordinates ? Does a snifter of brandy — swirling, amber, bright, piquant — strike you as a handsome thing? Is there trouble in Paradise? Do wheels have fun? Can there be surcease in the pursuit of charity? Would the number of snake teeth there have been in time exceed or equal or be less than the number of human teeth, do you think? Will you ride a pony? Can a man’s or a woman’s becoming a hero be an accident? Can you imagine doing something in your life that will be fully satisfying and redeeming for your having tried to do it, whether you succeeded in it or failed, and that, correspondingly, would be fully shameful had you not tried to do it? If a boy is robbed and shot delivering a pizza, has his life been a waste? Are you more likely to have occasion, do you think, to say “billets-doux” or “pietà”?

Would you rather be regular army or army reserve? If you were, or are, a woman, would you rather have trouble or women’s trouble, medically speaking? Do you know the principles of pruning? Are you wary of botulism? Would you rather see a cancan show or a turtle race? Could you be intimate with a blind person? Do you like a waiter who doesn’t write orders or are you irritated by the affectation of it? Is your mind bubbling pablum or snails commingling? Would you be disturbed to hear a child say, “The best thing about Granny is where she is”? Would you be more disturbed or less disturbed, provided you were disturbed at all, were the child who said this your own? Would you comb a mule? Would you wear a prosthetic testicle or breast? Would you run for public office? Would you sit outside the Sorbonne on a bench wearing a beret? Do you eat beetroot? Were you a bird and could choose, would you be white or black? Is bacon for you nasty or sublime? Would you have trouble killing in combat, do you think? Does the prospect of hernia bother you more than might other more severe and more likely medical disorders? If you learned that you were vying within a love triangle with a Navy SEAL, would you be concerned? Could you be depended upon, in a love triangle with a SEAL, to down a goodly quaff of schnapps and say, “He might outkill me but he shan’t outlove me!”?

Are you fond of a tree’s turning red? If you had a child who was mad for a go-cart, and pestering you to buy her one, would you spring for it? Do you believe that what is now called snail mail will disappear and be replaced entirely by electronic mail? If a person applied to you for a job, eminently qualified, and you learned in the interview that he had surrounded himself with fifty thousand images of monkeys by his own count, to include the monkey-print shirt and pants he was wearing that you could see and the monkey-print briefs he told you he was wearing, would you be less inclined to hire him than if revelation of his monkey obsession had not obtained? Do you have any idea how the name “Jujube” came about or what it might mean, if anything, apart from the eponymous candy? If you were fairly well laid up and immobile in a hospital, would you accept sexual favor from a nurse? If you accepted sexual favor from a nurse, would you be concerned about the long-term romantic complications you might not want — specifically, that the nurse might not be a purely practical professional in this respect but an impractical person getting involved with you in ways you deemed yourself not likely to reciprocate? If you accepted sexual favor from a nurse, would you be concerned about securing the door to the room and otherwise ensuring privacy, or would that be the nurse’s business entirely? Do you prefer to live in a country where eating well is important or are you just as happy in a country where people are indifferent to eating well or perhaps even embrace eating badly?