Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Would you trust a vegetarian veterinarian? With your own dog? I mean, I can see how you might take the tofu-eating neighbors’ dog to a vegetarian veterinarian in a kind of what-they-sow-they-reap vengeance, but would you take your own dog to a vegetarian veterinarian? What if there you were asked to fill out a questionnaire that asked if the dog, and you, were vegetarian? At any point in your life do you anticipate having sex again? If I said to you, “I want to return to 1940 and have a big coupe with big running boards and drive it drunkenly and carefully along dirt roads never causing harm except for frightening chickens out of the road, and I want you standing out there on the running board saying Slow down, or Let me in, and laughing, but I don’t stop, because of course you don’t mean it, you think as I do that a big 1940s coupe and careful drunken driving and one party outside the car and one inside and both laughing and chickens spraying unhurt into the ditches is what life was then, is what life was before it became ruined by us and all our crap,” and if I said to you, “I have an actual goddamned time machine, I am not kidding, we can get in the coupe inside thirty seconds if we take off our clothes and push the red button underneath that computer over there, come on, strip, get ready”—would you get ready to go with me, and go? Would you ask a lot of questions? Or would you just say, “Shut up and push the button”?

Will you believe me if I tell you that I am a little fragile, psychologically speaking, and that there is an eagle over the woods out my window, and every day that I see him gliding around, with his white head and his big white tail, even though I have come to appreciate that he is as much a bird of carrion as a buzzard, or more — will you believe me if I tell you that seeing him gives me a small but palpable lift, and not seeing him a small quickening of depression? Assuming you might have as a child, could you eat Chef Boyardee canned noodles today? Have you ever noticed that when the coffee purists insist that the coffee-brewing equipment be kept clean of even traces of built-up coffee oil because it makes the coffee bitter, they are not kidding?

Are you lazy? Would you rather deal with fire or flood? Are you familiar with the creeping displacement of the American anole by the Cuban brown anole? Do you remember redeemable trading stamps — S&H Green Stamps I believe a major one was called? How did those stamps come to die out? Do you use a business card? Are you a sweater person? Do you suppose it’s the case that damming some rivers is not an ecological hazard but damming others is? Do you picture the days of the week on a calendar in your mind? Are you afraid of a lathe? If we were bombed back into the Stone Age, as whatshisname proposed in Vietnam, would you have any idea how to go about making electricity? Could you even start a fire? Do you have a lot of credit cards? Given a choice, would you wear purple and red or pink and black? Were you spanked as a child, and will you spank a child? What’s just about the worst thing you ever heard of? What’s just about the biggest thing that ever happened around you? What’s your name? What are your intentions with respect to me?

IF YOU COULD HAVE feathers instead of hair, would you? Do you think shop courses in high school would have more takers were they not called “industrial arts”? Do the very terms “gingiva” and “dentin” not sound frightening? Do you think “sugar water for the overweight” a good modern-day American equivalent for Marx’s “opiate of the masses”? Do you give greeting cards? Would you take a short-haired dog over a long-haired dog, or vice versa, or are you indifferent? Do you carry a big gob of keys or have you managed to pare down? What’s the fastest you have ever gone in an automobile? If you learned that you would expire tomorrow at 5:00 P.M., what would you seek to do until then? How often do you sit in a good straight chair and do nothing else at all? Have you ever seen an indigo snake?

Do you regard living with routines as liberating or shackling? How much of a baseball game can you watch? Will you wear rain gear or do you prefer just getting wet? If your survival depended on it, do you think there are things you would not eat? What would these be? Do you sympathize with the outlaw? When you visit old folks’ homes and are mistaken by the senile for their own relatives, what do you do? Does this make any sense to you: “Pets at home. Glory. Man is but the percolator of his own retardation”? Do you know what exactly is meant by the term “a professional person”? Would you prefer to work for this kind of person or for the other kind of person? Are we in accord that whatever kind of person that is, he or she would not be called an “unprofessional person”? Do you recall, and did you ever try to use, all-metal roller skates that strapped on over your shoes? Are you big on nutrition, or is it something that happens or doesn’t? Have Schwinn bicycles disappeared yet?

Could you wear a red clown’s nose all day without explaining it? Are you a physical coward? Are you bothered by your cowardice? What are the top three things in your life you wish you had not done, or done differently from the way you did them? How old is the oldest human body you have seen naked? Is there a difference between a bobcat and a lynx? Are you more troubled by a lie or by a theft, or are they the same thing metaphysically? Is metaphysically used correctly there? If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose? Are you good at jacks? Does it matter to you if the jacks are fancy with the little balls on the ends of the spikes or are just straight plain spikes? Must the ball be red?

Have you read much philosophy? Do you wish you had comprehended that which you did not comprehend, in your philosophy reading? Do you wish you had comprehended that which you did not comprehend in all instances of your incomprehension in all areas and at all times of your life? Do you regard yourself a dangerous person? If not, under what circumstances might you have been, or might you yet be, a dangerous person? Are you made nervous by getting on buses whose routes you do not know? Will you get on a bus in a foreign country where you do not speak the language? If they came back in style and it was not a matter of kitsch, would you wear a fedora? Did anyone instruct you in the matter of shaking hands? Are you baffled that there are people who do not know about the importance of squeezing? In intercourse, do you prefer thrashing or more subtle motion? If your family had a cat, and the neighbor across the street had a cardinal in a cage, presumably because it could not live in the wild, and your family’s cat tormented the cardinal to death by leaping at and striking the cage, would you feel bad about it all your life? Is feeling bad about something all one’s life anything to particularly feel bad about? Are we redeemed by regret? Do you like going into very cold water? When was the last time you wielded a slingshot? Are you any good? Do you remember Buster Brown shoes? Are you afraid of geese with red carbuncular heads? Can you ski on water? On snow? Are you prepared for the end?

No? Will you wear fur?

ARE BLAND-FOOD EATERS to be trusted more or less than sophisticated eaters? Is it correct to suggest the eater of bland food is unsophisticated compared with the eater of spicy food? Are you aware that the European rock dove, commonly called a pigeon, represents one of the most successful global invasions in the history of animal adaptations? Do you think the incidence of human homosexuality is higher than 10 percent? Do you like to listen to weather broadcasts or do you just like to see, in uncoached anticipation, weather happen? Will you be saddened that your life has been minor if in fact it has been minor? Is there anything you might do today that would distinguish you from being just a vessel of consumption and pollution with a proper presence in the herd? Have you ever spent time in the house of a recently deceased old woman and seen her Siamese-cat needlepoints and her baking supplies and her shoes and her inspirational sayings on the wall? Do you realize that people move on steadily, even arguably bravely, unto the end, stunned and more stunned, and numbed and more numbed, by what has happened to them and not happened to them? Have you ever heard the saying, Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting?