Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

I followed her in. She went out of sight and came back with two beers and her mail, which she tossed through at a table, kicking off her shoes and rubbing her stockinged feet together. I saw that she was in not a nurse's uniform but a simple white shift, the only thing I'd ever seen her in. I sat down and pretended to be comfortable.

"]ust crap," she said of the mail.

I suddenly got the notion she had been crying a short time before, when she turned from me, crossed the room, turned back, and fell like big timber onto her bed, one arm behind her head and the white dress high, the red hair wide and fanned and brilliant. Her room was as drab as mine except for her hair. They were alike except for her hair and my tent. Thoughts like these kept me from feeling too conspicuous sitting there as she began a series of deep sighs.

"So," she finally sighed. "Tell me about yourself."

"Like what?"

"Like where were you born, who are your parents, that sort of thing."

"Who are my parents?"

"Yes. Of course." I should have left.

"Who are yours?" I asked.

"I don't know." She said this with such gravity, such theatrical weight, that I refused to respond with suitable alarm.

"You're not a nurse," I said.

"I'm in history."

"You're in history."

"Yes."

"You're in history." She was getting impatient. "Hmmm," I said.

"The art of conversation isn't what it used to be."

She was somehow managing to raise the hem of the shift and her tits into relief without seeming to move. As badly as I wanted to leave, I couldn't, and l as badly as I wanted not to be led in this programmed exchange, I was led.

"You don't know who your parents are and you're in history."

"Look, big boy-"

"O.K. I'm sorry."

It was better now that she had bucked up a bit and stopped the miserable sighing. I felt in a way she was as fragile as the Veteran, whom we could still hear stomping. I sat there, and unprompted further, she began a fluid account of her life history, without offering me another beer. She had been adopted and raised " by a wonderful couple, whom she estranged by seeking as a teenager to discover her true parents. Along the way, virtually disowned by her hurt foster parents, she found herself in mean straits. She was an eighteen-year-old go-go girl in a strip club in Baltimore supporting a clod in medical school who left her, etc. I suffered something like an embolism of testosterone picturing her dancing naked in a cage with her head afire and breasts awhirl. She was sighing again. She was in history, she now solemnly announced, "to assemble the skills necessary to discover my true identity."

I tried bravely to cooperate. "Why is that so important to you?"

She looked at me with a certain, quiet horror. "I don't know who I am ."

"You're you," I offered brightly, and got more of the look.

"No. What if my parents were- coal miners or something?"

"Oh. I see."

I didn't see, of course, but the Veteran, yet stomping around in his enraged search, put the notion in my head that she was in pursuit-and for all I knew, it was literally something like this bothering her-she was after, in a way, her own set of dead niggers. I sat there looking at her, the only body in the place not after a dead nigger. She was extremely good-looking, extremely good-looking.

"So. You. What about you?"

She was extremely good-looking . "What if we skip that?" I said. "What if you don't know anything about me except the as is?"

"Nooo," she said. "That's weird." She took another gargantuan sigh. "There's been just too much weirdness in my life."

I wondered if it would be too much weirdness to cross the room and lie down on top of her, as every gesture of hers for the last twenty minutes suggested one should, and decided it would be.

"Thanks for the beer."

"You bet."

She did not get up as I let myself out. She lay there like Theda Bara, looking at the ceiling, pondering her lost parents.

Iwas charged up. I wanted to go to a revival across the river for reasons then and still not altogether clear, yet now I can detect some order in all the disorder. I am not certain that life itself is not some complex series reducible to its hundred thousand discrete reactions between reactant A and B yielding product C and D with this or that energy consumed or released to yield E and F from C and D, and so forth. I left the Veteran in pursuit of his dead nigger and visited the Orphan, a silent-screen actress in pursuit of hers, and in three weeks would be living with a true actress. In between, I went to a revival, ostensibly to get a look at the inside of a tent-Tom and I had never erected our monstrous units, each larger than the rooms they were wadded into-and what I saw was a conglomeration of folk all as desperate for phantoms as the Veteran and the Orphan, and all arguably after a dead man who might never exist for them. There were not a few actresses present as well, the real kind that central casting never gets. They were rolling on the ground, for the most part, being held gently at their crotches and breasts by a man with a copperhead.

After my day, I was not in a state to be further amazed, but I was further amazed. A smallish man-I took him to be about the size of Polanski-in a blue double-knit suit was screaming at near the pain threshold into a whizzing, hissing, scratchy public address system. How many years will you be in hell? he asked the congregation. The congregation was uncertain. He offered to tell them. "Pitcher to yourself a 1," he yelled, "and foller it with all the zeroes in the world , and that's how many years you'll be in hell."

The congregation held its breath. All the while the preacher was drawing zeroes in the air with one hand and holding in his other, calmly aloft, the copperhead. I neglected to follow the sermon, but it soon had its effect. Suddenly the man was on his heels discreetly feeling women rolling on the ground, touching the snake to them. One woman got up, brushed herself off, returned to her seat, located her purse, lit up a cigarette, sat back in her chair, and told her companion, "G0 on, honey, get called. Nothing like it in the world."

"I don't know," the second woman said. "Them things-"

" He'll hold that thing, honey. It ain't nothing but Satan's failed little messenger boy ."

I looked at the docile copperhead, sanest fellow in the room, proving by not biting anyone how the truly damned are saved. I was starting to get high-high, I suppose, on the number of improbables that seemed to be appearing before me. I liked the feeling. Dreaming through more polyester loudness, I pictured to myself a 1, with all the zeroes in the world representing an endless chain of unconnected, connected events-my new theory of the human life reaction series. It seemed that I had been wasting my time by not acknowledging this necessary connectedness of the unnecessary things one can do in a life. I could do all the things in the world I wanted to do, ungoverned by imposed criteria for serious living, and they would connect, evolve, according to unalterable laws that were operating as surely as the one that popped Newton on the head with the apple, that made Mr. Millikan's oil drops swerve, that made Herr Kekule's snakes bite their tails and roll overnight into the benzene ring.

All I had to do was get loose in the limbec of life. A voice from this local, queer providence came to me from a row behind: "Did you know Camel Tent hiring, Jimmy?" I turned to look. Jimmy said he didn't know and didn't want to know, because Penny Baker sewed four of his fingers together and his (Jimmy's) wife now had a good enough job for the both of them. "So why fix it if it works, right?" Jimmy said, and his friend nodded Amen.