Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

There was no immediate problem with the roof beyond cleaning her kitchen and, she supposed, the entire house, now that it lay exposed to the light of day. Maybe she should call a cleaning service. That made some sense, but so did calling a lawyer and divorcing her husband, and so did calling a travel agent and booking a flight to Alaska, where as a young woman she had always wanted to go, but the importance of having a roof over her head had stopped that and other nomadic impulses. She had heard of families living in tents during the Depression and wondered if the tenability of that were soon to be demonstrated to her. Rather than walk outside, she climbed up on the kitchen counter and looked out of her house to see if other houses had suffered roof loss. They all appeared to be intact, and no one was out there gawking at hers. This was the first moment in which she wondered if her mental state might be not in order. Was her head really extending over the open wall of her kitchen peering at the unharmed houses up and down and across the street from hers, or was it somewhere else? Had it, her head, spun to Mars, leaving her house intact? Would a phone call prove the matter?

She decided it would not. Even if she called a cleaning service and they sent a crew of alcoholics who hauled her carpets into the yard and steamed her entire house and blew it spic and span with an industrial compressor — she imagined this with real pleasure — and they chatted about the remarkable missing roof and what a boon to true cleaning it was, she and the sots about ready for her to break out the beer in reward for their Herculean ordeal, there would be no knowing that the entire affair was not delusional.

What could she do? She had no idea, and usually having no idea what to do was a good inspiration for her doing nothing, but it felt different in this case. Sitting there in a roofless house did not speak of a sound mind. She’d look less suspicious somehow were she to bellydance from room to room in a roofless house, she thought. Yet it was also time to acknowledge that she was done calculating what was suspicious and how she would be perceived by others in what she did in life. This missing roof had put a foot down with respect to all that. She was clearly now on her own true, or false, path. She turned the TV off. Watching fat actual fornicators all day on the one hand and slender fake fornicators on the other had been fun, but it was over. The British call cookies “biscuits,” she thought, and we call cookies “cookies” and biscuits “biscuits.” She was going to be plain and correct from now on.

We did not know what to expect. The salamanders were cooking their own meals, having repudiated fast food with a viciousness that was surprising coming out of those soft-bodied gentle souls. They wore little chef hats and deftly used their tiny utensils and did not complain much as they burned themselves, which, given the deliquescent quality of their moist skin and the heat of the stove, was nearly constantly. In fact it looked as if what they were cooking most was themselves. The happy suffering of the salamanders in the kitchen put us into a nervous and humble and vaguely guilty state. They had devised a way of cutting a standard Band-Aid into 128 pieces for dressing their wounds. The kitchen smelled of these fresh Band-Aids and earthworms and of the odd things they cooked.

Well, by that I mean, since you ask, pancakes the size of Rockefeller dimes. Yes, you are right, not odd under the circumstances, given that they were pancakes for salamanders. Not odd at all. I have seen on a grown woman nipples the size of Rockefeller dimes, and that is odder than such a pancake fit for a salamander. To see those little dry pancakes going happily into those moist mouths was perhaps what I meant was odd. I have trouble meaning what I mean these days. I have trouble meaning anything at all. Am I not a grown man concerned with salamanders who cook, like cartoon characters? Can I actually mean this? To mean something you have to be capable of making a muscle with your brain, of bearing down mentally. I can no longer bear down. While this disturbs somewhat, it also does not disturb. If you can’t bear down, nothing much bears down on you. If you are preoccupied with salamanders in the kitchen, it is as agreeable as being preoccupied by anything else, or by nothing at all.

We might as well forget the salamanders and their pancakes. We are free to move on to other concerns. I have none, but you perhaps have some. They would relate to the world, most probably — certainly they would relate to the world as opposed to the otherworld, a phrase that is attractive, as indeed we find the otherworld, whatever we mean by it, more attractive than the world. Why is this so, that we like a world that we can but feebly and variously only imagine exists over one in plain view before us? Is it not because the one before us is, in the parlance of the more eloquent of our children, messed up? We have so messed up the situation here that we prefer to think of an afterlife of beatitudes, or if we are not given to that sentimentality we select a finer one, a world not after but parallel and supernatural, usually peopled not by people but by weirdnesses made of goo and capable of thinking better than we do and fighting with more sophisticated weapons. Even the odd salamander who can cook will do. Why do we seek these other places full of alien forms? Is it because people are one big piece of shit? I verily submit that this is so. When you have reached this position, there is not a lot of what gets called wiggle room, and you don’t feel like playing outside, or inside, anymore.

I have been traded back to my original team, which still does not want me. I play, and do not play, unwanted. It is not an enviable position, and I do not want to talk about it. I would rather talk about retardation, its onset and advance, considerable in my case, leading to my streamlighting into an ocean of ineptitude.

My testosterone has dried up. I never had courage, and now have not even bluster. This would be humiliating had I still balls. As it is, even humiliation is neutral. Some of you out there can understand this. Together we constitute a large human club but we are of course clubless. We do not require private rooms for our elite lounges. We sit on a bench here, stand on a corner there. We hardly remember our mothers and do not care. Or we do and we do care. There is no difference in what we do or do not do.

I am a goof guitar player, I believed in good shoes briefly but that belief too has succumbed to a risible and quaint erstwhile passionism, I will now go to bed. Lay me down to sleep, Jesus, you old bullyrag who first discovered these things I know.

I get back from the flood parade — a small flash flood is let through the streets to entertain the people — and discover my apartment filled with graduate students invited there by a colleague. They are watching television and he is testing a blowgun. I sit on a sofa next to a student. On the TV screen is a show featuring an actress I recognize as playing Miss Brooks from the show Our Miss Brooks ; the actress appears to be the daughter of the woman who originally played Miss Brooks, Eve Arden. I inquire of the room if this is the daughter of Eve Arden and the students confirm it as if it is something everyone knows. They cannot possibly themselves know the show Our Miss Brooks or Eve Arden; their knowledge of popular culture is boundless if they know this to be Eve Arden’s daughter without knowing Eve Arden. The woman next to me lets her hand fall to my collar and does not remove it. I touch her hand there and we engage hands; she plays with my ear and I play with her fingers. She leans over me to adjust the TV and I see her breast, about the size and contour of a Hershey’s kiss. The party becomes very thick and this woman and I make a tour through it holding hands. We discover that we have flirted before and that I learned earlier that she is not available because she is involved with a young man some distance away who has threatened to kill himself if she leaves him. My position is that such an arrangement is unfortunate, and the woman agrees. A second woman at this point begins to vie for my affection in front of the first and I allow it to develop, watching the reaction of the first woman, whom I want badly. It is clear that she has taken her moral position with the welfare of suicides in mind. I drift around the party and discover I am in my underwear, not unlike the bulk of the partiers, but I nonetheless feel a little underdressed. I resolve to leave.