Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

One of the natural developments to Big Brother’s Watching You is that he keeps a file on us, and we are not discouraged from knowing what is in that file, in contradistinction, I think, to how it worked before when people felt that Big Brother’s Watching You was prophetic and wrong. In that day, if I have it right, people did not know what Big Brother had on them in that file, and they were therefore correct to be worried and suspicious of being watched. But today we know. My file says, for example, “Mentally disturbed. Hire him. He wants to make private calculations the livelong day. Let him.” So I have no worries.

I suppose we are supposed to get worked up about this new development that Brother Catcard has had a dalliance with Sister Willetail, because it violates workplace ordinance, or ordinations, some ord-, or, if it doesn’t violate rules, because we want to have had a dalliance with Sister Willetail ourselves, and that we haven’t or can’t and Bro Catcard has and can violates us and makes us jealous. But I am OK with the whole schpoo. Do I want her? Yes I do. May I have her? Probably not. Does this fact, like about five million equivalent facts in my life, distinguish the situation to the point I need to get worked up? No. Rules in the equivalent workplace are, after all, equivalents to rules in the workplace. Bro Catcard and Sister Willetail should prosecute their voyage as best they can. In Brother Catcard’s file it will read “Wanted Sister Willetail. Got her.”

Last night one of the metal buildings in the compound blew over, and this morning everyone is out in the rubble on the slab, kicking through the ruined stock and supplies and, strangely, giggling at this and that. Balls of yellow and pink insulation are blowing around like tumbleweeds. The big Zeiss crystal lens is unhurt and is to be picked up and carried to an intact building. Right now a forklift is being fitted with real sheepskin sleeves that will slip over the forks so that the glass is not scratched. The glass ball — that is basically all it is, except of course it is some rare fine German glass — weighs as much as a bull. This right here is one of the perversities of being here. This ball could be picked up by suction discs fitted to the arms of not even the largest robot we have made for the army, picked up and set down wherever you tell the robot to put it, and that could be in any impossible place up to 125 feet off the ground, or 125 feet under ground after it digs a hole with its other arm while holding the ball, and it can throw the ball a half mile — and yet Brother Catcard or someone above him deems that, after a tornado, for some reason, new technology must accede to old, and here comes sheepskin and a towmotor and an alcoholic driving the towmotor.

Benny is on the forklift. They haven’t even sprayed the ball with the Kevlar beryllium foam, which they also have the capacity to do, so that virtually nothing, to include some missiles, can harm it. Here comes alcoholic-looking Benny wheezing and grinning on a towmotor with alcoholic-looking furry yellow forks out in front. He’s got the forks about man-high and is making reckless speed across the rubble on the slab, jangling the forks even in their shearling booties, and as he gets near the ball he lowers the forks and slows to a good professional approach speed and it is easy to see that Benny is an old forklift man and that what he is doing is picking up a giant marble, and I stop cringing. I start marveling. I like to marvel, but I often do not. I marvel in this instance because I have known this man for fifty years, although I did not see him for the fifty years between second grade and now, and what I saw him do then and what I see him do now is concern himself with marbles. Is there a God? Has something or someone determined that Benny and marbles are a thing? There is a vending machine still standing in the ruins and I get a package of those small powdered doughnuts and eat them as Benny drives the Zeiss ball on the towmotor carefully out of sight. The sugar is cool on my fingers, strangely menthol.

We have received news that the Zeiss ball has been shipped over the high seas on a wooden sailing ship to Pondicerry India for use in an ashram temple there. A hole in the top of the temple will admit a shaft of strong light that will strike the ball and be refracted around the temple in a way that will calm the spirit. The effect of this light, Brother Catcard says he is told by telegram from India, as it will be uniquely refracted by our crystal ball, will be “ineffable.” Insofar as the ball never did anything while it was here to calm the spirit, we are not aggrieved to learn of its better home, as it were. Brother Catcard also tells us that our time here is over, that the fallen building was a harbinger for the falling of our entire mission here. This too produces no outpouring of woe. It is the equivalent to failure, to being let go, to seeing one’s way of life end as we know it, to the end of “family,” and so forth, to perhaps not even being watched by Big Brother, to not having damning things in our files, to not even having files, and we are fine with the news, we are but equivalents to lost people. Equivalents to lost people, we discover, are not lost.

When she arrives, Lamar’s sister, who should be sixty, is thirty-five years old and in very good shape. She looks like certain movie stars from the forties whose names I have never managed to match with their faces and whose faces all look, more or less, alike. The cheeks are high, the hair is swept back up and off the face, there is a good smile, red lipstick, bosom, good cheer. Lamar’s sister is wearing the equivalent to those same cutoff jean shorts and a red-plaid yoked shirt with pearl snaps. We are instantly agreeable and without the difficulties that strain strangers, because we are only the equivalents of strangers. Equivalents to strangers are instantly intimate. I say this nonsense to her: “God, babe, I have been waiting for you a long time, it feels as if I was even holding my breath, I can breathe now, I didn’t realize I was waiting for you—”

“Yes, shut up.”

There is a powdered doughnut in its cellophane package on the nightstand. Lamar’s sister carefully extracts the doughnut and regards it in the light and takes a tentative lick. There is white powder on her red lips and she smiles and an air of menthol fills the room.

A man in a cigar-colored suit is not to be trusted, and frankly my aversion to that one over there goes well beyond mistrust: I outright do not like the son of a bitch. A cigar-colored suit!

I am pursuing my dissertation on agiation. That is the new science of getting old. In case you need to know what I am talking about. You probably don’t. Sometimes I myself wonder why anyone needs to know anything about agiation, when for thousands of years people just did it without being told a goddamn thing about it and they got along fine, getting old right on schedule and getting in their final pajamas, etc. I wonder why anyone needs to know anything about anything when you get right down to it. In this same spirit of wonderment I wonder why everyone has to suddenly be on the phone all the time. Everyone has suddenly decided they have to know what everyone else is up to at every minute of the day. How did this happen? We have all become The President.

There is a new society forming. It is going to allow only running water in a house, a three-channel TV, a rotary-dial phone, a wringer washing machine, and one car.

When the cigar-colored-suit-wearing asshole is not wearing that, he is wearing a sky-blue one! It would be fun and gratifying to see a car knock him out of his shoes. There they would sit, some kind of Italian superiority, empty on the road, nearby which groans the lump who wore them to that forlorn spot. The ambulance might be forever in coming. What will become of the shoes? I despise that asshole. I would hope that a bum would come along and fit himself into the shoes and shamble off in them, perhaps right by the paralyzed face of the owner, who could just force himself to groan, “Muuhshoooos!”