The Imperative Mood Read online

  PADGETT POWELL is a novelist whose Edisto was nominated for the US National Book Award. He teaches writing at the University of Florida. Edisto will be published by Serpent’s Tail in autumn 2012. His The Interrogative Mood is a small masterpiece. Through a seemingly random but infinitely artful series of questions, it mysteriously, elusively, hilariously lights up life.

  Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good?

  ‘A celebration of the human need to understand’ Financial Times

  ‘Profound, heartbreaking and fantastically funny’ Sunday Times

  ‘A work of real bravado and charm’ Observer

  THE IMPERATIVE MOOD

  PADGETT POWELL

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Padgett Powell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2012 Padgett Powell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published as an ebook in 2012 by

  Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of

  Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.serpentstail.com

  eISBN 978 1 84765 887 6

  Designed and typeset by [email protected]

  PUT THAT NICE BLUE AND WHITE PITCHER ON THE marble washstand. Determine your sock size. Play favorites. Have some. Be all you can be and all anyone else can be. Fall back and regroup. Be for heroes. Try not to fail. Recall your mother. Forget your father. Please release me. Let me love again. Trust that I will be okay.

  Whatever floats your boat, go ahead and float it. Do not have large untenable quantities of despair. Do not go to parades. When you feed orphaned wild animals, do not expect them to make it. Be forewarned. Be careful that your genitals do not show outside the strict confines of your underwear. Learn at least three racquet games during your lifetime. Study the coin flip. Please understand, and have according sympathy when relevant, that pink-skinned people and animals have tender feet.

  If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction. Let us abort the mission, if we are on one. Supply me with the name of that comic who climbed into a condom and tell me if it was specially manufactured or off the shelf. Be more forgiving. Test the wind. Brave the currents. Be strong, strong, strong. Tell me my name. Be gone.

  GO TO HARBOR TOWN and pee on someone’s boat. Chase dreams. Smoke a pipe, or pipes. Fix the toilet. Put on those wax lips over there and wear them all day I don’t care how deformed and drooly they get if you take them out at any point I will call the law. Try to keep your temperature in the accepted homoeostatic range for humans, can you? Hand me that newspaper without letting it make a sound. If I make a sound reading it, be grateful that I, not you, made the newspaper make a sound. Just thank your lucky stars, young man, thank your lucky stars.

  SIT IN GOOD OLD overstuffed chairs the live-long day and rejoice that you are not mixed up in the turmoil inside a church or outside the perimeter of a military position under attack or near an abortion clinic or in an airport. Prepare colorful drinks that are not particularly tasty but don’t have to be look at them! Call all your pets to you, living and more importantly dead. Keep your belt cinched just a tad tight. Believe in Jesus whether you do or not. Remove staples when you discover them not to be actually stapling things together and carefully discard them. Sing songs to ladies and appreciate the scarves they wear. Determine, were you to have put in your will the method by which you would like to be put to death, if this could have any bearing on how the state might put you to death should it come up.

  DO NOT ALWAYS be of good cheer; sometimes act as if you are a possum. Throw rocks at children. Leap tall buildings, of course. Remain calm. Try to win. Be winning whether you win or not. Declare bankruptcy not quite with pride. Alternate the theories you entertain about all things. Investigate leather tanning. Learn to swim again. Steadily decline in all your strengths until that steadiness is your strength. Purchase a packet of indigo dye and place it so that you can regard it every day. Call your friend who walked the wire in the circus and ask about the shoes. Change the linen. Realize yet again that for a long time you had too much courage to kill yourself or even entertain it but that now you can entertain it but have too little courage to do it. Regret that you have never seen a real cotton field in operation or a cotton exchange either and that these wants are both unrelated to many other things you should have witnessed but did not, both of the sort you can imagine and, worse, of the sort you cannot even conceive you are so small and deprived. Locate, purchase, and construct an industrial-grade galvanized swing set in your backyard, and if you do not have a backyard in the backyard of someone with a child whom you can convince that you mean the child no harm.

  TRY TO BE THE BEST you can be, and the worst. Prepare for Armageddon. Get to the bottom of baking. Imagine a conversation with Charles Manson. Try things. Invent something. Dilute dilute dilute the Dr. Bronner’s. Heap up the seconds. Take dance instruction, and of course step lively. Har’ to lee. Ponder NASA photos and wonder if there isn’t more wonder in them than you actually see. Run to the store.

  Lecture the pets. Try all the doors and windows for fit and trim and of course security and attend anything found amiss. Give some thought to securing an incandescent light-bulb or two before they go extinct—would one in a very out-of-the-way place, seldom used, like the closet under the stairs, be so bad? Walk the yard looking for snakes without any thought of seeing one. Whistle for your dog dead now fifteen years. Clean the kitchen. Pay a bill or two, get the phone, and reach out and touch someone. String the hammock and practice the diagonal lie. If this does not come naturally to you, reflect on just how far you are from ever speaking Spanish naturally also, or speaking it at all, or speaking any language at all, and admit that you are a retard uncomfortable even in a hammock who will need the Language Fairy to come down and put a language under your pillow if you are ever to have a foreign language. Envision some new, cool colors all through your house and go to bed.

  List the wounds you do not want, in order: head wound, genital wound, ass wound, spleen wound, eye wound, extremity wound, thumb smash, skin scrape, splinter. Decide that you have had enough surgery and can go the rest of the distance unaided by propping up by the knife. Fill out that exhausting questionnaire and take it to the will attorney. Have a little buzz on when you go in there. Rule out radiation therapy along with the surgery. It’s going to be the hammock and the perfected diagonal lie from here on in. Recall that frisky young whippersnapper Tennessee Williams whom you once so admired and still do. Recall that time you saw the 1% play for the first time. In your mind sit again on those pale green wooden stools in that cafeteria and watch Allen and Bob play in front of where the dirty thick-plastic beige dishes went in with the spaghetti sauce on them. Recite: Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, oh oh oh. Call North Carolina and see about a dog. Decide that deciding it is too late to rescue yourself may be itself rescue, but concede this salvation-by-surrender argument may be fallacious if not outright childish. Recall the boy in the back of the car saying, when someone in the front of the car derogated Elvis for liking the party girls to keep their panties on, “Just what’s wrong with that!”
r />   HOLD YOUR HORSES. Allow interest to compound, simply or whatever the other thing is. Do not have traffic today with a doctor. Read between the lines only; it’s easier than reading the lines. In the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely. Try to recall the smell of caged mice, and the image of the child of yours separating the twist ties one by one until they made a fine large mess that had to be put in a baggie, and the same child picking back up the flowers dropped in the aisle of her grandfather’s wedding, and the same child telling you at age five, fishing, “Look, it goes under, and nothing! This is ruining my life.”

  Inspect the phrase “resistant incoherence” as it pertains to John Ashbery, whose incoherence you have not so much resisted as found incoherently beautiful. Realize that you cannot take time out like this for reveries so private when people are expecting you to get on with the business of telling them what to do. So, people: get yourselves on with the business of doing what you need to do, and realize that sometimes in every life that will necessarily involve wasting a lot of time on fruitless pursuit of that which can be interesting only to you, and only in a way that at some point you will invariably yourself declare the time to have been spent pointlessly—have at it! If Helen Vendler writes “resistant incoherence” and you want to roll that around in your mouth like an unsatisfying little candy trying to suck off the –ant and put in its place –ed, leaving you a more satisfying “resisted incoherence,” because you resisted it, it is not resistant, it is incoherent, well this is your business and your business alone and nobody’s business but; yet even this improved candy is not that hot, what happened to the old Horehounds that were so thrilling to pronounce as an adolescent, whore hounds!, whether they were actually good to eat or not, but they were, were they not? and were they not heavy heavy sassafras, not resistant sassafras but sassafras that you resisted because it was too strong, as like, well, sometimes people get too enthusiastic about how well they think they make dressing for turkey and overload it with sage? Recall the time Charlie Geer freehanded the grits into the pot of boiling water on Cumberland Island, the time his uncle woke up on the rolling waterbed with his exgirlfriendJoanieloveofhislife on the other side of it being boinked by the new guy. Don’t ask people to go there. People, don’t go there, just accept that Holmes Geer eventually killed himself, that I then taught his nephew in school after having gone to school myself with the uncle, and that the nephew taught me you can freehand grits, resistant instruction.

  PUT YOUR NOSE close to the barrel of your shotgun right after you’ve shot a clay and get a good snifferoo of that smoke—delicious. Do not put your nose over the end of the barrel or you will be in violation of Safety Rule No. 1. Tell someone today of some event you fondly recall in your life and do not sentimentalize it, or do. Mourn the loss of your rooster, your Silver Duckwing bantam rooster who did not weigh one pound wet who fought you until he realized you were using the fights to catch and pet him. He was named Yeehi and it is perhaps prudent not to name birds if they are subject to slaughter by even the airhead neighbors’ airhead dogs. Put up some signs that say No Dogs and let the airhead neighbors tell you they don’t think their dogs, while certainly smart, can read.

  Consider getting a lawyer so you can call him and ask him to survey your entire situation and discover if you are good for successful litigation against anyone and suggest that you do not want to die not having lived a full life and sued someone. Perhaps your will could be adjusted to offer him a bonus as executor if he has already by the time of your demise successfully prosecuted a lawsuit on your behalf, but mention that he is not to take this to mean that you are uninterested in a posthumous lawsuit on behalf of your estate. Take a big load of clothes to the Goodwill; take everything you own if you can stand to do it. Go to Walgreens on your way back and get a toothbrush and a vinyl ditty bag. Keep it minimal from here on in. Tap dance on pea gravel in the driveway. Do not lament the loss of testosterone. Do not whistle so that others may hear you. If you get an opportunity to facilitate someone’s going to Alaska, seize it. If you can locate an old vacuum-tube clock radio, tune a distant AM blues station if they still exist and listen to it at night with your hand on the warm plastic cabinet of the radio.

  TRY TO RECALL the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and try to grasp and appreciate the high quality of lunacy required for you to have ever thought you were that person. Determine if it is reasonable to assume that there might be a conservation of sadness and happiness in the universe, as there is alleged to be a conservation of mass and energy. Ponder issuing a monograph called “The Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics of Human Emotion,” which will posit that the sloppitudes of human wants and fears and hopes and satisfactions and dissatisfactions and mournings and celebrations can be as precisely known as quantities of entropy and Gibbs free energy and the location of a particular subatomic particle, at a particular time, on the backside of the moon. Procure for yourself some good hard cooked cheese and eschew, as you do, raw soft cheese.

  Prepare your backpack. Line up all the velcro closures in your environment. Pine Sol the entire joint. Skip down to the mailbox and disregard the mail when you get it home. Picture in the cumulus clouds above you on the mail run a dog it would not be bad to have with you on the ground. Ponder whether you really do have the balls to refuse medical treatments in the event you are diagnosed terminally or with something that might as well be. Call Mickey Milam and ask him if it is permissible for a person in this county to be put on a funeral pyre and burnt. Try to use up the can of sweetened condensed milk and resolve to never open another one. Try to figure out what thyme actually tastes like and how you could know oregano and cilantro but not tarragon and thyme. Don’t regret anything today except the standard recycling regrets, and do not resist regretting those, which deepens and protracts the act of the regretting. Name Cloud Dog, if he would but come down, Nu-Ra Buddy In The Sky With Diamonds, and explain to him that he is sired by the most famous beagle in history out of a song by the Beatles, and say, “Beagle, Beatle—how cool is that?” to him, and watch him thump his tail in earnest gratitude for the attention and hold you altogether blameless for being an idiot. Resist the conclusion that if he does not perceive you to be an idiot he is an idiot himself. Show him a measure of the charity he shows you. Which is to say, love him with equal reciprocating indiscrimination and be for once, or for a few moments, which is what once means, a man as happy as a dog.

  THE INFAMOUS HOMOSEXUAL dogbreeder drugrunning moneylaundering felon Lumbee Indian who called you recently and left a phone number he stumbled with and then called back and gave a corrected one for, neither of which works, so you cannot call him back now—call the Fayetteville Detective Bureau and leave a message that a friend of yours up there has you worried and maybe they know something, and when the silliness of this settles in on you after the call, look in the narcotics drawer and see what there is. Go downstairs and get the football with the split bladder beside your daughter’s bed and take it outside and kick it into the woods. This will not be very far since the thing holds no air and after a day or so when the picture of mold on the dead football has a firm place in your mind go get the football and wipe it off well and put it back beside your daughter’s bed. Say, out loud if you want to, pretending perhaps that the narcotics have taken effect and so you have excuse to talk to yourself, She is a handsome girl who will not die of loneliness and not a spindly boy (as I was) who would have died of loneliness (as I did), my prayers on this score were answered, and she has not lied to spindly boys and broken their hearts, my prayers ditto, so all in all I am feeling very good about her and about her liking footballs and cannot kick this thing into the woods even if it were the case, which it is not, that its deterioration would not break my heart and keep me from sleeping and make me have to move.

  TAKE YOURSELF IN HAND. Get a heft of yourself, then prudently release yourself from hand: it is too late. Do not be ov
ertroubled by the chicken’s standing for you; you are her rooster and she must be herself. If you want to be troubled about something, be troubled that you let her rooster be killed by the airhead neighbor’s airhead dogs unavenged. Today is a good day to give no one a hard time about anything, or today is a good day to give everyone a hard time about everything. You must decide how you wish to presume. Look up “salamander”: you want the culinary meaning, which may well go back to medieval times. Do not oppress any of the women you have already oppressed, and try not to oppress any new ones. Try to get all the way to the grave, in fact, without oppressing another woman. You will need the equivalent of one of those harnesses that mechanically extracts the fainting lab worker from the immediacy of a noxious chemical reaction in research and manufacturing processes. Salute in your mind Mayo Smith, who invented PVC using just such harnesses and who talks a good game of oppressing women but to your knowledge has not oppressed one yet, and yet he changed the world with his polyvinyl chloride. He in fact de-oppressed a lot of women, if we want to take a special-angle view of Mayo and his work, by reducing the time a woman might have to look at a plumber’s butt crack to the time it takes a plumber to glue a PVC fitting together, about ten seconds. That is the speed of light compared to his threading and installing a piece of black pipe, and you should be in a position at all times to let the world know, and its women, what Mayo Smith has done for them. Just before you oppress another woman, you might, in fact, just say Excuse me, I know Mayo Smith, and in his honor, lest it be besmirched by my staying here any longer, I have to go.

  ADMIT THE WOMAN and her daughter to your house so that they can go to the ecology conference without staying at the Zen hostel. Have it explained that this is the eco conference, this month, not the solar-panel workshop, next month, for which you initially agreed to let them stay in your house, because a friend of yours asked if this was feasible and you said it was, not paying attention to dates, so when the woman called you naturally assumed she was on about the solar-panel workshop, but she was not, and now you have accepted the mother-daughter eco team twice into your house. Have it explained that the program of intense stretching and lymph-liberating mojo that she purports to trade for the room will take at least two and a half hours and that Sally, the daughter, was born here, and the only reason she was born at all is because Sheila Harr, a famous crazy landlord in the area, sixteen years ago during the Danny Rolling reign of terror, when she, the woman, demanded iron bars on the ground-floor windows because someone’s boyfriend had merely crawled through a window to get to an upper room to get his shit back from the girl who’d kicked him out, and if an ordinary boyfriend just getting his shit could get in that easily what did it say about how easily Danny Rolling could cut all their heads off—on day fifteen Sheila Harr showed up with the iron bars, but she, the woman, was like No I am already OUT of here, and went downtown to a large house with four men in it and took up with one of them, “And the rest is, well,” she says, smiling and indicating Sally with a motion of her arm not unlike Vanna White’s indicating a letter on the board, “history.” Regard ever so slyly Sally standing there, who says, “That’s great, Mom,” and heads for the bedroom you have lent them. As soon as the mother goes to the car to get the $1800 infra-red pad they will sleep on because the room is freezing and they have the $1800 infra-red pad, try to repair the girl, feebly, but try. “Are you in school?” “Eleventh grade.” Figure out a way to compliment her intelligence, which may not be vast but which looks vast insofar as the girl is still with this mother and therefore has the patience of Job and you think that her intelligence must somehow be as large as or nearly as large as her suffering. “You’re in the IB program.” “The whole school is sort of an IB program, it’s a magnet school.” Ah. And so how to rescue her? Lock the door on the mother in the yard? No: just stand there, thinking of Woody Allen and Roman P. Keep your eye on this girl for the next two days and see if you can do anything for her. You are an ass and this girl has had enough of assness but maybe you can slide something her way that will not be more assness. You will have your hands full with the mother, but still. Even tonight you will be up until midnight hearing about the spiritual healers in Sarasota Florida the mother is referring you to, while the daughter sleeps in the cold room. Listen to the ecologically ferocious mother’s twenty-minute shower from the safety of your own bed. You have told her about your own adventure with Jesus a few years ago and you may need Him again. You have withheld from her how He wears a dirty Pink Panther costume and gives bj to French husbands on family holiday. It will be interesting to see yourself try to tell her this; it will require your knowing that Jesus himself is witnessing your telling her this and chuckling at you as you do it. You must tip your hat to Jesus: when they say He is The Man, they are not kidding.