You & Me: A Novel Read online

  You see in the creek us.

  Yes I think I do.

  It is our mirror.

  It is.

  Well let us not be so vain.

  All right. We shall cease going to the creek.

  Our hair is also not good but I do not see that we can stop it. Our hair is us but we must have it. We are not good and we must admit it.

  I think we do a fair job of that. As good a job as might be asked of anyone.

  I hope that you are right.

  Will it matter, in the end, if we have been good, done well, etc.? Whence the very idea that it will have mattered?

  Whence the very idea of good?

  Yes, you playhouse playboy, you nine-year-old Tarzan, who came up with the idea of goodness?

  It is one for the sages.

  &

  Do you ever feel you’ve left your heart in San Francisco?

  Yes, all the time.

  Not there of course but—

  Of course not there, but yes, this is what we have done, left it somewhere.

  Or did we perhaps not really have a heart, and have come to know it?

  This is perfectly tenable.

  Do you think hand-wringing now will effect a recovery?

  No.

  We shall regard our absent hearts as total losses, regardless of whether we had them once and lost them or never had them at all?

  This is the prudent course, I think.

  I’m with you, then. Is wanting to go see the creek or not go see the stupid anemic ditch we have to call a creek in trashed-out suburban America part of this losing of the heart and not knowing whether it is a loss or a congenital absence?

  I think it is related, somehow.

  Okay then. The issue is settled.

  We could do with some ice cream though. Makes the boy-man feel good, heart or no.

  It’s a cold, brutally unhealthy comfort.

  The very best, most honest comfort.

  Ice cream is like maggots in a field wound.

  Tell that to the codgers.

  It would stop them for a moment in that calm stream of strong silent knowingness they so gallantly ride.

  Those codgers get you worked up.

  I am a cat to their dogging. I admit it. I am delicate and vulnerable and I must inflate and arch and spit or they will have me. I admit it. Mine is the weak strength of bluster.

  You are a good man nonetheless, in our tribe of weaklings.

  Thank you. To say that requires of you a heart, which you have momentarily retrieved from San Francisco. I see steam on the mountains across the way.

  We have mountains across the way?

  We do now. They flowed in overnight.

  I did not know we were on a fluid landscape.

  To my knowledge we are not, there is no such thing, yet there are mountains with clouds strafing them gently, looking cottony and kind and the mountains inviting not looming or threatening as big ones might look. No Everestage, I mean. These are junior mountains, with trees on them, big hills properly speaking I suppose, I am most innocent of mountain terminology and taxonomy.

  The clouds are moving across them, prettily, as if on the way to San Francisco. Folks’ hearts are in those clouds.

  Godspeed.

  I am tired today.

  We are tired every day, are we not?

  We are. But one can suddenly tire of tiring, and move down a quantum level.

  Let’s get to absolute zero and see what happens.

  This we may be doing, if we perceive the land out the window to be flowing. Your poor little girl’s shack may have been whumped into the next county by a mountain, the distressed creek now a noble rushing cold cataract of clear and gurgling and clean strength. Running over smooth rocks, harboring sturdy fish, appealing to bears.

  It’s too much to hope for. I am going to bed. Rompoid Sturgeon.

  What?

  Nothing.

  &

  Where exactly are we?

  A very good question, requiring care in the answer. Geographically we have no idea. In the geography that has no place, that which obtains when the there is not there, can you dig it, we are between Jacksonville, Florida, and Bakersfield, California. I have never been to Bakersfield so I will tell you that I imagine chain-link fences in strident disrepair, all manner of paper and plastic blown into these fences, the asphalt and concrete expanses they once purported to contain crumbling and earthquake-looking, a scree of rubble and grit blowing about as if on the floor of a pizza oven the size of Baghdad, if you will excuse me an excess, a glare that signals white heat, anyone you run into want to beat you up, for money or for sport, and no way that anyone like Frank Gifford is ever going to come from there again, if he ever really did, and even the kind of indigents in country-western songs about it are noble compared to the riffraff coursing through its collapsed streets now. And now we go downhill to Jacksonville.

  That’s where we get the girl in the shack and the piddly creek that disturbs you so much.

  Yes. That creek. It has that orange shit in its shallows that is not shit but that conveys every impression of sewage that can be conveyed. It looks like rusted cotton. There is not outright mud but dirty sand. Not outright water but enough to support seven minnows, two crayfish, one mud turtle, one giant water bug, half a leopard frog, a third of a garter snake passing through, and no water bird but a flyover by a depressed songbird just keepin’ on keepin’ on, trying to find a concrete birdbath for a decent drink. Add a rubber or a Fritos bag, maybe a purse, and you about have it. Pair of panties. This is where we are.

  You shouldn’t have to feel the way you feel.

  No, I should not. But have you ever heard of feeling insurance?

  The premiums would be impossible, the actuarial tables a nightmare.

  And this is why Lloyds does not offer it. Blues insurance. Quite an idea.

  Verification tricky. Who would not claim?

  Precisely.

  Let’s go down to the creek and stare Despair down.

  All right. Fortify ourselves with some Kool-Aid? Chocolate milk? Morphine? Lip balm? A Dr. Bronner’s peppermint shower? Sit-ups? Read this article about adult-retardation hospitals being phased out of existence by progress? Put on clean underwear? Promise ourselves a shoe-shopping trip after the creek stroll?

  You are incoherent, almost.

  The edge of incoherence is a strong position, militarily speaking. Not incoherence outright, but the selvage as it were, affords a bidirectional moment between dissolution and precipitation, liquid and solid, that can absorb about any assault, any direction, gross or subtle, acid, base, land, sea, or air. The mind properly speaking is in a condition suggesting pickle relish, or chow-chow as it gets called. I am in chow-chow readiness for the creek. Head full of chow-chow I could go on and watch you watch the girl in the shack and not be over disturbed.

  You don’t get disturbed there. You did not climb the rope with Kathy Porter’s parts in your fetid brain and a hawser burning through your crotch as the earth spun to meet you and drive your weakened knees into your chin. The true difficulty of such a maneuver is of course avoiding the terminus on the end of the rope, board or large knot. That is why you have to clear away from the rope. Getting away from a rope as you slide down one is a subtle athletic proposition, because of course as you get free of it, it is weightless and can offer no resistance to your push, so you are pushing an object that affords variable, decreasing resistance, and if you push it too hard once your weight is clearing it you will introduce into it a curve that will wave down the rope and whip the end of the rope, which is what your push is designed to enable you to avoid, into approximately your genitals by towing your buttocks through them. Thus you can see why I could no longer afford to perform this trick for Kathy Porter once she had informed her father of our inclinations in the playhouse. I could never have successfully negotiated the rope escape had I had to worry also about him staring down at me once I hit the ground in my tumescent exhaustion
from the climb and fall. Can you imagine the difficulty of sticking a landing for Bela Karolyi if you’d been diddling his daughter?

  You hadn’t been diddling Mr. Porter’s daughter had you?

  No. I had not touched her. I did not know that was part of the plan. I just wanted a look. But since I did not know about touching, I thought looking contained the entire crime. Having looked was enough if I had been lying in the dirt under their giant live oak with giant Mr. Porter looming over me, and small meek Kathy standing by regarding her two heroes in the throes of some contest—fighting over her, were we? It could have been an interesting moment, but I at least was not man enough for it.

  But today we are men enough to walk into the slums of Bakersfield and look at a poor girl in a shack.

  Well, yes. It is different. The voyeurism here involves her poverty and our hopelessness. That is to say, she is truly hopeless, and we are only constitutionally hopeless, as men who cannot connect to the world of men proper, and we want something from her, from her true and honest despair as opposed to our bogus and self-generated despair.

  I had no idea going to the creek could offer this much.

  Kathy was apple-cheeked and freckled and hopeful, willing to entertain me in my excitement and not outright condemn me for it, even after her father gave her the finger wag. This other girl is dull in the eye. You have seen her. We have no communication with her. No one in her community is going to approach her with a proposition as innocent as mine to Kathy. That is the little moment that transfixes me when I see her. How good to Kathy I was, fumbling in the early teeth of desire, how good her father was to us both. How this girl today has none of that goodness. How the world has rotted in fifty years, is what I am saying.

  There was a poor girl fifty years ago in the same way.

  That might be true, but I was not there to see her. Somehow today I am. Something has changed which effects that simple, or not simple, change.

  You are today a dirty old man, is part of it.

  That is why I am taking a Dr. Bronner’s peppermint shower before I go out winderpeekin’.

  &

  I once heard Peter Jennings say “passenger manifesto.”

  He was referring to what they said as they went down.

  He was clever then.

  Yes.

  He was a man of the world, in the world—

  And we are not.

  Precisely.

  How did this happen, he get to say “passenger manifesto” and be a national icon, if not some kind of oracle, at least a grand national-news-anchor corporate mouth, and we are nothing?

  Hoyle and Darwin, and lard-and-hair sandwich. Peter Jennings never teased his mother with lard-and-hair sandwich, and you never would have said passenger manifesto, and there you have it.

  Thank you for wrapping up another conundrum of our times.

  De rien.

  I would certainly like to have some ice cream.

  &

  What are these things here?

  I’ve never seen them before. Is it things or one thing? Where was it?

  On the porch.

  Let’s get out of here before they or it explodes.

  I am terribly becalmed by a washing machine. Is everybody?

  Not everybody, surely, but most.

  Had I the affluence of Peter Jennings I would put a dedicated sleep washer next to my bed, just run a low-water light cycle, no pollutants.

  You could always toss in, say, your underwear at the last minute, the clothes you discarded before bed. To be practical.

  You could. You could transfer them to the dryer if you got up in the night, and put poppin’-fresh BVDs on in the morning. Change your whole outlook on life, the sleep washer.

  You could connect it to the bed itself and get a vibration quotient. The dryer heat could be used to toast the bed in winter.

  Man. This puts a whole new spin on “white noise.”

  But we don’t have the affluence of Peter Jennings. A washing machine is not a frivolous appliance for us. We would not survive were we to say “passenger manifesto” on national TV. We would be subject to the cruelest of ridicule, dismissal, were we momentarily so irregularly lucky to have been employed in the first place.

  So we best resign ourselves to imagining Peter Jennings sleeping next to his dedicated washing machine, his bed gently shaken, gently toasted, snapping into his fresh panties at the top o’ the morning for another day of lucrative suit mouth. Just resign yourself. He delivers the manifesto, you’re the passenger.

  I’m too depressed to go to the creek now. Looking at the girl is utterly beyond me.

  Let’s just sit here.

  Let’s.

  She’ll understand.

  She too is a passenger.

  Bakersfield is a passenger of place.

  Without a manifesto.

  We are without a manifesto, not on the manifest.

  Let us just sit here.

  Yes.

  &

  In the grove of trees down there is a table and a barber pole. You place your hat on the pole, and—

  I do?

  One does.

  Why?

  Would you allow me to tell you?

  Prosecute your voyage.

  One places his hat on the pole and a barber will emerge from the woods and give one a haircut. It is an old barber who has cut the hair of certain famous deceased men. Now he is enfeebled and shaking so badly that you will need repair to another barber for corrective attention to your new and sad-looking do.

  Is the barber pole turning?

  Yes. Why?

  Because I would feel odd, if not outright dizzy, watching my hat turn while waiting at a table in a grove of trees for an old barber to emerge and give me a bad haircut.

  I do not mean to suggest you must do it.

  No no, of course I will do it. It is a grove of trees with a table and a pole and a haircut to be had, I will of course do it. Something that is done is to be done, period, in the interest of good and modest citizenry.

  In the interest of being a good fellow, you mean.

  That is what I mean.

  Yes, well, then the barber of some famous dead will affect to cut your hair as you sit at the table in a pleasant breeze by a table in the shade of the trees. The whirling of your hat will not disturb you overmuch once you begin to worry about the undeft motions of the man with scissors and razor about your neck and throat and eyes and ears and nose. The straight razor under the nose when the nose is pinched up—the razor poised for the Hitler cut, that cut which will take out the hair which would otherwise form the Hitler mustache, I mean to say—will be your worst moment.

  I will sail through it as if it is the Fifth of May. The table—is the table perhaps early American, unlevel, of two or three broad virgin boards badly joined?

  You have the picture, my friend.

  I do. I will enter the grove of trees, placing my hat on the pole, sit in the straight-backed chair, await the geezer, accept my scary butchering, in the corner of my eye my fedora turning dizzily, my arm resting on the uneven planks of pine or walnut or cherry since indeed it could be real wood if what you say about the table is true, all of this in the shade of the trees and in a breeze. I will be oddly and momentarily a complete man living a full life.

  &

  I don’t want to go down there. Something could eat me—us. I forget you’re here sometimes. Something could eat us.

  I don’t regard that as the worst way to go. No matter how it went down, you’d not waste away. If the thing was large enough to attack, we might presume it large enough to get it over with. You’d be part of an appetite, part of Life.

  No old-folks home for you, eh? Down the hatch!

  That is right. Laugh as you will.

  I worry about small things eating me—malaria is worse than grizzlies.

  Of that no doubt. I am not going down there either if you think there are mosquitoes.

  Let’s stay right here in our nets an
d eat bonbons and get fatter and whiter and stupider and lazier and more cautious as we have less to be custodial of.

  Pustulent academics!

  I have never heard that word before. Is it a word?

  Pustulent? What other adjective could derive from pustule?

  It sounds good, I grant you. But the red vapor of Air Spell Check puffs from your mouth when you say it. I see pestilent and postulant, but no pustulent. You look momentarily like a sloppy vampire when you say it.

  I wish I could be a sloppy vampire. My life has come to naught.

  Don’t start. Let’s not go there. We live there, so let’s not go home.

  That phrase, “go there,” is funny I think because it approximates an abstract translation of the English idea behind it.

  What are you talking about?

  An Italian would say, “I have large friendship and I like to go there all the time.” If you put the move on a Frenchwoman who was not ready for it, she might say, “Don’t go there,” and stop your hand.

  I see.

  These bonbons are hard as rocks.

  They came from the little Filipino lad you purchased that brutal haircut for.

  He chose the barber.

  No, the barber is his uncle, and he had to go to him once you made it so public you were funding the venture.

  Is it my fault the uncle is inept? They’d have known the child got his hair cut no matter how it was financed. He looked like one of those faux primitives.

  Now he looks like he suffered a head trauma at Sunday school.

  He looks like a houseboy.

  He may, but he is bringing candy to us that might be ten years old.

  Well, we are free to lie here and complain of it, so what is there to complain about?

  A fattening man may not bark?

  I think not. Not honorably.

  Do we still pretend to honor?

  We do.

  All right, then. I say no more about the granite nougat from the wounded boy. I will say that when I came into the café you should not have humiliated me that way.

  What way?

  “Are you not wearing panties?”

  Oh, that.