You & Me (11 page)

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Was that a . . . what was that?

What?

That flew by.

What flew by?

That is what I am asking.

You are asking what flew by.

Yes.

I saw nothing fly by.

Come on—it was like a condor, blew right through here about six feet high.

Didn't see it.

Dude, you should have
felt
it.

Didn't feel it.

I have a headache.

Take a nap.

&

In the broadest sense of the word: helmet.

What are you talking about?

I have no idea.

Are you insane?

I think so. Isn't that our goal?

I suppose it is.

So: helmet. In the broadest sense. I want to get the pols and the voters together and say, “In the broadest sense of the word, helmet, people. What I am doing here, on the ground, I am a commander on the ground, listen to me, I am thinking outside the helmet here,” and so forth, until someone objects—

And you know that no one will object.

Of course no one will object, unless they are told to object. Helmet.

Iyuh hayev ayuh mayarble.

What?

It's my new language: two-cylinder instead of one. Two-stroke.

Liyuk, cayool?

Roieet.

We are insane.

We are inSAYane.

&

Dude.

What?

Nothing.

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Are we going to have fun today?

No.

Are we going to live today as if it is the last day of our lives?

No.

But we know from the testimonials of Close Callers that we should.

Yes.

But we don't do it.

No.

Why not?

We can't conceive of how you actually do it.

We can't?

No. Go ahead. Propose that we live right now as if this is our last day. What do we do? Where do we go?

I want to sit right here and think about The End.

See? Why don't you ACTUALIZE yourself? Have you been to Tahiti? No? Then you must go. Now. Be gone.

Jesus.

See? You see?

God wasted two whole spaces on us as human integers. We're nils in terms of becoming all that we can become.

Actually, we are negativos, like junkies, except we don't even have the desire or the drive for self-satisfaction like a good junkie. He has at least his want and he seeks to claim it.

We just don't want. And don't satisfy.

I don't even really get hungry anymore in a good way.

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We're out there.

We're out where?

There.

We are here. Cornbread are round.

I know. I just feel like saying, We're out there.

The mood is upon ye for nonsense again?

It always is. You know that.

Yes. The stove is the only sane party here.

But, really, doesn't “We're out there” feel just about right, and finally true, and agreeably unpresumptuous—

The smart retarded we go for?

Yes.

I admit that it does. We are out there.

I can barely see it, the there out there. It's deserty but not in a rich, real way—no cacti or lizards or mesa or Santa Fe shit, not even the vast ocean sand roll of the African shtick. Just kind of sand-seeming blah. Like the, well—I just saw one of these—like a Polaroid picture that doesn't develop into anything except some toxic-looking edges and a grayish center you keep hoping will look like something soon but it never does and you put it in a drawer and keep it anyway until your house is so full of crap like it that you pray for a house fire to rid you of it all, and your life in a sense resembles the drawer and the house full of likewise crap around it and you want a fire to clean it up too, and in lieu of that you start longing to be in a gray undeveloped place that is represented by “out there” in your tired brain, and you go around saying, “We are out there”—

When in fact you are not, but you badly want to be, out there—

Exactly. Make us a drink if you will.

I will, my brother. I will go to the porch and make them on the washing machine, which I like to do, and from there I will call into the house and say, “I am out here making drinks,” and even this little echo of “out there” will gratify us a bit and keep us from being depressed and terrified.

We are geniuses.

We are not taking the pills that give you the Tantric ejaculation.

Grossoroni. I want clean gin with juniper berries in it. I can see a juniper berry rolling on the Sahara like a BB on a sixteen-lane highway. You remember when that joke was “four-lane” highway?

You remember when we thought the idea of Chernobyl was bad?

I have no idea what a juniper berry actually looks like. I picture a blueberry crossed with a caper. Rolling across a dune as tall as Fate.

As what?

Nothing. I've lost it.

When I make the drinks on the washing machine, there is always a tiny bit of sand on the lid under the glasses and I swirl the liquor and hear a faint gritty noise and it makes my day. At this moment “out there” is precisely under the glass in my hand.

You have lost it too.

No contest.

We must have our desires, even if they are not desires.

Perfect smart retard! We should coin something so objections will abate if we go public—like “smard.”

If I had access to a child I would buy it some marbles today. I would please the little bastard with something lovely and love the little bastard for being pleased and being lovely itself, the little bastard I would by that point not be calling a little bastard but would in fact by that point be in love with. My brain has become like unto a dog's, I think.

A dog is smard, very smard.

The essence of smard.

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What about airplanes?

What about them?

As Out There.

Well . . . yes, but a rather populist view isn't it?

I don't mean the Out There of being out there in one, alone and free and silent and all that horse. I mean the hangar, the clean huge spotless concrete floor. The plane with no grease on it. The brilliant dials and gauges. The firmitude of the wings. The good paint. The spanking new of things or the seasoned worn-glove old of things, nothing shitty. You know, a small plane in a good private hangar. I feel out there just imagining myself next to a plane like this.

We are not going to own such a plane.

No.

So it's an impossible exclusive Out There, for us. The fuckers.

True. Still: red and white cub on that squeaky weird-ass pebble-grained epoxy flooring, man.

That floor that has like Pollock in it?

Yes.

That is Out There.

For us, though, we are going to be in a field of used Huggies. The Wal-Mart parking lot at noon for us. There we are, dazed from trying to figure out if the bananas are plastic or real.

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So we are agreed that the best thing would be to be out there on the desert in a clean Piper Cub in the good worn leather seat fingering the rich knobbery.

Assolutamente.

It is dark today.

Looks like hurricane.

Can't be.

I know.

We need a child.

I know. But we won't pass the adoption profile.

Maybe in Kenya we would.

Where the qualification is Mzungu?

I would not think it more demanding than that.

I don't know—the Brits leave their footprint. Could be a pedophile-quotient assay right up front.

So what will we do with this child, assuming we are not proven pedophiles, or if the Kenyans do not care that we are if we are?

I want him to grow to be strong and reserved and smart and take this chainsaw here, which I haven't yet purchased for him, and slowly cut this house apart and burn it for warmth until we and it and everything else in it is gone, and he then, the child, is a stunning athlete and goes to Harvard and speaks well of his two Mzungu uncles whom he could not have done it all without, and he has one of those impossibly beautiful sets of brilliant white teeth and smiles a lot while saying this about us, and we are rotting happily in the sand out there by the little twisted clean Piper Cub wreck in the sand. That is all I want.

Will he not be sad?

He will not.

Why not?

I don't know.

Su visión es mi visión.

For me it comes down to this: We were not sane men, but we were better than many. Our boy will somehow know this. It will sustain him. He conquers the NFL and then Harvard Medical and he knows that he was put there by two old pops who had nothing, least of all pretension. Out of our agreeable daft arises his untaught heroic. That which we so lacked. That is what I want.

What's his name?

Stanley. They have named him Stanley and we want to change it but, agreeably daft, we can't.

Okay. God am I tired.

I'm tired too, Helen.

What?

Nothing.

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Do you see a problem with my outfit?

Have you lost your mind?

No. I just thought that was funny.

It is.

Do you recall when we wanted to go to the liquor store in the orange jumpsuit with an electrical cord trailing out of it all the way back to the house?

Vaguely.

I recall that we thought of this, and that it was funny or had some point, but now I don't know what the point was, or the humor, exactly.

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We need things. Let me rephrase that: we need
things
.

I got the first one but not the second.

Things
would give us some distraction.

Bass boat, bearer bonds—that kind of thing?

Well, I am thinking, yes.

I thought we wanted house fire.

We do, but I think we want house fire only because we don't have good things that really provide the distraction we need.

Wives, jobs?

Yes. Maybe.

All the things that the people we despise have that we see make them despair, we don't have, and now we want them?

Well, maybe. All we do is talk and sit here. We have nothing. Those people are humanly realized and all that, and I grant you many are fucked up, but cannot there be a few who actually do have it going on? Like, real and smart days, and fun and accomplishments—you have to admit we do not effect that, sitting here doing our thing. Pondering plane wrecks in the desert as a
good
thing.

I heard about this football coach fired twice in the same year by different teams.

Well yes and what about being one that would, say, win the national title twice in three years, have a wife, and children not arrested for anything, have his organization like a little military under him, redeem some criminals by giving them some legal violence to channel their evil intent through, lovely second home like on the beach to keep you from wanting to burn down the primary—don't you think that might be all right, if you could get it?

You are talking about being a real man.

I am.

You will be on medication and having retrograde ejaculations before the week is out you keep this up.

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I need a saddle pommel. To steer me through the house. Not a horse or a saddle.

Just a disembodied pommel?

Exactly.

We could get you one of those four-wheel walkers and put a set of longhorns on it. You couldn't go through a doorway but you'd be stylin', stuck there.

I just need the invisible saddle pommel to hold on to. I think it's what the rappers are doing when they hold the crotch.

Is your hand going to be out in front of you as if you are riding a saddle and holding the pommel?

No. This saddle pommel is in my mind, and I need it.

I need a shovel to lean on, in my mind only. Also I need to shave the hair off the back of my neck.

That is another kind of want. Unless you purport to do that too with the shovel.

I know it. I don't.

I wish the masseuse team would get here, speaking of it.

Put on the jumpsuit and go to the liquor store.

Not without my pommel. I can't.

Did you hear about the kid who punched out the school-bus driver?

Did he suspect him of pederasty?

That was not intimated in the news report. What was intimated was that an innocent man was attacked by an early irrigible thug.

By what?

Incorrigible.

You said irrigible?

I did.

What does that mean?

I don't know, I've never heard it.

It sounds like it should be a word, though.

It does.

The irrigible thug. Almost the opposite of the incorrigible thug. Is corrigible a word?

I think not.

Then the word for what we mean by corrigible should be irrigible.

Irrigable almost works too.

That
is
a word.

Scrabble master! Give me the jumpsuit and the cord. Plug me in. I'll get Nordic Blue vodka and be a dandy there and back.

I'll hold my pommel if the brothers mess with me. I'll say I'm looking for that irrigible punk that slapped the pederast bus driver and that I aim to seduce him with my suit and my juice.

There is a fine line between humor and stupidity.

The line is finer all the time.

The bird doesn't change.

The bird does not change.