You & Me by Padgett Powell

time today consist of? Can you put a finger on it? Isn’t that a lovely expression?
    To put my finger on it, something is percolating in my bowels, my life insurance policy has lapsed because I did not make the payment in time, my tax return is not yet complete, it awaits word from my broker whom I believe I have offended with a joke about his deplorable politics, I await word from a colleague at work whom I have offended by calling a nitwit, a willing young woman is to visit with whom I cannot see having carnal relations, with her is an unwilling one with whom I can, yesterday I did not eat anything, and apparently do not wish to today, though this coffee is nice, thank you; I miss my dog, I am in this foreign country and do not speak, I miss my wife, I live under the constant low roiling purple soft cloud of divorce about ten feet off the ground and tracking a man like a dog with a better nose than the dog I miss had. There. For starters.
    I do not see that you have a problem. You just have a whining problem.
    This is true. Thank you. I feel better. Much better.
    Don’t go getting carried away.
    No. Do you know the difference, by the way, between France and India?
    I do not.
    If you look out the window for thirty minutes in France you will see a dog take a shit; in India, a man.
    Why would a man capable of or interested in an observation of this caliber think he has a problem?
    You have been most helpful to me today, sir.

&
    Do you see this hazard of steel appearing—
    What is a hazard of steel?
    I don’t know. But it appears to recede into infinity, rails of steel or a channel of steel, somewhat like a steel trough, except it is heavy and precisely machined—it is like a giant pistol action the size of a railroad, you might say.
    All right. Let’s say I might say that. It is not clear to me why I am saying it or why you are saying it. What about the hazard of steel?
    Well, I see it. In my mind.
    You see in your mind a railroad-sized pistol action receding out of sight. To the exclusion of all else?
    Well, no. I don’t see exclusively the hazard of steel all the time, but when I do see it I will say that at that moment I see nothing else. It fills the screen as it were.
    So you don’t see, say, cedar trees and rabbits marching also into infinity beside the perspective of steel.
    No. And that is a good word, perspective. It is a perspective and that is what occupies your mind, not the surround, just as in seventh-grade mechanical-drawing class they never had you draw in the parking lot and trees around the building that also I might note seemed poised to recede into space.
    So what you have is like a seventh-grade vision of a giant pistol action stretching let us say from New York to Moscow.
    Or beyond. The steel looks so polished, so well cut!
    Nicely oiled?
    Finely oiled!
    And when you behold this vision, you are disturbed by it, or—
    No! Made completely, utterly content. I love the hazard of steel. I want to work the giant action!
    Do you think it tenable that our brains have gone?
    Yes I do.

&
    Have you had further occasion to view the hazard of steel?
    No. It has been replaced by a vision of flowers.
    Giant flowers issuing from the giant pistol action?
    No. A field of gladiolas. Tended by a blind man. On a three-wheeled ATV. The glads are sold from a jar in a shed by the road on the honor system. The honor system tends to stick in the mind when you see it.
    I will never forget seeing a refrigerator full of Orbit beer sold on the honor system at a motel in the Florida Keys. I wish I could recover that moment.
    Isn’t it wanting to recover moments that undoes us?
    Yes, I suppose that is what undoes us.
    How should we seek to not wish to recover moments, then?
    I propose two ways: repudiate the recovering of moments as childishness and embrace the covering as it were of the present moment in such a way that the recovery of a moment past seems moot.
    It would seem to me if we could