You & Me by Padgett Powell Page A

effect option two that the repudiation of the recovering of past moments as childish would be moot, so you are really proposing one method.
    So be it.
    It is simply seize the day, in the way that the day was seized the day you saw an Orbit in a rusty refrigerator on a slab in Pine Key at the Rainbow Motel if it was not the Peace Inn and put twenty-five cents in a cup for it and thought you were in an already passing-away time, and were, but you were seizing that time at that time and were in it and now it stands for its very vigor as the kind of moment cleaner and better than the current dull ones you are not so seizing and enjoying.
    Yes. That was a mouthful but I think you have it right.
    Have you noticed that everything is leaning a little bit today?
    Leaning?
    Yes, off-plumb. Maybe it is just me.
    Are you dizzy?
    No, but I swear that pot right there is hanging not vertical, and those decals you pasted up of that grasshopper are not symmetrical anymore, and, you know, isn’t everything just a bit leaning ?
    I think you are right.
    Should we straighten everything?
    I think not. I don’t think us capable, one, but I see no reason to undo the charm of things leaning. Things are finally getting in tune with us .
    About time.
    Yes. Leave the horse’s mouth alone.
    I wish we owned a forklift. Be fun to drive it around and pick impossibly heavy shit up.

&
    Is it amazing how fast things break down now?
    What things?
    Us.
    Oh. Yes. But that has, we have, always been breaking down.
    That is technically true but when I was twenty and looked like a beautiful girl and beautiful girls would pay attention to me because of it you could not tell I was breaking down.
    Well you can tell it now that you look like an old man and will soon look like an old woman.
    You are vicious.
    Yes. Do you know the original meaning of vicious ?
    No.
    Me either, but I recently read it and it is something quite different from what one is when he tells someone he is an old man soon to look like an old woman.
    Probably in the early innings of vicious there was not enough meanness about for old men to be telling old men they would soon look like old women.

&
    I recall it: tending to vice. That’s all vicious meant.
    Well you don’t tend to vice, you are vicious, a vicious bastard.
    I must say we have much improved the word over time.
    As we decline the words get better.
    That is how it should be. They are our children.
    We become old women and the words go skateboarding.
    I am down with it. I need a vicious drink today.
    I wish we had a live-in bartender.
    We should have an entire Court. We are princes.
    Yes we are. Just exiled before our time.
    I feel like walking in the woods that do not exist and talking birds into sitting on my hand with the promise that I will not hurt them.
    I had a dream that someone’s wife visited me in bed.
    Anyone’s wife?
    No, a particular someone whose name I daren’t mention. I was dreaming in the dream that I was kissing this woman and woke up still within the dream to discover that I really was kissing her. It developed—in three syllables or fewer—that she had been trying to get me to meet her down at the dock but that my prudence did not allow it so she knew the only way to have me was to slip into bed while I was helpless and asleep and have her way, and this alas she had done, she was as proud and bright as Jack Horner. She was facedown in the bed at this point and spread her legs and said, Do you like my apple?
    Did you avail?
    I took a bite of the apple before it occurred to me I was not free to bite with abandon. Husbing.
    Ah, you had the old husbing-still-looks-at-his-wife delusion.
    Yes. Well, I was after all in a dream state. And this apple was worthy of inspection, which is why I straight off took a bite.
    Why can we not live real lives?
    I don’t know.

&
    We are done?
    It would appear we are.
    I have noticed this morning that my shins have grown thin and sharp.
    We have