You & Me by Padgett Powell Page B

bird brains, why not bird legs?
    I suppose. Still, when your leg feels like a knife, it is sad and alarming, quietly.
    I can accept that.
    I want some bread pudding.
    Let us locate the best bread pudding within our reach and get on with dying.
    Do you know what cabildo means?
    No.

&
    It’s a miracle.
    What’s a miracle?
    Nothing.
    Why’d you say something was?
    Felt like it. It felt like the time.
    You’ve waked up mindless again?
    Yes. Just what is wrong with that?
    I have tendered no criticism of mindlessness.
    You better not.
    I merely seek to verify.
    Isn’t something a miracle, though?
    I’m sure something is.
    I am too.
    I don’t see one at hand.
    Well, they’re rare, that’s inarguable. If they were common, they would not be called miracles.
    Your logic is sound. It is not altogether mindless.
    Coffee bean.
    What?
    Would not a coffee bean be a miracle?
    Easy now.
    Why is not a coffee bean a miracle?
    Because then, ah, so is a cup of coffee and an idiot, or two, drinking it. Why not say a bird, or for that matter, a bird’s leg, is a miracle?
    Not a wing?
    Wing schming. A bird’s leg came off a dinosaur for God’s sake. A scaled powerful appendage shrunk to one five-hundredth of its original size and attached to an animal that can fly . Where would miracles cease if we allow coffee beans and birds’ legs? Miracles would not cease. They would never, properly speaking, not begin, never not have begun .
    Everything is a miracle.
    Exactly. And a minute ago you said nothing was a miracle.
    A minute ago nothing was. And you said I was mindless.
    You were. Now you’re not.
    I am happy. Are you happy?
    No I am not happy.
    I wish you were.
    I do too. I am happy that you are happy.
    If you were happy too, it would be a miracle.
    Yes it would. It would it would it would.
    Look: here’s a coffee bean, a bird’s leg, and your happiness. Is it so far-fetched?
    You remind me of the halcyon time when my father camped out on Lake Rosa with his strange uncle Jake. I envisioned Studio doing this earlier, but really it was my father. They did this on private land. There were so few people then, and the few people knew each other, so that camping on private land did not then, as it does today, constitute trespass and grounds for prosecution and trouble. They camp out on somebody’s land who does not mind and they catch giant bass by throwing the lure called a Dillinger. A Dillinger looks like a small wooden cigar with propellers at each end and it is painted to resemble a zebra. Actually it is painted to resemble a convict suit, black-and-white striped, hence its name. This caught fish in that miraculous day of absent litigation, friendliness among people, and large and plentiful game. I feel like weeping.
    I am weeping.
    We are fools to even try to be alive now.
    We are not, really, alive now.
    No, we are not.
    We are not miracles either.
    No. I can see my young father and this odd fellow Jake having coffee they have brewed over a small fire in one of those agate coffee boilers that look in profile like a laboratory beaker, sort of—
    Triangular-shaped.
    Exactly. Bad coffee badly brewed, overbrewed, boiled probably, actually ruined-ass coffee that they find delicious, that is delicious if you are lying there on that clean ground under the live oaks on the slightly painful acorn caps apprising the morning and the fourteen-pound majestic monsters you have caught on such a ridiculous artifice as the Dillinger, which is at rest suspended from a rod and reel leaned against the live oak they are under. My father will go into World War II as a marine and suffer hardship that is somehow not different from this very pleasure he and Uncle Jake are enjoying now.
    I don’t see how you make that connection but I do not dispute it.
    Dispute nothing.
    Disputing nothing is the first step unto miracles.
    Disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of