“Oh yes,” I said with the conviction of fatigue.
She got up and dragged a suitcase to the pallet and opened it on at least five thousand loose pills.
“What are they?” I combed my fingers through them. It would take several college freshmen good with their PDRs several days to key this load out.
“Berry good,” my good nurse said, and picked one for me and placed it on my tongue. Where had I been all my life? How had I not been on a Chihuahua quest until now? What had been wrong with me? Why had I even passively plodded along on the group hiking trails? Why had I listened to Park Rangers whom I knew to be pederasts? I had paid my bills and stopped at my stop signs, and it suddenly looked as if I need not have. I may have tied my Reeboks a little looser than my peers, but I had strode the mall all the same.
At this precise moment a ghostly face did appear in the window, scaring a very modest little spurt of something out of my behind. The face was as quickly gone.
“Who was that?”
“That was Zeus.”
“Zeus? The real one?”
“There is more than one?”
“Well, no, I—”
“Zeus.”
I took a deep breath and swallowed hard: okay, I was through with all this Ranger Rick paint-by-the-numbers living and Cartesian logic and conservation of this and that and paying for what you get and getting what you pay for and being careful what you ask for because you might get it and vengeance is the Lord’s and however many commandments and one and one is two and a circle is perfect and this is unique or not but not somewhat unique and the other million and one ways of staging yourself to the as if you were in possession of a street map and a schedule of trains. Since you were finally not in possession of a map and a schedule, who is to say that Yoo-Hoo and pills and Zeus making a bed check on you and your brown nurse is not the True Way? “Just tell me what is wrong with that!” I yelled at the ceiling.
“Shhh!” My brown good trained professional friend got me another pill and delivered it and calmed me with her cooing and we slept the sleep of sheep.
I lived in a sea of varicolored pills and brown flesh and pasty faces peering in the window. Not all of them were Zeus. I was left in the day to…to do with it whatever I chose. No discussions of purpose or plan oppressed themselves into our simple time. María went to work and at night we did pills and whoopee. We had no problems because we had no conversation. That clearly is the major undoing of relationships. I advise heartily against blather. There must be minimal communications of course, but in the battle of the sexes, as in any war, the communiqués should be tactical, brief, and if possible in code. María and I managed a coded brevity that was exquisite. I loved her breasts, her smiles, and her Percodan, and she liked my fox-colored starchy hair and that I did not strut around in banty swagger, I think. In the mornings when the poor thing had to ride the bus to work, I sat in the town square having mango and strong coffee and dark brown unlabeled beer. I pondered the absence of the kinds of problems one would be pondering Stateside. I pondered even this absence gradually less and less until I pondered the immediate: a mango without a bar code and wax on it, a coffee more coffee than water, a beer without a team of circus horses and a baseball team attached to it. I decided to name my fifty-pound Chihuahua Trotsky, or Mr. Trotsky.
On the lam in Mexico after a preposterous dog I have occasion to think of how sane childhood is, even its extreme moments and venues, compared to what we make of adulthood. This is why we go around chanting mantras about the value of maturity. We could not go on without this constant hypnosis. Of course — and I am living proof — if you do undo the hypnosis and prove capable of handling it, as I did when I mounted up on Tod McGillicuddy’s noble blue trike with my carton of chocolate milk, They will bind you over for the nuthouse, where everyone has had a vision of childhood and loss of the garden.
Dirt floors, sandals, foot baths in gaudy plastic tub. No deodorant. High-quality tortillas at every house. Butter and salt and roll into a cigarette! Eat it! A pig wanders the village and everyone knows whose it is! If someone took it everyone would know who! The pig knows whose he is, and who he is! Very little garbage because it is all valuable! Ice in an icehouse, abundant if you ask for it! Fruity drinks ladled to you and drunk from the vendors glass, which he hands you, you drink, you hand back! One glass the whole operation! Want new clothes? Find a stand, take off your old, put on the new on the roadside at the stand, and walk off! Get a hat! Buy an owl! Amulets, spice, dolls! Birds, yo-yos, sisters! Sun, dust, rain! Heat, wind, cool! Day, dusk, night! Living, breathing, dying! Drinking, fighting, screwing! Laughing, weeping, not saying a thing! Flies, spiders, ants! Fresh, stale, pickled! Taking a shit, feeling fine, delirious with fever! Happy! Sunglasses! Naturally losing weight! Happy!
Answers are to be found, when they are to be found, in the dirt. Questions of self-actualization would seem to be moot when you find yourself in Mexico in lazy pursuit of an improbable dog. There are no angels on our shoulders after a point in life, and I’ve reached mine. I eschew prescribed medication. I sometimes contemplate cotton candy. I can tie my shoes. I cannot sing or talk spontaneously anymore. I can hardly even lust on impulse, if lust may be verb intransitive, and the world is vulgar enough now, at least in the sense of crimes against English, that I do not see why it may not be verb intransitive.
The beauty of mountain living continues unapace. I do nothing and nothing does not strike back. I tidy the house of an odd morning, though with the dirt floor the operation is one of judgment. You want the broom marks either all in one direction or describing a pleasant and regular pattern; the two cups together here, the two plates there, or a cup on a plate and a cup on a plate, as you prefer. The crow in the window is not to be teased with a shiny object. A gecko on the hearth is to be steered around: he will eat his translucent weight in flies. Then a coffee and a pill of choice about mid-morning, about the time you’d sit down and watch a rerun of Lucy in the States. I continue to fret the non-abandonment of Mrs. M.
The people here are friendly, whether dead or alive, mortal or god. The switchblade boys appear to have been an aberration, mostly. I do sometimes long for the odd breakfast cereal, but this passes with a good eye-to-eye with the crow.
I more and more display a contemplative nature, except that little in me inclines to elevated matters. Of occasion I take exquisite pleasure in a good tooth brushing and face scrubbing with a marvelous soap that they make themselves somehow from hogs and that smells of oranges. Grooming seems important when you walk about on your twenty-thousand-mile sandals. I am going to go soon in search of the fifty-pound Chihuahua, and I want to look good. If I am to be laughed at, I prefer an impeccable countenance. There is comfort in being deemed a neat lunatic. And less vainly there is the matter of being thought well of by the fifty-pound Chihuahua should one be found. One does not ordinarily credit dogs with discriminating in the matter of the master’s dress, but this will not be an ordinary dog.
One day I washed my face well and got on the bus to go and find him. I felt very secure in myself. I did not care what happened. That is how everyone should feel every day, but in my case I need the artifice of looking for something that should not exist and, should it, that will make people laugh at or run from to feel “normal.” As I grasp the nuances and vagaries of psychological disorders from my early brushes with the science, there is not much wrong with me.
In Chihuahua I found plenty plenary kennel. I found dogs the size of country rats with eyes the size of shooter marbles, with tiny, heavy-nailed feet that clicked on tile. I smiled at all these dogs and asked the breeders, “Más grande?” I have no idea if this locution was correct. It seemed that it was taken to mean something more like “More greater numbers?”—i.e., more dogs? — because I was invariably shown more (small) dogs.