Without lives, men who are not neat and brave and Buster-Brown bustamente, you mean.
Yes.
Afraid.
Yes.
Nulls.
Yes.
I find that even if I have a coaster to hand I will rarely put my glass on it. I carelessly damage the surface of tables.
This is who we are.
I regard this carelessness carefully. I am industrially idle. This defines me.
There is no point to us.
I will not need another new swimsuit in my time.
We never needed a new swimsuit. We just thought we did.
What do you actually call a swimsuit?
Does one, or does I?
Do you.
I call it a bathing suit.
Would you ever have said trunks?
Never. Sounds preposterous, and I can’t say why. My trunks alas are in my trunk.
Once I am in my trunks I will get in the water.
Still, I can hear Jayne say, Studio, put your trunks on, love, let’s go for a refreshing dip in the Gulf.
That is the dead speaking, we cannot challenge them. And before they were dead they were neat and brave and not afraid. They can say what they will. I am having a cramp in my gut.
They can say that?
No, I am having a cramp. Now.
You are strange.
Make us a colorful drink with a sugary liqueur. Would you? I feel like a famous lost heroine.
But you are not famous and not a heroine. You are just lost.
Yes, I am comfortable enough. I would like to have a gun.
Not suicide.
Of course not. I would just like some oiled steel, just to behold.
A symbol.
I suppose. Of something. Perhaps not a symbol, but a thing.
The old Ding an sich!
I think so. We have finally gotten one, one we comprehend.
A good oiled pistol on the table.
To hell with the coasters and where the drinks park themselves, we have oily steel already on the table!
We are making progress.
I did not think that we would, in our time.
&
When I wake up in the mornings the impulse to cry is almost sufficient that I start.
Why do you not, then? As that little imp put it — do you recall this? Throw up right here, Mother.
You are referring to that child in the Sokol gymnasium.
Yes.
That was genuinely funny.
Why was he saying that?
Because she was complaining of having eaten too much spaghetti and said she might be going to be sick.
And they were kneeling on the gym floor.
And the child got tired of her threatening to throw up and tapped his finger on the mat and said, Throw up right here, Mother.
Politely.
Very politely.
No one took any notice.
That is what was so funny.
I recall it now. I am the same woman. I feel like crying.
So do. I will be the same imp. Cry right here.
I am embarrassed at how much weeping I have done in my life, and think that not one more tear is in order, to salvage what I can of…
Of what?
That is the question. Just what is this operation about? In preserving dignity or anything else, what is served? I think I do not quite get it all.
We’ve been over this.
Yes, and still, and this is what gets me, I feel that I should not cry anymore, even though intellectually, if we should call it that, we know one may as well cry as not if he’s as lost as we are.
Lost in the nonwoods.
The closest we are to lost in the woods is lost in the woodwork.
I like it.
Anyway I am unstable until I get the coffee and by jacking my nerves up a bit calm them down.
Is that how it works?
Yes, it’s irony, fairly traded and artisan-roasted irony.
Juan Valdez and Joe DiMaggio are taking care of you.
They are the same person except for the kind of women they ran with. They both help me keep on keepin’ on. I love that idiocy.
Did Crumb do that? Was it a big Crumb foot marching in the air, leading the fool attached to it?
If it were not Crumb I don’t know who it was.
Crumb left us here. He moved to France.
We would too, if we could. We would leave ourselves here.
Why does Crumb get to leave and we don’t?
Because we are talking to the dead? Because we are weeping? Because we miss our dogs more than our parents? Because we are the subject of Crumb? It’s a hard one.
Speaking of rocket science, do you recall hearing children of the ghetto proclaim they were going to be corporate lawyers? Plain lawyer wasn’t enough?
Is that not unlike wanting to be a brain surgeon?
Whence this zeal to specialize when they are so far in the hole?
Doesn’t it mean they know it’s fantasy so why not go ahead and make it sound fantastic as well? Is it really any worse or different than painting a car June-bug green?
Am I following you?
Can any of us follow Crumb to France? That is what I am talking about. If you cannot, paint your car green or cry all day, it does not matter. Tell people you are going to be a rocket scientist when you grow up. They cannot hold it against you. Shoulder to shoulder we look abroad and pray for Crumb to send drawings of feet and thick women.
We know he can because he’s eating good cheese.
&
Variegated terrain.
Yes?
I am thinking about it.
What about it?
Is it all it’s cracked up to be.
This I trust is not a pun.
No. I think that I am attracted to the idea of variegated terrain, or to the thing itself, and then I wonder what is wrong with a smooth plain—
The sound of wide water! We finally got to use that.
I have never heard that.
Then you are under-read or I am stupid because I think it’s Yeats.
Was Yeats a card?
Yes.
Would he have liked variegated terrain or monoterrain?
That is close to monotrain.
Yes it is.
I don’t know. All those guys, they drank, they did not want the ground playing any more tricks than it had to. I am thinking they’d go for monoterrain. Your poets with broken noses are unbecoming.
The mail just came.
It is not worth the powder it would take to blow an ant an inch to go get that mail. I knew a jolly woman in Georgia who would say stuff like that. She had terminal psoriasis at the end. Do you recall when you could get letters from girls?
Those were the days in which hormones ran like gurgling brooks in our veins and melted our knees with need.
Yes, those days, and those days are not these days, and that mail contains nothing.
Moreover, I shudder now to realize it is not Yeats but Trouser Snake Eliot who coined the sound of wide water. I apologize. I have rued the day.
Ease up. The day was rued when we came upon it, or when it came upon us, and beheld us marring the horizon, sitting here like unconquerable savages, men missing their dogs and talking pointlessly unless talking to the dead. Let’s sharpen something.
Do you recall the Mexicans sharpening the big knives on the concrete abutments under the bridge and cutting up the sharks?
I will never forget it. They were not big knives, they were outright plain old simple all-they-could-get machetes. Slicing up sharks with machetes!
Hand to mouth.
Mouth to hand.
Hand to hand.
Mouth to mouth. They were not bums sitting on their hands and complaining.
We are good at it, being bums. In our way we have made something also of a desperate situation. It is true that we are not carving up monsters of the deep with farm implements, but—