I do think so.
Because that girl in that house reminds me of once talking a girl into showing me the goods in her playhouse, all very genteel you understand, a cute playhouse with proper cardboard appliances in it behind her proper suburban home, a lovely affair really until one day during the goods display she flinched and looked out the window and I asked what was it, and she said, “Nothing, but my father told me not to do this anymore,” and I bolted, end of affair, I not knowing that was a father’s job in this context and not knowing that it did not include persecuting me, I did not want the fellow after me and most certainly I did not want him knocking on the door of my house and involving my own father, not knowing my own father’s job would have been to smile and promise to handle it and secretly approving to have gently dissuaded me from any more affections unto Kathy Porter because she was not, apparently, to be trusted — knowing nothing, I ran from the playhouse, not stopping as per usual to climb the long rope swing into the live oak which had been my end of the bargain, Kathy’s reward for exposing the goods: she got to watch me make this heroic climb into the mossy ether and become a little Tarzan to her Jane by sliding back down the rope, hands and legs and loins on fire from the titillation in the playhouse and the friction of the exhausted fall, the most agreeable fall. There I’d be tumescent in the dirt, which Kathy knew nothing about and I was only starting to know something about. It is for these reasons that I no longer wish to walk in that neighborhood and see that poor girl alone in that ratty house and wonder what is to become of her.
I am in full sympathy with you, as much as I will miss looking at the little creek, and pointing out as I must that there is not a famous cathedral within five thousand miles of us, or ten.
What is it about the little creek?
Its forlornness, its slightly iridescent stagnation, its unsupport of anything alive that one can see, its dubious mission, its helplessness, its pity, its bravery, the miracle of it withal in even remaining wet—
Which sometimes it does not—
— Exactly.
You see in the creek us.
Yes I think I do.
It is our mirror.
It is.
Well let us not be so vain.
All right. We shall cease going to the creek.
Our hair is also not good but I do not see that we can stop it. Our hair is us but we must have it. We are not good and we must admit it.
I think we do a fair job of that. As good a job as might be asked of anyone.
I hope that you are right.
Will it matter, in the end, if we have been good, done well, etc.? Whence the very idea that it will have mattered?
Whence the very idea of good?
Yes, you playhouse playboy, you nine-year-old Tarzan, who came up with the idea of goodness?
It is one for the sages.
&
Do you ever feel you’ve left your heart in San Francisco?
Yes, all the time.
Not there of course but—
Of course not there, but yes, this is what we have done, left it somewhere.
Or did we perhaps not really have a heart, and have come to know it?
This is perfectly tenable.
Do you think hand-wringing now will effect a recovery?
No.
We shall regard our absent hearts as total losses, regardless of whether we had them once and lost them or never had them at all?
This is the prudent course, I think.
I’m with you, then. Is wanting to go see the creek or not go see the stupid anemic ditch we have to call a creek in trashed-out suburban America part of this losing of the heart and not knowing whether it is a loss or a congenital absence?
I think it is related, somehow.
Okay then. The issue is settled.
We could do with some ice cream though. Makes the boy-man feel good, heart or no.
It’s a cold, brutally unhealthy comfort.
The very best, most honest comfort.
Ice cream is like maggots in a field wound.
Tell that to the codgers.
It would stop them for a moment in that calm stream of strong silent knowingness they so gallantly ride.
Those codgers get you worked up.
I am a cat to their dogging. I admit it. I am delicate and vulnerable and I must inflate and arch and spit or they will have me. I admit it. Mine is the weak strength of bluster.
You are a good man nonetheless, in our tribe of weaklings.
Thank you. To say that requires of you a heart, which you have momentarily retrieved from San Francisco. I see steam on the mountains across the way.
We have mountains across the way?
We do now. They flowed in overnight.
I did not know we were on a fluid landscape.
To my knowledge we are not, there is no such thing, yet there are mountains with clouds strafing them gently, looking cottony and kind and the mountains inviting not looming or threatening as big ones might look. No Everestage, I mean. These are junior mountains, with trees on them, big hills properly speaking I suppose, I am most innocent of mountain terminology and taxonomy.
The clouds are moving across them, prettily, as if on the way to San Francisco. Folks’ hearts are in those clouds.
Godspeed.
I am tired today.
We are tired every day, are we not?
We are. But one can suddenly tire of tiring, and move down a quantum level.
Let’s get to absolute zero and see what happens.
This we may be doing, if we perceive the land out the window to be flowing. Your poor little girl’s shack may have been whumped into the next county by a mountain, the distressed creek now a noble rushing cold cataract of clear and gurgling and clean strength. Running over smooth rocks, harboring sturdy fish, appealing to bears.
It’s too much to hope for. I am going to bed. Rompoid Sturgeon.
What?
Nothing.
&
Where exactly are we?
A very good question, requiring care in the answer. Geographically we have no idea. In the geography that has no place, that which obtains when the there is not there, can you dig it, we are between Jacksonville, Florida, and Bakersfield, California. I have never been to Bakersfield so I will tell you that I imagine chain-link fences in strident disrepair, all manner of paper and plastic blown into these fences, the asphalt and concrete expanses they once purported to contain crumbling and earthquake-looking, a scree of rubble and grit blowing about as if on the floor of a pizza oven the size of Baghdad, if you will excuse me an excess, a glare that signals white heat, anyone you run into want to beat you up, for money or for sport, and no way that anyone like Frank Gifford is ever going to come from there again, if he ever really did, and even the kind of indigents in country-western songs about it are noble compared to the riffraff coursing through its collapsed streets now. And now we go downhill to Jacksonville.
That’s where we get the girl in the shack and the piddly creek that disturbs you so much.
Yes. That creek. It has that orange shit in its shallows that is not shit but that conveys every impression of sewage that can be conveyed. It looks like rusted cotton. There is not outright mud but dirty sand. Not outright water but enough to support seven minnows, two crayfish, one mud turtle, one giant water bug, half a leopard frog, a third of a garter snake passing through, and no water bird but a flyover by a depressed songbird just keepin’ on keepin’ on, trying to find a concrete birdbath for a decent drink. Add a rubber or a Fritos bag, maybe a purse, and you about have it. Pair of panties. This is where we are.
You shouldn’t have to feel the way you feel.