Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  Lamar and Benny were given positions on the line, which surprised me but should not have. It is possible that they had already been hired by the time they joined us at the Christmas party, or they were being watched in the interest of hiring them according to how they took the candy-bar equivalents, etc. Let me say a word or two about that. Big Brother is Watching You, which once was a somber and dire prophetic warning of some sort as far as I can tell, is now such a given that we are frankly a little amused at the alleged concern the notion is said to have once raised. Of course he is watching you, is our position: what else would he be doing? Who would watch us if he didn’t? The idea that we might not be watched is altogether foreign, and frightening. We want to be watched.

  I watched Benny and Lamar on the line. They were mercury rollers. That’s where everyone with a fine hand starts, a little surprising because Benny, at least, appears to have the shakes, but I may be extrapolating from the condition of his nose, which looks whisky-rubricated. Oh, that is too poetic and probably inaccurate. It looks as red as an angry scrotum. By which I mean one that has been used and then not used when it would like to have been used. But Benny looks steady there with the mercury, and Lamar still has a bit of the fine cut he had when he was nine. His sister must have been ten, eleven, twelve when I noticed her legs. She was wearing short shorts and her legs were tight and long, and the shorts were tight on her legs, like say a rubber band on an eggplant. I know this is a stretch but this was decades ago and I was a child not yet ruined by thoughts of this sort and now I am an adult who is. I have license. And, as I say, if not that clearly, working here for Brother Catcard is really all about manifesting an equivalence to making sense. We manifest an equivalence to working and an equivalence to being adult.

  It occurs to me watching Benny and Lamar roll the mercury through the chutes to the atomizers that they are still essentially playing marbles, which is exactly what they were doing when I first saw them fifty years ago. And they were very good marble players, which is how, and I suppose why, they could afford to take me under wing and school me. We spent the bulk of the school day in a large yard worn to smooth dirt and full of incipient gangsters kneeling down playing marbles all over it. They, Benny and Lamar, did not even flinch when I showed up with the cheap goofy marbles my father got for me because that was exactly what you wanted to put into games and lose when you were learning how to play. One day early on some other boys wanted to beat me up, because I was new or had shoes, I am not sure which, or both, and Benny and Lamar stopped it by a simple military positioning: Lamar stood up to the gang in front and Benny flanked the leader and just stood there, and the gang walked off. At some time later Lamar took me in the bathroom and unwrapped some adhesive tape on his big toe and showed me that it was nearly cut off, held on by a piece of skin, and then somewhere in there I went to their house and saw their huge box of marbles, a cardboard box the size of a TV beside the kitchen door. And I got on the bus behind Lamar’s sister, which is when I saw the legs and the shorts from about a foot and a half in front of my face, going up and strong.

  One of the natural developments to Big Brother’s Watching You is that he keeps a file on us, and we are not discouraged from knowing what is in that file, in contradistinction, I think, to how it worked before when people felt that Big Brother’s Watching You was prophetic and wrong. In that day, if I have it right, people did not know what Big Brother had on them in that file, and they were therefore correct to be worried and suspicious of being watched. But today we know. My file says, for example, “Mentally disturbed. Hire him. He wants to make private calculations the livelong day. Let him.” So I have no worries.

  I suppose we are supposed to get worked up about this new development that Brother Catcard has had a dalliance with Sister Willetail, because it violates workplace ordinance, or ordinations, some ord-, or, if it doesn’t violate rules, because we want to have had a dalliance with Sister Willetail ourselves, and that we haven’t or can’t and Bro Catcard has and can violates us and makes us jealous. But I am OK with the whole schpoo. Do I want her? Yes I do. May I have her? Probably not. Does this fact, like about five million equivalent facts in my life, distinguish the situation to the point I need to get worked up? No. Rules in the equivalent workplace are, after all, equivalents to rules in the workplace. Bro Catcard and Sister Willetail should prosecute their voyage as best they can. In Brother Catcard’s file it will read “Wanted Sister Willetail. Got her.”

  Last night one of the metal buildings in the compound blew over, and this morning everyone is out in the rubble on the slab, kicking through the ruined stock and supplies and, strangely, giggling at this and that. Balls of yellow and pink insulation are blowing around like tumbleweeds. The big Zeiss crystal lens is unhurt and is to be picked up and carried to an intact building. Right now a forklift is being fitted with real sheepskin sleeves that will slip over the forks so that the glass is not scratched. The glass ball—that is basically all it is, except of course it is some rare fine German glass—weighs as much as a bull. This right here is one of the perversities of being here. This ball could be picked up by suction discs fitted to the arms of not even the largest robot we have made for the army, picked up and set down wherever you tell the robot to put it, and that could be in any impossible place up to 125 feet off the ground, or 125 feet under ground after it digs a hole with its other arm while holding the ball, and it can throw the ball a half mile—and yet Brother Catcard or someone above him deems that, after a tornado, for some reason, new technology must accede to old, and here comes sheepskin and a towmotor and an alcoholic driving the towmotor.

  Benny is on the forklift. They haven’t even sprayed the ball with the Kevlar beryllium foam, which they also have the capacity to do, so that virtually nothing, to include some missiles, can harm it. Here comes alcoholic-looking Benny wheezing and grinning on a towmotor with alcoholic-looking furry yellow forks out in front. He’s got the forks about man-high and is making reckless speed across the rubble on the slab, jangling the forks even in their shearling booties, and as he gets near the ball he lowers the forks and slows to a good professional approach speed and it is easy to see that Benny is an old forklift man and that what he is doing is picking up a giant marble, and I stop cringing. I start marveling. I like to marvel, but I often do not. I marvel in this instance because I have known this man for fifty years, although I did not see him for the fifty years between second grade and now, and what I saw him do then and what I see him do now is concern himself with marbles. Is there a God? Has something or someone determined that Benny and marbles are a thing? There is a vending machine still standing in the ruins and I get a package of those small powdered doughnuts and eat them as Benny drives the Zeiss ball on the towmotor carefully out of sight. The sugar is cool on my fingers, strangely menthol.

  We have received news that the Zeiss ball has been shipped over the high seas on a wooden sailing ship to Pondicerry India for use in an ashram temple there. A hole in the top of the temple will admit a shaft of strong light that will strike the ball and be refracted around the temple in a way that will calm the spirit. The effect of this light, Brother Catcard says he is told by telegram from India, as it will be uniquely refracted by our crystal ball, will be “ineffable.” Insofar as the ball never did anything while it was here to calm the spirit, we are not aggrieved to learn of its better home, as it were. Brother Catcard also tells us that our time here is over, that the fallen building was a harbinger for the falling of our entire mission here. This too produces no outpouring of woe. It is the equivalent to failure, to being let go, to seeing one’s way of life end as we know it, to the end of “family,” and so forth, to perhaps not even being watched by Big Brother, to not having damning things in our files, to not even having files, and we are fine with the news, we are but equivalents to lost people. Equivalents to lost people, we discover, are not lost.

  When she arrives, Lamar’s sister, who should be sixty, is thirty-five years old and i
n very good shape. She looks like certain movie stars from the forties whose names I have never managed to match with their faces and whose faces all look, more or less, alike. The cheeks are high, the hair is swept back up and off the face, there is a good smile, red lipstick, bosom, good cheer. Lamar’s sister is wearing the equivalent to those same cutoff jean shorts and a red-plaid yoked shirt with pearl snaps. We are instantly agreeable and without the difficulties that strain strangers, because we are only the equivalents of strangers. Equivalents to strangers are instantly intimate. I say this nonsense to her: “God, babe, I have been waiting for you a long time, it feels as if I was even holding my breath, I can breathe now, I didn’t realize I was waiting for you—”

  “Yes, shut up.”

  There is a powdered doughnut in its cellophane package on the nightstand. Lamar’s sister carefully extracts the doughnut and regards it in the light and takes a tentative lick. There is white powder on her red lips and she smiles and an air of menthol fills the room.

  Utopia

  A man in a cigar-colored suit is not to be trusted, and frankly my aversion to that one over there goes well beyond mistrust: I outright do not like the son of a bitch. A cigar-colored suit!

  I am pursuing my dissertation on agiation. That is the new science of getting old. In case you need to know what I am talking about. You probably don’t. Sometimes I myself wonder why anyone needs to know anything about agiation, when for thousands of years people just did it without being told a goddamn thing about it and they got along fine, getting old right on schedule and getting in their final pajamas, etc. I wonder why anyone needs to know anything about anything when you get right down to it. In this same spirit of wonderment I wonder why everyone has to suddenly be on the phone all the time. Everyone has suddenly decided they have to know what everyone else is up to at every minute of the day. How did this happen? We have all become The President.

  There is a new society forming. It is going to allow only running water in a house, a three-channel TV, a rotary-dial phone, a wringer washing machine, and one car.

  When the cigar-colored-suit-wearing asshole is not wearing that, he is wearing a sky-blue one! It would be fun and gratifying to see a car knock him out of his shoes. There they would sit, some kind of Italian superiority, empty on the road, nearby which groans the lump who wore them to that forlorn spot. The ambulance might be forever in coming. What will become of the shoes? I despise that asshole. I would hope that a bum would come along and fit himself into the shoes and shamble off in them, perhaps right by the paralyzed face of the owner, who could just force himself to groan, “Muuhshoooos!”

  “Yeahnow,” the bum says, “I clickin’ and clackin’ down the track now.”

  No Empress Eyes

  No Empress Eyes In Here had first been named No Empress, then No Empress Eyes, and then the owner’s daughter, hearing the name but not knowing it applied to a horse, said, “No empress eyes in here,” and the final name was set. She was ten years old, the daughter, and lived in New Jersey. They then told the daughter that the horse No Empress Eyes In Here disappeared during the Kentucky Derby when she fell through a trapdoor in the track. She went down a laundry chute not to China but to some other inscrutable place no one knew anything about or where it was, so “She might as well,” the daughter said, “have gone to China,” for all they could do about it. Thereafter the horse was known as No Empress Eyes Down There.

  There was a boy in Kansas, also ten, who dreamed of inventing a new kind of combine that would not harm animals when it came upon them in the wheat. Specifically the boy was thinking about fawns, who were told by their mothers, who had galloped away, to stay put no matter what, and who, the fawns, would stay put no matter what, no matter if a combine with a 24-foot-wide worm blade came upon them and scooped them up and sprayed them into the wheat in pieces no larger than the wheat. This very much bothered the boy, who wanted to be a farmer badly except for this one thing, turning baby deer into bloody wheat. So he wanted a humane combine. He thought and thought and could not come up with an idea for a combine that would pick up the deer and set it to the side and pet it and send it trotting off to the place its mother had hightailed it to before abandoning it in the field with the diesel monster bearing down on it. He wanted the mother deer to be issued a citation for negligent parenting too, and maybe have the combine call the department of child welfare and take the fawn away from the mother as it did children from human parents who did things not nearly as bad as leave their children in the tall grass in front of huge machines. But he would never invent a machine that would do all this, that was fantasy thinking, he wanted a real machine to really rescue the fawns, forget about justice. He thought and thought and finally arrived at a compromise suggested by the man at the Brandt’s meat market in Lucas: the fawn could be scooped up and blown whole into another chamber, probably dead, but not in a million pieces. Okay, the boy said, okay. Until he could invent the new combine he drove the conventional combine so slowly that everyone was unpleased with him during harvest but he did not care. He was through with scooping up fawns. He was disgusted with these people, like John Deere, who probably called themselves that for a joke, and a joke about killing deer was not funny. They had a slogan “Runs like a Deere” that ought to be “Like Running Down a Deere,” he thought.

  After the horse she’d named fell through the track and no one did anything about it, the horse owner’s daughter felt she’d had it with these people and ran away. It went well for a while, was not too frightening when she was on the bus, but then she was walking a long way and in the country and she hid in a field, and a giant machine came up on her with a big steel like barber-pole thing turning and cutting the grass, and it stopped, the machine, coming at her, but the barber pole did not stop turning and hissing, and a boy got out of the glass cabin on top of the machine letting blaring music come out with him, like Queen, or Aerosmith, and she wondered what kind of hicks they had out here wherever she was. “Well,” the boy said, “do you want to run like a deer or be run down like a deer?” That was about the coolest thing she had ever heard anyone say whether he was a hick or not, and she got in the cabin and they mowed some more field.

  Then they went to his cave. It was in the side of a creek bank with no water in the creek and it was filled with a lot of appliances that did not work because there was no power. He had floor lamps in it with fringe on the shades, and a big kitchen stove, and an old TV with a wood cabinet that looked like an aquarium full of dull green algae and no fish, and a brass bed that was brown from the moisture in the cave. There were no bats. The boy said he wanted bats but none ever came in that he saw. There were only dried-up roots hanging from the ceiling. These felt like bats when you touched them. If it were her cave she would trim the ceiling, the horse owner’s daughter thought.

  They decided they had to tell someone where she was but the boy was afraid he would be arrested for kidnapping and molesting her. “All you did was run me down like a deer,” the girl said, suddenly wondering what became of the jockey on her horse that had gone down the hole in the track. Really, nothing had been said at all about the jockey; it was a thoroughly unsatisfying business, that horse disappearing, and horse racing in general, and rich people, and poor people, the whole earth was messed up, and now here was a boy talking about molesting her who had not touched her, who had no idea what molesting even meant. She didn’t either. “Why don’t you molest me then?” she said.

  “Good idea, since I will be arrested for it.” The boy threw himself on the moldy bed. “I don’t know what molest means, actually.”

  “I don’t either. Whatever it is, don’t do it.”

  “Okay. I won’t.” The boy had crossed his feet and put his hands behind his head. “Man,” he said, “this is like living!”

  They both envisioned living in the cave for a good long time away from horrible and boring horse racing and horrible and boring farming—“But farming is not boring, just horrible, and jus
t the fawn grinding,” the boy said—but they knew they couldn’t make it very long in a cave. “That is fantasy thinking,” the boy said.

  “No Empress Eyes Down Here,” the girl said, and the boy did not ask what in the world was she talking about. He just got out of bed and adjusted his pliers on his belt and said, “Come on.” He was very cool, in her judgment. They held hands crossing the field.

  “I think holding hands is part of molesting,” the girl said.

  “Okay,” the boy said. “I will be arrested.” He clearly enjoyed saying arrested.

  At the farm the boy’s father called the Sheriff and reported having the girl with no more travail than he might have reported the wheat to be too wet to harvest, and his mother set a place at the table almost as if they had expected her and certainly as if she were a guest they were pleased to have and not a runaway with legal strings attached to her. If anyone was going to be arrested it was not going to be them, or even her, it seemed. The mother told her everything would be fine and she could plan to stay with them until they heard anything from the Sheriff.

  “We want to live a long time together in the cave,” the boy said.

  “We’ll have to run some Romex out there after dinner,” the boy’s father said, “in that case.” He was eating and perhaps joking, perhaps not, you could not get a good look at his mouth for the food going in. He had on his belt the same kind of pliers the boy had on his. He wore jeans and non-pointy boots and no hat. These Kansas people were not like Texas people. The girl had had enough of Texas people with their ridiculous boots and jewelry, always around scaring the horses and trying to buy everything in sight. She had not seen a Kansas person try to buy anything and she had not heard one be loud. This was more like it. If they were going to run Romex to the cave, whatever that meant, she would help them.