You & Me by Padgett Powell

Mzungu?
    I would not think it more demanding than that.
    I don’t know—the Brits leave their footprint. Could be a pedophile-quotient assay right up front.
    So what will we do with this child, assuming we are not proven pedophiles, or if the Kenyans do not care that we are if we are?
    I want him to grow to be strong and reserved and smart and take this chainsaw here, which I haven’t yet purchased for him, and slowly cut this house apart and burn it for warmth until we and it and everything else in it is gone, and he then, the child, is a stunning athlete and goes to Harvard and speaks well of his two Mzungu uncles whom he could not have done it all without, and he has one of those impossibly beautiful sets of brilliant white teeth and smiles a lot while saying this about us, and we are rotting happily in the sand out there by the little twisted clean Piper Cub wreck in the sand. That is all I want.
    Will he not be sad?
    He will not.
    Why not?
    I don’t know.
    Su visión es mi visión.
    For me it comes down to this: We were not sane men, but we were better than many. Our boy will somehow know this. It will sustain him. He conquers the NFL and then Harvard Medical and he knows that he was put there by two old pops who had nothing, least of all pretension. Out of our agreeable daft arises his untaught heroic. That which we so lacked. That is what I want.
    What’s his name?
    Stanley. They have named him Stanley and we want to change it but, agreeably daft, we can’t.
    Okay. God am I tired.
    I’m tired too, Helen.
    What?
    Nothing.

&
    Do you see a problem with my outfit?
    Have you lost your mind?
    No. I just thought that was funny.
    It is.
    Do you recall when we wanted to go to the liquor store in the orange jumpsuit with an electrical cord trailing out of it all the way back to the house?
    Vaguely.
    I recall that we thought of this, and that it was funny or had some point, but now I don’t know what the point was, or the humor, exactly.

&
    We need things. Let me rephrase that: we need things .
    I got the first one but not the second.
    Things would give us some distraction.
    Bass boat, bearer bonds—that kind of thing?
    Well, I am thinking, yes.
    I thought we wanted house fire.
    We do, but I think we want house fire only because we don’t have good things that really provide the distraction we need.
    Wives, jobs?
    Yes. Maybe.
    All the things that the people we despise have that we see make them despair, we don’t have, and now we want them?
    Well, maybe. All we do is talk and sit here. We have nothing. Those people are humanly realized and all that, and I grant you many are fucked up, but cannot there be a few who actually do have it going on? Like, real and smart days, and fun and accomplishments—you have to admit we do not effect that, sitting here doing our thing. Pondering plane wrecks in the desert as a good thing.
    I heard about this football coach fired twice in the same year by different teams.
    Well yes and what about being one that would, say, win the national title twice in three years, have a wife, and children not arrested for anything, have his organization like a little military under him, redeem some criminals by giving them some legal violence to channel their evil intent through, lovely second home like on the beach to keep you from wanting to burn down the primary—don’t you think that might be all right, if you could get it?
    You are talking about being a real man.
    I am.
    You will be on medication and having retrograde ejaculations before the week is out you keep this up.

&
    I need a saddle pommel. To steer me through the house. Not a horse or a saddle.
    Just a disembodied pommel?
    Exactly.
    We could get you one of those four-wheel walkers and put a set of longhorns on it. You couldn’t go through a doorway but you’d be stylin’, stuck there.
    I just need the invisible saddle pommel to hold on to. I think it’s what the rappers