The Interrogative Mood (10 page)

Is there any hope? Do we need galoshes? Are bluebirds perfect? Is there charity? Can there be reason? Does a kitten settle your nerves? Would you like to play a board game? If you would, do you know which one you’d like to play? In all of human history, would you say mothers or fathers are the more loved?

If you could see a large-animal trainer mauled in the middle of his or her show, perhaps even killed, would you prefer to see the mauling done by a lion, a
tiger, or a bear? If it were a bear, would the pleasure or horror you took from the moment be mitigated or heightened in any way by the presence of bicycle-riding in the show? Is semaphore still used at sea or has it been displaced by the digital age? Would you take final pleasure if acquitted of a serious charge or would you always feel tainted? Do you see the exact humor in “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh”? Does it change things a bit for you to perceive that these questions want you bad? And that they are perhaps independent of me, to some degree? That they are somewhat akin to, say, zombies of the interrogative mood?

DO YOU EVER THINK
you hear someone saying “Liftoff!”? What would it mean if you dreamed you found two baby squirrels and asked two women if they knew a good baby-squirrel formula and when you fetched the squirrels you found they had drowned because you had inexplicably iced them down, and the ice had melted, and now the baby squirrels were sodden gray puppy-looking short-haired turds in a foul juice, and you broke down crying in front of the women, asking, “Why would I have
iced
them?” Do you try to listen to
classical music but feel you don’t ever really advance past knowing it’s better than it sounds? Would any particular failing on your part today be more painful than all other failings?

Would it require more energy than you have in order for you to really lose it, or do you think really losing it can be a function of having too little energy to prevent losing it? Do the people you do not wish to talk to far exceed the number you do wish to talk to? Do you have much to say to even those to whom you do wish to speak? Do you know where it went wrong with you? Do you own any good copper? Are you favorably disposed to American Indian causes but less so if you must say Native American causes? Are you more at ease in a veneer of civilization or in a true hardwood of barbary? What is your favorite piece of equipment on a playground? Do you know by sight and sound an oboe from a bassoon? When you hear someone say “There’ll be hell to pay,” do you assume generally that there will be or won’t be hell to pay?

Don’t you think it a fairly prudent plan if in the halcyon early days of a relationship, before they’ve become the good old days of a relationship, one were to periodically say, “I’m sorry,” and, to the reasonable
response of the other party, who asks, “For what?” because one has ostensibly done nothing wrong, to say, “For everything,” meaning of course everything that will accrue, as surely as the tides bring barnacles, to convert the early halcyon days into the good old days of the relationship? Do you see any value, I mean to say, in the preemptive-strike apology when times are good before they are bad? Would it delay the accumulation of the barnacles by a second or a minute or two, an hour, a day, a week, a year? Or might it be better to say right in the flush of new-intimate ecstasy, “Look, this is bound to rotten up, probably at my hand, good-bye”?

Have you read as much Samuel Johnson as you should have? Can you always immediately recall that Darwin’s first name is Charles? Do you take pills you are not precisely sure you can identify? Do you feel no better, better, or inordinately better after you polish something? Are you aware that up to a third of the tongue can be removed and it, the tongue, can regenerate itself more or less completely? What is the color you most enjoy in lipstick? If you are presented a nipple with a ring through it in a sexual situation, is your first move to bite the ring itself, or to take the
ring in whole, or to do something else altogether, like run?

Would you say “pine-needle green” or “green as pine needles”? If you were to be put into a primitive situation without power in a more or less temperate climate and were offered a lifetime supply of ice or fire, not to say that you could not by natural circumstance periodically gather one or the other as you found it, would you accept the ice or the fire? Doesn’t it seem as if the board game called Chinese checkers was once popular and has now disappeared? What would be your best-case scenario for your being forced, or able, to say, “I accept the lash!” If you wear eyeglasses, how many times a day do you wash them? Have you lived in more houses than you’ve had dogs and cats? Would you like to be on a submarine? Do you have a position on pantyhose?

Do you love buffalo as much as I? May I tell you that I love buffalo and do not think you could love them as much as I love them? Have you ever seen finches or sparrows on a tree that suggest fleas or lice on a large animal? Under what circumstances would you kill yourself, and what means might you use? What do you think about a small candy factory
in Desoto, Georgia, called the Desoto Nut House that once allowed tours of its kitchen while large black women handled great slabs of peanut brittle and other confections on marble tables, all of this in a sweet open warm friendly air of business and pleasure, and you emerge and buy a bag or two of nuts or candy more out of good feeling and cheer than out of any affection for the stuff, so fun was the kitchen and watching the women turn the dangerous boluses of hot sugar, and now when one goes to the Desoto Nut House one is not allowed in the kitchen because tours are no longer allowed for reasons relating to insurance? What I mean to ask is, is it not the kernel of the demise of the world as we knew it that you can no longer watch candy be made “for insurance reasons”? Does not someone need to stand up and say, “If I cannot have people watch my candy be made, as I have done for forty years without incident, because of insurance, I will not have insurance”?

Have you been to India and seen lingam coming out of the ground, and if you have, do you recall if they are only in holy places or are they also in secular places? Have you ever witnessed elephant foot maintenance? Do you know any apparently very healthy
people to have died suddenly from stroke? Will you maneuver to procure very good coffee, or for you is coffee coffee? Whom do you regard as a bona fide intellectual, and have you known personally anyone you regard as a bona fide intellectual? Do you suppose that once a bird knows how to fly he pretty much can expect to fly without incident, more or less as, say, we walk about, or would you think bird flying to be fraught with aeronautical accident? How accurately can you shoot a rubber band? Have you ever been bitten by a horse? When you buy clothes, do you assiduously check the way they fit you, or do you just decide they fit or they don’t and be done with it?

Do you ever hold hands with anyone? If you do not, are there circumstances in which you might hold hands with anyone? If there were a gun case full of guns, yours or someone else’s, and one of the guns was dirty and fouled from use while the others were meticulously clean, would you want to see that the one gun got cleaned? If you were at a landfill and saw a large pile of girly magazines, which you do not customarily look at, beside a large pile of unopened tins of Skoal, which you have never used, would you go over there and take a pinch of snuff and have a look
at a magazine? Do buzzards give you the creeps? Have you ever constructed a sandbox? If you once owned a slide rule and do not have it now, do you know what happened to it?

When was the last time you saw an ostrich? In what kinds of weather do you most like to walk? Do you enjoy oiling things or is that best left to others? Do you know what comes after “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man / bake me a cake as fast as you can”? Are you familiar with the sport of kite fighting? Do you think of there being a proper point in your debilitation as you age at which you should, if you can, kill yourself?

Do you have any experience with boils? When people are weeping and fretting about you, do you console or attempt to move away as politely as possible? Do you find Mary Martin in
Peter Pan
sexually stimulating? Have you ever had cockles? Does Ireland sound like your kind of place or like someone else’s kind of place? Have you ever been exposed to rigorous mathematical proofs, and if so, do you like them? Do you know the term for the kind of trowel, used in applying certain adhesives, that has teeth on its edge so that glue is laid down in fine rows instead of as a film?
Does any confusion arise if you see or hear pinecone and cornpone together? Do you have any impulse to wish that everything you own could somehow without overmuch trauma be made to disappear? If you had to threaten someone with either “I’mone slap the taste out of your mouth” or “I’mone knock you into next week,” which colorful expression would you prefer? If someone threatened you with either of these utterances, would you rather reply “Well, pack your lunch” or “You and whose army?”

THESE SMALL BIRDS FLITTING
about the top of the pine tree outside my window that I likened to fleas or lice on a large animal—may I say now more accurately that they look like gnats around the head and eyes of a tall creature? Did they get to the bottom of what has killed all the amphibians the world over? Do you think the heyday of hair spray was the 1960s, or has it lived on? Are Kotex still worn on belts? Were you ever familiar enough with gladiators that you preferred one style of combat over others—the net and trident, say, over the short sword? What sort of boat do you fancy best? Would you rather have to
deal with a regulatory commission or a codes inspector? Do you have much patience for sanding wood? Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?

Do you keep a neat living place or a messy place? Is it better to work in a messy place and get a lot of work done or a neat place and get nothing done? Do you recall the last time you set something on fire that you were not supposed to set on fire? Do you trust or mistrust people who say “Candy is too sweet for me”? If you had to perform a field amputation to save someone’s life, could you? Do you like ivory? Do you remember those children’s beads that popped apart and were held together by means of stems and balls and sockets of the same material the beads were made of? Does honey come out of the front end or the back end of a bee?

Are you aware of a more likable kind of person than yourself that you would like to be like? What for you are the characteristics that make a person extremely likable? Have you ever been lain on by a heavy naked person in a boat as it raced by another boat full of heavy naked people? Is the world through with worrying about Communism? Have you known anyone to say “biscuit” in referring to a vagina? Do you subscribe to the position that there is good plastic and bad plastic? Would you rather be a bear who is compelled to eat a hundred dying salmon to make it through the winter or a salmon who has to make it past the bear to spawn and rot and die? Are small green rubber army men still sold? Would you say that civilization is protocol, a set of protocols large and smaller nesting inside each other like those Russian dolls? And that as long as the smaller protocols are followed—the trees in the forest as it were—no one much minds that the large protocol, the forest as it were, might be going to hell? Have you ever been not disappointed by a banana split? If a voice instructed you that the tub of salve levitating over the table before you was invisible cream and invited you to put some on and join the party, would you put the cream
on? Would you prefer a child who says “I want one” or one who says “That’s bad” when told in answer to her question “What’s a slave?” that “It’s a person who has to do anything you want it to do”? Do you know the Lindy rhythm? Are you any good at horseshoes? How fast do the fastest birds fly?

In mustard, do you fancy the fancy or the ballpark? When part of a group, do you favor stepping to the rear or to the fore? Do you know enough about rifles to select one for purchase? Would you think it improbable that a man might be a professional trainer of military and police dogs and also a certified instructor of yoga? I mean to say, is that avocational yoking not unlike having a meal of hamburger and tofu? As you age, do you find you enjoy driving in cars less or more? Do you have the patience or the fortitude for house painting? Would you mind telling me in detail what your proficiency in the realm of sewing is?

Do you regard yourself a person who has money, a person who is going to have money, or a person who has no money and, barring an accident, is not going to have any money? Who is the best guitar player in the world, in your view? If it had to be the case that a raccoon, a skunk, a possum, or an otter was going to take
up residence under your bed, which one would you prefer it be? Do you know what actuaries are? Would the phrase “clapping cancer” mean anything to you? Do you enjoy the ineptitude of local news broadcasters or are you annoyed by it? Do you enjoy the slick professionalism of national news broadcasters or are you annoyed by it? Do you know an anole from a gecko and a skink? Can you love, still? Did you ever love? Is there heartbreak in rain, or cheer? Are you tired?

DO YOU DO YARD
sales? Are you happy with your teeth? Do you in general trust or mistrust earnestness? Do you attend parades? Do you gamble? Do you like pull candy? Have you any weapons on you at the moment? Would you buy a pearl choker? Are you important? Do you have any skin disabilities such as eczema or psoriasis? Can you envision saying seriously to someone, “You just holler for help, and I’ll come arunnin’”? Do you like to use terms like “triangulation” and “extrapolation” when not speaking mathematically? Are you bold, would you say? Can you count in languages other than your mother tongue? Would you like for your life to be more, or less, danger
ous than it is? Have you ever experienced any sort of hernia? Is baseball all it’s cracked up to be? Do people stink, mostly? Is there life on other planets, or after death on this one, as it were? Do you like stalling for time? Can you lob a grenade accurately, would you think? Are there interstices in your character?