Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  You know what?

  I know you like you'll never know.

  You think I don't know whereof I speak?

  I know the day will come, the day will dawn.

  Didn't I tell you you never know? Because I guarantee it, no one will dance a jig, no one will do a dance, no one will cater to you so fast or twiddle his thumbs or wait on you hand and foot.

  You think they could care less?

  But I could never get enough of it, I could never get enough. Look at me, I could take a bite out of it, I could eat it up alive. But you want to make a monkey out of me, don't you? You want me to talk myself blue in the face for you, beat my head against a brick wall for you, come running when you have the least little complaint. What am I, your slave? You won't be happy except over my dead body, will you? I promise you, one day you will sing a different tune.

  But in the interim, first things first.

  Because it won't kill you to do without, tomorrow is another day, let me look at it, let me see it, there is no time like the present, let me kiss it and make it well.

  Let me tell you something—everyone in the whole wide world should only have it half as good as you.

  You know what this is? You want to know what this is? Because this is some deal, this is some setup, this is some joke. You could vomit from what a joke this is.

  I want you to hear something, I want you to hear the unvarnished truth.

  You know what you are?

  That's what you are!

  You sit, God forbid I shouldn't go—didn't I already have enough to choke a horse?

  Go ahead and talk my arm off. Talk me deaf, dumb, and blind. Nobody is asking, nobody is talking, nobody wants to know. In all decency, in all honesty, in all candor, in all modesty, you have some gall, some nerve, and I mean it in all sincerity and truth.

  The crust on you, my God!

  I am telling you, I am pleading with you, I am down to you on bended knee to you—just don't get cute with me, just don't make any excuses to me—because in broad daylight, because in the dead of night, because at the crack of dawn.

  You think the whole world is going to do a dance around you? No one is going to do a dance around you. No one even knows you are alive.

  Just who do you think you are, coming in here like a lord and lording it all over us all? Do you think you are a law unto yourself? I am going to give you some advice. Don't flatter yourself, act your age, share and share alike.

  Ages ago, years ago, so long ago I couldn't begin to remember, past history, ancient history—you don't want to know, another age, another life, another theory altogether. Don't ask. Don't even begin to ask. Don't make me any promises. Don't tell me one thing and go do another. Don't look at me like that. Look around yourself, for pity's sake. Don't you know one hand washes the other?

  Take stock.

  Talk sense.

  Give me some credit for intelligence. Show me I'm not wasting my breath. Don't make me sick. You are making me sick. Why are you making me sick like this? Do you get pleasure from doing this to me? Why are you doing this to me? Do you derive satisfaction from doing this to me? Don't think I don't know what you are trying to do to me. You think you're so smart.

  Don't make me do your thinking for you.

  Shame on you, be ashamed of yourself, have you absolutely no shame?

  Why must I always have to spell it out for you?

  Why must I always drop everything and come running just for me to spell it out for you?

  Does nothing ever occur to you?

  Can't you see with your own two eyes?

  You are your own worst enemy.

  What's the sense of talking to you? I might as well talk to myself. Say something. Try to look like you've got a brain in your head. You think this is a picnic? This is no picnic. Don't stand on ceremony with me. The whole world is not going to step to your tune. I warn you, I'm warning you, don't say nobody didn't warn you—wake up before it's too late.

  You know what?

  A little birdie told me.

  You know what?

  You have got a lot to learn.

  I can't hear myself talk. I can't hear myself think. I cannot remember from one minute to the next.

  Why do I always have to tell you again and again?

  Give me a minute to think.

  Just let me catch my breath.

  Don't you ever stop to ask?

  I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to give you the benefit of my advice. How would you like it if I gave you some good advice?

  You think the sun rises and sets on you, don't you? You should get down on your hands and knees and thank God. You should count your blessings. Why don't you look around yourself and really for once take a look at yourself just for once? You just don't know when you're well off, do you? You have no idea how the other half lives. You are as innocent as the day you were born. You should thank your lucky stars. You should try to make amends. You should do your best to put it all out of your mind. Worry never got anybody anywhere. Whatever you do, promise me this—chin up, buck up, keep an open mind.

  What do I say to you, where do I start with you, how do I make myself heard with you? I don't know where to begin with you, I don't know where to start with you, I don't know how to impress upon you the importance of every single solitary word. Thank God I am alive to tell you, thank God I am here to tell you, thank God you've got someone to tell you, I only wish I could begin to tell you, if there were only some way someone could tell you, if only there were someone here to tell you, but you don't want to listen, you don't want to learn, you don't want to know, you don't want to help yourself, you just want to have it all your own way and go on as if nothing has changed. Who can talk to you? Can anyone talk to you? Nobody can talk to you. You don't want anybody to talk to you. So far as you are concerned, the whole wide world should keel over and drop dead.

  You think it's all a picnic? Where did you get the idea it's all a picnic? Face facts, don't kid yourself, people are trying to talk some sense into you, it's not all just fun and fancy free, it's not all just high, wide, and handsome, it's not all just pretty is as pretty does.

  You take the cake, you take my breath away—you are really one for the books. Be smart and play it down. Be smart and stay in the wings. Be smart and let somebody else carry the ball for a change.

  You know what I've got to do?

  I've got to talk to you like a Dutch uncle to you.

  I've got to handle you with kid gloves.

  Let me tell you something no one else would have the heart to tell you. You better look far and wide—because they are few and far between! Go ahead, go to the ends of the earth, go to the highest mountain, go to any lengths, because they won't lift a finger for you—or didn't you know some things are not for man to know, that there are some things that are better left unsaid, that there are some things you shouldn't wish on a dog—not on a bet, not on your life, not on nobody at all?

  What do you want? You want the whole world to revolve around you, you want the whole world at your beck and call?

  Be honest with me.

  Answer me this one question.

  How can you look me in the face?

  Don't you dare act as if you didn't hear me. You want to know what's wrong with you? This is what is wrong with you. You are going to the dogs, you are lying down with dogs, you are waking sleeping dogs—don't you know enough to go home before the last dog is dead?

  When are you going to learn to leave well enough alone?

  You know what you are?

  Let me tell you what you are.

  You are betwixt and between!

  I'm on to you, I've got your number, I can see right through you—I am giving you fair warning, don't you dare try to sit there and put anything over on me or get on my good side or lead me a merry chase.

  So who's going to do your dirty work for you?

  Do me a favor and don't make me laugh!

  Oh, sure, you think you can rise
above it, you think you can live all your life with your head in the clouds in a cave like a hermit without rhyme or reason, without a hitch, without batting an eyelash, without a leg for you to stand on, without one little bit of sugar on it and butter on your bread. But let me tell you something—you're all wet!

  You know what?

  You're trying to get away with it—with murder, with false pretenses, that's what!

  You know what is wrong with you? I am here to tell you what is wrong with you. There is no happy medium with you, there is no live and let live with you, there is no by the same token with you—because talking to you is like talking to a brick wall to you!

  Pay attention to me!

  You think I am talking just to hear myself talk?

  SHIT

  I LIKE TALKING ABOUT sitting on toilets. It shows up in the roughage of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things, I try to work it in. You just have to look back at stories I have had printed for you to see I am telling you the truth. Sitting on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person sitting on a toilet in it, forget the name that's signed as author—no one but I could have written the thing. Indeed, it would be inconceivable to me I didn't.

  But the one I've got now, this one here, it promises to be the pick of the lot.

  Or anyhow the purest.

  Well, the truest, then—the least fictitious, then—then the one with not much in it made up.

  The other thing about it that I like is that it could not be simpler for somebody to tell—nothing in it but just a man sitting on a toilet in it and the wallpaper in it the man is looking at.

  Oh, of course—not just a man but myself.

  How could I tell a story about anyone else? For one thing, it could never be true, could it? I mean, what do I know about people—or care to? Good Christ, I have all I can do to marshal even a small enough interest in guess-who.

  Or do I mean large enough?

  I don't know.

  THIS IS ANOTHER THING I am always putting into stories—"I don't know." Just those words, just like that. You see a story with "I don't know" in it, this'll be your tip-off as to who was it who wrote it. It could have anybody down there under the title there—but he isn't, she isn't, I am.

  Or was, was.

  Well, it's exciting.

  It is exciting.

  Not writing, not speaking—but being a sneak.

  When I was a boy, this was what I wanted to grow up to be—a person who was a sneak and an assassin. I wanted to be dangerous. This was when I was little.

  When I was little, my mother would get me to sit on the toilet for her and stay there and stay there until I could show her something, and sometimes—more and more oftentimes—I couldn't. She would say, "Put your royal bombosity down on the royal throne and don't you dare let me see you get up off of it until there is something in there in it for your mother to look at."

  It's terrible what I have to show for it now. I tell you, I don't know where the food goes. It's frightening. Am I getting poisoned? Or pickled?

  I take things.

  You know—to make me go.

  I especially take things when we go away and it gets worse—not going, the not-going. This is where this comes in—the story, this story, the wallpaper. Listen to this—I had taken a lot of something—because it had been days already, days of nothing but of sitting and of not going already, of its maybe having been thus even for a week of it already. So I'd swallowed enough to choke a horse, gone to bed, been down for mere minutes, when I had to get back up again and I really mean it, what I said.

  Get back up!

  It was somewhere quaint—an inn somewhere—you lose track—a cute hotel—meaning no bathroom of your own, meaning a bathroom out at the end of the hall, meaning a bathroom with a kind of a latch contraption on the door—and with a pitched ceiling pitched so low you had to keep bent over—even sitting down, you had to keep bent down—and even bent, I couldn't stop going—oh, God, going and going. Forever it felt like.

  Gallons it felt like.

  It felt like my whole life was coming up and coming up—and going good and out.

  I mean going down and out.

  Which is when I started studying the wallpaper.

  I thought I was sluicing away, dissolving from the inside out, rendering myself as waste, breaking down to basal substance, falling through the plumbing, perishing on a toilet I could not even call my own.

  You'll laugh, but I got scared.

  I thought: "Call for help."

  I thought: "Do it before you swoon."

  Which is when I reached out for the wallpaper as you would for a lifeline, for smelling salts, a float.

  I don't know.

  I thought: "Hang on to the wallpaper!"

  I mean, with all my mind, with that.

  Well, I could see it was a wallpaper you could do it with—a pattern—growing things—things that grow—a picture of this, then of that—and the names for them given as thus:

  Blue-eyed grass.

  Wintergreen.

  Sweet William.

  Sneezeweed.

  Vetch.

  Violet.

  Primula.

  Coreopsis.

  Clover.

  Mariposa.

  Marsh marigold.

  Rose mallow.

  Dandelion.

  Red-eye.

  Clover.

  Black-eyed Susan.

  Poppy.

  Bluebells.

  Buttercup.

  Hepatica.

  Wood sorrell.

  Belladonna.

  Ivy.

  I SWEAR IT—ALL THOSE, each and every one.

  Grasses, weeds—I don't know—crap, all that itchy actual crap—pointless from the word go.

  I sat there holding on.

  For nothing less than for life itself.

  Pretty dumb.

  After all, all it was was just a lot of shit. If anything, I should have been joyous, been jubilant, been pleased as punch. Hey, come on—I was going, wasn't I?

  But I was scared to death.

  I thought: "Hey, hotshot, you think you're so smart, let's see you swindle your way out of this."

  Skip it, what the tricks are—they are never not the plenitude the wallpaper-writer needs.

  But ask yourself meanwhile this—which wallpaper-reader lived again to have for him to struggle again with shit like this?

  RESURRECTION

  THE BIG THING ABOUT THIS IS deciding what it's all about. I mean, by way of theme, what, what? Sure, it gives you the event that got me sworn off whiskey forever. But does this make it a tale of how a certain person got himself a good scare, put aside drunkenness, took up sobriety in high hopes of a permanent shift? I don't think so. Me, I keep feeling it's going to be more about Jews and Christians than about this thing of matching another man glass for glass. But I could be wrong in both connections. Maybe what this story is really getting at is something I'd be afraid to know any story I ever wrote is.

  Either way or whatever, it happened last Easter, which doesn't mean a thing to me because of my being Jewish. To my wife it's something, though, and I am more or less willing to play along—providing things don't get too much out of hand. Egg hunts for the kids, this is okay, and maybe a chocolate bunny wrapped in colored tinfoil. But I draw the line when it comes to a whole done-up basket. I don't see why this is called for—strands of candy-store grass getting stuck between floorboards and you can't get the stuff up even with a tweezers or a Eureka.

  As for the Easter that I am talking about, not much of all of this was ever at issue. This was because we got invited out to somebody's place. I think the question just got answered this way—whatever they do, this'll be it, this'll be Easter—no reason for us to have to make any decisions. Which was a relief, of course—the whys and the wherefores of which I am sure you do not need for me to turn nasty and explicate for you. But
my wife and I, didn't we find something else for us to get into a fuss about, anyway? And this is the best I can do—say "something else." Because I don't remember what. Not that it was anything trifling. I'm certain it must have been something pretty substantial. I mean, aside from the whole routine thing of spouses with our differences doing Easter.

  Our boy, however, he got us reasonably jolly just in time for our arrival. What happened was, you just caught it from him, his thrill at getting into all this country-ness of experience. You see, I think our boy really suffers in the city—I think my wife and I agree on this—not that you could ever actually get a confession of his unhappiness out of him. He's all stoic, this kid of ours—God knows from what sources. Twelve years old and tough as a stump, though to my mind a stump is nowhere near as tough as what I think you have to be as tough as. At any rate, he was out and gone as soon as we pulled up into the driveway. Trees, I guess, the trees. That boy, in him we're looking at a mighty delight to get up high on anything, his mother and his dad always hollering, "Come down from there! You're giving us heart failure!"

  The host and hostess, they were swell people. No need to say more. Nice folks. I was going to say "for Christians," but it is never necessary for you to actually say it, is it? As for the houseguest thing, we can skip right from Friday when we got there to Saturday before supper, their having over a few neighbors to meet us—other couples, more Christians. There was this one fellow among them, he seemed to take me for a person of special interest. We got to talking with what was surely more gusto than you would have thought customary among such citizens. I don't know what about so much as I know it had to do with a lot of different municipal things—the houses around there, the gardening, getting the old estates up to scratch with strenuous renovations. There were these trays of Rob Roys going from hand to hand, and dishes of tiny asparagus spears and something lemony in a small porcelain bowl, kids underfoot, and the light in there, it was that settled light, this burnished thing the April light can sometimes get to be at maybe any o'clock when you are indoors in a low-slung, high-gloss, many-windowed room. Well, I might as well tell you now, the fellow had a little girl there, maybe half the age of our boy. Harelipped—this was the thing—a girl with a bad face to go through life with, and I think I got drunk enough to say to the man, "Aw, God—aw, shit."