Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  "But only think of it!" the girl exclaimed. "I mean, wouldn't it be like an heirloom really? I mean, when we have a family, couldn't we just sort of pass it on to them the way real people do, sort of like generations upon generations forever?"

  The boy colored at his spouse's high sentence, wanting to hurry to correct her where it had struck his ear that the girl had gone with it, great Christ, a measure or two too far. But the boy knew the damage had been done, that it was always already centuries too late ever to withdraw the smallest wrongness, that the proprietor— the man hovering ever more tellingly into position—a lofty enough presence to hover, actually—had heard all, judged all—"generations upon generations forever" indeed!—doubtlessly savoring the evidence on a tongue that would publish conclusions elsewhere.

  Ah, God, the boy could hear the verdict carrying down the ages after him: "Innocent young dear has gone and got itself a goodish burden, now hasn't it? Dreadful silly luckless sap."

  That did it, or so it seems not unsafe for us, less lucklessly, to suppose.

  At any rate, grinning horribly, the boy motioned for the girl to fetch the "family" checkbook from her handbag—so that, by whatever means fiscal, the clock was got—and a note was accordingly made and thereafter wired to the fancy key that poked from the fancy keyhole whose lock could let you get at the lordly pendulum either for the errand of starting it up or, if ever required, shutting it down.

  Sold.

  And so forth and so on.

  We are reporting they bought the clock.

  A "GRANDMOTHER CLOCK" was what status the thing was rendered by the reference books in which its kind was pictured, this, it is not unlikely, in pursuit of a program to restrict the object to a rank not so grand at all—and though the provenance of the clock was very probably more local than not, still (the seller had seemed so tall, so hovering, so . . . otherly), once the clock had taken up its post against their bedroom wall (there was really nowhere else for them to fit their purchase, what with the premises being—the marriage was hardly yet out of its cradle—so cruelly unbaronial), the owners succumbed to the practice of engaging the phrase "our imported piece" whenever inquiries were made by one or another young couple who, after very persuasive fare indeed, at the card table set up for the purpose in the kitchen, were escorted back into the bedroom for a bit of TV with coffee, dessert, and cordials.

  "Oh, but it's so unutterably special," the other wife would say. "No wonder you want it back here where you sleep, where a chic antique of its type can really be better appreciated on a much more frequent basis."

  "Yeah, nice," the other husband would say. "So you guys inherit it from your families or something?"

  But whatever enthusiasms the other young couple would insert into the ethers as they bit into cake and drank from goblets and sipped from demitasse cups no bigger than big thimbles, sooner or later someone would be bound to observe—generally when the clock's imperturbable chimes were finally being heard from—that the time was the better part of an hour fast.

  Or slow.

  But wrong.

  Fast or slow but wrong.

  Always wrong.

  Never not anything but chaotically wrong.

  Off.

  Way off.

  Not right.

  Not once.

  Nope, nowhere even close.

  THERE WAS NO REMEDY for it.

  Years into the marriage, the thing still tolled the hour nowhere near the hour—and when one went to the living room (oh, as they will to all couples who achieve the early stewardship of a magisterial property, other important possessions had issued to our couple, even a commodious enough living room had) to see what time it was, one had to smack one's head and reinstruct oneself that for such a use, for telling the time, the clock wasn't any good. Whereupon, whichever of them it was, this party would then get himself prayerfully down onto his knees, would work the fancy key, would draw open the panel whose business it was to keep from view the relentless commerce of the pendulum, would put a finger out to stop it, would then reset the whole affair, hideously mindful all the while that whatever adjustment was being made will have long since, hours hence, begun to yield to the mischief transferring exacting correction into more and more violent error.

  The bother was pointless.

  Clock people were summoned from other counties, from distant precincts, from bizarre neighborhoods, wild sullen grisly creatures, who, angrily bearded and extravagantly undeterred, brought with them menacingly exotic instruments and, sometimes, wordless ghostly staring children, their fathers keeping to their dismal labors for days without sleep, taking no recesses for food even—greasy oblongs of oil-darkened canvas spread out all about as the place more and more accumulated the inward parts of . . . our imported piece!—the thing nauseatingly sundered, the inmost laid open, the hidden laid bare, the genius of the thing suddenly truly charmlessly alien, whatever the truth of its origin.

  No help.

  Nothing worked.

  The clock kept keeping the wrong time.

  But no one is saying the clock was ever a stroke less reassuring to look upon.

  He who looked upon the clock was reassured.

  She, too.

  Made present to the wonder of things in being, of no change, of the venerable venerating itself, of nothing giving up in the teeth of everything defeating.

  It was okay.

  THE CHILDREN HAD COME and gone.

  To be sure, the notion of the generations was just beginning to exert itself good and proper the year the couple packed up and gave up the place where the marriage had conducted its offspring into the habits that had been proclaimed for them. So here was the time for something smaller and more manageable, for a dwelling better fitted to the compressions of middle age—and the clock, of course, went to this dwelling with them—all the time in the world for passing such a patrimony along to the first one to wed—no, to the first one to honor the ceremonies of homemaking—oh, but no yet again—to the first one to express the resolution to prostrate himself and spouse before a token of the household, consenting to welcome unto their destinies the instruction the clock would give.

  BUT, LOOK—see how we, the tellers of what is told, are not exempt from what is said?

  Behold, must not the clock keep perfect time before the story can claim for itself storyhood?

  And so it does!

  All day.

  Every day.

  And all the next ones, too.

  MAGIC!

  How else to explain but as magic?

  The spontaneous institution of what was helplessly wanted—everything in unimprovable order—nothing even a tock's tick off.

  Go ahead, call the timekeepers in, get in touch with the lucky custodians, telephone from right in there—we mean from right in there in the little sleeping room the widow and I have now taken to storing the clock in and to keeping tidied and anointed for the visits of our children's children's children.

  You'll see.

  Say "Could you please tell me what time it is, please?"

  Now watch the clock.

  Right on the money, yes?

  But here is the thing.

  Every time the old woman and I hear it chiming the time it really is, a ridiculous condition of panic takes up our minds in its hands and twists. I mean, the clock, the good old clock—our very index of the durable order of things—has got us scared stiff.

  ON THE BUSINESS OF GENERATING TRANSFORMS

  I have, for example,

  heard such sentences

  as "They didn't know

  what each other should do" . . .

  —NOAM CHOMSKY

  HE DID NOT MEAN IN Ahnenerbe, in Ahmecetka, in Ananiev, in Apion, Arad, Armyansk, Artemovsk, Aumeier, Auschwitz, Baden, Bad Tölz, Baetz, Ballensiefen, Balti, Belzec, Beresovka, Bergen-Belsen, Bessarabia, Birkenau, Blizyn, Bobruisk, Bolzano, Borisov, Borispol, Brabag, Bratislava, Breendonck, Breslau, Brest Litovsk, Buchenwald, Budzyn, Bukovina, Chelmno, Chisinau
, Chmiolnik, Chortkov, Cservenka, Czestochowa, Dachau, Dorohoi, Dorohucza, Dubno, Flir, Florstedt, Flossenbürg, Gomel, Gorlitz, Grodno, Hilversum, Kamenka, Karlovac, Karsava, Kaunas, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Kislovodsk, Kistarcsa, Klimovichni, Koblenz, Kobryn, Kodyma, Kopkow, Kowel, Krakow-Placzow, Krzemienec, Kulmhof, Kummer, Kurhessen, Kursk, Kysak, Kyustendil, Langleist, Larissa, Lida, Liscka, Litzenberg, Ljubljana, Lodz, Lom, Lublin, Lvov, Majdanek, Malkinia, Mariupol, Mielec, Mitrovica, Mogilev, Moldavia, Monowitz, Nasielek, Neu-Sandez, Nevel, Novo Moskovsk, Novo Ukrainka, Olshanka, Opitz, Oppeln, Oswiecim, Pionki, Plovdiv, Poltava, Poniatowa, Poznan, Pristina, Pskov, Raschwitz, Ravensbrück, Rawa-Ruska, Regensburg, Rovno, Saarbrucken, Saarpflaz, Salonika, Sambor, Sdolbunov, Silesia, Simferopol, Skopje, Slavyansk, Slivina, Slovakia, Slovenia, Slutsk, Sluzk, Smolensk, Snigerevka, Snovsk, Sobibor, Sonsken, Struma, Staden, Stammlager, Stettin, Szarva, Szeged, Szolnok-Doboka, Taganrog, Tallin, Târgu-Mures, Tarnopol, Tartu, Theresienstadt, Tighina, Timisoara, Tiraspol, Tizabogdany, Tomaschow, Transnistria, Trawniki, Treblinka, Trikkala, Trzynietz, Turck, Turda, Uzhorod, Vapniarka, Varna, Vijnita, Vilna, Vinnitsa, Vitebsk, Vitezka, Volhynia-Podolia, or in Vyazma, or in Zakopane, or in Zangen, or in Zupp.

  But, yes, certainly it is probably true they did not know what each other should do. They probably did not know what even they themselves should.

  FISH STORY

  AS FAR AS I WAS ALWAYS CONCERNED, the outdoors was where you maybe went when it wasn't raining and only when you had to. I wasn't the only indoorsy type in my parish to cherish this unhealthy opinion. One thing was, you couldn't hear Jack Armstrong under some spreading chestnut tree—because Jewish boys did not have spreading chestnut trees and, anyway, back in those backward burnished days, portable radios went about three pounds shy of the total tonnage of the Normandie, crew and cargo loaded. Or maybe they hadn't even invented them yet—portable radios, I mean, not Jewish boys. But the days were indeed backward, all right, aglow with the feeble light those ancient flame-shaped amber bulbs struggled to give off. Everybody's mother thought they were the cat's pajamas, those cunning bulbs, just the thing for the fake-Tudor houses everybody lived in. Oh, we were all as happy as clams in those glowy places the mothers tried to pry us from into the bright outdoorsy day calling all unwholesome boys. All you wanted weekdays was a box of Uneeda Biscuits and a row of Walnettos, to sustain you from Jack Armstrong through Lorenzo Jones. Saturdays, Let's Pretend and Grand Central Station so filled the inner kid and stilled the organs of ingestion, you went serenely, the whole day, without. Sundays we won't even talk about, so you and your loved ones will not have to hear what it sounds like when a grown man sobs. Oh, I suppose I can risk a little bit, mention just The Shadow, The Adventures of Nick Carter—Master Detective, and Quick as a Flash, leaving it, I think, impressively, unbeatably, oh so longingly at that.

  Are you kidding me—the outdoors? The outdoors was for droolers and for nose-pickers, for kids called Buster and Butch and the one, I swear, called Bix. The outdoors was for the kid we called "Wedge" because, you know, because someone had told us your wedge was your simplest tool.

  But sometimes God was merciless and it did not rain.

  It was then that the mothers came armed with reminders of Green Harvey, to breach the ramparts and storm the trenches of Bad Hygiene.

  But first they'd move into action with rickets.

  You'll get rickets!

  (Aw, Ma, what's rickets?)

  Rickets is from not playing outdoors and from eating meat from a can! Do I ever give you meat from a can?

  (Aw, Ma, I've got to stay tuned for a coded message.)

  Tell me something, Mr. Young-Man-Who-Is-Willing-To-Break-A-Mother's-Blood-Vessel, have you lately taken a good look at Harvey Joel Rosensweig?

  Visions of Green Harvey an uncomfortable number of houses away always did the ruthless trick. Because you did not want to look like Harvey Joel Rosensweig anymore than Harvey Joel Rosensweig did. And if you were the sort of chicken-hearted impressionable I was, the mother in question did not have to break a blood vessel. You want to divide a believer from the family Emerson, you will never get a better crowbar than Visions of Green Harvey. But this, of course, was back when liddlies were backward and just little.

  Which reminds me of another thing which they had not invented yet—which was smart kids. Not only that, but they also hadn't uninvented parents who never heard of traumatizing the crap out of a ten-year-old radio fan.

  Green Harvey!

  Jeepers, you never saw a kid quicker when it came to buckling on his swashes.

  SO THERE YOU WERE, on the lawn, just crazy to participate in the American Way of Life. You had the Wheaties box to guide you in the modalities of how your American boy is supposed to play, but what you did not have was anybody to do it with—because this was the day it was your mother who was the only mother home to hound her issue into the streets, all of the other mothers being at the neighborhood rummy game, which is where it is mothers and fathers in a perfect world were perfectly meant to be.

  I'd sit on the curb for a time and stare at some glinty thing in the gutter. I don't know what it was with me, but in those backward burnished days, whenever I sat on a curb, this is what I would do, cut my eyes sideways from side to side until I had spotted some glittery thing, a bonanza in the gutter. Then I'd sit there, at whatever distance, trying to guess what it was. Not guess, really, but just declare aloud with mad conviction—alone like this, you being Renfrew of the Royal Mounties or Sergeant Preston of the Yukon—the startling powers in you something scary in your solitude. Hey, whatever it was, off there in the gutter, who even needed a second glint?

  Gum wrapper!

  And then you'd get up and go look.

  The time's too backward and burnished for me to remember if I ever did guess right. But I remember one day what it was when the guess I'd guessed was nowhere near to close, which—okay, okay, you got me, okay?—which incident is what accounts for my getting into this whole outdoorsy business with you in the first place.

  Because one day it was a fishhook!

  NOW A FISHHOOK IN THE GUTTER was not a discovery you routinely made in the gutters of the streets where I come from. I'm talking about a place called the Five Towns, a sort of way-station along the ongoing Diaspora about twenty miles out on Long Island, counting from the center of familial concern—which was where all of the fathers bravely went each day with their brown suits and their gray fedora hats.

  I wasn't all that dumb about fishing, mind you. Not only did I know it was a thing the Wheaties box okayed, but I knew almost all the grammar-school readers had Skippy always doing it with his pop, or had Bucky always wanting to do it with his pa, or had Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling a story about it to his dog.

  I knew they all did it with an animal they called a worm and that they did it with a stick they called a pole. I knew they got a worm and a line and a pole, and that where they went with them to do it was to a crick.

  I wasn't too sure we had anything around there where we lived which would qualify as a crick, but the first three items I figured for a cinch. Hook in hand—you know, holding it—my mother's shrieked philosophy conjuring in my mind's ear the shout of calamity (You will put an eye out with that thing!), I headed for the garage, happy to be in darkness for the time it would take for me to get the pole (a piece of picket fence, an upright left over because the lawn we had did not go that far) and the line (a bunch of Venetian-blind cord the vermin had set up for themselves as a haven in a heartless world).

  Worm.

  Worm?

  I'd seen a few in my time—but not really where they had come from. I mean, a worm was something Green Harvey would come running at you with—until you had had the luck to see him coming and the good sense for you to take off a safe distance the other way, far enough for his fat to make Green Harvey quit coming and eat it—the worm. But it never crossed my mind to wonder where Harvey Joel Rosensweig got his worm from. I suppose I just leaped to the conclusion you had to be a
Harvey Joel Rosensweig to know where worms were.

  Worm! Worm! Worm!

  I think I remember scuffing up the pebbles in our driveway for a trice or two, giving many maddening seconds to my idea of how a real American boy breasts all hardship to quest the Great Quest. What I mean is I was by this time back in those backward burnished days pretty damn wised-up as to a pessimist's construction of everything in sight—meaning: if I did not catch a fish, I would be the last one to be surprised. Listen, it was a boyhood perpendicular to the kind you read about in the readers in school. It was a boyhood where the community never rested in its preparations for disaster and was amazed, seemed disappointed, when it did not strike. It was a boyhood where standards were sky-high but where expectation had been leached out of them to make for you a non-annihilating semi-null class. Come on, I'm not whining—I am just giving you, straight from the shoulder, the whole heart-rending tragic picture.

  SO HERE WE ARE, nostalgia fans, back behind the family garage with a piece of picket fence, about nine feet of chewed-up Venetian-blind cord, and a hook Satan had set out to do temptation's work there in a gutter-looker's gutter. But you're thinking crick, you're thinking where does the kid get a crick from? Well, it takes the kid about a half hour to walk it to the crick, an inlet (let in by the Atlantic Ocean) spanned by a little bridge you crossed to get to the beach clubs. We called this inlet The Inlet, and we called the bridge The Bridge—not unmindful of how Skippy and Bucky were always coming up with these really great names for things—it dawning on me that if you got yourself out there on a little poke of dock up on out there on the landward side (hello, Skippy! hello, Bucky!), you could drop a line down into something maybe liquid and deep enough.

  Look, I can appreciate how knot-tying is probably a pretty big deal to most people, but for me there's never been much in it for me after the shoelace stage. So if you are wondering how I got the Venetian-blind cord stuck onto the piece of picket fence, do me a favor and save your worry for the hook.