Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  Because the hook, jeez, the hook truly was a bitch. I mean, I tried a lot of very fancy thinking, but my brain could only handle in my mind the mental thought it definitely, the hook, could not be hooked to anything I had in my hands.

  So I just dropped the line in, tossed the Venetian-blind cord in, hookless and wormless but serious-looking if you went by the principle of its having lifted up its share of slats.

  YOU READY?

  You're ready!

  Because how else could this all come out but as a good and countervailing lesson for a boy who always waited for the worst?

  I am not saying what happened converted an indoors type to an outdoors one. Please, I still get closest to God somewhere where you can control the light. All I am saying is I went ahead and pulled up no fewer than a dozen lunatic fish with that stick of picket fence—fish which just bit anywhere all at once on that Venetian-blind cord and which looked like they were not going to let go of it wherever they'd bit on a bet.

  I did not take even one of them home to prove it, though. As a matter of fact, I did not try to yank even one of them off the line. I just dropped the stick and ran like hell, all twelve or so of those infectious things on there fastened to it for good.

  You know who would have stuck around?

  I bet you Green Harvey would have stuck around—the loon probably harvesting those evil-minded monstrosities just to pitch one through the window of every mother's son who ever had believed himself to be altogether more than far enough away from any undoing indoors.

  But me, I had had my fair warning of what is sometimes under outdoor things.

  Knew I'd never need to have another warning again.

  IT WAS BETTER THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER, when I was turning the pages of a Ladybird Book for an indoorsy type of my own (a kid whose peaceable opinion of nature continues to treacherously thrive on an abundance of urban ignorance), that I found out what it was the Wheaties box had got me into back in the backward burnished days when my heart was brave and true—namely, the worst scare ever to chase me through all of the backward burnish of my youth.

  It was just a blowfish.

  They were just blowfish.

  Every last one of them a blown-up certitude in and of itself.

  Oh, it will bite on any fool thing, your natural blowfish will. But so, for that matter—hook, line, and sinker—will your friendly reader. I mean, since it is all the same in the end, and if it is all the same to you, give me human nature every time—and the equally metaphoric, equally dubious, equally muddled angling of men.

  AFTER THE BEANSTALK

  THE ONE LOVE of my life was Beatrice, a dog of some kind. As for her sentiments, it convincingly appeared Beatrice more than amply reflected the experience of my emotion. Goodness knows, whatever modest attention I might let be sent in her direction, the thing would answer with such a frenzy of delight one feared the exertion might do the creature in. But Beatrice lived and lived, and must have come to quite a great age actually, considering it was promptly on the accomplishment of my birth that she had been made over to me as a gift, this by Aunt Enid and Uncle Jack in an earlier century. I had always understood dogs to suffer—in arithmetic terms, of course—a more severe constraint within the natural precinct. It would, in this regard, have occurred to me I should prove to outlive Beatrice by a rather notable margin, all things being equal. But truly, truly, I ask you, when are they ever? For there I was, just managing to limp gingerly into the impressive decrepitude of a very latterly decade, yet there also was Beatrice, doubtless more ancient than myself—the ratio concerning this computation will be not at all taxing for even the most deficient reader—still continuing to conduct herself in the old manner. By what means, by what means, I put it to you, had my companion succeeded in eluding the penalty of the years? But just look at her, persisting with every vigor at the acquitting of those chores whose number Beatrice had obtained from Aunt Enid at the time of this person's having taken her absolute leave of us. I mean to say, it still happened I had only to glance up from my studies at any time of night or day to espy this good and earnest beast toiling away with the fiercest zeal as she sought the completions and perfections of the dwelling we had for so long an era shared one with the other. To be sure, it would have been quite inconceivable to me I should have permitted myself to slip into the last sleep without wondering aloud at the marvel Beatrice, in the mutt's mere being, revealed to me. And so it was that I, Gordon—Gordon!—touched Beatrice ever so lightly (it had become a rather unpleasant procedure for me to do much other than to read) upon the shoulder whilst this mysterious animal was making all speed past me in pursuit of her errands with whisk broom and dustpan.

  "Dear dog," I said, "one sees you absorbed in labors for the common good, so please to forgive me for this interference and, too, for the impertinence which occasions it, but I should like to inquire of the heavens how can it be that every evidence of life keeps flourishing in yourself even as in me so slight a display of it threatens to endure."

  Beatrice said, "Seeing that you ask, the answer is this—I am not what you see."

  "Not what I see?" I said, too stunned to be quite at all comprehending of the event now in motion before me. "What, then, if not what I see?" I said, still construing myself as a figure deeply adream.

  "A princess, but of course," Beatrice replied, conveying in her style of speech a certain impatience with my unrestrained amazement.

  "Then an effect of magic has been worked upon you and you are, as a consequence," I exclaimed, quite beside myself with the triumph of my surmise, "an enchanted dog! Occult, occult!"

  "Right!" Beatrice confirmed. "A curse, a spell, a charm—you name it."

  "Was it," I asked, and none too bravely, I will admit, "Aunt Enid who did it to you?"

  "No, no," Beatrice sighed, letting fall both dustpan and whisk broom in a show, I concluded, of no small annoyance with me for the tiresomeness of my interrogative, "not her, not the dame, but him—that fucker Jack, the motherfucker."

  "Please, Beatrice, please!" I erupted, ashamed for the both of us at the intemperance of her diction. "I must beg you to realize I had not known to this very time that you could speak, nor either that you are, in truth, one transformed—and most assuredly not a household hound, it must be assumed, but a rather handsome woman, I expect the case must be, one who would very likely seek to amuse me in a fashion quite beyond my power to imagine—and of noble bearing, you say, of nothing less than noble bearing!"

  At this Beatrice retrieved her implements and settled upon myself a none too forgiving gaze. "Look," she said at length, "my father was a monarch, yes, and me, I am some piece of ass, depend upon it—which, conjecture that it is, is nevertheless probably how come your weird relation had to hex me—the dirty stinking rotten crummy creep!"

  It was then I spoke to my pet thusly: "Oh, oh, Beatrice, I beg you, I beg you, no more of this coarseness—it is altogether too distressing to me for me to hear it from your lips, not least when I now have such a deal of everything to struggle with within myself to make an adjustment to if we are, you and I, to produce a future for ourselves from this present—that you can converse, to cite the first of these items, that you are prospectively a most sumptuous instance of womanhood, to cite the second of these, that you promise incalculable erotic bliss, to cite the third, and that you must certainly be rich as well as royal, to cite in seriatim now a fourth and fifth."

  "Kiss me, Gordo!" Beatrice commanded, flinging aside the symbols of her servitude and thrusting her open body at me. "Kiss me, pal, and all—big bucks, fabulous pussy, even life everlasting—it all shall be yours!"

  "Sounds pretty swell to me," I acknowledged. But, collecting myself not a jot too soon, I drew myself safely apart and issued the ensuing statement: "I positively refuse, precious thing, to surrender myself to the conditions, and therefore to the punchline, of any joke that I, Gordon—Gordon!—have not myself devised, just as I would also refuse, please be aware, to forego even one
of the several myselves deployed in the foregoing utterance."

  The brute's eyes widened.

  One noted, I note—with a twinge of unseemly satisfaction perhaps—that it was no longer my turn to be the party taken aback. Yet my heart was swift to soften at the spectacle of melancholy I had, in my recall to form, inspired—and, accordingly, awful as it was for me in my ruined substance to do, I reached out my fingertips and caused them to create a sort of consoling effect upon the nearer of the cur's ears.

  "There, there," I crooned, "thrilling as it would be—I don't deny it for an instant—to inaugurate your freedom and therefore to liberate your tits, your title, your checking account, and your hole—I do think, on the whole, sweetness, I should much prefer the fame of my having been the proprietor of a talking dog."

  Well, I needn't report the bitch bit me good and proper at that. Nor that I do not expect the wound she gave me—good God, the offense of one's biology, the incommensurable insult of it!—ever to give itself to even the beginnings of repair.

  That's it.

  It needs only to say no regrets.

  It's been the first and last of my amours—witty, just, and not all that long from now, fatal.

  SQUEAK IN THE SYCAMORE

  I WANT TO TELL YOU some fast things first about when I was little and then I am going to go ahead and tell you a story like everybody else. One is there was a tree out front and I heard things in it and I could not see up to the top of it and it made me scared I couldn't. Two is the man next door said come see my jonquils and I did not know if I should or not. Three is I went to bed with socks on and somebody came in and pulled off the covers and stood looking and crying and saying look at that. Four is Little Eugene had a slime spoon and they made it my job to be the one to have to go clean it off. Five is the butter-and-egg man died from adhesions. Six is the plumber died from getting electrocuted. Six is the gardener died from digging up a basilisk. Seven is the electrician died from a double hernia. Seven is the fruit-and-vegetable man died from his goiter getting wet. Eight is my second-grade teacher died from something. Nine is the sandwich man at the druggist's died from something else. Ten is the mailman died from kidney trouble and his wife. Eleven is the man who came to put the wallpaper up died from keeling over. Twelve is my mother died from stones in her cunt. Thirteen is my cousin Artie Sakowitz died from choking on ice water. Fourteen is Aunt Esther died, Aunt Dora died, Aunt Adele died, Aunt Pauline died, Aunt Miriam died, also Uncle Lou did, Uncle Sig did, Uncle Jack did, Tante Ida did, Tante Lily did, and so did a girl in my class from bending over too much, and so did a man from a sled hitting his head, and so did a dog, and so did Jesus. Lots of movie stars are dead. Rabbi Sandrow is dead. There are dead people from wars, from volcanoes, from floods, from earthquakes, from fires, from famine, from pestilence, from pestilence, bad food, bad habits, rash decisions, rushes to judgment, killer plants, death thoughts, from playing too much with a jump rope too much, from even just doing nothing. There is a bug that can make you die by you walking on its back. There is a jellyfish that can swim in through your nose and then climb up into your brain and then eat your whole brain up. There is a lake that has bloodsuckers in it that can suck all of the blood out of somebody and nobody can get the bloodsuckers off of them even after all of the blood has been sucked out of them and there is no blood left in them anymore for the bloodsuckers anymore to suck out of them anymore. Did you know you can get somebody's hair stuck in your throat and suffocate from it? You can get hemorrhages. You can get dysplasia. You can get glossitis and herpetic stomatitis. You can get acute arterial thrombosis. Don't laugh. It's not funny. There's nothing funny about any of it. You think there's anything funny about obstructive uropathy? How about idiopathic long QT syndrome, you asshole! You think it's funny too? Fucking people with their fucking idea of what's hilarious! It makes me sick when somebody's got pericarditis with effusion and people start laughing about it and making wisecracks about it and carrying on like it's some kind of fucking joke.

  People!

  What makes people so absolutely so sickening?

  Doesn't anybody know what makes people stand there and be so sickening?

  Okay, as to the story like everybody else:

  Schmulevitz comes out of the doctor's office, and Mrs. Schmulevitz says to him: "So? So tell me, darling husband, so what is the verdict?"

  "The verdict?" Schmulevitz says. He says, "You are asking me, Schmulevitz, what the verdict is? Because the answer is," he says, "not so hotsy-totsy, for your information. Because for your information, Mrs. Schmulevitz," Schmulevitz says to Mrs. Schmulevitz, "because for your information the man in there, he gives me two weeks tops."

  "Two weeks tops?" Mrs. Schmulevitz says to Schmulevitz. She says to him, "You are telling me the verdict is two weeks tops? So what is the deal with the two weeks tops?" Mrs. Schmulevitz says to Schmulevitz. "What, pray tell, is the condition with regard to the two weeks tops?" says Mrs. Schmulevitz.

  "The ticker," says Schmulevitz. "The man says to me forget it, Schmulevitz, it's the ticker, Schmulevitz. Tops, the man says to me, you got two weeks tops, the man says to me. This is what the man says to me because of the ticker," says Schmulevitz.

  "Well," says Mrs. Schmulevitz, "thank God at least it's not cancer."

  So to you that's pretty fucking comic, right?

  God, I cannot goddamn believe it.

  HOW THE HEAD COMES OFF

  ALL RIGHT, WE EACH HAVE SEVEN CARDS. Seven cards have been dealt to you, seven cards have been dealt to me. Let us say that, between the two of us, it is I who has done the dealing, yes? All right—if it is I who has been the one to deal, then you play first.

  Yes, yes, yes, of course—but what do you play?

  Let us say that you play the seven of diamonds.

  Very good, you have played the seven of diamonds.

  All right, my options are these—play a seven, or play a diamond, or play an eight.

  All right, why an eight?

  Eights are wild. This is why an eight. It can always "be" an eight.

  But do I have an eight?

  No, I do not have an eight.

  Moreover, if I had an eight, it would be smarter not to play the eight—no, no, no, not at this "stage" of the game.

  I mean that when this "stage" of the game is the beginning "stage" of the game.

  Ah, but what if I had three eights?

  Or all four eights?

  In other words, what if I had in my hand such a supply of eights that it might not do incorrigible harm to my long-term prospects for me to spend spendthriftly from my copia of eights?

  But skip it.

  I have no surplus of eights.

  To be sure, what I reckon myself to have in my hand is not even one goddamn eight.

  Ah—so what do I do?

  Yes, yes, yes, what do I do?

  Play a seven? Play a diamond? Yes, yes, yes, these are possible plays—a seven, a diamond—either of these is a possible play, is it not?

  But one must have the one or have the other in one's hand, must one not?

  I mean I must.

  But I do not.

  So now what, now what?

  I'm sevenless and diamondless, not to mention eightless—so, as I said, now what?

  All right, the answer is I pick.

  I may—or must—pick.

  I can "go pick," taking from the "deck" cards in hopes of my coming upon a playable card.

  Meaning, taking cards from the aggregate of cards not dealt when the cards were, you know, dealt.

  In other words, that's the "deck," the undealt cards.

  The thirty-eight cards.

  Because, at this "stage" of the game, the "deck" is constituted of the result achieved when fourteen is taken away from fifty-two, given that neither of us has thus far been made to "go pick"—is this not correct?

  Yes, this is correct.

  But now I, your opponent, must "go pick."

  All right, I pick the jack of
hearts.

  No good.

  I pick the deuce of clubs.

  No good.

  I pick the eight of spades.

  Ah.

  Ahhh.

  An eight!

  But do I use it? Do I "play" it?

  No, no, no, eights are wild, or eights are "wild," but let their "wildness" be held in reserve.

  I pick again.

  This will be my fourth pick.

  I ask you, I ask you, how many picks is one permitted when one must "go pick"?

  The answer is five.

  The rule is this—when a player "goes and picks," the pickable limit of cards is five.

  I pick.

  I have picked.

  The four of diamonds!

  Thank God.

  All right, I play the four of diamonds. The other cards that I have picked, the jack, the deuce, the eight, these all get stored, placed, preserved—in my hand, or in my "hand." Whereas I play, have played, can play the diamond "on" your diamond.

  Good.

  Your turn to play.

  You search your "hand."

  You see in it—rulingly—a diamond.

  Yes, yes, but what if the set screw is stuck?

  All right, let us suppose the set screw, so-called, is stuck, is "frozen," as they say—what then?

  Or, "then what"?

  Look at it this way—you arrive at the cemetery.

  Everyone trudges, everyone traipses, everyone trundles inside—where there is a frosted window at which, it is plain, one applies. Or, let us say, goes to, stands at, stares into, and lightly agitates the bell that is there for you to summon the cemeterian assumed to be inside.

  Good.

  "You are?" the fellow says.

  One answers, "Lish, the child of, the brother of, the husband of—what difference?"