Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  Third of all, let's get going, okay?—because it's late and I am knocked out and there is no reason for us to go overboard with this and I'd really like to get to bed.

  I GET ON the subway at the place where I usually get on, which is Ninety-sixth. I only mention the number to you—come on, what good are numbers in stories, right?—only because this way you can see how stuck I am with how long the story has to be—since it goes from Ninety-sixth Street to Fifty-first Street, which is the distance I have to go to go from my place—the place where I live, this is—to the place where I work.

  Isn't distance the same thing as time or something?

  Anyway, what isn't?

  When you really get right down to it—to time—is there anything which isn't?

  Which is the point about the nun.

  You take one look at her—I couldn't miss doing it because, first of all, the nun is sitting almost right straight across from me and because, second of all, the nun has the most beautiful face which I have ever seen—you take one look at her and you cannot stop looking at her.

  The nun.

  But she will not look back at me.

  She will not look at anybody that I can see.

  The thing I notice after I notice how beautiful the face of the nun is is that the nun will not look at anybody that I can see.

  What I can see is that the nun is looking more or less in front of the tips of her shoes, which are black, of course, and which are clamped down flat on the floor right straight out in front of her, of course.

  Then at Eighty-sixth Street there is a woman which gets on and which starts carrying on like a beggar.

  Begging.

  I don't have to tell you.

  It is a public occurrence.

  Asking everybody for everything you can ask for.

  The thing of it is that she gets herself, the beggar does, set up right straight in front of the nun.

  But the nun never looks up to see.

  The nun is instead looking at the place, which I have told you is the place which is more or less the place in front of her shoes.

  The nun's.

  This means where the beggar lady is standing is, call it, one place away.

  THE NUN IS NOT looking at anything but at what she is looking at—except, please, please, am I in any position to tell you if the nun is actually seeing anything of what the nun is looking at?

  I am not in any position like that.

  Anyway, I figure the nun, if she gets off before I get off, I will see her probably at least maybe touch the arm of the woman begging or see her touch the wrist of the woman begging—maybe whisper to the woman a blessing, if this is what nuns do, whisper blessings to women begging, or whisper to the whole wide world, "Come with me and I will see you are fed and bathed and given comfort and so forth and so on—bed, blanket, clean sheets to sleep inside of and all your woes undone."

  But she didn't.

  The nun got off at Fifty-ninth Street and never put her hand out to lay it upon anyone, least of all upon the lady in want.

  Did I tell you she had a little valise with frer and that off with it she went, the nun?

  Me, I go the rest of the way to Fifty-first and then get off at Fifty-first. It is my usual routine per usual—Ninety-sixth Street to Fifty-first Street, day in and day—Jesus, Jesus—out.

  Anyway, here's the story.

  That I would have followed the nun anywhere if I thought she would have let me—especially after the look I see she has on her that I saw on her when the nun went past me and then went out of the subway with her little valise.

  It was what I would have to tell you was a peeved look, you know?

  You know what I mean when I say peeved?

  I mean peeved as in pissed off.

  Made to stop being, for a little bit, where she was—it must have really pissed her off, the nun.

  God, to be there—to be anywhere—the way the nun I have been telling you about was.

  Just once.

  Or—better, better—forever.

  KONKLUDING LABOR OF HERKULES

  HERE'S ONE.

  Woman gets sick. Seven years sick. Dies. Is dead. So husband buries her. Comes home. Sees mess the household is in. Sees seven years of the mess the household is in. Phones cleaning service. Gets on phone and phones cleaning service. Wants premises cleaned. He means get it cleaned just for him to be able to first begin to see where somebody like him could maybe begin to start to really get it clean. So they come, they clean. So man takes a look—and breathes. Sits breathing, breathes. Then goes gets garment. Goes gets needle. Goes gets thread. Sews garment to chest, chest to garment, chest to chair. Had probably must have wished, don't you guess, to effect said deed with thimble. But thimble make-believe.

  UPON THE DOORPOST OF THY HOUSE

  WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT THIS FOR? Is there something you expect to derive from looking at this? What is it you expect to derive from looking at this? What result is it you anticipate from the time you give to this? What if it is not forthcoming? What if what you want from reading this is not forthcoming? Will you make it your business to assign blame if what you want from this is not forthcoming? Have you given any thought to the question of why it is you think something ought to be wanted or might ever be forthcoming? Do you not think it worth wondering why anyone should wish for anything to be forthcoming? Does it not occur to you the wish for there to be something forthcoming subjects one to the allegation that one deems oneself to be incomplete, needful, deficient? Do you believe it inures to the grandeur of your notion of yourself to deem yourself any of the foregoing? Are you quite certain you quite positively know the sense in which the expression "inures to" is uttered? Is there not some particle of uncertainty somewhere in you in your sense of what you know? Is it not altogether too immediately conceivable to you that you must have misconstrued the character of my meaning? Would it not at all give you to wonder for you to come to discover you took a view of matters quite out of keeping with what you were meant to? If someone says to you a sentence wherein the device of "if not"—let alone "let alone"—is in evidence, would you not feel yourself a dot unsteadier as you went, if not disabled? Did the sentence just prior to this one not warrant, as it went, my right to produce myself as your inquisitor? What is it in you that, despite every reason for you to be rid of this exanimate exercise, animates you, that keeps animating you, that will not quit animating you, that keeps making you make your way onward with such animal vivacity? Is this how you have determined to un-determine yourself, how it is imagined you will let alone yourself, how in a bounded event bondage, the bondage, is not a little like—you feel it!—infinitude, let alone freedom?

  DOG STORY

  I ONLY HAVE A CERTAIN NUMBER of minutes for me to tell you this one. Or I have only a certain number for me to. Holy moly, I only do—but am, but have been—look at me, look at me!—already wasting some of the ones I do. Except the thing of it is is this: where the dickens does the only go, where the deuce is the only supposed to? Because it has just been made clear to me I do not know whether where it is supposed to is before or after the have.

  The positioning of the adverb, I mean.

  Or is it that it's not?

  Is, rather, an adjective, that is.

  Look, if I had all the time in the world, if I had as much time in the world to tell a dog story as I bet you would probably have time in the world for you to tell one, then here is how I would have probably begun to tell you this one and not the way I did.

  Let me tell you what our custom was—for it was for us to make our unhurried way arm in arm along High Street when the commerce in it was first giving evidence of its having begun to come for the day to the end of its incidence and when none but the ladies of station still sought to keep the shopkeepers established in states of attention in hopes perhaps of their—of the hopeful merchants, that is—disposing of whatever further of their wares. It was then that she customarily for her part and I for mine would hasten fro
m our sleepy offices to collect ourselves at the corner of High and Indenture and then to turn in along High and to take ourselves along our practiced course to where the vendor, at Cathedral, from the shelter of a sidewalk stand, sold a variety of grilled sausages and, to go with them, any one of them—providing one wished it to—one variety of bread.

  Forget it.

  I do not have time for anything as leisurely as tarrying with food in or even out of my mouth.

  The minutes I have are fewer than the minutes I had—and I can see there are sentences yet for me to go before I can get to the wind-up yet.

  Which anyhow goes, in certain of its acoustical and lexical occasions, like this:

  "They killed my dog there. But did I not tell you that they killed my dog there?"

  Because I, in the story, say to her, in the story: "It is so nice here. It's so nice."

  Whereupon she says, "It is. Yes, very. It is very nice, isn't it?"

  "Yes, " I say, "it certainly really is."

  "But I think it is decisively nicer in Zurich, I think."

  That's she.

  Now here's—in the story, that is—me, I, speaking in it, and saying, as if it mattered:

  "It is?"

  "I think it is, yes," says she.

  "Zurich," say I. "Imagine it, Zurich," say I.

  "Yes, very," says she, reaching into her purse for the money to pay.

  "Then you have been to Zurich?" say I.

  "Oh, yes," says she. "Yes," says she. "I actually," says she, "lived there, was once in residence there, you realize."

  "Imagine it," say I. "The famous burial place," say I. "The place of the famous burial, that is."

  "Oh, yes," says she. "Lived there—oh, yes—years literally—literally years."

  "Years?" say I. "Actually years?"

  "Oh, yes—very," says she. She says. "Quite literally longer than he did, you know. Actually," says she, "Zurich. But did I not tell you that they killed my precious Schatzie in Zurich? So adorable, so deliciously adorable. A dog."

  I acquired the blutwurst—with which no mitigating breadstuff, to my mind, would be required.

  Okay, time's up. She is fucking making me as tetched as a Pomeranian all over again anyway. Or she anyway is making me as fucking tetched as one.

  Well, let's face it, sweetface, there are never anymore minutes—nicht, you know, wahr?

  I am meanwhile—I positively, I honestly believe—savagely famished.

  Adverbially speaking, or speaking adverbially.

  IN THE CITY OF GRAMMAR

  I'M TELLING ANOTHER FISH STORY. That's what this is—it's going to be another fish story. Told one once and read it for the eighth time just two minutes ago and you know what?

  It wasn't so bad.

  It was actually pretty good.

  At least it made, I think, some sense, which is a lot more than I think I can say for most of what I say. Anyway, just like the first fish story I told, it won't take but a minute for me to tell it. Another thing, there's just mainly me in it and Uncle Henry in it and Uncle Henry's dogs in it, which means it shouldn't be so hard for you to keep track of what's going on in it. Their names (those of the dogs, you understand) were (I hope with all my heart the stinking stinkers are dead) Jackson and Mickey, or were Mickey and Jackson—big (or so everything seemed to me at the time) ponderous brutes that snapped at the air for what probably looked to them like it was flying through it—bugs and shit, I guess—and that chewed the eels Uncle Henry kept producing from up out of the junky water we always sat there fishing in.

  We were out there up on top of it for flounder and fluke, you know—but what we forever kept getting up out of it were more like the likes of skates and eels. They wouldn't chew the skates, Jackson and Mickey, Mickey and Jackson. They only chewed and then vomited right back up the eels. Actually, they didn't—so far as I could see from where I was told for me to better keep myself, no matter what, sitting—chew the whole eel, its whole horrible evil body, but just its tiny evil head (pretty horrible enough, if you ask me), which they could get at (which Jackson and Mickey could) with no great obstacle to themselves, given the fact that Uncle Henry always snatched out his hatchet to hack the head off with this hatchet he always had with him in under his jacket back there in the back of the boat.

  It was a rowboat.

  Dom and Dell (okay, I just remembered there were also them), or Dom or Dell, always got it out for us (the rowboat) from the mess of them (of rowboats) they rented out to people that were tied (the rowboats) nose to tail down at the dock. You'd go down there and pick one out (a rowboat) and then Dom or Dell would jump right on down from the dock into the nearest one—this being the nearest rowboat, I mean—jump down into that one and then jump from that one on over to the next one until, and so on, he'd jumped his way (Dom's or Dell's) all the way over to your one, and then, once in your one with an oar to do it with, pole it back on over to the dock to you, first cutting it loose first and so on.

  You know, rope, rope.

  Lots of tough-guy work with rope.

  Uncle Henry had a Johnson.

  Or it could have been an Evinrude.

  It wasn't a Mercury, anyway.

  People never had a Mercury.

  THE NEXT PART OF THE STORY is Mickey always—between vomiting back up the chewed-up head (or semihead) of an eel—coming up to me and squatting down in front of me and scratching at me with his toenails to get me to scratch back behind his ears for him.

  It made me bleed.

  It always finally made the same knee bleed because this was back when boys always wore short pants and because Mickey would always scratch this same one knee and not the other knee and because Mickey always kept scratching this same one knee again to get you to start back up scratching him back behind his ears for him again the instant your arm could not stand it for it to be out there in the air anymore scratching anything anymore and you had to scream or quit.

  But nobody could do anything like scream with Uncle Henry on board. Neither was Uncle Henry the kind of person somebody could do anything like scream with even if it was anywhere else you were with Uncle Henry, either.

  (One thing was, Uncle Henry only had anybody in the rowboat with him because of the fact that his own sons weren't around instead for them to be in it with him because they were fighting for our army overseas.)

  The only thing was, Uncle Henry probably wouldn't have heard anybody doing it, anyway—screaming, shrieking, yelling your head off about anything.

  I think Uncle Henry was thinking of something.

  I don't think it was of fish.

  Uncle Henry would come get me at my house, come take me down to the dock with him, come help me step down into the rowboat with him, then tell me not to ever budge from off the seat in the middle of it if I had any idea of what was good for me, and then just run the Johnson (or run the Evinrude), and get the rowboat somewhere, get the anchor over, get his rig all rigged up, reach around to check to see if his hatchet was ready, and then start to sit there and start to look like he was fishing but really instead, I think, be thinking, be just a man in a rowboat thinking.

  Jackson sat back there in the back with him.

  You know where Mickey did.

  Unless there was a nice fresh headless eel aboard.

  Then the both of them would go lumbering after it. God.

  It was really pretty (I guess) disgusting.

  THERE'S PLENTY MORE I could fit to go in here—shit about bait and about the little bottles he swallowed down everything out of and then set adrift overboard and about how Uncle Henry would stamp down his boot into the combination of throw-up and ocean water every once in a while while he was saying to himself something which sounded to me like he was saying "The mud, the mud!"

  There's plenty more like that which I could fit in—but, you know, fuck it.

  LET'S GET TO THE THIRD PART (which will be the last part) which is the part about me thinking, "Jesus, I got the ocean, I caught the ocean�
��I, Gordon Lish!" Which part will be—if you're ready for it—the fishing part. Well, it wasn't even fishing from in the rowboat but was fishing from off the dock.

  The picture is this—it's this once when we had come back in and when Dom came or when Dell came and got the boat from us and when Uncle Henry got off the Johnson (or it could have been an Evinrude he got off, but it definitely wasn't any, I can tell you, Mercury) and got up with it out of the row-boat and went to get it washed out and I got up out onto the dock with my rod and my reel and went to work to keep fishing from it for a little bit because even though I did not have any sinker on anything anymore, I still had threaded on my hook this little bitty bit of bloodless bloodworm.

  It wasn't two seconds before I had a bite.

  Bite?

  It was more like—when I started pulling on the line trying to get it taken up back in a little—a horse had gulped it all in down to his shoes.

  Christ, I couldn't believe it.

  "It's the whole ocean!" I stood there heaving back on it thinking—and then screamed, "Uncle Henry, Uncle Henry, come quick!"

  But didn't I tell you he was off getting the salt water out of it by running it (the Johnson, the Evinrude) in a cut-off oil drum with plain unsalted water in it?

  Heard me, didn't hear me—it wasn't anything I was thinking about anymore—because I was instead just thinking about not getting myself whipped the fuck off the dock and bitten in half and eaten by whatever water dragon which had my line.

  Of course, I guess I could have let go. I guess I could have just let the hell go of the whole treacherous rig and let it get itself slammed right the devil down the drain down into the stables down there in the cellar of the deep down world.

  I guess I could have done it and then tried to make a run for it on over to where Uncle Henry was running the junked-up outboard in the cut-off oil drum, or run to get myself in under the tin shelter where Dom and Dell sat looking in charge and hustling bait.