Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

She said to me, "Now, now—you mustn't."

  But whatever made this creature to have claimed such a thing? Was I not being perfectly myself?

  She said, "Why cry?" She said, "Stop it at once." She said, "I am not going to stand here and be a witness to you doing this to yourself—do you hear me, do you hear me at once?"

  But I did not know what she was talking about. I swear it to you on my mother's grave—that there was not a tear in my eye, that there were no tears in my eyes—where were there tears?

  Until she reached her hand out to me and touched her hand to my hair with her hand to me—and then, I admit it, yes, I stood there and cried out my heart out.

  And have been doing it—elaborately, unflaggingly—and, of course, not unprofitably—ever since.

  I just thought time to tell, time to tell—tell anybody who's come this far back to the back of the book with me—tell her name. But oh how she knew how to touch me to be with me—there, is this not the mystery in it for us—and therefore the fiction?

  TRAVELING MAN CONTINUES TO OVERCOME RULES OF STATE

  THEY FURNISHED, WITHOUT FURTHER FEE to you, coffee in the morning and milk in the morning for what you had paid to them for the day for the room. There was, as well, a kind of juice given, derived, it seemed to the man, from an angry fruit. Yet, hungry as he was, and as dependent as he had become upon the inventive conservation of his dwindling resources, he had nevertheless not been drinking the juice the mornings that he had thus far been a guest at this hotel, so disruptive a gustatory future did his initial sampling of this obscure beverage promise.

  There was a bread that was not to his liking, a rather dark and granular creation, the slice you reached in and extracted from the package and were to put onto your plate and take with you to your table confected of a substance that promptly collapsed into disconcertingly haphazard sections under the pressure of butter being spread upon it with a knife.

  The butter was good, though.

  And there were also the routine packets of preserves. These he also refused, since not to do so was to impart to your fingers the sensation of there being a certain residue on them, in mute but implacable answer to which unpleasantness no water was permitted you in the place where the courtesy of the complimentary breakfast was fulfilled.

  The sort of fellow he was, it happened not to be in his nature for him to tolerate for very long the particular disquiet occasioned in his bowels by the experience of his flesh having been in contact with the unclean. Not that what was being proffered by way of jam was at all unclean but, rather, that this was his inexorable reaction to whatever evidence of his having fed himself he could not with a vengeance get washed from himself in the next instant.

  He would, in any event, upon the completion of these matinal ceremonies, hasten back up the stairs to the floor where they had been keeping him domiciled, this to set to work to lather and rinse his hands at the sink there, whatever daintiness he might have just exercised in his partaking of the premium in food.

  Was it necessary for him to do this?

  It was, let every reader please be willing to concede, necessary for this tourist to do this.

  He presently discovered that if he got himself into the neighborhood queue that was always well along in its formation whenever he got down into the street, an acceptable bread could be purchased for the price of two coins of an altogether negligible rank—so that it came to be his practice in this nation, for the remainder of his holiday in it, for him to go first into the little street, line himself up with the rest of the customers, and contrive to come back to the little hotel with his bread with him well enough before the hour when the management would shut down the little cafeteria, if this is what the tiny gloomy room in which there evolved certain of the events this chronicling now seeks to recall is called.

  How particularly hospitable of this hotelier, the man thought, that guests be dispensed such a span of opportunity for them to savor the assortment of comestibles the establishment supplied right to the very stroke of noon. Too, to judge from the seeming indifference of the young woman who from time to time gathered about herself the gestures of being the official in attendance charged with the responsibility of keeping the buffet topped up, it appeared to be altogether among the statutes of decorum for the man to come in from the street with his bread, to lay it in its great length proprietorially across one of the little tables, and then to go to the serving table and to take from it for himself what coffee and milk he wanted, a spoon to agitate his sugar with, an exceptional number of napkins, an equally exceptional hoarding of butter, and a knife to enact the applying of the butter. It was gloriously wrapped, the butter, each noble pat of it importantly turned out, it delighted the man to observe, in a covering of gold-colored foil, the surfaces of which shone with authority by reason of the regal effect endowed upon them by the emblazonings thereupon of a single shining medallionlike ornament. Was this in recognition of a nutritional accomplishment, the man encouraged himself to consider, or proof that the government had annexed the buttermaker with whom the hotel did its business?

  He might, if his eyes had been up to it, have more sharply inspected the device from which the illusion of power developed, but they were not. No, his vision, joyless breakfast after joyless breakfast, was up to little, as neither was his mental stamina, these means of coping with all that was exterior to himself having already been, well before he was challenged by the character of foodstuffs, too mercilessly drawn upon in support of his endeavor to forge ahead against the defenses marshalled by the difficulties deployed among the vexing sentences waging war upon his esteem of his faculties in the pair of little books that he had, to this other country, brought with him—Discerning the Subject, by a Paul Smith, and Agamben's, Giorgio Agamben's, Language and Death, pertaining to which second meditation, if you had asked the fellow to speak to it, you would have first, before suffering to hear him stammer his strangled replies, have heard him transposing the two terms of the title. To be sure, it seemed he did not mean, in fact, to do this, but neither may the allegation be dismissed that in our man's doing so, in his devising of the error, he betrayed in himself the impulse to produce the deformed and thereby to perform a kind of larceny whereby the productions of others were made to assemble the impression that he was, if one got right down to the bottom of it, the origin of all things, all local distinctions included.

  But listen—if this sojourner of ours was to be thought the origin of anything, it was most specifically not of any idea. Indeed, apart from the industry idleness required of him, there was not much in the line of effort for him lately to boast of, and what instance of it there might ever have been was most assuredly in no sense in the vicinity of the intellectual. Yet he kept company with books such as the ones indicated—gazed, that is, expectantly, and in all earnestness, at the words in them—and was curiously, so very curiously, comforted by the activity. Yet he unvaryingly had had, for the day, more than quite satisfactory of this by breakfasttime, so that, when he had washed his hands and had taken himself each morning to the little park nearby, bearing with him the pair of books, it was a sincere expression of a sort of textual communion—desire, call it!—that this detail in his behavior honored. The pair of books had, you see, become, after all, his friends, and now, as you can also see, his companions, much as—of course, of course!—he, as with anyone still possessed of his wits, preferred people to books, although it was only for the monitoring, it must actually be admitted, of humanity's incessant comings and goings that our fellow had any hint of an affection, comparative or otherwise.

  Hence the little park—to which our man had every day been conducting himself, unhappy breakfast after unhappy breakfast, more recently carrying with him to it not just the pair of books remarked but also what was left of the bread he had taken to acquiring and had not finished downing, at his little table, the given, any given, morning.

  Further for you to know, do please be told that in his trouser pockets, in the both of t
hem, there was the capital that had been collected unto himself from his plunderings of the bowl wherein the morning buffet showed off its wealth in butter. To secure the safety of his garment, he made certain that he had lined his pockets with napkins prior to his cramming them with their bounty, the charming packets of it, chilled sufficiently at the time of their theft but being in no prospect of enjoying a guarantee of remaining so for as long as it might take for the man to get at their contents.

  And now you have it, our subject's readiness.

  His labor—it had been his daily labor and would continue to be his daily labor until his holiday in this nation had come to its end—was to sit himself down in the little park, the pair of books beside him on the stone bench from which he had that day selected to carry out the day's watchings, and to keep himself informed of whatever specimen of the manifestation of life there passed to and fro before him in the street.

  The pageantry, the pageantry!

  From time to time he would eat—that is, bread and butter, butter and bread, tearing off bits of the latter and pushing into them lumps of the former, this with the utensil of the opened foil.

  Oh, he might have taken away with him from the cafeteria a second knife from among the many knives the hotel put out along with the morning's provisions, but such a boldness would have asked of him so very much more than he could give.

  He wanted no transactions with the troublesome, was, in fact, in flight from the troublesome—traveled, kept traveling, for the very purpose of postponing the troublesome. Even sight of the troublesome was, well, say, troubling to him, as witness the little nausea that kept welling up and spilling over in him, day after day, upon the event of his first coming into the little park, a feeling enforced—this can be the only word for it!—by the word regliment.

  To explain.

  There was a sort of large sign, fixed into position rather high on a post, stationed centermost in the little park. On it was given, at the start, and in the exclamatory, this word, in this form—REGLIMENT. There followed, also of course in the language of this land, item after item of statements the man took to be topics of instruction governing one's uses of the little park.

  He did not, as you know, read this language and could not have told you what infamies these regliment had been conceived, in the populace, to subdue. But however ignorant as he was of the particulars, that much, toward the end of civilized demeanor, was expected of the citizenry was an implication the man plainly understood and approved. All the more reason, then, that it was such a point of distress to him that, day after day, upon the occasion of his arrival in the little park, there should each of these days be discovered by him, near to where there stood the depository for trash, the same undisturbed arrangement of discards—a pair of cardboard suitcases and a topcoat of equally low grade.

  This was mysterious, was it not?

  Not with respect to the matter of to whom these objects might have once, or still, belonged—but as to why the authorities had not, when the trash was so regularly and so fastidiously removed, and when the little park was elsewise so conscientiously restored to itself-—but as to why these very authorities had not, in thunderation, treated not even the merest fringes of the eyesore now under discussion.

  Goddamn.

  No, there it still squatted, day after day, a ghastly excrescence exhibiting its putrescence not only in doubtless defiance of at least one of the regliment but of everything this nation had seemed to the man to stand for.

  The civic.

  The municipal.

  The decidable.

  The closed.

  Our man meanwhile, especially while he was himself on view in the little park, sought in all his aspects to do all that he might to obtain the good opinion of those in charge of the common domain, even if this body, and its delegates, were nowhere in sight.

  And so, all to himself, in a condition of excruciating alertness, he all day, our man, in the little park for the whole of the day, day after day of every day of his holiday, sat as a very vigilance, as a very sentinel, the bread and the butter his only sustenance, the pair of little stubborn books laid out beside him on the little stone bench in a manner so vitally reassuring to him, his stewardship, his guardianship, his very ghost fastened upon the keeping of constant tabs on the human commerce in the street. But when the insistings of his stomach should no longer let themselves be appeased by his appealing to patience and restraint, he would get a package of butter out from either of his caches, meticulously laying open the folds of the exalted foil scored with such admirable precision in such intelligent anticipation of this very procedure, and, by this craft, reveal to himself his prize, well softened by the duration of its storage upon his person.

  This marvel of the nation, this cunning pat of butter!

  Using the foil to keep his fingers unsoiled, he would then insinuate the kingly spread into the cavity he had poked into what portion he had torn free from the bread, rushing the creamy morsel into his mouth as would one maddened by the dishevelments of famine. Immediately thereafter, it would happen that our fellow would hurriedly close the wrapper against the oily side, fold the paper and fold it further until it then existed as no more than a tiny crushed pellet of a thing, scrub very vigorously at his fingers with one of the napkins that he had, deposit the dot of waste into the napkin, and then, having reduced the napkin to the densest materiality his strength could manage to make of it, he would get to his feet, not without some excitement abruptly racing in his limbs, and with all deliberation transport the result of his exertions to where refuse was meant to go, noting as he went, and with visible distaste, the continuing dominion there, near to where the rubbish bin was, of the inexplicable pair of hideous suitcases and of the no more explicable, no less hideous, topcoat.

  But, wait, was it an overcoat?

  He was—on one of the several excursions just remarked—stunned to catch himself having to wonder which, which—for nothing can be both the one and be also the other.

  Was this a topcoat that was, in consort with the pair of suitcases, the genie of his ruin, or was it an overcoat?

  He could not come to a decision.

  No longer was it the lack of compliance with ordinance that was at the alpha of the turbulence that had been erupting against the limit within him and had been establishing the alibi for all his experience, now, now was it not the very belligerence—no, the very viciousness!—of utterance itself?

  It was the day after this episode that our man took at his morning's repast a glass of the strange libation always so unforgivably on offer.

  It was, still was, as it had at first been at that first testing reported to you at the onset of this narrative, bitter—oh, bitter to the last drop.

  Tether abandoned, bondage overturned, our wanderer drank down, all the way down, his next glass, the whole glass, the next day, which day was the last day—at last!—of his holiday here, and then, as had been planned for, as he himself had planned for himself, the source of our concentrations did quit this bewildering place and did make vindictively, unrenewably—with plenty of malice aforethought—for another littler still.

  JOUISSANCE

  JUST HEARD THE EDITOR of this book complaining of her not having enough in the way of fictions to fill up the pages of this book to what she must imagine to be an adequate number of pages of same. So by way of fancying myself prepared to be responsible for an act of adequation, I turned in my seat and said to her, "Would something concerning us as us perhaps be acceptable to you in this embarrassing regard?"

  "Which?" she said. "Which?"

  "To fill up the book," I said, "I mean, I am wondering if you might want to see your way clear for me to see if I can make a little filler for you."

  "For the book?" she said.

  "Yes," I said. "Because I think I just heard you sort of complaining about there being a certain insufficiency of stuff for the book," I said.

  "Insufficiency?" she said.

  "Of pages," I said.


  "Am I to treat this as a criticism of myself?" she said "Are you telling me you wish to heap scorn upon me as myself?" she said.

  "No," I said. "It's not that," I said. I said, "All it is is I like to write fictions sort of to order, I think—and so I just naturally when I heard the complaint—because didn't I just hear you say something which just seemed to me a sort of complaint?—and I agree, I agree!—please believe me, I agree I perhaps failed to quite catch quite the essence of what it was I think I just heard you saying, or had heard you—wait!" I said. "Look," I said. "I think this is getting sort of, you know, kind of sort of pretty all mixed up as to communication, don't you think?"

  "Don't you think?" she said. "What do you mean—don't I think, don't you think?" she said. "Have I, is it that I have somehow said, have I, or given any indication, have I, of my having any interest in something with respect to anything you have in the recent course of things said?"

  "No," I said. "Please," I said. "Will you listen?" I said. "Because today," I said, "this morning," I said, "as I was on my way downtown," I said, "I couldn't help but hear behind me—on the bus, that is, on the bus before this bus, that is—two women talking, two women having a conversation, or two women anyhow having a talk with each other, or with one another, and I hear one of them say, I hear this one of them say, ‘Well, she was offended,' and then the other one says, ‘They take offense. That's the thing with them nowadays, they take such offense—you say one word to them and they're instantly determined to take offense,' and then the first one says, ‘She was offended. That's what I'm telling you, that she was very offended,' and then the other one says, ‘But this is the way it is with them these days. Did I not tell you that this is the way it is nowadays? There is no way you can talk to these people without the minute you say anything, one of them is going to jump right down your throat screaming they're offended. That's all they know how to say to you anymore—I'm offended, I'm offended, I'm offended,' and then the first one says, ‘Well, she said she was offended,' and then the other one says, ‘Didn't I tell you? I told you. Didn't I just tell you? You can't talk to these people, you can't say anything to these people, there is no possible way for anyone to say anything to these people, you are taking your life into your hands when you make the slightest attempt to try to say anything to any of these people—so I ask you, I ask you, is it any wonder when one of them says to you that she is offended? Of course she is offended. Of course she said she was offended. That's all these people know to say to you, they don't know anything else to say to you, is there anything else they know how to say to you? Offense, offense—they go to bed at night, they get up in the morning, this is all they know to say to people, they do not know one other thing for them to say to people, they have not the least knowledge of anything else for them to say to people, they do not have the simplest conception of anything else which could possibly be said from one day to the next to people, this is all these people are concerned with, this is the one thing which these people are concerned with, taking offense, taking offense, taking umbrage,' and then the first one says, ‘To think—will you just think?' And that's all she said," I said. ‘"To think—will you just think?'"