Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  To bathe in! To take sips from!

  Go know when it comes to the customs of your cockroach in your Bohemian household.

  Hence, yes, you guessed it, our little closure here discloses itself accordingly:

  The fellow not actually perishing from fright but only very nearly doing so, which close call some thirsty, dirty exoskeletal invertebrate, crawly and not unmodishly vile (revealed in the midst of its vanishing up into the conduit of his business), had, in its evil decor, wrought.

  Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!

  (Sorry, Franzie.)

  "Ai caramba, meineh schlangeleh!" shrieked he—for, man that he then was, could he, albeit stricken as he now was, still not shriek as such a one undone?

  It later turned out, as it never not does, that the focus of all this dissembling of mine was indeed, in due course, compelled to consent to relinquish himself, in whatever phylum, to the one true abyss.

  This by enacting a strong French swerve.

  The upshot being a stroke induced by rushed—nay, gulped—draughts of Lipton's Instant Tea Mix in the company of many too many Uneeda Biscuits.

  His headstone gives his dates.

  Gives his name.

  But gives nothing of his story, there having actually, of such a thing, been none.

  Unless you people count impersonations, damn you.

  I, the true Kafka, do not.

  BUON DIVERTIMENTO, ANNA!

  ANNA KRACZYNA IS LIVING HERE here in my house with me now. Anna Kraczyna is from Florence (Firenze to you, smart aleck!), and was born there and has lived there all her life (except, of course, for the time of it that she has been living here with me in my house, which is, you should have been able to tell by now, which is not a house in Florence), even though a smart aleck such as yourself might look at the name and arrive at a notion otherwise. Anyway, the reason I am writing this about Anna Kraczyna living here with me here in my house is this—the thing she just did, the thing she just said right after she had just done it, I have to, I just have to make a record of them both. One is she was vacuum cleaning the carpet in the carpeted bedroom. I refer to that bedroom as the carpeted bedroom because the other bedrooms aren't. The carpeted bedroom was long ago carpeted because when my wife Barbara and I created this house, the floor in the now-carpeted bedroom wasn't good enough, as was the floor elsewhere in this house, to just get by with with its being scraped, its being sanded, its then getting itself stained and varnished, or polyeurathaned, if that's what you call it, all that. It had to be carpeted, the only solution was that it be carpeted, and so we carpeted it. It's the one, it is the bedroom, my wife Barbara and I slept in all the years of the marriage, and then it was the one wherein Barbara was looked after all the years of her dying. She had to be fed there and have everything else done for her there. You don't want to hear what. It is too awful for anybody to have to hear what—was probably, probably was too awful for Anna Kraczyna to have heard some little bit of it, I don't doubt, although, yes, she did hear some little bit of it—because I couldn't, because, yes, I think I tried but couldn't keep my mouth shut. I wish I hadn't told her. It always gets told all wrong when you tell anyone. I don't think there is any way for me ever to tell any of this to anyone without it getting told pretty all wrong in the telling—the words you use, the way you use them, what your face is doing when you do. But I told Anna Kraczyna a little bit of some of it because we had to kill some time between when we got up this morning and when she had to go off to the airport for her to get herself back to Florence, where she'll start calling it, I guess, calling Florence, Firenze again. But I don't know. I don't know what Anna Kraczyna does when she is not here with me in my house and is instead in hers in Florence with her Pietro. It's just, as I said, a guess. But I bet it would be more or less congruent with the quality of what I have seen her do and heard her say at—what do they say?—at close hand, or is it range? Which brings us to this story—the story of Anna Kraczyna listening to me tell about my wife Barbara living and about my wife Barbara dying and then of Anna Kraczyna herself killing time vacuum cleaning the carpet in the one bedroom that's carpeted. She was going, she said, before she went to go do it, to go after the hairs of hers that had become visible to her on the carpet—and it would be easy for you to see how they would. We had spent a lot of time in there, Anna Kraczyna and I, this is one reason—and her hair, Anna Kraczyna's hair, it is probably as long and as golden as any hair anywhere. Well, it is as long and as golden as any hair I have ever slept next to, this you can bank on, and I guess this would go for my wife Barbara's hair too. Well, this is one of the reasons Anna Kraczyna's hair was so visible in there in that bedroom in there—because I had to change the carpet in there from the one my wife Barbara had decided on when we first had the carpet bought and paid for and laid. It was pretty wrecked. It was pretty ruined. It had been a kind of tapestrylike affair, or maybe it would be more correct of me for me to say a sort of turkey-work affair, crewel-work, or, Christ, I don't know what—this linen-y floral stitchery, this florally branchy clouded stitchery affair, all of it—wrought from, knotted into, embossed upon a ground of wheat-colored union twill, I suppose I could say, or, look, why not say beige?—because beige is what I was going to say—say beige in the first place—the original impulse I had, it was for me to say beige—so if it's all the same to you and if sufficient of your smart aleckiness has been by maybe been worn the hell off you by now, why don't I just go ahead and make it beige, just stick to beige, say, okay, then say anyhow beige? It didn't show anything, is the thing. Which, over the course of the years of my wife Barbara dying in there, was a lucky thing for all concerned. You know, all the machines and whatnot in there—tubes, tubes, tubules, tubules, tubulation, tubulation to the baseboards as if the municipality had decreed there be dredged a runaway cesspool. Then she died. Then my wife Barbara died. So one of the corrections I right away performed was get these gangs of specialists to rush onto the premises for them to have a go at getting the carpet rehabilitated. Then I finally broke down and went to a carpet store and made arrangements to have the dreamiest extravagance of the lot installed. Chesnut-colored. This—you won't believe this—this angora, I think, wool—or alpaca wool, maybe it's said, having to be snatched away, in season, from a region indecently southerly on the beast's neck. From Bolivia, anyway. So new-looking—so smooth-feeling on your feet—everywhere this chestnut-colored, wonderful wool miracle—except now that it is stretched out down on the floor in there, everything that descends to it is declared. They didn't tell me, nobody told me, you have a carpet laid anywhere like this, you lay a carpet in your house like this, watch out, get set, it is going to end up being a minute-to-minute lifelong project for you, all the sheddings, all the detritus, the ceaseless torrent of mere being made to glare back up at you in accusation from some umbrous perfection so much darker than a resident with any common sense would have picked for himself to have to live with with two eyes still in his head.

  My wife Barbara would have known better.

  The woman who has been in my house with me—you know, Anna Kraczyna?—she just came and said to me that I did too, that I had known just as better about it as anybody else would have known. I mean, even before Anna Kraczyna had taken the pains she would characteristically later take to get the cord all wound back up into just the right loops of it and all of it going in its loops in all the same one direction of it and then get the vacuum cleaner so carefully restored to where the vacuum cleaner always gets itself kept, this same Anna Kraczyna came back out of the bedroom to me where I was sitting at this table I always sit at and said to me, "Fool, fool, how can you not admit it it's how come you picked it, for the goddamn penitenza in it, you idiot?" Whereupon Anna Kraczyna presently put away the vacuum cleaner where it officially belongs, bestowed the famous peck on the cheek, murmured to me "Buon lavoro, smart aleck, buon lavorol"—then made her way brilliantly, and for the last time so altogether forgivingly, to my door and back forever into the distant rubble
of the needless, heedless, perpetual world.

  ESQUISSE

  DARNEDEST THING, DON'T YOU THINK, the tapping of a hammer in an apartment neighboring yours. Or should say somebody tapping one since there's no hammer next door there, is there, tapping itself. I mean the fact that you cannot, can you, establish in your mind which one. Somebody is tapping with a hammer, somebody has got a hammer and is tapping with it in one of the apartments adjacent to mine, which isn't interesting in and of itself, is it, but is desperately intriguing insofar as the fact that I am sitting here listening and cannot state to you, or to the authorities, if I had to, if it is the residence above me or the one below me or one of the ones to the sides, any of the four of these. Not that I foresee any reason for me to formulate a statement to the authorities. It's just somebody putting in nails in walls for pictures, don't you think, or digging out decomposed grout around a sink. It sounds to me crunchy, whatever it is, like crunchy bone or crunchy skull, what's in receipt of the blows, whatever the object is that's being hit. But this is only, I suspect, because of my foot and because of the bones in it. I did something to them, or to it. Not that it's yet been ratified yet by anybody yet what I did. The site of the damage appears to occupy a locale more or less up and down my leg, it feels like, but I am certain the source of the disturbance was the foot. Pain tends to distribute itself, doesn't it? I think I read somewhere how once it starts, how once pain has got itself a foothold in you, as it were, it can propagate itself almost all over. It hurts in my head, for instance. Yet who is to say this cannot be blamed on the tapping? This head involvement I am just this instant noticing, it could be it is attributable to the tapping I am hearing and cannot be laid at the feet of, no joke or anything, of my foot. Two things I would like to know—what the tapping is all about or where at least it's coming from, and what's the origin of this foot. Not that the knowledge thereof could not be adduced in either instance, of course. Not that a perfectly acceptable condition of knowing would not in either instance be achieved just by my taking action, of course. I could get up from here, make my way out the door, present myself at the doors of all of the probable dwellings. I'm sorry. Gear must have just slipped a notch on me, no? I mean, proposing getting up to go in search of the whereabouts of the hammerer. Foot, you know. Gone and forgotten about foot, you know. Have to take into account I am not the footloose thing that once I was. Besides which, to come absolutely into the open with you on this, the pain seems to have accomplished a beachhead in my head, it feels like, the pain seems to have migrated to my head, it feels like, the pain gives evidence of its being in the process of settling in and sending down roots down inside in my head, it feels like. No, I am hardly, I assert, up to undertaking a quest. It's come and gone, the moment when I might have been up to undertaking a quest. Not that the hammering will not in due course stop. Oh, but look at me, exaggerating the claim from tapping to hammering. Lucky thing for all concerned I just caught myself at it, these exaggerations fingers typing are heir to. Yet in their defense, let it be written, my knuckles commenced to ache in advance of the sentence jogging tapping up to the rank of hammering. In any event, I take it back. So what do you say—the doctor, do you think? Is this your counsel, seek the attention of a professional, do you think? X-rays and all of that, let him palpate the injury? He won't be able to see anything. It's not swollen or anything. It's just that—oh, oh—something inside in there, it's not right. I took, I think, a false step. I balked, is it, instead of kept on with the meter of my walk. It was just a stroll around the block. It was just for the purpose of one's having for oneself a bit of an air-out on one's itinerary around, among other things, the block. Oh, but now look. Now there is none of me that is free of agony. Now is not my entire person the very thing of excruciation?

  There's the pounding again.

  He's still at it.

  Or must I say it continues to be at itself?

  I suppose I will never again walk in the manner of a fellow with grace. Even were I to launch an investigation, would I not have to hobble? Limp there, be denied every courtesy, be made to limp myself away onward into deepening offense?

  They're slamming now.

  My God, they're slamming.

  It could be an excavation, it sounds to me like—the gouging out—through tissues of plaster, of tile, of concrete—of a grave.

  No, no, it's the building itself!

  They are wrecking the building itself, can't you see? It's the demolitionists! Can you credit it?—the dogs have gone and brought in the bleeding demolitionists, haven't they?—whilst here was I, Lish himself, so absorbed in these self-imitations of myself—nay, these self-destructions of myself!—as never to have heard them—but they did, didn't they?—they had to have, hadn't they?—ring, rang, rung my bell.

  NO SWIFTER NOR MORE TERRIBLE A CONFESSION

  THE SENTENCE I MOST DREAD hearing is please, sir, step to the side into the street, sir. Or I suspect I should have written it "Please, sir, step to the side into the street, sir," or perhaps, prettier still, in italics.

  I don't know why this is.

  I don't think it owes to my practice of walking always as far from the curb as I can get. Which means near to the store fronts, near to the shop fronts, and therefore not infrequently straight into the path of those citizens ambling closely along there-along in order that they have an unobstructed line of sight into the dressed-to-the-nines display windows of the United States of American commerce.

  But as to the practice I mentioned, I certainly do indeed know what this owes to, yes—i.e., which I have taken care to italicize in witness of my dereliction firstmost among the aforesaids—i.e., keeping my motion, when it is parallel to the thoroughfare, as distant on the perpendicular as I can get it from the curb, this on account of the cant of the sidewalk.

  They cant them here where I live.

  For to provide for the run-off into the street.

  Of rain, of snowmelt, of what-have-you. E.g., schmutz.

  Creating thereby an inclined plane—however slight the elevation of which I see no reason for me not to seize advantage of. For I am short, am of unaverage measure, am of below-average stature—and therefore feel myself ever so much less challenged when passing my fellow humankind if improved, if bolstered, if increased by the not at all dismissable gain the higher ground guarantees me if I seize it.

  At least when I am here in the city.

  But when do I ever take myself thither from this city? I think never. Yet were I to, it first comes clear to me first this very instant, were I, the undersigned, to venture forth from here into field and swale, into swale and dale, then mightn't I be free, even for the littlest while, of this dreading that so vexes me?

  Such an awful sentence.

  "Please, sir, step to the side into the street, sir."

  "Please, sir, step to the side into the street, sir."

  Unless it were to have the power to pursue me into all its cruel transmutings—so that it could become, in its most pastoral use, sir, step to the side into the hollow, sir—or, in its most fanciful, the pit.

  Well, it's all a matter of your making room for Eros—between Pygmalion and Narcissus.

  Quotes and unquotes all around, everyone.

  Yours truly, the author of this.

  APPEARANCES

  THE ONLY APPARENT GOOD to come of his encounter with the ravishing Chinchilla Benét was the renewal given to his residence after this person had agreed to consign her body to it for the span of a pair of nights.

  He began with the bed, stripping it of its linen and of its various accessories—the mattress pad, the lamb's wool spread that lay beneath the mattress pad, the layer of ruffled foam rubber that lay beneath the lamb's wool spread. The linen and mattress pad he took to his washing machine, adding a dose of his most astringent detergent. The lamb's wool spread he fetched to the dry cleaner, tarrying while the deed was done, all the more promptly to see to the return of this object to his premises so that the great labor before him
might be, without undue delay, gotten on with.

  The layer of ruffled foam rubber—this he discarded at the service elevator, thereafter telephoning a bedding company for overnight delivery of a replacement.

  He poured bleach into the commode and allowed it to stand for the time it took for him to scrub—scour, could we say?—the exterior surfaces of the porcelain.

  He thereupon activated the flushometer in order that the way be cleared for a serious exertion on the interior, and then, this task brought to an end, put himself to sleep on the floor of the facility, waking the next day to the bedding company's proof of its promise of reliability, or was it its sympathy that it had warranted?

  He could not get his mind to produce the answer.

  The only product in it was the yes of the ravishing Chinchilla Benét.

  She had said yes to him, yes to him, yes—but presently demonstrated to him the hopelessness in all things uttered once she had lain herself out alongside him in his very soft, very thoughtful, very complicated bed.

  "Is there something wrong?" said he. "I'll fix whatever is wrong," said he.

  "Oh no, thank you—it is all wonderfully lovely, thank you," said the ravishing Chinchilla Benét, offering the bosom of her pillow—he had retrieved from storage for her his most treasured, his featheriest, example of the sort—a reassuring pat of the hand, a gesture incomparably prophetic of the one the ravishing Chinchilla Benét in due course performed on the elbow of his arm when bidding him adieu at the delightful moment of her departure.

  "Was there something wrong?" said he. "I would have fixed whatever might have been wrong," said he.

  "Oh no, thank you—it is all wonderfully lovely, thank you," said the ravishing Chinchilla Benét, thence—presto!—with no further ado, exhibiting herself as gone from him, and therefore from his habitation, forever.