Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

There was fear in the first family too. The spouse who ran away was afraid. That is why he did it.

The two children were afraid when the father ran away. They thought everybody would run away. Well, this was when the light in those children began to go out. They were turned down, turned out, both parents were willing to agree.

They agreed on there having been some loss of light. But they did not agree whom to blame for this. So the spouse who wanted to murder in the first place set out to try it again. She would have to go from coast to coast to try it. But considering the greatness of her aim, the journey seemed no tall order.

She wanted to get to the one who would know the most about the loss of light. You can see how she would.

She set out by car to do it.

MEANWHILE — meanwhile in these sentences, not meanwhile in these events — the father of that boy called that boy back to him.

"I want to explain," that father said.

"You're a coward," the boy said.

"Give me a minute," that father said. "Don't be so quick to call a man a coward. I want to make one last appeal to you. May I make one to you?"

"That's what cowards do," the boy said.

But perhaps the boy knew this father loved him less than this father did his other son. Children so often know. It happens when they say their prayers and must give a sequence to those they number in them.

"It takes a strong man to go along with a sadness," that father started off. "It takes a very strong man to stay put. It takes the strongest man for him to be a coward if this is what his son, in a father, has to have."

How this came out of his mouth was not how that father had wanted it to. It was hard to get his point. He knew he had one, but what you just heard was the best that father could do.

"It takes a strong man to kill," is what that boy said, and it took him no time at all for him to say it.

The boy was not all that young. But he was too young for the idea the father thought he had in mind. That was when the father had another one.

He went to the man his son said was the stronger. This is what the father said to the man:

"You're stronger than I am. Your body is stronger. Your mind is stronger. I am going to tell you something. My boy knows. The older one knows, but now the younger one does too. It's okay about the older one — because I love him the more of the two — and I think it is all right for me to say that. But because I love the younger one the less is what makes it really bad for us. I can't do what I'm doing anymore. I have to do something else. But am I strong enough to do it? You know I'm not. But you are. Tell me if you are following me so far."

"I'm way ahead of you," the man said. "You have to do something, but you can't do it. So you want me to be the one to do it for you, check?"

That father liked this. He said, "What proof that you're the stronger! You see the point? Kill her for me. What is your answer?"

"I don't mind," the man said.

"You owe it to me — don't you think?" that father said as fast as he could, already compiling the sentences that would turn over his sly purpose to the son he loved the less. It would test that father to postpone the tale of his irony. But that father was very strong. He could wait.

"I like it," the man said, "that complexity of reasoning. It's strong."

That father was at the mercy of utterance. He said, "But you're complexer for knowing it."

SHE TOOK THE CHILDREN with her. She planned everything — the same way she had planned it in the first place. But now she had to use a map — for where was her navigator, for where was he indeed?

She marked off intervals, the mileage each person in the vehicle would have to drive for the driving to come out even-steven. But the family was one fewer than it had been. This is how come the younger boy got the wheel in Utah instead of in Idaho. He said his prayers when he got it — then drove under a truck with twenty-four tires.

I DON'T THINK I would be writing this story if the facts did not force it. Actually, it's publishing this story that I do not think I would be doing unless I had a very pressing — really an irresistible — reason. It is probably necessary for me to say that I always imagined such a reason would one day come along. But I imagine many things — and why this one has caught up with me and most of the others have not is only the way it is with luck.

Not too much should be made of it, I suppose. My brother's, actually— his bad luck. But I believe that when I arrive at the end of what I want to say, I might also arrive at seeing the bad luck mine too. This is what comes of imagining things. It is also what comes of making promises you never intend to keep — or, worse, which you do not keep but which you try to convince somebody (even yourself) you have.

I made a promise like that once. It was a long time ago, and the one who inspired the promise was a child. A girl in this case. It was my conceit to think that she would remember what I had promised her, but I don't think she really did. After all, the year was 1944 and she must have had other things on her mind, there being a war going on at the time and her being twelve or thirteen or fourteen (despite a large opinion to the contrary, I am not all that much a student of children, and am especially inferior, I have often noticed, at pinpointing their ages), with all the calamitous worries that seize a child of such an age when its father has gone away. But she always wore a Campbell tartan and a watch much too big for her delicate wrist — and in those days in Devon and those days in my heart, a promise of any sort to a gentle child in plaid (with a weight too great for her to bear) was not a thing I would not want to make. Besides, she had a little brother and always took good care of him, fretting if he were within earshot of a fact too awful for a small boy to hear.

At any rate, I promised the girl a story (I had wanted to be a writer then, and for too long a while thereafter I was one) — and some years later I wrote a story that was meant to appear to be the fulfillment of that promise.

Of course, it wasn't. A writer, especially the sort of writer I was trying to be, can't write stories like that — a pretty story when a child asks for one, a squalid story when this is the favor she asks. What I am paying for now is that I shabbily led this young lady to believe otherwise. I wrote a story, a not very sincere story, nor a very graceful one (the years since demonstrate that the world disagrees with me in this judgment — but all I care about is that the story was mainly made up and is bruised by a very great fracture in its posture of narration), and when the piece was cast into print, I sent her a copy of the magazine sheets with a patch of paper pinned to the first page. I hadn't even the courtesy to set out my one sentence in my own hand, but instead typed the following, after a greeting that consisted of no more than the two lovely parts of her lovely English name: "I always keep a promise — I mean, p-r-o-m-i-s-e." Well, I hadn't — and what I am paying for now is the lie I tried to get by with then.

I often read a Viennese logician who, I think, would go along with such reasoning. And let's not overlook the penalty for too much reasoning. So you see the kind of logic the fellow favored when he lived?

It will presently be clear that I am, however, chiefly paying for my having a brother I love more than I love my silence. It will presently be clear that by publishing — and only by publishing — the little story I want to tell you, can I stop him from doing a thing he believes he must do. It is an act of extreme gravity, of extreme gravity, in all the spheres of spiritual prospect human imagining can consider. Or it is an act of no consequence at all. I am not certain. I am too overcome to rest for very long with a certain opinion. So I choose instead to do the safe thing — to put this story out for print.