Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

And, of course, the boy Chap will have his fair warning.

It is the least a loving uncle who has made his fortune (and his misfortune) writing can do. He can write as he is able. He can write a "story" that no one but the ones who most matter to him will quite be certain is true. I do see now that it is only through the miracle of the falsehood of fiction that I can catch up the people I love from the truth and consequences of what they might do. The cost to me is very slight in comparison — the exception in a habit for silence (Are you smiling now, dear dead brother, master of ceremonies in all my deliberations?) and the reinstatement, for a time, of the shame that covers me whenever I play the thief of hearts and come like a highwayman to the unsuspecting page.

Speak , Smithy! I am the instrument by which you may submit your supreme reasoning and the dark circumstance that stirred it to unfurl its awful syllogism. And when you have stated your case, I will return for a parting courtesy to the reader, a gesture I swear to be greater than that to which I proved equal when I wished to say the right thing to soothe that splendid girl of Devon. I am thinking I owe a very particular politeness to the reader — who, for the purpose before us, and as do his mother and father, I call Chap.

Listen , Chap. The father of your body is speaking to you. Will you recognize his voice? You were not much more than two years old when you last heard the peculiar American resonance that made your dad a regular on Rosemary of Hilltop House and When a Girl Marries , a kind of choked vibrancy that must have softened when he blessed you to sleep and drew the covers up to just under your chin, high enough that not one whisper of cold would chill your breast, but not so high that your restlessness would slip the blanket higher and impede the glorious song of your breath. This is the father of your body whose voice you are going to hear. Will it be at all familiar to you after fifteen voiceless years? Will it frighten you to hear a silence broken? Certainly the speech he makes will seem frightening — for it is a statement in support of his decision to secure your death. But it is, nonetheless, a reasoned argument, and if you are your father's son, Chap, you will see he has a point.

Listen , boy! A brother I love like life itself, your true father, on the fourth day of November, by long-distance telephone, just after the dinner hour, his voice all repose, his heart deranged, in tumult, said this :

"I HAVE A PAD AND PENCIL here, and it's all worked out, that thing you know I do with columns, this on one side, that on the other. Buddy, can you grab a piece of paper and something to write with? I think it'll help — I think it'll help if you make notes as I go along. I mean, it's just that I want you to know how it happened. Most of it has been happening for years. I think it has always been in the back of my mind since Pert was born. Maybe even before that, in a crazy kind of way. Maybe it dates back to when I kissed Chap goodbye and could never get back to kiss him again. In any case, I don't want you to think this wasn't among the premonitions that always go on in my head — because the head will do these things, Buddy, and you just can't, you know, stop it. Aren't you the expert in this subject? I'm rambling; I'm sorry. All right, I'm going to pick it up from what I've got written here. By the numbers, okay, big brother?

"About two weeks ago — hell, I know the exact day, who am I kidding? — Scharfstein told me I've got it bad. Wall-to-wall cigars and three packs of Raleighs a day for almost twenty-five years, and I get cancer of the goddamn spleen . I've always agreed with you that Scharfstein is a bastard, but his medicine is the best. Anyway, he sent me over to Sloan Kettering that afternoon, and by the next morning they'd confirmed. Three to six months with routine measures, maybe another three to six with heavy antiprotein therapy. But that's it — that's tops.

"Maggie knows, of course. I didn't tell Mom or any of the rest, although I promise I will just as soon as I can figure out how I want to do it. And maybe you can help me with that . For the time being, all I am doing is getting my life in order, squaring away my affairs, as Maggie would call them. Everything's pretty shipshape, actually — all the durables. There's plenty of money and there's nobody better than Maggie at managing. Then there's Pert —and that's, of course, clear sailing too. He could be the President of the United goddamn States , or change the theory of zero, and this won't stop him. My being dead, I mean — my dying. Pert could be anything, do anything. You know him; you've seen the probability in him for yourself. You just have to take one look at Pert to know .

"Except there's this one thing — and that's Chap. And if you don't mind, Buddy, I think I want to refer to Chap as David from here on out. There's David— he's the one thing. There's my son and there's my son — and that's the whole of mathematics of it for you there! Are you following me? Because you better be doing it.

"What David's mother has done lots of divorced women do — I know that. Except I think she's done it better. But I'm only guessing, of course — because for fifteen years the evidence has been withheld from me. Can you believe it, Buddy? With people who feel about blood the way we do? Not one word, not one touch, in fifteen years ? Jesus God, the woman is a trained analyst. If she can unravel a synthesis, I guess she can ravel a good enough one up. Can you just imagine what she's probably achieved with that boy? It's not just a job of contamination we're talking about — it must be more like the making of a system refined to a single principle. Or do I mean aim? Anyway, I'm only guessing — but that's where my imagination takes my reasoning — and what else do I have to go on?

"I believe in David's rage. Let's just say it's an article of faith with me — and with me dead, that rage will logically get pinned on Pert , don't you see? Loathing, envy, spite, you name it — and all of it susceptible to even greater intensity when David actually finds out what Pert is . I mean, what I see happening, when I'm gone, when all the rest of us are gone, Margaret and you and Mom and me and that woman — Buddy, I just can't say her name, not even now — I see a world with just the two of them in it — an openness named Rupert, who owns all my heart, and a man named David with a heart with such a lot of hate in it. What would Rupert ever know of what his brother must feel for him? How could Rupert ever imagine ? No boy could — no boy like Rupert — and, Buddy, you know what Rupert is like. He is all light — a lightness, this one diaphaneity.

"Pert would never guess even. But I can. More than that — I know . David will wait, he will wait his time — like his mother, he will be patient, deliberate, a fury waiting for his chance. All right, perhaps I'm imagining too much. Perhaps it will never come to this — something violent, an injury, a killing, who knows? Perhaps instead it will be a civilian act, but decisive, devastating — David sitting on some committee that Rupert happens to be petitioning, David behind the interviewer's desk for some job Rupert must have, David installed at a judicial bench before which Rupert pleads his case, David standing with gloved hands while Rupert lies beneath him, chest swabbed and bare to the scalpel — hell, I don't know, Buddy, but I know it'll be some thing. Some way none of us can predict, my firstborn will stalk my second, find a way to hurt him because my death robs him of chance to hurt me .