Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

You smell things, right? (In your bed, what's to taste?)

If it's not your wife, then it's the pillowcase — or, no less turbulently, yourself. But let's say that whatever it is, it gets in the way — when the whole thing of it for sleeping is for you to struggle to think a certain thought and work your way down into it — like a beetle falling asleep inside of what the beetle is feeding on — even though I personally never really fall asleep.

Not that I think a serious thought, like the thought I gave you about evil. What you want instead is something playful, even crazy. It's the truth — the crazier the thing you think about, the more it's like a mallet knocking you out.

So as to the night before last, I remember exactly — I'm thinking they should invent a cigarette with a negative gas in it — you smoke it and it sucks all of that crap in you out of you. Naturally, I must have been mouth-breathing to keep from smelling things. So go explain this little packet of molecules that for an absolute fact it's my nose, not my mouth, which detects.

It's like a spear of perfect olfaction going up in there— coffee burning, kitchen burning, get up and go take a look!

Here's the smell. You know the smell of what coffee smells like when it's boiled away and the residue's been turning crisp and the stove's next? But even in my semi-sleep I know it's me that makes the coffee in my house. Are you kidding? Let her make it? Besides, now that I am smelling things, I smell her right where she belongs.

You can see how there is another interesting thing here, which is this package of intrepid vapor. Consider, all day long it's been poking around the house, a look here, a look there, but come three, four in the morning, hi, hi, it's like a dagger's been directed deep into this one nostril and there's this solitary drop of disaster on it— Jesus Christ, fire!

Think of it — the Brownian motion. God, I love this shit.

Stop to consider. Molecules that could have maybe been airborne days ago. Maybe weeks, months, what? Centuries, whole epochs even — coffee left on too long by Adam, right?

So it's this which gets me up and gets me investigating. The scare, I mean. Go put out a fire out and all that. Go save our lives or at least the life of the kitchen.

HERE'S THE STORY. I just stood there in the darkness, looking. The next fellow would have snapped on the light for him to make certain. But me, I understood — I know science, I know philosophy — Aristotle isn't the only one. Turn on the light, what? There goes mystery, there goes art — stove empty of event, porcelain vacant, not anything disruptive of anything.

I got milk and cookies. Eyes closed, mind open, I got milk and cookies and propped myself against the counter, nibbling and sipping — a box with a mouth, a thing that wants things inside it, its lid wide open, check?

Aristotle, are you listening?

I needed a crazy thought. I needed crazy. I needed the little bit of sleeping I ever get.

So what came, what comes, is this — is me and Izzy and Eddie and Mel. It's from the days of me and them — of Izzy and Eddie and Mel, an age in there, a whore Izzy said we could all get if we got her a bottle and had enough money. So I don't know — getting the bottle was even harder than getting the money was. But I got the bottle, and I did the talking when we got there. Her, the whore, she said we were nice enough boys, and I said seeing as how she said that, could she see her way clear to shave it to six per jump. She said okay, six per, round it off at twenty-five, but just blowjobs, a woman maybe fifty, forty, small and soft this fritzy hair the color of gum.

Izzy went first and then me.

Then Eddie came out, and Mel said no. So then I went back in instead of Mel going at all.

This was when I get her to drink all the rest of the bottle and when that's what she did, drank it, I'm sorry, but money's money, you know?

So I come out and say we don't have to pay her, she'll never know. Eddie says give her half. Izzy says what's this?

Hey, it was what they used to call a little black book back in those golden olden days.

Izzy says, "You see this?"

WE TOOK IT. We didn't pay her. We didn't give her one red cent.

Here is the aggravation I remember.

I say, "I don't think we should have taken it."

Izzy says, "We'll look at it. We'll see the names in here. The guy which told me about her, we'll see if he's in here "

Mel says, "Suppose we call them and tell them they have to come across with something or we're telling their wives or something, all of the guys."

Eddie says, "No, what we do is we call her and tell her it'll cost her just for her to get it back."

I say, "That's terrible. We can't do that. You've got to see it this way — it's stealing something, it's robbery."

Izzy says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm thinking there's something here we're not thinking yet."

I say, "Give it to me. This is lousy. You guys are louses. The day will come when you will stop and remember this, and hang your heads in shame."

SO THE THING IS I got it away from them and I went back up to her place, and I got her to give me a double sawbuck for her to get it back.

Or it could have been I just took the twenty because she was too plastered for her to give it to me herself.

Night before last I was sipping and nibbling and just being a thing that was leaning and letting all of this come, even the part about how for all of the time I knew them after that, I never stopped showing them who the disgusting ones were and who the nice guy was because of who it was who took it and went and gave it back. Eddie, Izzy, Mel — want to bet me they're still a mess? Then I tiptoed to the bathroom off the bedroom and sat down on the toilet and turned to other thoughts. That's when those names came — the Strand, the Columbia, the Laurel, the Lido, the Gem — and let's not forget the Central!

Look, I sat there urinating.

The thing was for me to keep my eyes closed and keep ready to fall more or less back to sleep. So why did I turn on the light to see the big blue box and the yellow rose on it, the million-dollar decision in some genius's brain to make the whole deal hazy?

THREE THINGS HAPPENED to me today. One of them taught me the meaning of fear. Actually, these were not things that happened to me. They were just things that happened in my presence. I am not certain how much of my presence was involved. Let's leave it at this — I was there when these things happened.

THE FIRST THING WAS the woman speaking.

You might want to see her this way — nice eyes, nice hair, pretty face, those bones, good ones. The eyes are liquid, the hair chestnut, a barrette hiking a section of it up front into a flung-back pleated effect.

I had my eye on those bones as she talked.

She was talking about a lover of hers, the man's funeral.

She said she rather enjoyed it.

She knew I'd known the man. Perhaps this explains everything. Because something had better explain.

He was a lucky man before he died. I am thinking of the things he saw — the bones of the woman from top to bottom, the eyes swimming, the chestnut hair without the barrette in it, the pleated effect unformed.

What a lucky man, I thought.

This is what I was thinking while the woman was speaking — even when she mentioned the funeral and allowed as how she had rather enjoyed it.

THE SECOND THING was the head in the subway car.

This happened on my way home, one stop still to go.

I looked up from nothing in particular and saw it coming from the far end of the car, a wheelchair and a small colored man behind it, pushing.

I know I took a good look right from the very start. It was because of the wheelchair. It was because here comes a wheelchair through a subway car. But what kept me looking was the absence of someone in it. It was just an empty chair coming down the aisle, a little man behind it, pushing.