Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

"You think what they're doing is just killing the fuel for to keep the conflagration only to a minimum?"

HEY, I KNOW HOW the fnocker feels.

They should really have to tell you. Even when it's just routine, I think they should have to keep issuing updates to you and, you know, reassurances, regularly wising you up as to the fact that you are not just going around and around for no roundabout reason at all or, Great Christ Almighty, around when it should be round.

So what's the story?

Go ahead and try for four?

My pal Denis just took off for Ireland, whereas Nietzsche couldn't sit tight, his flight wouldn't stay put, after Basel.

THEY LOOKED TO ME TO BE TIBETAN or Mongolian or — I don't know, I just want to say it — Burmese. Oh, but this is inexcusable. This is embarrassing. Really, there's not a blessed thing I know about national types like these, about what they're supposed to look like or what you'd call them if you knew. I mean, maybe this couple had actually looked to me mostly like they came from Thailand, but I didn't know how to say it, so I right away gave up on the likelihood because I could see ahead, see the situation of the adjective coming, and knew it would have me stumped frontwards, backwards, sidewards, knew it would have me whipped hands down. Thailander? Thailander can't be right. At least I would not bank on my ever having heard anyone say it — say Thailander. Great day, you'd know it if you'd ever heard anyone say it. But neither can I imagine what you might alternatively say, unless it's Thai landian , which, now that I have actually said it, sounds to me excessively improbable and possibly, to Thailandians, insulting.

You may as well know I once got into some absolutely hopeless trouble over a thing like this — from referring to a certain person by this name rather than by that name. Or it may have been the other way around. Frankly, it was not all that long ago, this misunderstanding. It remains to be proved, in fact, which, if either, were the case — that I misunderstood or was misunderstood. Not that the couple on the subway represented the opportunity for the same sort of confusion. Oh, no, theirs was a confusion of an entirely different sort. I mean, you could see that they were not the kind of people to care a fig for how anyone anywhere might elect to propose a category for them. Or do I mean something simpler and can't say it? But I am a man of action, you see, and not, as you will also see, of words. Although I doubtlessly know more about words than would most persons operating along the lines of the job title I carry with me, me with the Euher and the Thompson to carry it out.

Dropped a stitch back there. Had meant to say that these two — that the man and the woman — that what they looked to me like was as if they had reached what is sometimes called "a higher state."

To be absolutely candid with you, I just don't know how I got us into this Thailandian thing. Actually, the more I let thought attack the question, the more I am willing to favor the notion that they, the couple, were very likely Siberian, by which I mean the man and woman who were sitting across from me on the subway last week. Ah, but I forget, I forget — so bundled up against the cold they were, not on your life could they really have been Siberian. Unless, of course, I am making the mistake of believing where you come from has something visibly to do with how you react to what the temperature is where you go to. On the other hand, who is to say one hasn't come to us from Siberian parentage but was nonetheless native to somewhere where one might have grown up warm?

Except they didn't look that way. Not to me, at least. To me, they looked like people who had got used to getting on in measureless abominableness and then had got unused to it. You know what they looked to me like? They looked to me like chumps who were sitting on a subway freezing in New York.

Siberia.

I take it back.

What could I conceivably know about Siberia?

Didn't I say they were sitting right across from me? Because it was actually at a little angle from me that they were sitting — since these were the days when the end of a car on the Lexington line had these two two-seater affairs that were not exactly opposite each other but were sort of, you know, jogged off from each other at a little slant. Anyhow, the picture I'm trying to get painted is it's them on one side and it's me on the other side, whereas as for the rest of the car — believe it or not, because I don't have to tell you, it's not every day it's empty, empty, empty, not one other — hey! — dead soul riding the knife.

Not leastways on this here particular snag of it — and ain't this the darnedest?

Well, face it, we tighten it down, it gets tightened down. But can you beat it? From when they get on at Eighty-sixth Street to when she gets off without him at Forty-second, there is nobody but nobody aboard but I and they — aboard, that is.

Or is it them and me?

Now this is the whole point of my telling you all of this in the first place, which is that they , the couple, didn't. I mean, get off the train in each other's company. And not only this, but this other this —which is that he , the Siberian fellow, he tricked her into it — actually faked her out, by hook and by crook gets her off onto the platform and then cuts back into the car without her.

But, damn, with me in it, right?

No, I'm not doing this anywhere near the way I should be. I'm talking and I'm talking — but you do not know what in tarnation that's going on, and couldn't possibly, could you?

I am starting again.

Here is the whole thing from the start of it again.

I said they got on at Eighty-sixth?

No, no, it is I who gets on at Eighty-sixth.

This is my practice — get on where I have to get on — the Lexington line, the Broadway line, here, there, wherever they send me, everywhere in the city. But what should instantly give me away to you the morning I am reporting to you on is that it is swept clean of people, the car that I get aboard on — except for them, of course — if they, the couple, were in fact already on it — the Siberians, the Thailanders, the Mongolians — you know, the whatever — huddled together in one of the two-seater affairs down at, or up at, one end of the car — a man and a woman — this is guesswork, of course — who I am guessing must be in their seventies at least — just little disks of faces to guess from, that's how hooded they are with scarves and caps, these weird foreign-seeming wrappings. So it is not just the eyes which gives you the Asian notion, not just the bones around the eyes, but also the bandaged effect that gets imparted to the head when these people are looking to get cranked up with some ceremony or something, or seek protection from the loosey-goosey elements. As in the elemental.

No, that's off.

Does not make any sense, neither.

Oh, Lord, I am really getting out of my depth with this. It's just you turn on the TV and what do you see but Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, whole columns of them shoulder-to-shoulder, kids, these legions of kids, brats always up in fucking arms over this or that, their noggins all done up with this ad hoc crap on them, the whole street chuggyjammed with them doing this slow goofy sort of creepy Bangkokian conga-like line.

So this is probably why I almost thought that, actually. Namely, almost thought they might both be Cong or Jap or Viet like, except he was such a tall bugger, six-three, if I am any judge, whereas as she was a good one, too — old woman, I mean — every inch of her as tall as she had to be, and maybe then some on top of that. Not that I ever was standing when either of them was. Not that any of what I am saying to you is anything but a guess. But you couldn't have thought about it anymore than I was thinking about it, even saying to myself, "Make up your mind, guy," meaning I should make up my mind what kind of height I was involved with because I already knew I might have to later on get written some writing about it — a report, at least — and now look, this is just what I am doing, isn't it? — sitting here and getting like debriefed. But so what if she wasn't, and if he wasn't, either? I mean, even if the both of them put together weren't enough to make up even a Maltese dwarf, does this mean it don't count?