Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

Or, okay, doesn't.

IT IS NOT OUT OF THE QUESTION, the truth.

Wasn't there something somewhere in my reading, something I read somewhere where there is this region of the Orient where the people are positively tremendous?

But maybe I didn't read it. Maybe it was in a movie when it was raining and the whole school had to stay inside and couldn't have recess. You know, the climate and the crops and the trade routes of somewhere, setting aside the enormous size of certain of its citizens. Or maybe we were doing a class project on cotton, and it was maybe the year of the adjective, wasn't it? Which reminds me to tell you I am not dumb. I promise you, I am more than competent in speaking to the distinction between that which is merely morphologically adjectival and that which is instead, or which is as well, chiefly syntactically thus.

Unless you forgot.

I mean, about back there where I was giving the appearance of being flummoxed as to what you transmute Thailand to when you want to say, "I think they both were. ."

Wait.

When you say, "The man was Mongolian," you replicate the form but not the function exhibited in "The man was a Mongolian."

But I imagine you have gone and forgotten all this. Ah, God, one offers speculations and, once offered, forgets one's own offerings, or speculations. Takes a position and, betaken'd, betrays it.

Man.

My, my — man.

Sorry.

Really.

Been farting around for altogether too long now. You've got me dead to rights — just another two-fisted action type knocking his three-rounder brains out to come across as a powerhouse of thought.

Meant transform, not transmute.

IT'S SO HARD.

You shouldn't have to know anything to do something. I mean, it doesn't seem fair, does it? But isn't this how the setup is: know-how, smarts, skilled labor? — fellows like me, nothing unwitting, nothing nonpredictable? Ah, it's all such a lousy deal, start off with things which couldn't be simpler, and before you know it, what?

The answer is you're beating your way upstream against great torrents of shit, complexities you never had the gray matter to create. Thought you were just doing arithmetic, yes? Whereas, Jesus, if you're not Boltzmann, you might as well give up, keep tropical fish, go sign on with the Pentagon instead.

I saw them.

The car was empty.

I tell you, it was the coldest of damnable days! It was New York and there was an icicle up my ass — and them, they — they looked so warm together — they looked like Eskimos together, the dopes, they looked so toughly snuggly with each other, so hardened from, so hardened by, events.

No assumings.

Fact.

Because you realize I am sitting in the seat that is almost exactly facing theirs? The whole car to choose from, check — but let us not forget the noun to know me by — why I was there then, why I am here now.

You'd look at me and see a fellow who does not look to you like anything — a big man in a big coat.

Lots of room in it for everything.

Oh, you bet, they could have been Aleutians.

They had to be something .

Did they not have things? He had in his pocket these folded-up papers and he kept getting them out and scribbling shit on them — not words, of course, but numerals, I think, or symbols from applications we keep warning these people they have no effing business messing with. Integrations, disequilibriums — things, didn't I say things? But, all right, this is not my sphere, and wouldn't I be the first to admit it?

On the other hand, just don't think I couldn't see the skunk acting as if he were up to something big — reaching for some elusive result, putting on like some fucking Taiwani or something, like some Taiwanese whizbang, like some trafficker in new methodologies feeling his way heurism by heurism?

You got a beef with it, pal— heurism?

Oh, you know, you know — so absorbed he seemed, so thoroughly insulated, so isolated — I don't know — so innoculated from things, the old broad meanwhile nattering away at him, all jabber-jabber without letup or surcease — get napkins, get ketchup, aren't we all out of mayo? Or so I was made to make a theorization— because who could fucking hear? And even if I could have, wouldn't it've been in Singaporese?

Or what is it, Singapo?

Oh, yes — Wu, Dr. Wu, this is who is at the bottom of all of this, big shot sitting over there working out cosmological models in exponents of ten, this Mrs. Wu of his going on at him and on at him, get this, Wen Lung, get that, Wen Lung, him looking at her like he's not listening to the lyrics but only to the tune — all out of eggs, all out of bread, don't forget eggs, don't forget bread!

I'll tell you the truth. It wasn't that many minutes between the time I got on and he got her to get off, but it was enough of them for me to make all of this up. You know, Dirac, Besso, Lorentz, and good old Wen Lung Wu, the stinking turncoat humping it on down to the U.N. with whatever he's got going on down there in the language of Hwei.

And doesn't Wennie know it?

Can't old Wennie see?

Can't anybody put two and two together and tell it's three more pages to the end? Hey, who can't figure it that somewhere between here and Forty-second. . except how do you get out of this, declaratively or interrogatively? Well, it was all imperative the instant the loose-coated hooligan had got himself all aboard, confederates having cleared away all prior jussivities, confederates having closed off all escape, confederates having screwed down the hatches, having prepared all preparable matters, spot-cleaned the setting for the pointshooter, made way for the ace eraser. So what, then, is left for it but for to put the best face on it and for them to huddle in some version of an Asian-ish cuddle? Or vice versa. The scoundrels!

Ah, Christ, I hear her say, "Clorox, get Clorox, don't forget, make a note," and him, he writes OQ2=t2x2-y2yz2 and thinks, "Good-bye, my love — good-bye!"

BUT AS I ALREADY TOLD YOU, the old fraud faked her out at Forty-second. I mean, if he had meant to get rid of her, then this is just what he did — got her off without him, got her good and off and well out of harm's you-know-what without him.

Oh, the old sly-sides!

I tell you, these people with their eyes, they are not for one instant to be trusted. Why, the rascal, he leapt up with a great start as we drew into the station — fairly leapt, or leaped, I say — as if to say, "Good heavens, Mrs. Wu, your hubby appears to have been incalculably distracted, preoccupied beyond all fathoming — mercy sakes, dear lady, darned near made us miss our station — let us hasten, sweet helpmeet, let us take ourselves away."

Oh, the dickens, the dirty dickens!

But see it as I, your patriot, saw it — the old reprobate flinging himself at the doors and she, the poor dear, staggering after — so completely bewildered, taken so completely unawares — plunging blindly after, bad on her ancient feet, blisters rupturing I don't doubt, corns, spurs, calluses, great horny bunions — totally but totally disoriented, not to mention so helplessly overcome by such an absolute riot of agonies — but nevertheless making her way just well enough, gaining on her hubby just gainingly enough, while he, the devilish four-flusher, he executes the adroitest of pivots — and all with such gallantry, with the very sheerest of chivalries, as in "Ladies first, ladies first — my very dearest lady of the realm."

Well, you know what I say?

I say he said, "Radies first," okay?

Her safe from me on the platform, him unsafe with me on the train, the whole shebang still of no more than just the two of us moving again, hellbent for Thirty-third.

BUT TO BE ABSOLUTELY EVENHANDED, I'll say this for him — which is this — the scamp actually winked at me once the doors had shut her away from me and off we went again, off, off, clattering clangingly along again on our deadly underworld way.