Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

The sort of fellow he was, it happened not to be in his nature for him to tolerate for very long the particular disquiet occasioned in his bowels by the experience of his flesh having been in contact with the unclean. Not that what was being proffered by way of jam was at all unclean but, rather, that this was his inexorable reaction to whatever evidence of his having fed himself he could not with a vengeance get washed from himself in the next instant.

He would, in any event, upon the completion of these matinal ceremonies, hasten back up the stairs to the floor where they had been keeping him domiciled, this to set to work to lather and rinse his hands at the sink there, whatever daintiness he might have just exercised in his partaking of the premium in food.

Was it necessary for him to do this?

It was, let every reader please be willing to concede, necessary for this tourist to do this.

He presently discovered that if he got himself into the neighborhood queue that was always well along in its formation whenever he got down into the street, an acceptable bread could be purchased for the price of two coins of an altogether negligible rank — so that it came to be his practice in this nation, for the remainder of his holiday in it, for him to go first into the little street, line himself up with the rest of the customers, and contrive to come back to the little hotel with his bread with him well enough before the hour when the management would shut down the little cafeteria, if this is what the tiny gloomy room in which there evolved certain of the events this chronicling now seeks to recall is called.

How particularly hospitable of this hotelier, the man thought, that guests be dispensed such a span of opportunity for them to savor the assortment of comestibles the establishment supplied right to the very stroke of noon. Too, to judge from the seeming indifference of the young woman who from time to time gathered about herself the gestures of being the official in attendance charged with the responsibility of keeping the buffet topped up, it appeared to be altogether among the statutes of decorum for the man to come in from the street with his bread, to lay it in its great length proprietorially across one of the little tables, and then to go to the serving table and to take from it for himself what coffee and milk he wanted, a spoon to agitate his sugar with, an exceptional number of napkins, an equally exceptional hoarding of butter, and a knife to enact the applying of the butter. It was gloriously wrapped, the butter, each noble pat of it importantly turned out, it delighted the man to observe, in a covering of gold-colored foil, the surfaces of which shone with authority by reason of the regal effect endowed upon them by the emblazonings thereupon of a single shining medallionlike ornament. Was this in recognition of a nutritional accomplishment, the man encouraged himself to consider, or proof that the government had annexed the buttermaker with whom the hotel did its business?

He might, if his eyes had been up to it, have more sharply inspected the device from which the illusion of power developed, but they were not. No, his vision, joyless breakfast after joyless breakfast, was up to little, as neither was his mental stamina, these means of coping with all that was exterior to himself having already been, well before he was challenged by the character of foodstuffs, too mercilessly drawn upon in support of his endeavor to forge ahead against the defenses marshalled by the difficulties deployed among the vexing sentences waging war upon his esteem of his faculties in the pair of little books that he had, to this other country, brought with him— Discerning the Subject , by a Paul Smith, and Agamben's, Giorgio Agamben's, Language and Death , pertaining to which second meditation, if you had asked the fellow to speak to it, you would have first, before suffering to hear him stammer his strangled replies, have heard him transposing the two terms of the title. To be sure, it seemed he did not mean, in fact, to do this, but neither may the allegation be dismissed that in our man's doing so, in his devising of the error, he betrayed in himself the impulse to produce the deformed and thereby to perform a kind of larceny whereby the productions of others were made to assemble the impression that he was, if one got right down to the bottom of it, the origin of all things, all local distinctions included.

But listen — if this sojourner of ours was to be thought the origin of anything, it was most specifically not of any idea. Indeed, apart from the industry idleness required of him, there was not much in the line of effort for him lately to boast of, and what instance of it there might ever have been was most assuredly in no sense in the vicinity of the intellectual. Yet he kept company with books such as the ones indicated — gazed, that is, expectantly, and in all earnestness, at the words in them — and was curiously, so very curiously, comforted by the activity. Yet he unvaryingly had had, for the day, more than quite satisfactory of this by breakfasttime, so that, when he had washed his hands and had taken himself each morning to the little park nearby, bearing with him the pair of books, it was a sincere expression of a sort of textual communion — desire, call it! — that this detail in his behavior honored. The pair of books had, you see, become, after all, his friends, and now, as you can also see, his companions, much as — of course, of course! — he, as with anyone still possessed of his wits, preferred people to books, although it was only for the monitoring, it must actually be admitted, of humanity's incessant comings and goings that our fellow had any hint of an affection, comparative or otherwise.

Hence the little park — to which our man had every day been conducting himself, unhappy breakfast after unhappy breakfast, more recently carrying with him to it not just the pair of books remarked but also what was left of the bread he had taken to acquiring and had not finished downing, at his little table, the given, any given, morning.

Further for you to know, do please be told that in his trouser pockets, in the both of them, there was the capital that had been collected unto himself from his plunderings of the bowl wherein the morning buffet showed off its wealth in butter. To secure the safety of his garment, he made certain that he had lined his pockets with napkins prior to his cramming them with their bounty, the charming packets of it, chilled sufficiently at the time of their theft but being in no prospect of enjoying a guarantee of remaining so for as long as it might take for the man to get at their contents.

And now you have it, our subject's readiness.

His labor — it had been his daily labor and would continue to be his daily labor until his holiday in this nation had come to its end — was to sit himself down in the little park, the pair of books beside him on the stone bench from which he had that day selected to carry out the day's watchings, and to keep himself informed of whatever specimen of the manifestation of life there passed to and fro before him in the street.

The pageantry, the pageantry!

From time to time he would eat — that is, bread and butter, butter and bread, tearing off bits of the latter and pushing into them lumps of the former, this with the utensil of the opened foil.

Oh, he might have taken away with him from the cafeteria a second knife from among the many knives the hotel put out along with the morning's provisions, but such a boldness would have asked of him so very much more than he could give.

He wanted no transactions with the troublesome, was, in fact, in flight from the troublesome — traveled, kept traveling, for the very purpose of postponing the troublesome. Even sight of the troublesome was, well, say, troubling to him, as witness the little nausea that kept welling up and spilling over in him, day after day, upon the event of his first coming into the little park, a feeling enforced — this can be the only word for it! — by the word regliment .