Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

Now it was just the twain of us.

"Guardimente!" I snarleth.

"Go ahead!" I chasteneth.

"Make your move!" I, with ligament, chirg.

Not on it so much as near it. At, you might say, the margins of it. Or is it sidelines? Off there, then, at the fringes, you might say — this thing of thinking somebody once said to me something about some woman I know — but which woman, which woman? — having consorted with another woman. Or currently consorting with ditto. So crazy, this is all so crazy — because what further of info can I furnish anybody? — none, none! — I having no knowledge of anything save of the tidbit — well, it's hardly that, hardly a tidbit in the sense of its being anything toothsome, I reckon — save for the snippet, then, which I just gave you. But now to give you the other thing that's there at these reaches of what? — of this mouldering slag-scape of mine — out there where it all turns all to rubble and is getting ready for it to any instant drop off into the great basin of gone and beyond — it's, this other thing, this thing this guy tells me where he's sitting somewhere making small talk somewhere with this other guy somewhere and this other guy somewhere says to him, "But look at this, look at this," whipping out his wallet and going fingering around in it and plucking free from it this tiny pic which he's got in there which is of a woman's feet on what looks to him — we're speaking now, when I say him, about this guy who is saying all of this to me — which looks to him as if the woman is standing on a bathroom floor — tiles and so forth, sort of bathroom-floor-looking tiles and so forth — not that there is any woman, because there is no woman, what there is is just these gorgeous feet of hers, there's just these really perfect feet of hers — top-notch feet in this top-notch relation to the floor, or so this guy is saying to this other guy of mine, saying check it, will you, check it out, won't you, this gorgeously perfect contact between these gorgeously perfect feet of hers, and, you know, the floor. So my guy, this guy who is telling me this, this guy says to me that he says to this other guy, that he says to the pic-exhibiting guy, that he says to him, "Some feet, uh?" So my guy, he then, this my guy of mine, he then says to me that he says to this pic-exhibiting guy, "Hey, you don't see feet like these feet every day of the week, right?" Says to me he says to this pic-exhibiting guy, "Hey, I can certainly see what you're getting at, showing me, hey, the way these feet of whoever's sort of really achieve real contact and all with the floor and all, am I right?" So that's the thing — so that's all I have — that's, I mean, the second thing I thought I had — but what do I have? Because I don't know, one, who either of these guys is or, two, who's the woman whose feet they are that are there in the pic, and, three, is it her bathroom the woman is standing bare-footed in — I'd like to say naked-footed in if you don't mind my saying it — is it her bathroom the woman is standing naked-footed in, and, four, zaniest of all, or actually most alluring of all, was it, was the pic a pic taken of just the feet or was what the guy who's talking to me looking at when the other guy is showing him the pic, is it a pic somebody took scissors to to reduce it, to minimalize it, to make a minum of it right down to the, you know, to the absolute footmost crux of it?

So that's it — unless by now it any longer isn't.

Since what refinement is ever finished?

Onomatological revisionism?

You bet your ass.

An open-and-shut case.

Well, such a flight the poor devil was in, as we all would do well to be in, from the ghastly inferences so readily alleged from the given conditions — alack, from the complete repertoire of grotesqueries in unimprovably flagrant potentiality among, well, life forms.

Both real and fanciful.

But which of us had not harkened to lamp-lit accounts of destinies so remorselessly awful that only nature herself, the bitch — man's mischief we'll get to in a jiffy — might have bothered to contrive them?

Yet, mark you, it was one of the homemade malignities — what else but the matinal transformation Kafka's opportunism had made notorious? — that he pegged so unthinkable as to be hurtling toward him with all certitude and good speed.

There was therefore nothing for it but that our fellow must outflank sleep if to elude the ensuing event of waking up as other than that which he was.

It was this, then — it was dodging the embrace of Morpheus — that he besought himself to do by a not unfantastic labor of the will. You see what I'm saying? Hard work.

No, no one has the patience to sit here and make up for you from whole cloth some simpering constellation of causes. Who the hell knows why anyone does what anyone does? Or even how you can say there is incontestably someone.

Look, the story's this — a reader, a name-changer, has got himself stuck on a sappy vision of ruin. But, hey, don't you know the only reason that I am the one sitting here involved in this is that I am the one sitting here writing this?

YEAH, YEAH, BUT DON'T KID YOURSELF — doing never again what has hitherto never not been done — no shit, it's really hard.

Hard for anyone, but harder by far for someone whose list of accomplishments might have come to no more than his otherwise having been a good sleeper.

Here's the man's mother.

Listen to the man's mother.

"‘Geh schlafen,' I would say to the child.

"I would say to the child, ‘Schnukeli, geh schlafen , for God's sake, willst du?'

"And like you had knocked the creature senseless with a brick, lo and behold, a woman's son was asleep."

Please, who could have anything against sleep as such?

It was not slumber the fellow opposed but slumber's routine career into a renewal of consciousness, please God it should only issue, if this it must, into a species of metamorphosis no worse than the Ovidian nor more vulnerable than the shell-less.

What, then, were the days of his life adding up to — save that the only activity he had excelled at he must now, to escape anticipations too fearful to rehearse, abandon or else?

Oi gevalt !

No wonder it was a swollen prostate all this worry produced in him — for so engorged from fretful inward clutchings was our person that he took to keeping a night jar near to the couch upon which one would be made to stand firm against the colossus of one's fatigue.

He was ready, then.

And he would read.

Read the Germans — though, by Thor, read no faux Kraut on the model of the aforementioned.

Schiller?

Why not Schilling?

No, Schelling!

Bestimmt , Schelling!

Then on to the whole Frankfurt crowd when fiction, as it will, had quite worn itself snivelingly out.

Scared too silly not to be unyielding, the chap read as if his life depended upon it, an invincible drowsiness deforming the sense he would make even of the umlaut. Heaven help him, book in hand, our man's diminuendo conspired to stretch him out on said furnishing in the throes of making something out of anything, the exhaustion in him transmuting all meagerness into a muchness, the sublime meanwhile erupting out of itself in illimitable abundance. Oh, jeepers, everything read was to him everything — and betokened, in the man's demented constructions of the evidence, tokens of the exorbitant, the ordinary reasserting its rule only when, bladder flaring, our victim felt himself required to roll onto his side, to let fall the book, to take up in its place the night jar, and thereupon to poke his hose well enough into it in order that the excruciation of his being emptied of the promised efflux might begin.