Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

My wife Barbara would have known better.

The woman who has been in my house with me — you know, Anna Kraczyna? — she just came and said to me that I did too, that I had known just as better about it as anybody else would have known. I mean, even before Anna Kraczyna had taken the pains she would characteristically later take to get the cord all wound back up into just the right loops of it and all of it going in its loops in all the same one direction of it and then get the vacuum cleaner so carefully restored to where the vacuum cleaner always gets itself kept, this same Anna Kraczyna came back out of the bedroom to me where I was sitting at this table I always sit at and said to me, "Fool, fool, how can you not admit it it's how come you picked it, for the goddamn penitenza in it, you idiot?" Whereupon Anna Kraczyna presently put away the vacuum cleaner where it officially belongs, bestowed the famous peck on the cheek, murmured to me " Buon lavoro , smart aleck, buon lavorol " — then made her way brilliantly, and for the last time so altogether forgivingly, to my door and back forever into the distant rubble of the needless, heedless, perpetual world.

DARNEDEST THING, DON'T YOU THINK, the tapping of a hammer in an apartment neighboring yours. Or should say somebody tapping one since there's no hammer next door there, is there, tapping itself. I mean the fact that you cannot, can you, establish in your mind which one. Somebody is tapping with a hammer, somebody has got a hammer and is tapping with it in one of the apartments adjacent to mine, which isn't interesting in and of itself, is it, but is desperately intriguing insofar as the fact that I am sitting here listening and cannot state to you, or to the authorities, if I had to, if it is the residence above me or the one below me or one of the ones to the sides, any of the four of these. Not that I foresee any reason for me to formulate a statement to the authorities. It's just somebody putting in nails in walls for pictures, don't you think, or digging out decomposed grout around a sink. It sounds to me crunchy, whatever it is, like crunchy bone or crunchy skull, what's in receipt of the blows, whatever the object is that's being hit. But this is only, I suspect, because of my foot and because of the bones in it. I did something to them, or to it. Not that it's yet been ratified yet by anybody yet what I did. The site of the damage appears to occupy a locale more or less up and down my leg, it feels like, but I am certain the source of the disturbance was the foot. Pain tends to distribute itself, doesn't it? I think I read somewhere how once it starts, how once pain has got itself a foothold in you, as it were, it can propagate itself almost all over. It hurts in my head, for instance. Yet who is to say this cannot be blamed on the tapping? This head involvement I am just this instant noticing, it could be it is attributable to the tapping I am hearing and cannot be laid at the feet of, no joke or anything, of my foot. Two things I would like to know — what the tapping is all about or where at least it's coming from, and what's the origin of this foot. Not that the knowledge thereof could not be adduced in either instance, of course. Not that a perfectly acceptable condition of knowing would not in either instance be achieved just by my taking action, of course. I could get up from here, make my way out the door, present myself at the doors of all of the probable dwellings. I'm sorry. Gear must have just slipped a notch on me, no? I mean, proposing getting up to go in search of the whereabouts of the hammerer. Foot, you know. Gone and forgotten about foot, you know. Have to take into account I am not the footloose thing that once I was. Besides which, to come absolutely into the open with you on this, the pain seems to have accomplished a beachhead in my head, it feels like, the pain seems to have migrated to my head, it feels like, the pain gives evidence of its being in the process of settling in and sending down roots down inside in my head, it feels like. No, I am hardly, I assert, up to undertaking a quest. It's come and gone, the moment when I might have been up to undertaking a quest. Not that the hammering will not in due course stop. Oh, but look at me, exaggerating the claim from tapping to hammering. Lucky thing for all concerned I just caught myself at it, these exaggerations fingers typing are heir to. Yet in their defense, let it be written, my knuckles commenced to ache in advance of the sentence jogging tapping up to the rank of hammering. In any event, I take it back. So what do you say — the doctor, do you think? Is this your counsel, seek the attention of a professional, do you think? X-rays and all of that, let him palpate the injury? He won't be able to see anything. It's not swollen or anything. It's just that — oh, oh — something inside in there, it's not right. I took, I think, a false step. I balked, is it, instead of kept on with the meter of my walk. It was just a stroll around the block. It was just for the purpose of one's having for oneself a bit of an air-out on one's itinerary around, among other things, the block. Oh, but now look. Now there is none of me that is free of agony. Now is not my entire person the very thing of excruciation?

There's the pounding again.

He's still at it.

Or must I say it continues to be at itself?

I suppose I will never again walk in the manner of a fellow with grace. Even were I to launch an investigation, would I not have to hobble? Limp there, be denied every courtesy, be made to limp myself away onward into deepening offense?

They're slamming now.

My God, they're slamming.

It could be an excavation, it sounds to me like — the gouging out — through tissues of plaster, of tile, of concrete — of a grave.

No, no, it's the building itself!

They are wrecking the building itself, can't you see? It's the demolitionists! Can you credit it? — the dogs have gone and brought in the bleeding demolitionists, haven't they? — whilst here was I, Lish himself, so absorbed in these self-imitations of myself — nay, these self-destructions of myself! — as never to have heard them — but they did, didn't they? — they had to have, hadn't they? — ring, rang, rung my bell.

THE SENTENCE I MOST DREAD hearing is please, sir, step to the side into the street, sir. Or I suspect I should have written it "Please, sir, step to the side into the street, sir," or perhaps, prettier still, in italics.

I don't know why this is.

I don't think it owes to my practice of walking always as far from the curb as I can get. Which means near to the store fronts, near to the shop fronts, and therefore not infrequently straight into the path of those citizens ambling closely along there-along in order that they have an unobstructed line of sight into the dressed-to-the-nines display windows of the United States of American commerce.

But as to the practice I mentioned, I certainly do indeed know what this owes to, yes— i.e ., which I have taken care to italicize in witness of my dereliction firstmost among the aforesaids— i.e ., keeping my motion, when it is parallel to the thoroughfare, as distant on the perpendicular as I can get it from the curb, this on account of the cant of the sidewalk.

They cant them here where I live.

For to provide for the run-off into the street.

Of rain, of snowmelt, of what-have-you. E.g. , schmutz.

Creating thereby an inclined plane — however slight the elevation of which I see no reason for me not to seize advantage of. For I am short, am of unaverage measure, am of below-average stature — and therefore feel myself ever so much less challenged when passing my fellow humankind if improved, if bolstered, if increased by the not at all dismissable gain the higher ground guarantees me if I seize it.