Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

How on earth had he got this weak, this old?

It had never been his plan. His plan had been to be strong, and to come to the last of his life with the power of his youth. Not one jot of himself would time ever wrest from his fisted hands. But time had, hadn't it?

It was a trick.

It had to have happened when his attention had been situated elsewhere. But where? Certainly not on the children who had conducted into his life these numberless offspring of theirs. There were so many of them — grandchildren, everywhere grandchildren — whereas it required no numbering for the man to reckon there was hardly even one of him and that not at all long from now would there be a sign of even that?

He was alone, had always been alone, and would die — perhaps this very night — as solitary as he had forever in his memory been.

The man had no complaints, not a one.

Yet what could have made him so horribly weary just this very instant?

Fatigue must have hurtled down at him from somewhere overhead and now, at the end of the day, it felt to the man as if exhaustion, breathless itself, lay gasping as it hung from his neck, snatching at the frail struts of the crazed skeleton as the man struggled to free himself from this last cruel assailant.

But why bother?

After all, was the man not preparing for sleep?

They had made up some sort of contraption for him in the main room. It had rather surprised him to turn away from the kisses goodnight and discover behind himself the site where he had sat from sun-up wearing himself out enunciating for the children — for the grandchildren — transformed into what would be his bed. When had this happened? How could it have? Hadn't he been occupying the very place, reading and reading to half of creation since the very stroke of day?

Everyone seemed so capable nowadays.

By what means had this occurred? Was there any precedent in their lives for this? Where was the example in managing matters that had guided these children of his in their accomplishment of such infernal displays of competence, competence — skill and grace? It had not been their mother, surely. Long gone in her dishevelment somewhere to the dreadful margins, hadn't the woman made a proper mess of things, starting with — let gentility select our diction — her exercise, first and last, of, shame, shame, bed-making?

Wait a bit.

He had packed his sleeping pills — but exactly where? The little overnight bag he had fitted them into, what had the children — or the grandchildren, damn every squirming living one of them! — done with it?

Ah, there.

Or here.

Yes, yes.

Just where it ought to be — at the foot — or is it the head? — of this exasperating business that must have once been a couch before the new ingenuity on the march in the world decided to interfere with it and make it serve two ends.

Well, it wasn't out in the open enough, was it? How come people don't appreciate the courtesy of leaving things where you cannot miss them! Why does it have to be his fault if everything's not where fair play would indicate it be?

He sucked and sucked and accumulated saliva in his mouth and swallowed it waterless — bitter pill, so terrible for such a tiny palliative indeed.

His fingers — were the bones breaking?

Not just canny and capable, but thoughtful, actually incomparably thoughtful, once you gave it some thought and actually really thought about it, this family of his, even if none of them knew somebody's overnight bag belonged where a person did not have to spend half his life in a wild hunt for it. Such a fund of solicitude, whatever source it had, it could never be alleged any spoor of it could be tied to him. No, it was not that the man did not wish to be generous with himself when called upon to do so. It was rather that the man noticed not all that much of what was available to notice, so that such a call, made however close to the man's ear, might go unattended even when the caller shrieked. But what little the man did attend would grip his attention with a violence that was unrelenting and even eerie. Oh, no, never think the man was not all too excruciatingly aware of what he deigned to be aware of — torn spines of storybooks irksome in their haphazard stacks, toys luridly expressed in polyurethane deep-banked for the night up against the baseboards, frame after frame of family snapshots gaping in disorderly array from every level of tabletop, everywhere the walls flapping with sheets of crayoned and penciled foolscap, none of it had the man elected to ignore — given the chance, he would have discarded the lot, and with gusto! — not least the photograph of the children's mother — was this person a grandmother, in fact? — that now came plunging into view at the far side of the man's pillow and, with it, the career of the marriage, a contending whose vehemence never flagged and whose object was the vector of the slant — upwards versus downwards, downwards versus upwards — of the Venetian blinds distributed throughout the dwelling in receipt of the — up to that point — happy couple.

If the woman aimed the slats one way, the man would restore their alignment to the prior disposition. Where the woman had visited would have the arrangement of its window treatment, however maddening the task to effect the detail, reversed upon the man's replacing the woman there.

Oh, it was endless, endless.

Until it ended.

And what had it all had to do with — what?

Neither the man nor the woman might ever have said — unless it had been the use to be made of sunlight if sunlight were in the moment given — or, at all events, by those who paid attention to change, been promised.

Well, it seemed to the man it must have had.

One wanted a radiance either to ignite the ceiling or, otherwise, set fire to the floor.

Make much of what was above.

Make no less of that below.

You choose.

They chose.

Or, rather to say, one of them chose and the other, in a word, unchose. Oh, and speaking of which, never a word was spoken on this score. Sentiments inspiring the impasse dividing him from her and her from him never acquired the status of speech.

Mm, the aphonia of matrimony.

Compromise between the combatants was as impossible as was acknowledgment that each was pledged to oppose the other in a style of disputation unique in the common experience. Any reference to their differences not carried out in silence, would it not prove — talk, talk — the reigning feature in the loser's defeat? Well, there was no backing down, and the man never backed down. Not that the woman ever did, either — there looking him now full in the face, her furious countenance singling out the father of her children as with all his might the man pushed the pillow from the bed so that, in the morning, he would not have to come fighting his way up from the waters of the night with what was left of him — his neck, Christ, the neck — more punished than he deserved.

Wait again, wait!

Was there to be this remembrance of the grandmother and none of the grandfather? Among all these damn pictures, was there honor being paid to the woman and none, by thunder, to the man!

He got to his feet.

It made him dizzy for him to do it.

And his knees, Jesus!

The pill — good, good — soon, soon — another minute or so and he will have searched the room and determined the worst and then come back to this device to be just in time for the blessing of good old-fashioned oblivion.

Nothing, he found nothing, not a hint of himself was there anywhere to be found, not even in settings where a family grouping constituted the topic to be developed within the frame.

Where was he?

Was the man nowhere at all?

He staggered from footing to footing, very nearly falling into things a time or two, before finding — the thing exhibited well back on a tabletop so that evidence of the man's existence might have very nearly persisted in keeping itself hidden from all — before coming across the boy sitting astride the door-to-door photographer's droopy-looking, ruined-looking, condemned-looking pony, naked leg, pale anklet, toe of the dark shoe visible from within the enormous-looking stirrup it was, on this side of the animal, possible for the observer to see.