Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.

A certain woman had a very sharp consciousness but almost no memory. She remembered enough to get by from day to day. She remembered enough to work, and she worked hard. She did good work, and was paid for it, and earned enough to get by, but she did not remember her work, so that she could not answer questions about it when people asked, as they did ask, since the work she did was interesting.

She remembered enough to get by, and to do her work, but she did not learn from what she did, or heard, or read. For she did read, she loved to read, and she took good notes on what she read, on the ideas that came to her from what she read, since she did have some ideas of her own, and even on her ideas about these ideas. Some of her ideas were even very good ideas, since she had a very sharp consciousness. And so she kept good notebooks and added to them year by year, and because many years passed this way, she had a long shelf of these notebooks, in which her handwriting became smaller and smaller.

Sometimes, when she was tired of reading a book, or when she was moved by a sudden curiosity she did not altogether understand, she would take an earlier notebook from the shelf and read a little of it, and she would be interested in what she read. She would be interested in the notes she had once taken on a book she was reading or on her own ideas. It would seem all new to her, and indeed most of it would be new to her. Sometimes she would only read and think, and sometimes she would make a note in her current notebook of what she was reading in a notebook from an earlier time, or she would make a note of an idea that came to her from what she was reading. Other times she would want to make a note but choose not to, since she did not think it quite right to make a note of what was already a note, though she did not fully understand what was not right about it. She wanted to make a note of a note she was reading, because this was her way of understanding what she read, though she was not assimilating what she read into her mind, or not for long, but only into another notebook. Or she wanted to make a note because to make a note was her way of thinking this thought.

Although most of what she read was new to her, sometimes she immediately recognized what she read and had no doubt that she herself had written it, and thought it. It seemed perfectly familiar to her, as though she had just thought it that very day, though in fact she had not thought it for some years, unless reading it again was the same as thinking it again, or the same as thinking it for the first time, and though she might never have thought it again, if she had not happened to read it in her notebook. And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her, though it was hard for her to understand, and troubled her to try to understand, just how they had to do with her, how much they were of her and how much they were outside her and not of her, as they sat there on the shelf, being what she knew but did not know, being what she had read but did not remember reading, being what she had thought but did not now think, or remember thinking, or if she remembered, then did not know whether she was thinking it now or whether she had only once thought it, or understand why she had had a thought once and then years later the same thought, or a thought once and then never that same thought again.

Last fall my aunt burned to death when the boardinghouse where she lived went up in flames. There was nothing left of her but a small pile of half-destroyed objects in one corner of her room, where I think she must have been sitting when the fire broke out: her false teeth, the frames of her glasses, her pearls, the eyelets of her leather boots, and her two long knitting needles coiled like snakes in the ash.

It was a gray day. Friends of the dead picked their way through the rubble like lonely ants, wheeling and backtracking. Every now and then a woman cried out in horror and was taken away. The chimneys were still intact: everything else had crumbled. Rain began to fall slowly on the crowd. Two firemen, pale from sleeplessness, kicked the rubble with their boots and stopped several people from going near the house.

My aunt was dead. Or worse than dead, since there was nothing left of her to call dead. I wondered, with some fear, what would become of her old lover Mr. Knockly, a small man, who stood in the thickest cluster of men and women, his face like a white pimple among their overcoats, staring at the ruin as though his heart had been burned out of him. When I went near him he ran away from me in his tiny boots. The collar of his jacket was turned up and his gray crew cut sparkled with rain. He moved as though he had been wounded in the legs and arms, the chest, the neck, as though he had been shot full of holes.

I saw him again on the following Sunday, at the funeral. In front of the church there were seven coffins. It occurred to me later that the coffins must have been empty. The church was full: only one of the dead had been a complete stranger — the police were still sending photographs of his teeth to cities as far away as Chicago. Near me sat an old man with glassy eyes who was drawn like a magnet to any gathering of people: I had once seen him throwing confetti onto a parade from the window of a deserted house. In the first pew was a pious woman who spent a great deal of time in church praying. Mr. Knockly was at the back, his head bowed so far over that it was barely visible.

He rode in the car with me behind the hearse, but looked out the window at the scrap-iron conversion plants and did not answer when I spoke to him. In the cemetery he stood by my aunt’s coffin until it was lowered into the grave. His face was so palsied with grief, he seemed so nearly out of control, that I thought he would jump into the grave with her. But instead he turned away abruptly after the “dust to dust,” and walked alone through the gate. There was no sign of him on the road when I returned in the car.

It was early October. The days were long and cool. I went out every evening and walked. I would leave home before the sun set and stay out until night had fallen and the sky was completely dark. I went a different way each time, through back alleys, along dirt paths by the river, away from the river, over the hill on the outskirts of town, down through the main streets. I looked into doorways, into living rooms, into store windows; I watched through the glass as people ate dinner by themselves in coffee shops; I walked behind restaurants through clouds of steam from the kitchens and through the noise of clattering dishes.

I think I might have been searching for Mr. Knockly, though often I went where I was unlikely to find him. I didn’t even know if he was still in town: with my aunt gone, there was no reason for him to stay here. But when I saw him again, I felt as though I had wanted, all this time, to see him again.

I was walking in the muddy lane behind a seafood restaurant, after a heavy rainstorm. The clouds had broken up and the sky was light in places, but the sun had set. I thought there was no one with me in the lane, but I heard a noise at the other end, and saw him. He was wearing a white work shirt and white apron with a red anchor on it, and he was emptying a small garbage pail into one of the large ones that stood in a row by the back door of the restaurant. As I went up to him, he was jerking the pail up and down to free the clotted garbage. His head was bowed. I spoke to him and he looked up quickly. Garbage spilled onto the ground. He stood still for a moment; the emotion that had been in his face at the funeral had died away: his eyes, his mouth, were blunt and dogged. I said something to him, and for a moment I thought he would answer: his face moved, his lips unstuck. But when I put out my hand to take hold of him, he shied away and went indoors. There was a break in the noise from the kitchen. I stood there sinking into the mud and looking at the spilled garbage: crab’s claws, sauce. The door opened a crack, and a black face blocked the light, then the door shut again. I felt uncomfortable. I felt suddenly that it was very strange for me to be there. I left.