Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

After turning off the light, I lay in the dark, relaxed and peaceful, and conjured up his image for the pleasure of looking at him, and for company, though I was too tired to imagine anything more — only his image standing in a well-lit place, against the wall of a room. I had him there, though he looked irritated, but as I began to fall asleep, of his own accord he turned and walked away, out of my sight, as though off a stage and into the wings, and I was startled. I woke up to think about what had happened: I had brought him there, but I had been too weak to hold on to his image and had lost control of it. Even though he was only an image, he had his own feelings, and he was there under protest, and as soon as I grew too weak to hold him, he walked away out of my sight.

* * *

I still have trouble sleeping. I am always a little short of sleep. If I slept more, the color might come back into my face and I wouldn’t have such trouble holding on to a thought, or two at once, and I wouldn’t keep getting sick. But it’s complicated: if I get too much sleep one night I’m not tired enough to sleep well the next — either I can’t fall asleep in the first place or I wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying. So I’m afraid of getting too much sleep and would rather get not quite enough so that I will sleep soundly.

Now and then I am too excited to sleep, because I have a plan to reform something: if not what we eat, which should be the diet of the hunter-gatherers, then what we have in our house, which should include as little plastic as possible and as much wood, clay, stone, cotton, and wool; or the habits of the people in our town, who should not cut down trees in their yards or burn leaves or rubbish; or the administration of our town, which should create more parks and lay down a sidewalk by the side of every road to encourage people to walk, etc. I wonder what I can do to help save local farms. Then I think we should keep a pig here to eat our table scraps, and that the Senior Citizens Center should keep a pig, too, because so much food is thrown out when the old people don’t eat it, as I used to see when I went to pick up Vincent’s father at lunchtime. The pig could be fattened on these scraps until the holiday season, and then provide the senior citizens with a holiday meal. A new baby pig could be bought in the spring and amuse the senior citizens with its antics.

Nowadays my nights are broken anyway, by Vincent’s father, who has taken to rising at all hours. He wanders the hallways, creeping softly because he is so slow, and each time, when I hear the creak of a floorboard and get up, it is unnerving to find him out there barely moving, dimly lit by the streetlamp and the headlights of passing cars, his nightshirt white, his skin pale, his crooked hands outstretched for balance, his stale smell floating around him, a rather kindly smile on his face.

And then the next day, because I am so tired or maybe because of a state of mind induced by something else, as I sit here working I will see, out of the corner of my eye, mice running across my floor, but when I turn my head and look, they are only knotholes in the floorboards.

Tired, I try to make out a word I’ve written. I can’t be sure of it. At the same time, I hear a voice in my head. It is my own voice speaking the word, strangely insistent, though my eyes still do not know what the word is.

On other days, my hand will keep typing a period after a word, trying to end a sentence before I’m ready to end it, as if my hand is trying to stop me from saying what I want to say.

The old man is up during the night, but he sleeps more and more during the day. Even when he is awake he sits quietly in one place, staring into the distance. His company is peaceful, like the company of a cow. In fact, like a cow, he often chews his cud as he stares into the distance. But it was not so long ago that he would grow excited if a visitor came to the house, and stand up, leaning on his walker. If he was asked a question about his health, he would begin to talk about Communism.

I have had trouble sleeping lately because I have been worrying about time and money again. I thought I could finish this in a year even if I stopped now and then to work on a translation. I did stop once to translate a very difficult story by an eighteenth-century writer I had never heard of. It was a silly story about a tryst in a summer house. But I was glad of the change, because in that work, the most important decisions had already been made by another person. I stopped again to translate another story from the eighteenth century, and then a third. Then I realized this was not a very good idea after all, because the year was passing quickly and I had no time to work on the novel. I had to think of something else. So I signed a contract for another, more extensive project, took a large advance for it, and then did not start working on it but instead continued working on the novel. Soon, whether I like it or not, I will have to begin translating again.

Because of all this worry, I began having problems with my stomach. I fussed over it, but I also abused it. I had to have my three or four cups of coffee in the morning even though I knew they were bad for me. I also ate no fruits or vegetables, only white bread and crackers. My health began to suffer.

Maybe I am trying to sabotage this as I come within sight of the end so that if I can’t finish it I will have good excuses: a cold over the holidays that grew worse, turning into a mild case of pneumonia; two cracked ribs from coughing so hard; then what seemed like acute food poisoning but turned out to be a stomach flu. The flu lingered and became a general squeamishness about food, but when I realized my stomach problems were by then self-induced, they got better and I came down with another bad cold, this time affecting my sinuses.

A silly thought occurred to me the other day as I stopped work, went into the bathroom, and glanced at myself in the mirror. When I started trying to write this novel, years ago, I thought I looked pretty much like a translator but not at all like a novelist. Now on certain days I think I am beginning to look like a novelist. Glancing in the mirror, I said to myself, Maybe as long as I do not look like a person who has written a novel, I will have to go on working on this, and when at last I look like a person who could have written a novel, I will be able to finish it.

If I finish it, I will be surprised. It has been unfinished for so long now that I am used to having it with me this way, unfinished — and maybe I will always find ways to procrastinate. Or maybe I will become too exhausted to go on. But if I do go on, I know I will reach a point where for one of several reasons I won’t be able to change it anymore even if it should be changed.

For a long time I told myself I had to write it even if it wasn’t going to be quite what I wanted, and I would put everything into it that I could. Now, if I finish it, I don’t know if I will be satisfied. I know I will be relieved, but I don’t know if I will be relieved that I have told the story or simply that the work is over.

It isn’t turning out the way I thought it would. I don’t know how much control I ever really had over it. At first I thought I had a choice about every part of it, and this worried me, because there seemed to be too many choices, but then when I tried certain options, they didn’t work, and I had only one option after all: many parts of the story either refused to be told or demanded to be told in only one way.

For instance, I used to wonder if I had to use the vocabulary I was using or if I could use a different one or a larger one, if only I tried harder. I thought I should read the thesaurus just to remind myself of words I might have forgotten. Of course there are some words I would never use. A woman once told me with sudden passion that she wished more people would use the word “vex.” Only English people seemed to use it, she said. I wanted to agree with her, but I don’t really like the word as much as she does, though I might use it in a translation.