Goings

by Gordon Lish

  She said, “Put it on.”

  I held it up to my chest and smiled, the modesty incumbent upon the unconquerable.

  She said, “No, put it on. I want to see how it fits.”

  “It fits,” I said. “I’m positive of it.”

  She adopted an expression not as forgiving as the one that had received me when I had returned home, my not undifficult mission completed.

  “You mean,” she said, “you didn’t try it on?” She said, “Are you telling me you walked out of that shop without seeing what the thing looked like on you?” She said, “Darling, you are definitely not standing there telling me that, are you?”

  But I was.

  For it was true.

  I said, “The tag says there’s an insecticide somehow suffused in the material.” I said, “It says it wards off mosquitoes, even kills them.”

  “Put it on,” she said.

  I put it on.

  “Come closer,” she said.

  I did as she said, and before I could defend myself, she knocked my elbow out of the way and hooked her finger—from outside the shirt, from outside—through into the armpit.

  And wiggled it.

  The finger.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “What’s what?” I said.

  “This,” she said.

  “What?” I said, wondering, but not all that assiduously, how she had managed to get her finger into my armpit from the outside.

  From outside the shirt, I mean.

  “This slit,” she said. She said, “What’s this doing here? Not that I want for us to overlook this one on the other side over here. Are these gills?” she said. She said, “Are you actually wearing a shirt with gills?”

  Well, it turned out I was.

  Holes.

  One supposes to vouchsafe upper-body ventilation for the active man.

  “Take it back,” she said. “Get your money back,” she said.

  I took it back. Demanded a full refund. Explained I had taken it for granted that shirts were still made the old foolish way, that I was very sorry for my hurried though admittedly enfeebled assumption, might I please have refunded to me what I paid for it.

  There was some grumbling, of course. I think a somewhat ungentle remark might have been passed, somewhere at a little distance from me, to the effect that the elderly ought not to be released into an engagement with citywide retail commerce without a guardian present. There’s only this left to say—that as the paperwork was being enacted, I accommodatingly burbling something about how admirably clean I’d kept the shirt, that I had not even tried it on in front of the mirror or, ah God, my wife, that as I was doing what I could to distract the sentinels posted at the door of the new epoch from their calculating the full moral cost of their vexing themselves with my case, I noticed a blackish blot on the shirt’s placket and, reflexively, stupidly, for wouldn’t this surely give me away, I darted my hand out to obscure the evidence of my felony.

  But not fast enough.

  Not for the fellow processing the refund.

  He beat me to it, the sharpster—plucked (from the placket; yes, I would say placket again if I were less alert to the finer if superficial aspects of this confession than I guess you reckon me to be) plucked the blot off the shirt and flicked it—magic, magic!—away.

  Weeks later, napping, only just yesterday, as a matter of fact, in the course of an ingenious digression erupting during an especially vapid dream, I came, all at once, to recognize what the salesman—whoops, the server, right?—had snapped behind his waist forever off into the abyss, this without the slightest indication of a hiatus appearing in his otherwise superbly confident dealing with one of the untold bothers of the mercantile day.

  So it worked!

  By Jupiter, these modern times, what will they have the cheek to pull on us next?

  As for her?

  She’s okay—except she’s yet to quit mentioning her intention to pick up a couple of frog-resistant skirts, snickering hideously just as her tongue curls into the cusp of what seemed to me to be precipitating the utterance of a nonlatinate near-rhyme.

  KNOWLEDGE

  I DO NOT have to do this, you know. It is not mandated by government, you know. Nothing forces me to say what I will—or shall!—you know. It is, rather, my means of giving back to “the” community, of one’s seeking to perform usefully, even munificently, in the—well—in the modest manner that might, on occasion, by a dues-paying member of mankind, be accomplished.

  Like the alliteration I just indulged myself in.

  I mean (heh-heh, see?), I could have gone farther, or further, mounting a montage of even more ems, or, if you insist, em’s.

  Dub it my bearing, my engaging existence at what is judged to be a depth deep enough but not so sheer that ostentation ensues. To be sure, taking the flyer down, as I had just done in the course of my stroll back (in return, as in effectuating a ritornello) from the bakery, ripping the big sheet of paper from where it had been plastered to the lamppost, made me a degree uneasy on this score.

  Was the deed too showy?

  What were the chances I was being observed?

  I do not believe neighbors—residents of my building, that is; tenants, that is, legitimated denizens enjoying the privileges of tenancy herein—saw me at it: to wit, my exerting no little effort to rid the streetscape of the big sheet of paper without my rending it into pieces, and then (failing at this, failing not thoroughly but discoverably clownishly at this) to remove the duct tape that was wound around the topmost and bottommost margins of the thing, tethering the whole of it—a poster, a poster!—to the lamppost with, as the poet has proposed, a vengeance.

  Yes, perfect, perfect!—that’s the fashion to express it—vengeance, vengeance—vindictively.

  The bastards.

  Oh, I imagine the doorman must have caught me at it, mustn’t he? For he was there when I, not many strides from home, maneuvered to aim myself toward him, this worthy’s massive hand on the brass-work, the whole of him at the ready to see to it that his master’s motion not be made tardive as I glided past the good fellow into the lobby and thus into the warmed air thereinward, gaining ground ever so fluidly onwards and, thereafterwards, whilst awaiting the arrival of the elevator, calling out to the chap, perhaps a dot too cheerily, “Ferdy, have I greeted you on this merry Flag Day of ours? If not, then to you, Ferdy, I say let this day be savored as the merriest of them—i.e., Flag Days—ever, that is!”

  Alas, the cunning son-of-a-bitch must have seen me at it.

  Jesus Christ, what now?

  Too late, too late!—the big sheet of paper crushed into parts—hidden, hooray, successfully hidden!—squeezed, as the ghastly shreds were, down into the crease of my coat pocket, a grand patch-pockety affair commodious to a fault. Whereas to the other side of myself, employing no more than the chilled tips of my fingers, I held aloft, ever so deftly, the loop of the sack in which were composed the bran muffins I had gone to collect from the pastry shop so popular in this particular (hmm, particular) precinct of ours.

  Wretchedly sorry.

  Did it again—the pee’s repeated.

  Really, it is the awfulest tic, I do actually quite admit it.

  Oh, how not concede that sometimes—nay, “oftentimes, oftentimes”—(as the crude, as the untutored, as the reader cannot yourself but have noted, have lately taken to saying)—if, if, if there is to be parsed the natural policy of this reported reflex of mine, this, you do see, from the lowlier view, there is thereby to be beheld, it is granted, a practice vicious, murderous—for the sake of the effect (i.e., for effect’s sake)—or (sake be cursed!) for worse?

  At all events, I am restored to my habitation now: bran muffins, not yet unpacked, resting in their sack on the kitchen table, I seated (or situated) on this frail stool, inscribing for your entertainment the day’s prescribed confession, concession, you—this is the United States of America!—choose.

  For this is what this is.


  And so forth and so on.

  Did I, Gordon Lish, have anything to do with the matter mentioned on the flyer? Or, then, call it “public notice,” if you wish.

  Rhyme, rogue, rhyme—hah!

  (Not entirely, isn’t it, un-akin to “ah-hah”?)

  The very thought, the very idea, the very thing of such a thing—willikers!

  Let us first recognize that it has been years since the era when I was other than a mere pedestrian. The “public notice,” howsoever, if you still will, appertains to a “motorcycle accident,” does it not? By Jupiter, dearest forerunners in the celestial circle—a motorcycle accident, oooo, brrr.

  There is no comma between ATTENTION and PLEASE READ. Nor is “occurred” spelt correctly in the sentence WE ARE LOOKING FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT THAT OCCURED THIS PAST SUNDAY IN THIS AREA.

  Do you see?

  Look again.

  Make certain you have seen.

  “Occurred” is not spelt like that, is it?

  Well, for your information, it’s not.

  Plus the lack of a comma between ATTENTION and PLEASE READ—it’s a fucking flouting of the fucking rule—revealed, revealed!—unless the unruly, behind my back, have long since prevailed at what the tireless mob of them will never cease to resolve to come to prevail at—at, namely, at an undermining; at, namely, at a conniving, this with the overruling of the enfeebled estate of sense—the filth, the filth!—forever asquat upon their program to bolix the shit out of whatever they’ve yet to bolix the shit out of, whenever for even a whipstitch a person’s all too trusting humanistical bent has been turned away from the thuggery currently in charge of the forms.

  Oh, people!

  Why oh why are people so sickening?

  Have they no shame?

  Old as I am, I am pledged to bring to a graceful denouement my use of the municipal pavement, whatever spirit then remaining to me superbly freed, thank you, for the furtherance of the edifying of the up-to-the-instant class.

  Them and their loathsome equipage.

  (Or is it they?)

  The rest is rich.

  Get this: WE HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED.

  Did you get all that?

  Here we go again, every blessed particle of it a promulgation sponsored for what’s left of us to go ahead and construe as Gordon Lish’s not ungrudging treat. Yes, yes, yes—do please play the forgiving reader and do one more time try it, if only for the giggles and, heigh-ho, the agony.

  Elided commas?

  I am counting a total of two of the type, right?

  WE HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED.

  Then there is a telephone number.

  Plus one of those—oh, God!—email devices.

  That’s it.

  The whole story.

  Except to ask—for the decency of my community, for its bloody battered decency—shall this cruel business ever be deemed to have come to a proper end, lest, of course, the last of the duct tape be torn from the lamppost precious steps from where one—no, no, no, from where I—a citizen, a citizen, you do realize!—struggle, struggles—eloquently, with patience and eloquence aforethought—and in perfect innocence—to live?

  Besides, since when do I, your duty-bound pedagogue, venture forth, on a Sunday, to fetch fiber for the bowels?

  END OF THE WORLD

  SO THE EDITOR of this publication, the man phones me and he says to me, “Give me something. Can you give me something?” I says, “Sure, I can give you something. You want writing, right? I mean, what you want for me to give you, it’s writing you want, right?” “Right,” the fellow says. “Got any writing you can give me?” the fellow says. “How much of it do you want?” I says to the fellow. “Oh,” says he to me, “whatever you have handy.”

  Handy, I sit here and say to you, person reading with fleeting attention.

  Handy?

  Let me tell you something, person solicited for a striving for perfect—here comes that word again—attention. What I have handy for you, not to mention for that editor fellow and his vicious congregation—is, to wit, the—in a word—boot.

  To wit, in a phrase, the superb terror in it for me of the, uh, of the word boot.

  No, not the word denoting the thing which might contain, if in use, a foot. No, no, not that sort of boot, by Christ—but a boot of another sort. A boot that can restrain, constrain, detain—scare the life out of six-year-old now seventy-nine and just as insanely still counting an account of the years upon years, the child, the man, terrified, you know, uncontainably, okay?

  Ah, do I, your voluble coward, then, continue to enjoy your incomparable (here she is again!) attention?

  Fine.

  Listen.

  My mother (the woman then alive, does it not go without saying?) had collected me to her side and taken me along with her on an errand to be effected in another place. Well, let us acknowledge it was another place only in the sense that its kind of place was a kind of place thitherto unseen by me—what I, therefore, took to be a rough kind of place for the very reason above-stated, get it?—our automobile aligned, one took it, in happy accord with the manner of the other automobiles assembled there, in that great space for the purpose of—their being parked prefatory to their owners being set free for shopping and the, you know, the like.

  Now then, our commerce attended to (the errand, remember?), the pair of us are making our way back to the automobile. To be sure, one could see it from where we had thus far come (or gone) in achieving our return to it, the weary machine heaving in the bleak alien light, an immense thing, a grayish thing, our, you know, Lish family automobile.

  Still listening?

  The two of us, mother and child, nearing it, getting near to it, the gray breathless machine, that is, my hand in hers, my hand pressing into hers, hers squeezing a little back into mine a little by way of her imparting to it (to my hand, you fool!) what little reassurance the woman must have judged, we may suppose, to prove a sufficiency for me, the other hand busy managing the reticule she carries with her for the keeping of her business—in this instance, I do think, you may have concluded there being therein included certain instrumentalities for the act of knitting.

  A guess.

  Had the woman acquired yarn?

  Needles?

  I cannot tell you.

  All I can say is my hand was let go of a countlessness from home—the hand which had hitherto hold of my hand now a fist gripped in her—ah, my dead mother’s, my dead mother’s!—teeth.

  What next?

  The woman screamed. The woman shrieked.

  “The dirty lousy stinking gentiles, they put a fucking boot on it!—can’t you see it, Sonny boy, can’t you see?”

  No, I never saw it—nor saw since any of its kind.

  I have nothing more to say.

  Except to ask if that that that that could have been the instant I (my name goes here) (yours doesn’t) became everlastingly, for the duration, what I am? No friend of woman. No friend of man. No friend of—right, that’s right!—even of these, especially of these—you understand me, do you?—words.

  Fair enough?

  Fair enough.

  Deed—Dear Mister Sir Editor, please—as the noun has already said of and for and by itself—done.

  TROTH

  HOW COME IS it we all of a sudden stopped hearing people talking about their cuticles anymore? So how come is that? I mean, don’t you remember there was a time when cuticles were all the populace had on their minds? Unless it’s its mind. Which is to say, “its mind,” if this is how you are construing “populace.” You know what I am saying? Maybe you don’t know what I am saying. Which necessarily doesn’t of necessity make it irrelevant, I hope you are sitting there willing to, you know, to realize. Just because you do not happen to be interested in what I am telling you, you would be wrong to conclude that that (that fact!) nullifies it, that it makes it inconsequential, that is renders it s
quat. Jesus Christ, I get so tired of my having to just keep on sitting here driving myself crazy trying to wise everybody up.

  Like this.

  You want to hear something?

  For instance, do you want to hear something?

  Very well, then.

  I used to spell it populus.

  How about that, huh? Doesn’t that just kill you? Because me, I am telling you, it definitely kills me, it just definitely absolutely kills me. Populus when it was supposed to be spelled populace. Tremendously pathetic, right? But fine, fine, I didn’t set them off with quotation marks or with italics, and you know why? Do you want to know why? Because I went ahead and figured you for a savvy enough person for you to be able to see what I, Gordon (Gordon!), have been going through for me to get you to understand me without my going to all of the trouble of me every two seconds having to take your hand and hold it until you get the essence of what I, Gordon (Gordon!), am trying to say to you. But, as I say, or have said, fine, fine, “populace” I spelled “populus” and nobody ever said to me boo. The same thing goes for trough. I mean, you know—I mean trough. But skip it. Yes, I was going to inform you of how I used to pronounce the word I just italicized for your, you know, for your personal convenience. But forget it. I, Gordon (Gordon!), am not inspired anymore. Except to say yeah, that when I think of all of the people who sat there listening to me mispronounce “trough,” it makes me sick to my stomach, it just absolutely totally sickens me soul-wise, you know? All these years, me, Gordon (Gordon!), saying it (trough) wrong. Oh, excuse me—my, okay, my saying it wrong. Pronunciation-wise. My saying trough all totally but totally wrong, or wrongly, or whatever. Like if you take into account how old I am and so therefore how long I have been saying trough all wrong, that’s a major fraction of the populace which heard me, Gordon (Gordon!), making myself a figure of, you know, of ridicule. Which word, as a word, encourages me for me to go ahead and search my mind for various possible associations as far as the word ridicule (“ridicule”), which à la the classical cyclic thing, enforces a re-encounter with cuticle (“cuticle”). I mean, a lot of people just sat there thinking fine, fine, let’s let Gordon (Gordon!) go make a total idiot of himself—because, hey, he, Gordon (Gordon!), is not getting any correction from me, the jerk, the yutz, the putz, the schmuck. Unless schmuck’s not spelled like that.