Collected Fictions (25 page)

THE PROBLEM OF THE PREFACE

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A MAN
who was done in by a story, and by that, by done in, it is meant killed, done away with, finished, done for—all that. It is a very straightforward affair from its start to its end, the only question being this—is it, was it, made up? Oh, but no, no, no—the question is not whether this story is made up, but whether that one was, that one being the one our victim was dispatched by, for it was—and here is the nastiest spicule in the whole sorry business—a story he himself was the one who had told every chance he got.

And had he not?

But tell it he did, and over and over.

As we ourselves shall now have to do, to offer—wouldn't you know it?—the effect of effecting something, lest elsewise look inert for having not done so.

Behold.

This is the story the dead fellow was, true or false, both the origin of and the context for.

HE SAID JELLY APPLES
were coming around and that he hurried to his father to get the money for one and that no sooner did he have the jelly apple and did bite of it then, lo, he set to choking his last upon it, but along came his brother who happened to notice and who got him by the belt and who hiked him up by the belt and who turned him over by the belt and who held him upside-down and who shook him good and proper, such shakings that what had got itself stuck down inside of him came right back up and fell back out of him, such that, by heaven, there our father was, restored to himself and right as any rain and thus a creature who was loving forever everlastingly of his brother.

Never mind this latter's fate.

OR MAYBE HE'D CHANGE
his tune and tell it like this—say somebody was coming with jelly apples, so he went and told his father about it and his father said there would always be somebody coming who was going to be coming with something, that if they would not be coming with one thing, then that they were going to be coming with another thing, that there was not anything which they were ever going to be coming with which was not going to cost somebody some money, but that, no, no, the father would not be a father ever to deny any son something, least of all savvy and candied nutrition.

BUT IT ALL WORKED OUT
to be the same story, anyway—one bite and the boy was choking to death on whatever he had bitten into—take your pick—sour ball, hot peanut, jelly apple. Whereupon, here comes the brother to come happening along and thereupon to see what lethally gives, so that the brother takes the brother by the belt and yanks the brother up and turns the brother over and holds our father upside-down, et cetera, et cetera, such that whatever it was that had got in him gets knocked loose and comes back up out of him and he is breathing again and is among the living again, even if the whole deal is hokum, hokum, cock-and-bull.

ANYWAY, THIS IS THE STORY
the dead man told.

Or
that
was.

But what else could it do but get him killed?

For the storyteller told the story to his children—who just could not wait to grow up enough for them to get strong enough for them to accomplish the same saving feat that had been so robustly extolled of, who just could not wait for them to be ready enough for when their father would start choking enough, which eventually—as it will with any of us—the father regrettably, but not all that excessively, in the event did.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

From the children's point of view, it was all for love, whereas from the viewpoint of the father, death was no more than the cost of the narrative endeavor paid out to the end of its aboriginal course. Yet whichever ornament you choose to adorn the humbug of the text with, the fact is the kids managed to get the old man head over heels, all right, but then, upended, the kidder slipped loose and cracked something pretty critical, a stiletto of neck bone thence—
oh, shit!
—stabbing its way up into the back of a drastically literal brain.

LEOPARD IN A TEMPLE

LOOK, LET'S MAKE IT SHORT AND SWEET
. Who anymore doesn't go crazy from overtures, from fanfares, from preambles, from preliminaries? So, okay, so here is the thing—so this is my Kafka story, fine and dandy. Actually, it is going to be my against-Kafka story. Because what I notice is you have to have a Kafka story one way or the other. So this is going to be my Kafka story, only it is going to be a story which is against Kafka. Which is different from being a story against Kafka's
stories,
although I could see myself probably producing a story against those, too, if I ever went back and took another look at any of the preservations of them.

I'm not interested.

It's exclusively the man himself which I am incompetent to be uninterested in.

But not to the extent you would get me to give you two cents for this person even if he were made of money, which is what I understand the man in his lifetime was.

I'll tell you about lifetimes.

I have a creature here who is a kindergartner, so right there this takes care of lifetimes. Whereas I don't have to tell you what Kafka got was
nafkelehs.

You say this Kafka knew a lot. But show me where it says he knew from doily-cutters.

Or even what cutters were who didn't work in paper.

Take my dad, for the most convenient comparison.

The man couldn't make a go of it in business.

In other words, so far as his fortunes went, if dry goods were hot, then he was in wet ones.

But who has the energy for so much history?

Kafka, on the other hand, the louse didn't even know the meaning of the word idle, that's how fast the fellow sat himself down to write his father a letter. But let me ask you something. You want to read to me from the book where it says this letter-writer ever had the gall to ever say as much as even boo to his mother?

Save your breath.

I am not uninformed as to the character of the heretofore aforementioned author.

Pay attention—we are talking about a son who could not wait to stab the son of a butcher in the back—but where is it on exhibit that this Kafka Shmafka ever had the stomach to split an infinitive in his own language?

Now take me and my mother, to give you two horses of a different color.

You know what?

We neither of us ever had one.

Or even a pony they came and rented you for the itinerant photographer to make a seated portrait.

You see what I am saying to you? Because I am saying to you nothing is out-of-bounds so far as I myself personally in my own mind as a mental thought am concerned—unless it is something which is so dead and buried I have got nothing to gain from unearthing it, which she, the old horseless thing, doesn't happen, as an historical detail, happen to be yet.

But Kafka, so how come wherever you turn, it's Kafka, Kafka?—just because, brushing his teeth, the man could not help himself, even the toothbrush alone could make this genius vomit.

You know what I say?

I say this Kafka had it too good already, a citizen in good standing in the Kingdom of Bohemia, whereas guess who gets to live out his unpony'd life in the United States of a certain unprincely America!

In a mixed building yet.

In yet even an apartment which is also mixed also.

With a kindergartner—who is meanwhile, by the way, looking to me not just like the bug he looked to me like when he came into this world but also more and more like he is turning into a human being who could turn big and normal and dangerous.

You want to hear something?

In kindergarten, they teach reading already. So the teacher makes them make a doily and then lay it down over some Kafka and recite through the holes to her.

This day and age!

These modern times!

Listen, I also had the experience of waking up in my room once, and guess what.

Because the answer is I was still no different.

From head to toe, I had to look at every ordinary inch of what I had taken to bed with me.

Hey, you want to hear something?

I was
un
metamorphosed!

You look like I look, you think you get a Felice? Because the answer is that you do not even get a Phyllis!

Fee-Lee-Chay.

"Oh, Feeleechay, my ancestor is a barbarian, a philistine, a businessman—so lose not a moment, my pretty, if you are for the Virtual, if for the Infinite, then quick, quick, then with all swiftiness suck my dick!"

But, to be fair, my mother used to say Klee-Yon-Tell.

Still does, I bet.

You know what I bet?

I bet if I ever could get my mother on the telephone, you know what she would say to me? The woman would say to me, "Sweetheart, you should come down here to visit me down here because they cater down here to the finest kleeyontell."

One time I went to call her up once, went to look for her number once, but never did it, never did.

Had to scream bloody murder in my office instead.

Hate to admit it, but I did.

Boy oh boy, was it a scream.

From flipping around the Rolodex cards and then from spotting what was on her card when the flipped-around cards fell open to hers.

You know what I say?

Who wishes the man ill?

But I would nevertheless like to see him wake up to what I wake up to.

Just once.

Forget it.

The rogue was small potatoes.

My dad lived through fifty years as a cutter in girls' coats, whereas Kafka, the sissy could not even shape up and live through his own life.

But why argue?

Where's the percentage?

It wasn't a cockroach on my mother's card.

It was just a very groggy earwig instead.

THE HILT

OH, THE PLEASURE SOLOVEI
took in the manner of Shea's death, never mind that it was a suicide and Shea the very paradigm of what Solovei could not but help but helplessly think of whenever he, Solovei, had thought to set himself the meditation of what it must be to be the very gentile—oh so very big-boned, so very large-boned, heavy-boned, long and broad in all the central categories, the blithe inventor of every blocky declension, the very thing of this actual life most actually lived.

And never mind that Solovei loved Shea.

Solovei loved Shea's death more.

Could not keep himself from telling everyone.

"You hear about poor Shea? Poor devil drove himself off a fucking cliff. Took his car out and went poking up along the coast and found himself the scenic view that must have looked to him to be oceanic enough and then sailed the sonofabitch right off."

Or so the story went.

The story that had been carried cross-country to Solovei by those who had still been keeping company with Shea right up until Shea's finale.

Not that Solovei and Shea had ever had a falling out. Just that Solovei had come to arrive at a time in his life when it was more and more seeming to him to be necessary for him to keep himself more and more to his own small experience. This is why when Solovei told everyone about poor Shea, it was via the telephone that Solovei would pass along the news.

It made him ashamed.

"Hello?"

"Hi, this is Solovei."

"I'm calling about Shea."

"You remember, my old buddy Shea—big guy? Great big happy bastard, great big cheerful happy chap, with this sort of what you might call this indomitably red or reddish or reddish-colored hair?"

"Anyway, I just got this call from the other side of creation and you'll never guess what."

It seemed to Solovei nothing short of a veritable show of heroics in himself that he could keep telephoning the word around when here it kept making the fellow feel so horribly ashamed of himself for him to be doing it.

"Ah, God, the fierceness it must have taken in him for him to have taken hold of that goddamn wheel."

And so saying, have a vision of the hands of his friend Shea—great hams of hands, as Solovei understood these gentiles in these matters to say.

Meaty.

Big-freckled.

Letting go and gripping elsewise and then yanking your mind that long, clattering, blazing, disastrous way.

Jesus Christ.

The fucking savagery of Shea!

To which she said, "Oh, it is certainly not a question of living or of dying but only of the hilt."

Solovei did not get this.

He said, "Hilt?"

She said, "Why it has got its teeth so obstinately into you like this, Shea's doing away with himself—the fact that, like his life, how he did it was up to the hilt."

"Oh," Solovei said.

"Yes, of course," Solovei said.

"I see," Solovei said.

"Yes, I suppose so," Solovei said.

And knew his interlocutor had uncovered the truth.

She.

Her.

One of the ones Solovei had stopped feeling the necessity of keeping up with when he had started feeling the necessity of slowing down for himself.

"Come on over and we'll fuck," she said.

"You're spooked," she said.

"It'll get you unspooked," she said.

"Come fuck," she said.

"Maybe sometime soon," Solovei said, and then, with terror in his heart, hung up.

AS FOR WHAT IS LEFT
of the story, Solovei never did manage to have his little visit with her but did have, some months thereafterward, a dream in which he had set out to have it, the visit, and in it saw himself in his motor-car motoring along the highway to her house, whereupon suddenly also saw—that is, the Solovei sleeping saw the Solovei driving—suddenly also saw himself having to perform an amazing sequence of unimaginably shrewd maneuvers to elude the enormous truck that had so abruptly been revealed to be bearing down so brutally down upon Solovei from Solovei's blind side, which was both, in his dream, of Solovei's sides.

Solovei could even hear himself already telephoning all of the friends he used to have.

"Hi."

"It's me."

"It's Solovei."

"I was on my way over to see Shea's old wife."

"I had the car out, just to pay a condolence call, and couldn't have conceivably have been driving more cautiously, when out of the blue there is all of a sudden right out of blue this gigantic fucking truck."

"Anyway, it's a miracle, the stunts I could all of a sudden so incredibly do—the steering, the brakes—my reliable, my viciously reliable, my God, mind."