Collected Fictions (41 page)

PRACTICE

COUPLE OF THINGS ON MY MIND.

Not on it so much as near it. At, you might say, the margins of it. Or is it sidelines? Off there, then, at the fringes, you might say—this thing of thinking somebody once said to me something about some woman I know—but which woman, which woman?—having consorted with another woman. Or currently consorting with ditto. So crazy, this is all so crazy—because what further of info can I furnish anybody?—none, none!—I having no knowledge of anything save of the tidbit—well, it's hardly that, hardly a tidbit in the sense of its being anything toothsome, I reckon—save for the snippet, then, which I just gave you. But now to give you the other thing that's there at these reaches of what?—of this mouldering slag-scape of mine—out there where it all turns all to rubble and is getting ready for it to any instant drop off into the great basin of gone and beyond—it's, this other thing, this thing this guy tells me where he's sitting somewhere making small talk somewhere with this other guy somewhere and this other guy somewhere says to him, "But look at this, look at this," whipping out his wallet and going fingering around in it and plucking free from it this tiny pic which he's got in there which is of a woman's feet on what looks to him—we're speaking now, when I say him, about this guy who is saying all of this to me—which looks to him as if the woman is standing on a bathroom floor—tiles and so forth, sort of bathroom-floor-looking tiles and so forth—not that there is any woman, because there is no woman, what there is is just these gorgeous feet of hers, there's just these really perfect feet of hers—top-notch feet in this top-notch relation to the floor, or so this guy is saying to this other guy of mine, saying check it, will you, check it out, won't you, this gorgeously perfect contact between these gorgeously perfect feet of hers, and, you know, the floor. So my guy, this guy who is telling me this, this guy says to me that he says to this other guy, that he says to the pic-exhibiting guy, that he says to him, "Some feet, uh?" So my guy, he then, this my guy of mine, he then says to me that he says to this pic-exhibiting guy, "Hey, you don't see feet like these feet every day of the week, right?" Says to me he says to this pic-exhibiting guy, "Hey, I can certainly see what you're getting at, showing me, hey, the way these feet of whoever's sort of really achieve real contact and all with the floor and all, am I right?" So that's the thing—so that's all I have—that's, I mean, the second thing I thought I had—but what do I have? Because I don't know, one, who either of these guys is or, two, who's the woman whose feet they are that are there in the pic, and, three, is it her bathroom the woman is standing bare-footed in—I'd like to say naked-footed in if you don't mind my saying it—is it her bathroom the woman is standing naked-footed in, and, four, zaniest of all, or actually most alluring of all, was it, was the pic a pic taken of just the feet or was what the guy who's talking to me looking at when the other guy is showing him the pic, is it a pic somebody took scissors to to reduce it, to minimalize it, to make a minum of it right down to the, you know, to the absolute footmost crux of it?

So that's it—unless by now it any longer isn't.

Since what refinement is ever finished?

LIFE OF THE WRITER, DEATH OF THE WRITTEN-UPON

FORSOOK ONE NAME FOR ANOTHER.

Onomatological revisionism?

You bet your ass.

An open-and-shut case.

Well, such a flight the poor devil was in, as we all would do well to be in, from the ghastly inferences so readily alleged from the given conditions—alack, from the complete repertoire of grotesqueries in unimprovably flagrant potentiality among, well, life forms.

Both real and fanciful.

But which of us had not harkened to lamp-lit accounts of destinies so remorselessly awful that only nature herself, the bitch—man's mischief we'll get to in a jiffy—might have bothered to contrive them?

Yet, mark you, it was one of the homemade malignities—what else but the matinal transformation Kafka's opportunism had made notorious?—that he pegged so unthinkable as to be hurtling toward him with all certitude and good speed.

There was therefore nothing for it but that our fellow must outflank sleep if to elude the ensuing event of waking up as other than that which he was.

It was this, then—it was dodging the embrace of Morpheus—that he besought himself to do by a not unfantastic labor of the will. You see what I'm saying? Hard work.

No, no one has the patience to sit here and make up for you from whole cloth some simpering constellation of causes. Who the hell knows why anyone does what anyone does? Or even how you can say there is incontestably someone.

Look, the story's this—a reader, a name-changer, has got himself stuck on a sappy vision of ruin. But, hey, don't you know the only reason that I am the one sitting here involved in this is that I am the one sitting here writing this?

YEAH, YEAH, BUT DON'T KID YOURSELF
—doing never again what has hitherto never not been done—no shit, it's really hard.

Hard for anyone, but harder by far for someone whose list of accomplishments might have come to no more than his otherwise having been a good sleeper.

Here's the man's mother.

Listen to the man's mother.

"‘Geh schlafen,'
I would say to the child.

"I would say to the child, ‘Schnukeli,
geh schlafen
, for God's sake,
willst du
?
'

"And like you had knocked the creature senseless with a brick, lo and behold, a woman's son was asleep."

Please, who could have anything against sleep as such?

It was not slumber the fellow opposed but slumber's routine career into a renewal of consciousness, please God it should only issue, if this it must, into a species of metamorphosis no worse than the Ovidian nor more vulnerable than the shell-less.

What, then, were the days of his life adding up to—save that the only activity he had excelled at he must now, to escape anticipations too fearful to rehearse, abandon or else?

Oi gevalt
!

No wonder it was a swollen prostate all this worry produced in him—for so engorged from fretful inward clutchings was our person that he took to keeping a night jar near to the couch upon which one would be made to stand firm against the colossus of one's fatigue.

He was ready, then.

And he would read.

Read the Germans—though, by Thor, read no faux Kraut on the model of the aforementioned.

Schiller?

Why not Schilling?

No, Schelling!

Bestimmt
,
Schelling!

Then on to the whole Frankfurt crowd when fiction, as it will, had quite worn itself snivelingly out.

Scared too silly not to be unyielding, the chap read as if his life depended upon it, an invincible drowsiness deforming the sense he would make even of the umlaut. Heaven help him, book in hand, our man's diminuendo conspired to stretch him out on said furnishing in the throes of making something out of anything, the exhaustion in him transmuting all meagerness into a muchness, the sublime meanwhile erupting out of itself in illimitable abundance. Oh, jeepers, everything read was to him everything—and betokened, in the man's demented constructions of the evidence, tokens of the exorbitant, the ordinary reasserting its rule only when, bladder flaring, our victim felt himself required to roll onto his side, to let fall the book, to take up in its place the night jar, and thereupon to poke his hose well enough into it in order that the excruciation of his being emptied of the promised efflux might begin.

And by what means, you ask, were all and sundry possessed of the news of these behaviors?

Skip it.

Never was there a one—dreadful thing, nasty thing!—to distribute more widely word of his humiliations.

Nor was it not unknown how the widow who rented rooms to him entered them punctually on the occasion of their tenant's having from their precinct removed himself, the better to translate his endeavors abroad into revenue-bearing gestures, the lady's agenda consisting in her lavishing upon the interior of the disgusting vessel a further episode of covert flushing, there having been present—egad!—to this worthy's nose sufficient of notice to have sent her on the errand.

("How dare the creep pee in Tante Lorelei's cruet!")

Need we state, however, that what was paid to her by him who occupied the premises for the privilege that he might do so was a sum satisfactory in its magnitude to subdue the extremes of her annoyance? Too, to inspire in such as herself such esteem of her net advantage that the return of the now soundly washed object to the site where its owner conceived of it as hidden was never, as a domestic courtesy, neglected.

Ach!

Returned, yes, but never once, once returned, dried entirely of that which had been introduced into it—the cruet, Tante Lorelei's cruet!—to render it good and washed and torrentially rinsed.

Hmm.

All vermin please note.

To bathe in! To take sips from!

Go know when it comes to the customs of your cockroach in your Bohemian household.

Hence, yes, you guessed it, our little closure here discloses itself accordingly:

The fellow not actually perishing from fright but only very nearly doing so, which close call some thirsty, dirty exoskeletal invertebrate, crawly and not unmodishly vile (revealed in the midst of its vanishing up into the conduit of his business), had, in its evil decor, wrought.

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!

(Sorry, Franzie.)

"Ai caramba, meineh schlangeleh!
" shrieked he—for, man that he then was, could he, albeit stricken as he now was, still not shriek as such a one undone?

It later turned out, as it never not does, that the focus of all this dissembling of mine was indeed, in due course, compelled to consent to relinquish himself, in whatever phylum, to the one true abyss.

This by enacting a strong French swerve.

The upshot being a stroke induced by rushed—nay, gulped—draughts of Lipton's Instant Tea Mix in the company of many too many Uneeda Biscuits.

His headstone gives his dates.

Gives his name.

But gives nothing of his story, there having actually, of such a thing, been none.

Unless you people count impersonations, damn you.

I, the true Kafka, do not.

BUON DIVERTIMENTO, ANNA!

ANNA KRACZYNA IS LIVING HERE
here in my house with me now. Anna Kraczyna is from Florence (Firenze to you, smart aleck!), and was born there and has lived there all her life (except, of course, for the time of it that she has been living here with me in my house, which is, you should have been able to tell by now, which is not a house in Florence), even though a smart aleck such as yourself might look at the name and arrive at a notion otherwise. Anyway, the reason I am writing this about Anna Kraczyna living here with me here in my house is this—the thing she just did, the thing she just said right after she had just done it, I have to, I just have to make a record of them both. One is she was vacuum cleaning the carpet in the carpeted bedroom. I refer to that bedroom as the carpeted bedroom because the other bedrooms aren't. The carpeted bedroom was long ago carpeted because when my wife Barbara and I created this house, the floor in the now-carpeted bedroom wasn't good enough, as was the floor elsewhere in this house, to just get by with with its being scraped, its being sanded, its then getting itself stained and varnished, or polyeurathaned, if that's what you call it, all that. It had to be carpeted, the only solution was that it be carpeted, and so we carpeted it. It's the one, it is the bedroom, my wife Barbara and I slept in all the years of the marriage, and then it was the one wherein Barbara was looked after all the years of her dying. She had to be fed there and have everything else done for her there. You don't want to hear what. It is too awful for anybody to have to hear what—was probably, probably was too awful for Anna Kraczyna to have heard some little bit of it, I don't doubt, although, yes, she did hear some little bit of it—because I couldn't, because, yes, I think I tried but couldn't keep my mouth shut. I wish I hadn't told her. It always gets told all wrong when you tell anyone. I don't think there is any way for me ever to tell any of this to anyone without it getting told pretty all wrong in the telling—the words you use, the way you use them, what your face is doing when you do. But I told Anna Kraczyna a little bit of some of it because we had to kill some time between when we got up this morning and when she had to go off to the airport for her to get herself back to Florence, where she'll start calling it, I guess, calling Florence, Firenze again. But I don't know. I don't know what Anna Kraczyna does when she is not here with me in my house and is instead in hers in Florence with her Pietro. It's just, as I said, a guess. But I bet it would be more or less congruent with the quality of what I have seen her do and heard her say at—what do they say?—at close hand, or is it range? Which brings us to this story—the story of Anna Kraczyna listening to me tell about my wife Barbara living and about my wife Barbara dying and then of Anna Kraczyna herself killing time vacuum cleaning the carpet in the one bedroom that's carpeted. She was going, she said, before she went to go do it, to go after the hairs of hers that had become visible to her on the carpet—and it would be easy for you to see how they would. We had spent a lot of time in there, Anna Kraczyna and I, this is one reason—and her hair, Anna Kraczyna's hair, it is probably as long and as golden as any hair anywhere. Well, it is as long and as golden as any hair I have ever slept next to, this you can bank on, and I guess this would go for my wife Barbara's hair too. Well, this is one of the reasons Anna Kraczyna's hair was so visible in there in that bedroom in there—because I had to change the carpet in there from the one my wife Barbara had decided on when we first had the carpet bought and paid for and laid. It was pretty wrecked. It was pretty ruined. It had been a kind of tapestrylike affair, or maybe it would be more correct of me for me to say a sort of turkey-work affair, crewel-work, or, Christ, I don't know what—this linen-y floral stitchery, this florally branchy clouded stitchery affair, all of it—wrought from, knotted into, embossed upon a ground of wheat-colored union twill, I suppose I could say, or, look, why not say beige?—because beige is what I was going to say—say beige in the first place—the original impulse I had, it was for me to say beige—so if it's all the same to you and if sufficient of your smart aleckiness has been by maybe been worn the hell off you by now, why don't I just go ahead and make it beige, just stick to beige, say, okay, then say anyhow beige? It didn't show anything, is the thing. Which, over the course of the years of my wife Barbara dying in there, was a lucky thing for all concerned. You know, all the machines and whatnot in there—tubes, tubes, tubules, tubules, tubulation, tubulation to the baseboards as if the municipality had decreed there be dredged a runaway cesspool. Then she died. Then my wife Barbara died. So one of the corrections I right away performed was get these gangs of specialists to rush onto the premises for them to have a go at getting the carpet rehabilitated. Then I finally broke down and went to a carpet store and made arrangements to have the dreamiest extravagance of the lot installed. Chesnut-colored. This—you won't believe this—this angora, I think, wool—or alpaca wool, maybe it's said, having to be snatched away, in season, from a region indecently southerly on the beast's neck. From Bolivia, anyway. So new-looking—so smooth-feeling on your feet—everywhere this chestnut-colored, wonderful wool miracle—except now that it is stretched out down on the floor in there, everything that descends to it is declared. They didn't tell me, nobody told me, you have a carpet laid anywhere like this, you lay a carpet in your house like this, watch out, get set, it is going to end up being a minute-to-minute lifelong project for you, all the sheddings, all the detritus, the ceaseless torrent of mere being made to glare back up at you in accusation from some umbrous perfection so much darker than a resident with any common sense would have picked for himself to have to live with with two eyes still in his head.

My wife Barbara would have known better.

The woman who has been in my house with me—you know, Anna Kraczyna?—she just came and said to me that I did too, that I had known just as better about it as anybody else would have known. I mean, even before Anna Kraczyna had taken the pains she would characteristically later take to get the cord all wound back up into just the right loops of it and all of it going in its loops in all the same one direction of it and then get the vacuum cleaner so carefully restored to where the vacuum cleaner always gets itself kept, this same Anna Kraczyna came back out of the bedroom to me where I was sitting at this table I always sit at and said to me, "Fool, fool, how can you not admit it it's how come you picked it, for the goddamn
penitenza
in it, you idiot?" Whereupon Anna Kraczyna presently put away the vacuum cleaner where it officially belongs, bestowed the famous peck on the cheek, murmured to me "
Buon lavoro
, smart aleck,
buon lavorol
"—then made her way brilliantly, and for the last time so altogether forgivingly, to my door and back forever into the distant rubble of the needless, heedless, perpetual world.