Collected Fictions

I never had that duplicate.

Or a bicycle that fit my size.

Or the courage to stay seated when here comes havoc and I haven't got a rhyme.

I have a wife.

I have the ungainly weight of my love for her.

I am the beast who can circle without letup.

In theory.

So far.

FLEUR

HONEST TO GOD, it's something, how a thing comes back, how nothing is ever lost. Look at this — the Strand, the Columbia, the Laurel, the Lido, the Gem. And that's just from the night before last, from when I was sitting on the toilet, urinating.

The Central. I almost forgot the Central.

These are the theaters where I went to the movies back in the days when you went every Saturday. That's what? Thirty-five years ago?

Also, I saw the large carton of Kotex leaning, or leaned, up against the side of the bathtub.

News to me they had a yellow rose on there, long-stemmed and photographed to make it look misty. So what's the story, they do this how? Gauze over the lens? Vaseline? Real fog actually fogging it?

So how come I turned on the light? Or did I?

I don't know. If I did, then maybe I did it on account of the kitchen.

LISTEN, I say the thing with evil is it's a time thing — whereas where you get your basic appeal with lust and violence is because they're not. You see a person stick a person with a knife or with a hard-on, it's the quick effect which gives you your theater. Let's not kid ourselves, impulse enacted with all good speed, that's what the eye likes. What the eye wants is something it can catch all at once. But evil, there you're talking about a different story altogether — because with evil, the mind's got to get into it, and the mind doesn't work that way. The eye does.

Be honest with yourself-isn't this why Aristotle didn't give a fig about any of this, and was twice required to say as much? Not that I am asking you to see it as how I am bringing in Aristotle to back any of this up. Hey, with proof like the proof that follows?

GO BACK TO BEFORE when I was sitting on the toilet and saw the box of Kotex and the rose. Go back, say, let's say, fifteen minutes from that. To me asleep. To me out like a light. Which for me is an interesting exception, the case being that I am no great sleeper. I mean, even if you hear me snoring, I am probably not sleeping.

Here's the second interesting exception about the night before last — which is that I am not a nose-breather when I'm supposed to be sleeping, which the reason for is this.

You smell things, right? (In your bed, what's to taste?)

If it's not your wife, then it's the pillowcase — or, no less turbulently, yourself. But let's say that whatever it is, it gets in the way — when the whole thing of it for sleeping is for you to struggle to think a certain thought and work your way down into it — like a beetle falling asleep inside of what the beetle is feeding on — even though I personally never really fall asleep.

Not that I think a serious thought, like the thought I gave you about evil. What you want instead is something playful, even crazy. It's the truth — the crazier the thing you think about, the more it's like a mallet knocking you out.

So as to the night before last, I remember exactly — I'm thinking they should invent a cigarette with a negative gas in it — you smoke it and it sucks all of that crap in you out of you. Naturally, I must have been mouth-breathing to keep from smelling things. So go explain this little packet of molecules that for an absolute fact it's my nose, not my mouth, which detects.

It's like a spear of perfect olfaction going up in there—coffee burning, kitchen burning, get up and go take a look!

Here's the smell. You know the smell of what coffee smells like when it's boiled away and the residue's been turning crisp and the stove's next? But even in my semi-sleep I know it's me that makes the coffee in my house. Are you kidding? Let her make it? Besides, now that I am smelling things, I smell her right where she belongs.

You can see how there is another interesting thing here, which is this package of intrepid vapor. Consider, all day long it's been poking around the house, a look here, a look there, but come three, four in the morning, hi, hi, it's like a dagger's been directed deep into this one nostril and there's this solitary drop of disaster on it—Jesus Christ, fire!

Think of it — the Brownian motion. God, I love this shit.

Stop to consider. Molecules that could have maybe been airborne days ago. Maybe weeks, months, what? Centuries, whole epochs even — coffee left on too long by Adam, right?

So it's this which gets me up and gets me investigating. The scare, I mean. Go put out a fire out and all that. Go save our lives or at least the life of the kitchen.

HERE'S THE STORY. I just stood there in the darkness, looking. The next fellow would have snapped on the light for him to make certain. But me, I understood — I know science, I know philosophy — Aristotle isn't the only one. Turn on the light, what? There goes mystery, there goes art — stove empty of event, porcelain vacant, not anything disruptive of anything.

I got milk and cookies. Eyes closed, mind open, I got milk and cookies and propped myself against the counter, nibbling and sipping — a box with a mouth, a thing that wants things inside it, its lid wide open, check?

Aristotle, are you listening?

I needed a crazy thought. I needed crazy. I needed the little bit of sleeping I ever get.

So what came, what comes, is this — is me and Izzy and Eddie and Mel. It's from the days of me and them — of Izzy and Eddie and Mel, an age in there, a whore Izzy said we could all get if we got her a bottle and had enough money. So I don't know — getting the bottle was even harder than getting the money was. But I got the bottle, and I did the talking when we got there. Her, the whore, she said we were nice enough boys, and I said seeing as how she said that, could she see her way clear to shave it to six per jump. She said okay, six per, round it off at twenty-five, but just blowjobs, a woman maybe fifty, forty, small and soft this fritzy hair the color of gum.

Izzy went first and then me.

Then Eddie came out, and Mel said no. So then I went back in instead of Mel going at all.

This was when I get her to drink all the rest of the bottle and when that's what she did, drank it, I'm sorry, but money's money, you know?

So I come out and say we don't have to pay her, she'll never know. Eddie says give her half. Izzy says what's this?

Hey, it was what they used to call a little black book back in those golden olden days.

Izzy says, "You see this?"

WE TOOK IT. We didn't pay her. We didn't give her one red cent.

Here is the aggravation I remember.

I say, "I don't think we should have taken it."

Izzy says, "We'll look at it. We'll see the names in here. The guy which told me about her, we'll see if he's in here "

Mel says, "Suppose we call them and tell them they have to come across with something or we're telling their wives or something, all of the guys."

Eddie says, "No, what we do is we call her and tell her it'll cost her just for her to get it back."

I say, "That's terrible. We can't do that. You've got to see it this way — it's stealing something, it's robbery."

Izzy says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm thinking there's something here we're not thinking yet."

I say, "Give it to me. This is lousy. You guys are louses. The day will come when you will stop and remember this, and hang your heads in shame."

SO THE THING IS I got it away from them and I went back up to her place, and I got her to give me a double sawbuck for her to get it back.

Or it could have been I just took the twenty because she was too plastered for her to give it to me herself.