Stephen Dixon: Love and Will: Twenty Stories

She’s also a very pleasant girl, man in the cab thinks. Attractive. Even pretty. He’d definitely call her pretty, even beautiful in some ways, though he doubts a couple of his friends would. Still. And she had spark. Bright, besides. Far as he could make out, bright as any woman he’s met in a year. He’s definitely phoning her tomorrow. Monday night, not tomorrow. Doesn’t want to appear too eager. Why not? She seemed like she’d like eagerness. Directed at her, but not just to score. She complained how most men she meets these days don’t really care or get excited about anything but making money and getting ahead. Don’t really read, don’t think much about serious things, aren’t interested in much art other than movies and music. She didn’t say he was different than they but implied he was. She also gave him her phone number willingly enough. He likes her name. She seems to come from a good family: intelligent, moral, involved, well-off. He thinks she sort of took to him too. Maybe that’s why he should act fast: so she doesn’t forget why she was attracted to him, if she was. Tomorrow night. No, Monday’s soon enough. He hopes she paints well. If she doesn’t, he could always say at first — later he could level with her more—“Hell, what do I know?”

Top floor. Roof stairs and door. Always trying to get a look at him to see if he means it — seemed he did. Had one of the most maniacal faces she’s even seen, when she saw him just that one glimpse. Slim, young, smelly, wiry, ruthless, cagey-looking. He’s crazy. He’s going to kill her. If it was just robbery he would have taken the bag from her downstairs and fled. Knife isn’t on her neck anymore. Rape and possibly kill her. She has to find a way to get away. She has to scream, run, kick, maybe on the roof. Now she’s thinking. Roof, where there’s space. Stairs he’s got her trapped. This building’s attached to the corner one and unless there’s barbed wire or something separating the two roofs, she can make a run for it yelling all the time. Pick up a brick if they have one on the roof and he’s cornered her against something like a wall or by a roof edge and throw it at him. Anything: teeth, knees and fists and then down a fire escape, but to escape. There’s one that goes all the way past her bedroom window to the narrow alleyway on the ground floor. Corner building must have one too. If not, down her building’s fire escape screaming, knocking, banging, breaking all the windows along the way if she has to till someone comes, wakes up, shouts, whatever, but helps chase the man away.

Tenant hears footsteps on the roof right above her. Who could be up there this hour? Trouble. Either some junkies got in the building or corner one next door and got to the roof that way and are shooting up. Or winos or runaways or just plain bums making a home for the night up there? Why can’t it rain now or snow? Get them off. She just hopes the roof door’s locked tight so they don’t start walking down the building’s stairs and making noise and throwing up in the hallways as what happened a couple of times or trying all the doors. What else could it be up there but something awful? She hopes not someone forced to go for the worst of purposes. That’s happened on one or two other buildings around here but never hers.

“Now you know what I want,” the man says. “I want to screw you but I want it without holding the knife to your face. That way it’ll be better for me and easier and quicker for you. Then if you’re good to me and a good little girl all around and give no trouble I’ll let you go. You’re a real piece of ass, you know? I could tell right away you screw well and that you’ve screwed around a lot. You got the face for it. Saucy. Sexy. So, you going to do it like I say? You don’t, you’re dead.”

“No, I don’t want to do it with you,” the woman says. And then louder: “Now let me alone. Let me get by you and downstairs. Now please — I’m asking — please!” He stabs her in the chest. She raises her arms. He stabs her several times. She goes down. She screams. She says “Help, I’m being murdered.” He gets on one knee and stabs her where he thinks her heart is.

“Stop that, stop that,” the tenant shouts out her window. “Whoever it is, leave that girl alone. Help, police, someone’s killing someone upstairs. On the roof. Stop that, you butcher, stop that, stop.”

“Help me, I’m dying,” the woman says. “Stupid bitch,” the man says. He jumps up. Lights have gone on in some of the apartment windows in buildings that overlook the roof. “Shit,” he says. “Hey you there,” a man says from one window. “What is it, what’s going on?” a man says from a window right next to that one. “I’ve called the police,” a woman shouts from what seems like the building he’s on. “They’re coming. They’re on their way. Everybody call to make sure they come. Girl, don’t be afraid. They’re coming. People from this building will be up there for you too.” “Shit,” he says and leaps over the low wall to get to the next building’s fire escape.

Her mother thinks about the dream she just had. All the apartment buildings around hers were falling down, one after the other. She lives in a suburban townhouse and has never lived in anything but a private home, but in the dream she was in she lived in an apartment in a tall old apartment building in a large city that looked more European than American. The buildings collapsed straight down as if heavy explosives had been set off under them. For a while it seemed the window was a TV screen and she was watching the buildings fall in slow motion in a documentary. She was with her three daughters, all about four to eight years younger than they are now, and her husband and mother, who’s dead. Then her building was falling. She held out her arms to her family and said “Here, come into me.” Her arms became progressively longer as each person came into her. She kissed their heads in a row — they were all as small as little children now — and started crying. Then they were at her family’s gravesite behind her grandparents’ farmhouse, burying her mother. “This proves life can go on,” she said to her husband, daughters and grandmother. She doesn’t know what the last part of the dream means. There is no farmhouse or family gravesite. Her parents and grandparents are buried in three different enormous cemeteries. Where was her son in the dream? She gets out of bed, goes to the kitchen, writes down the dream and what she thinks the end of it means. “That everything will be OK with C (living in her city hovel)? That I really needn’t be anxious about any of my kids or really about anything in life (how’d I come to that last conclusion?)? That if people stay in mind & memory (just about the same thing; I realize that) they’re never really dead? That living, dying, illness, fraility, tragedy, mayhem, mishaps, madness, revolutions, terrorism (from inside & out) and the rest of it are all quite normal? (Was that all you were going to say?) That we’re all basically entwined &—now stop all that; it was never in it. Then what? Time for God? Not at any price & why’d that idea pop in? (To interpret it theologically, that’s all.) An important dream though, start to end, no matter what I don’t make of it. Read all this back tomorrow. Underscore that: read, read.’ Maybe then.”

Her father can’t sleep. He feels for his wife in bed. She left it before but is there now. “Hilda, you up? I can’t sleep; want to talk.” No answer or movement. Why’d she have to worry him so? Not that he can’t handle it, but — He gets up, goes to the bathroom, drinks a glass of water. That was stupid. Meant to take two aspirins first. He gets the aspirins out of the medicine cabinet, puts them in his mouth and washes them down with another glass of water. Now he’ll feel better. In about fifteen minutes. And his dreams are usually more vivid and peaceful in theme when he takes aspirins. His doctor thinks he should take an aspirin every other night to reduce the fat or plaque on his blood vessel walls. He doesn’t mind, especially for the side benefits of a more peaceful sleep and dreams, but usually forgets to.