Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

I never did it that way except when that was all I was doing with boys.

Make believe I’m a boy.

Uh-uh. From now on you better get used to doing it to yourself and in your own apartment till you hook up with someone else.

It’s not the way I’d prefer it now, either.

Fine. But I’m serious. You and I — we’re no more.

Okay, you said it.

Then you understand?

Right.

Good. I’m getting dressed. Please do too.

Come on, what am I asking for? Then I go, and for good, as you said.

Enough.

Honestly. A quick one. Then I never call or come back.

I said no. I don’t want it or feel like it.

Then I’m going to have to take it.

Try, and I’ll kick your nuts in.

Go on. I’d like that.

You really are crazy, you know? Just take off.

I want it, though.

You want to prove something’s more like it. Well, not with me. No time. And don’t get crazier or you’ll have more than trouble from me. The police — I promise you.

What will you say? I’ve been banging you every other day for two months. You’ll say you suddenly don’t want to?

Don’t start with me.

Let me just touch it.

Hands off. Not even a look.

Once, and more than a touch, and I swear I’ll be fast, and then I’m gone.

Get away.

Please?

Get the hell off of me.

Just a little fun-making.

Stop. You’re hurting me. I’m not ready.

Get ready!

I can’t. It doesn’t work like that. And you’re already in deep trouble.

Get ready, because I’m coming in.

You craphead.

Oh, I love that.

You mother, you bitch, you whore. Get off. You’re heavy as shit. I don’t want to. Not now.

Now.

You’re hurting.

Now. Oh good; that’s so good.

Shut your mouth.

You want me to keep it shut?

Shut your mouth. Let me out. Get out of here. Off me. Please.

I’ll shut up if you want. I’ll be quiet.

Be quiet.

You won’t complain.

I’ll complain. I don’t want to do this.

Complain, then. That’s actually not so bad. Complain all you like.

I won’t complain.

No, complain.

I won’t say anything.

Then, good. Neither will I. Let’s just enjoy it.

I can’t.

Try.

All right.

You won’t blame me?

Yes. No.

Say you won’t blame me.

I won’t blame you.

And you don’t.

I don’t.

And that you like it this way a lot.

I don’t.

Neither do I — not a lot.

Please be quiet.

It’s not a bad way, though, is it?

Quiet.

I will. But what I’d like to know is why we have to do it this way so often.

This position?

No, just doing it.

Not often.

A lot of the time, then.

Not even that.

Then once ever week or so…you got to admit that.

Shush.

Falling feet first in the air I get the feeling if I wanted to save myself 1 could simply flap my arms and fly back to the bridge. Fly in loops and all kinds of stunts under and around the bridge, in fact. In fact, if I could fly like that I don’t think I’d want to die so fast. I’d first fly to wherever in whatever way I wanted to and then die by flying someplace I could only die by flying to, like straight into a building or mountainside. I flap my arms. I start to fly. I fall into the river. But I’m not dead yet. I’m zipping further down in the water like a heavy spear but more like a sleek fish. I don’t mind drowning but I don’t think I’d want to drown that fast if I could swim for a while like a fish. I’d swim to the ocean’s floor and see its strangest sea creatures and rock formations and flora, and then when I’d seen enough I’d kill myself some way like swimming deep when I knew I didn’t have the breath to get back to the top in time. Or else off a huge waterfall to jagged rocks below, or I don’t know but somehow like a fish when I no longer wanted to swim but just wanted to die.

I try to swim and start but stop because I can’t, and give myself up to drowning, but pop out of the water like a stick and onto my back. Somehow I made it to the top, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t even want to reach the water alive. I wanted to die in flight as I thought people did when they jumped from so high a height, and I was sure if the free fall didn’t kill me the impact of my body against water would. Maybe the way I fell stopped me from being suffocated in the jump, and the way I landed — there was barely a splash — stopped me from being smashed. But I survived and I’m now unable to sink. This river is near the ocean and the ocean might be depositing a lot of its salt in this part of the river, and that salt bed, if it’s called that, might be keeping me afloat. But I could be wrong, as I know as much about oceanography, if that is the science that deals with ocean salt accumulating in the river’s delta or basin or whatever the right word is for the river area the ocean flows into making it even saltier than the ocean, as I do about aerophysics, if that is the science that deals with the speed of sixteen feet per second — or is it thirty-two? — that an object falls at once it reaches its maximum speed if there are no obstacles in its way.

I let myself go all over as I do when I want to completely relax myself, but I still can’t sink. It would be nice, though not as nice as swimming like a fish or flying with my arms as wings, to float around like this for as long as I want, though only if I were able to navigate myself and go at a faster speed. But I am able to float, as I wasn’t able to swim or fly, so maybe I should float out to the ocean and somehow across it and then after a long journey down all those foreign coastlines, but more realistically just down our domestic ones, to find a way to kill myself by floating, such as going up a river where the ocean’s salt line ends and making sure I’m in the middle of this very wide river when I start sinking so there’d be no chance the current could carry me alive to land.

I try to float faster by kicking my feet. But I can’t get up sufficient speed to make floating interesting enough to want to stay alive for the time being, so I turn over on my stomach with my head in the water to drown. But by some natural means or I don’t know what, I’m flipped over on my back. I turn over and try to swim, thinking maybe the force of my strokes and kicks will keep me on my belly long enough to swallow enough water to drown, but I’m flipped right over and floating on my back. Now what animal or insect do I remind myself of and in what environment does this animal or insect’s automatic flipping-over movement take place? The closest one I can think of is a dead fish in stagnant water being prodded onto its stomach by a stick, and once the stick’s taken away, flips back over to one of its sides. And what science would deal with the phenomenon of my being flipped over when I try hard as I can not to? Probably a couple of them, including oceanography.

I turn over on my stomach and while I’m being flipped back I gulp a mouthful of water, thinking if I do this repeatedly I’ll swallow enough water to drown. But the moment I’m on my back again I cough up the water. I try it again and again, but my body won’t allow even a small portion of water to stay past my throat.

It seems I’ll never get to do what I want in this water and I’ll have to float like this till one of the river’s boats picks me up or I’m washed to shore. Either way, I’ll be pampered with warm drinks and blankets and eventually they’ll find out what I was doing in the water and word will get back to some newsroom and I’ll be made into this dumb folk hero whom nature kept alive despite his most earnest efforts to take his life, which will make it even tougher for me in the future to find a solitary way to die. What I should do is backstroke to a remote shore before daybreak, get back to the bridge and my car, and find a way to kill myself where there’d be no chance I’d survive.