Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

After breakfast the captain takes me to his cabin. He points proudly to several framed photos on a wall. One is of him and a woman in a wedding dress arm in arm. Another of four beaming children sitting on the grass, with the captain and woman hugging each other behind them. Another inside a frame bordered with black ribbon is of the captain and woman and four children, all much older now, standing behind an elderly seated couple, who are kissing each other’s hands.

The captain offers me the top bunk, a brandy, pulls curtains over the portholes, puts on pajamas and gets into the bottom bunk. In the dark he says something in his language, which I suppose means sleep well or pleasant dreams. I say “Goodnight or good morning,” and the room is silent. Only the boat’s engine can be heard. For now I’ll just think and sleep. Later in the day I’ll try to find a way to end my life. A sharp fishing knife, since this seems to be a fishing boat, to slash my wrists and bleed to death in an out-of-the-way section of the boat. If there is no such section, I’ll jump into the ocean, which I assume we’re in, when none of the crew is watching, and preferably in the night. Maybe this part of the ocean doesn’t have the salt accumulation the other part had, if that was the reason I couldn’t sink. Or else maybe the reflex action or survival instinct or whatever it was that kept me flipping over on my back and stopped me from swallowing the salt water, won’t work so well this time or at all.

But suppose one of the crew finds me after I’ve just slashed my wrists or sees me in the water and jumps in and saves me? Then they’ll know I was in the water to commit suicide the first time they found me and they’ll lock me in an empty room or brig with my arms bound behind me and take me to wherever the boat’s going or to my country, but certainly hand me over to the authorities who deal with people who try to kill themselves. I’ll be locked up in jail or a mental institution till the authorities are sure I won’t try to kill myself again. That might be for weeks, maybe even years, because who knows what standards are used for releasing potential suicides in the captain’s country or even in my own. If these standards are now fair and progressive, how do I know they won’t be reversed during the years of my confinement, meaning, for example, that what would release me today if let’s say I was confined for the same reasons five years ago, might in the future, because of the new harsher standards, get me ten years, fifteen, maybe life.

Or suppose I manage to escape in the water without anyone seeing me and another boat comes along and rescues me no matter how hard I try to avoid it? Or else I get so cold in the water or frightened of being attacked by sharks I see or irrationally fearful of sharks I imagine I see because of the hallucinations that come to someone freezing to death, that I signal that boat and it rescues me and the new captain learns I jumped off another boat and probably a bridge and I’m locked up and later turned over to the authorities. Or else this new captain might not learn of my previous attempts and I again try to commit suicide by slicing my wrists or jumping overboard and I’m discovered with my wrists bleeding, or saved a third time from the water, or else they don’t see me in the water but for the same reasons of freezing or sharks real or imagined or something else I’m rescued and locked in a brig till I’m turned over to the authorities who deal with people who try to kill themselves again and again. No matter how progressive the standards are in whatever country I’m taken to, I still won’t be released because of my three to four consecutive suicide attempts till the authorities are absolutely sure I won’t try to kill myself again. That might mean, in my extreme case, the surgical removal of some part of my brain to prevent me from killing myself. Which would mean living a total hell for the rest of my life without any chance to kill myself though perhaps with occasional dim ideas I should. Or maybe the surgery doesn’t work, as my jumping and drowning attempts didn’t, and I’ll try in some way to kill myself again and this time fail because of my own panic or weakened condition brought about by the surgery. Or else the authorities might detect through some special tests that I’m going to try to commit suicide again, and they’ll order the doctors to cut deeper, pump me up with chemicals or alter my genetic code, leaving me as much dead as alive, more dead than alive, but for the rest of my life not alive enough to try to kill myself.

I never should have jumped. I should have worked out my suicide better. I certainly won’t try to kill myself on this boat and possible bungle the act, maybe even injuring myself while doing it to the point where even if no one finds out about the attempt I’ll end up physically incapable of making another suicide try. What I have to do now is contrive a foolproof excuse as to what I was doing in the water. Another as to why my car was left by the bridge. Others to cover the possibility of my being seen on the bridge or falling into the river. And once the press, public and authorities and scientists are done with me after I get to land, I must resign myself to living a quiet, modest though noticeably content existence till the next time I try to take my life.

Downstairs, his father was watching TV. Ray was in his old room upstairs trying to keep his eyes open and his mind from drifting, as there were still lots of things to take care of before he flew back to California.

His father had to be put in a nursing home, that was the main thing. He was ailing, incontinent, periodically incoherent, in constant need of attention and his condition was only getting worse. It’d be ridiculous taking him to San Diego with him, as Ray’s house was too small and he knew they’d be at each other’s throats the day they got there.

Ray had looked after him a month now, after a neighbor had phoned and said his father was too feeble to stay by himself anymore. He was tired of changing his father’s bed every day, doing all that laundry, emptying and scouring his urinals and setting them strategically around the house, tucking him into bed so he wouldn’t fall out, turning him over twice a night and waking, showering, drying and dressing him and for breakfast sticking two eggs in boiling water for three minutes when every day his father demanded they be scrambled in chicken fat or at least fried sunnyside up.

He’d only put off placing him in a home earlier because the old guy had begged, pleaded, “I’d get down on my knees if I could to stop you,” blubbered real tears as he said “Just another week. Ray. Wait till the Sunday after next, please.” Always the stall. And last night he said “I’ll die in a week’s time if I’m put in a home. I know it, sure as I’m sitting here watching TV.”

Ray went downstairs. “Pop? I’d like to speak to you.”

“Speak to me later. Ted Soloman’s got a good show on tonight.”

This is more important than Soloman. I’ve got to be getting back to California.”

“When?” He pressed the TV remote in his lap, and the sound went off. “You going back tomorrow? Good. Tonight? Even better. Not that I won’t miss you. But it’ll be nice having the house to myself again,” and he turned the TV sound back on. A comedian was still talking about his freeloading brother-in-law.

“Now this mooch,” the comedian said, and his father laughed, “is such a sponge on me that just yesterday…”

“I’m not going back tonight. Things have to be settled first. Number one, we’ve got to discuss that nursing home.”

“What nursing home?” The comedian became a raving mute again, right on a major punch line. “You going to work in one in California?”