Stephen Dixon: What Is All This?: Uncollected Stories

“He told us, so I’m just suggesting to him.”

“Do what I say; don’t get involved.”

“Ah, the attitude of the day,” I say. “Stay cool, your nose clean, hands off, once removed — no, I don’t know what I’m saying. But that’s what I hear a lot from the guests and call-in folks on the radio talk shows, going into the city and on my way back. You know, to and from work? But I don’t believe it, do you? We’re all still earth dwellers and not very far from our origins and so pretty much the same, isn’t that so?”

“What?” Pete said.

“Now I told you, Pete,” the other man says.

“My dad says to keep my trap shut, so I will, but I can’t make out half what you’re saying.”

“Your father? How nice. Hello, sir. Walt Wilkerson here. May I ask your name?”

“Hyram Falk. This is Pete.”

“Glad to meet you both.” I shake their hands. “What are you reading?”

“Just magazines,” Pete says.

“Good for you. Excuse me; I got to make an important phone call.” I dial Information, get Miriam’s work number and call her, “Miriam, I’m about to make your job much easier and also make it possible for Edith to pay your exorbitant fees. I’m going to burn down my house now so she can collect all the insurance money from it and, though I’ll contest it to make it look authentic, a quick divorce because of the mental cruelty inflicted on her by my burning the house down with all her things in it.”

“Don’t, Walt,” she says. The authorities will say you did it only to get the insurance money for Edith, and then she’ll get nothing. Besides, she called before and said your house is being watched and that the police of your town and the surrounding ones are out looking for you. She suggests, and I go along with it, that you plead temporary insanity and that I represent you in criminal court. Believe me, it all looks bad now, but everything will work out.”

I do. It doesn’t. Six months in the clink for resisting arrest and attempting to run over an officer. Lies, but what can I do? After that, too much to drink and everything goes down the tubes. Wife and kids are already gone, but now business, savings, friends. Ten, twenty years pass. Cheap rooms, rotten food, crummy jobs, too many times fired or laid off, for entertainment: watching lousy television on thirdhand TVs. I don’t want to go into it that deeply anymore. I get sick, liver and kidneys fail, I get worse — throw in the heart and lungs — but I don’t do anything to control or prevent it. With each succeeding operation I tell the surgeons not to worry if it looks bad for me on the table: just put me away for good, something I’d do myself but can’t. They say Hmm, interesting entreaty, they’ll think seriously about my suggestion but I should know that in the last years of some of their 90-year-old patients there was nothing they liked more in life than sitting out on a porch or sidewalk under a warm sun. Finally, the one who’s to operate on me today says he’ll take away my life support system under anaesthesia as he’s a great believer in mercy killing too. So that’s where I am now. Men’s ward of the city hospital and soon on my way to the operating room. Since there’s no one to say this for me, I’ll say it myself: “May he rest in peace forever; I mean me.”

I wake up in the recovery room. “Sonofabitch lying doctor,” I try to say. One of these days I’m going to be gutsy enough to do myself in. But by then I probably won’t have the strength.

He phoned the newspaper and said to the woman who answered “I’d like to place a notice in your In Memoriam space.” She said The In Memoriam notices are handled by the Obituary section of the Announcements department. Hold on and I’ll connect you.”

“Obituaries, Ray Kelvin speaking.”

“I’d like to place an In Memoriam notice, Mr. Kelvin. You have a pen handy, because I’ve the notice all set?”

“Just a second, sir. What’s the name and address of the person we’re to bill this to?”

That would be me. Stanley Berwald. B-e-r-w-a-l-d. Three-seventy-six President Street. Brooklyn.”

“Is there a middle initial?”

“It’s ‘O,’ but it’ll get to me without it.”

“And repeat the address, Mr. Berwald?”

He repeated it.

“Zip code?”

He gave the zip code.

“Finally, your phone number.”

Phone number.

“What date do you want the notice to appear?”

“February 10 th.”

“Now, if you’ll write down the cancelation number in case you later want to change or cancel the notice, we’ll go ahead with the wording.”

“I’m not going to want to cancel or change it. I’m going to give you this notice and when you send me the bill, I’ll pay right away and that’ll be the end of it.”

“You probably won’t cancel or change as you say,” Kelvin said. “In Memoriams, in fact, have the lowest cancelation and change rate of any of our announcements, obituaries being the next. But there have been placers like yourself in both categories who also had no intention of changing or canceling their notice, but who later, after the paper’s closing time for canceling or changing one for the next day’s edition, called and wanted to do just that. Even that we change the name and address of the person we’re to bill the notice to when the bill’s already been sent out — we get some of those also.”

“You won’t have that problem with me. I’ve lived in the same apartment the last thirty-eight years and don’t plan to move, and nobody but me knows the notice’s being placed. And I’ve worked most of the night composing it, so it’s the one I’ve decided on without question.”

The paper, no matter what the circumstances, still requires me to give a cancelation number for each notice, both for our protection and yours. The number I give will be the only way the paper and you can identify and locate your notice once I’ve put it through. We’re also required to give cancelation numbers to all death, birth, marriage, engagements, memorial services and thank-you-for-your-condolences announcements. Also for help and situations wanted, personal and commercial notices, real estate, auction sales, merchandise offerings, business opportunities, automobile and pet exchange and anything else in the line of classified ads. We use this system because we haven’t the filing space or staff to keep any records of announcements and classified ads other than the cancelation numbers, which are automatically processed into our computers and then removed once the announcement and ad charges are paid.”

“It seems you’ve made your system a lot more complicated than it need be, and probably at the expense of the customer.”

The system actually simplified the placing and taking of announcements and ads. And the fees for them are much less than they’d be without the system, if you’ve any idea what filing and office space rent go for in this part of the city and what kind of payroll it’d take to keep a staff of bookkeepers and filing clerks for this department, not that it’s so easy to hire them. But what do you say we finish up with your notice, Mr. Berwald? There could be another caller with a notice or announcement he or she wants to get in before closing time.”

“After all you’ve said, I’m not so sure my notice will get in on the day I want it to or won’t get mixed up in the real estate or help wanted sections or canceled soon after I get off the phone.”

“Not anything to worry about. Because of the early closing time for In Memoriams, as compared to obituaries, let’s say, typographical errors or misplacing an announcement almost never happens. The most likely error, though chances of it are extremely rare, is that your notice will get lost between the time I type it up and dispatch the original copy to the printers and the carbon to the accounting department, both by pneumatic tube, which is usually done within twenty minutes after our call’s completed, depending on the length of the notice to type and how busy the tube is. This also further illustrates how important the cancelation number is. Call us before I’ve dispatched your notice, and without cancelation number or anything else, I or one of the other announcements reporters will be able to locate your In Memoriam at one of the three places it could be: still in my typewriter, typed up and on my desk waiting to be inserted into the pneumatic tube cylinders, or in the cylinders and waiting to be placed in the tube to the printers and Accounting. But call without cancelation number after the cylinders have been sent and you could end up with two published In Memoriam notices and bills, if you’re calling to change the wording of the notice, or one bill and published notice if you wanted the original notice and bill canceled.