Stephen Dixon - Time to Go

He met a woman in England when he was in college, corresponded with her during the school year and the following summer hitchhiked with her from her home in South Africa to Cairo. It took them four months. They were in love when they started out and hated each other by the time they reached the Sudan. He saw her off at the Cairo airport and her next to last words to him were “What did I ever see in you I wonder?” His last words to her were “If we’d time I’d remind you, but as for me I used to love the way you looked, acted and talked and that you answered and so intelligently and lengthily a letter of mine every other week and that you thought there was nothing better in life for you to do than become a hospital nurse and that you once sent me a nine by twelve inch photo of yourself in a skimpy swimsuit and that you hailed from Estcourt, Natal, and summered when I wintered and that when we lived in our native countries we never saw the same stars.” “Is that true about the stars I wonder?” and she went up the ramp to the plane. He was broke and the American embassy wouldn’t loan him money so he called his folks collect for the fare home.

His sister was Gretel to his Hansel in a summer camp play. He wanted a girl closer in age to him to play the part but the drama counselor said their being brother and sister would make the play more realistic and endearing to the audience. The camp photographer took pictures of the performance and till his sister died his mother loved to bring them out and show them to the women friends he’d ask over for dinner or drinks.

He was playing ring-a-levio one night on his block. A girl named Mary, who lived on the next block, was hiding in the same brownstone walkway with him. They were kneeling close together, their shoulders and arms touched. She had on a short skirt and when she looked over the walkway wall to see if the person who was “it” was anywhere near them, he looked up between her legs, hoping to see her vagina or maybe some hair if she had any there yet but only saw the ends of her buttocks sticking out of her panties. Later, as a prisoner, it seemed his underpants were wet. He felt down inside them, thinking he might have made. His penis and the pants around it were sticky. He got scared for a second, then remembered the dirty part of a book he’d recently read and something some boy had said, and thought Holy Christ, for the first time in my life I’ve spermed.

“Touch me again and I’ll call the cops,” a woman friend said to him. She got dressed, left his apartment and he never spoke to her after that till he bumped into her in a museum garden a few years later. She said hello and smiled, then must have remembered what he did that night and walked past him into the museum. He started after her, wanted to ask what it was he did that night — he’d completely forgotten or had blocked it out — so he could apologize again or for the first time. “I don’t care how bad it was, I want to know,” he wanted to say, but the museum was crowded and he couldn’t find her. That evening he wanted to call her and apologize for whatever he’d done that time years ago, but her name wasn’t in the phonebook. He knew a couple of people who might know her or how to find her, but then thought it’s all right, you can have a few harmless enemies in this world and still sleep well and live through a normal day every day. In time you’ll straighten it out with her, if it was that important.

For the last two months, when he brushed his hair on the right side, his head hurt. He went to a doctor, something he hadn’t done in about a dozen years, and pointed to the spot. The doctor felt it, looked into his eyes with a penlight, took his blood pressure and said “I know you must be worried it’s brain cancer or some form of brain damage or anything resembling those, but that you’re definitely on your way out of this beautiful world, but it’s not so. You’re healthier than you almost should be for your age; when you’re approaching fifty you should begin conducting yourself as if you are. You must have hit your head hard two months back and it hasn’t healed fully.” He was relieved when he left her office, didn’t feel any pain the next day when he brushed his hair or pressed down on that spot, but has felt the same pain and even worse every day since for the last two weeks. He was worried about it again but more worried what a neurologist might do to try to find the reason behind the pain, so for the time being he’d avoid brushing that part of his head and pretend to believe the pain would ultimately go away.

His wife was playing with his penis when she said “Good God, you’ve blood coming out of the hole.” He went to a doctor, afraid he had something serious. His wife went with him, saying “Don’t get excited, it’s probably nothing. People always think they have the worst when they should think that nine times out of ten they have nothing, and if they do have something, it can usually be cured simply and quickly.” The doctor said it was a minor case of prostatitis and prescribed pills that would clear up the infection in two weeks. “Can I have sex during this time?” he asked and the doctor said “By all means — it’s good for the prostate gland. Only thing to stop you from it now is if your wife for the next few days minds a drop or two of your blood.”

For a year his uncle showed him a lot of attention. He took him to professional baseball and hockey games every other week, took him to first-run movies or Broadway plays at night, let him stay with him an entire summer month at his beach house, gave him a hundred dollars on his birthday and told him to buy what he liked with it. They were never close before then, and after the year his uncle stopped calling or coming by. He’d call his uncle and his uncle would say “I’m busy this weekend, kid. I’ll see you next Saturday or Sunday,” and the next weekend he wouldn’t call or show up either. Finally Don’s mother told him “I think my brother’s going through some change-of-life crisis — don’t feel it’s your fault he doesn’t act the way he used to with you.” Ten years later his mother called and said “Uncle Nat died in Miami last night — a heart attack. I’m flying down with Dad — can you look after my plants?” He said “I’d like to come too,” and she said “What for? — you two were never close.”

His wife said “Let’s renew our marriage vows, just together, Carole can stay with my mother. We’ll write the ceremony ourselves, be our own witnesses and judge, go on the Caribbean honeymoon we never took, not tell anyone what we’ve done and only my mother where we’re going — it’ll be our one secret we’ll keep from everyone for life.” “Let me think about it,” he said, and that was the last they spoke of it.

He was thumbing through the phone directory looking for the zip code page when his wife said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you if you’re doing anything important, but would you like to go to bed for fifteen minutes?” “I just want to find this,” he said and she said “What are you looking for? A zip code; for Christ sakes. Forget my proposal,” and he said “No no, I have it now just let me mark it down,” and she said “Next time I should try to catch you when you’re reading page five of the Post , because I’m not asking too much, am I?” and he said “No, I can always do it; just it might take a little more time.”

His wife said “Please don’t take it — it can’t be good for you. The others here are all heads and know how to handle the stuff,” and he said “I always wanted to take a trip — now’s my chance, and I swear I’ll be okay,” and swallowed the LSD tab. First they were all gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus and his wife, who hadn’t taken any, said “If this is all it’s going to be, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all,” and he said “Drop another grape in my mouth and then come kiss me, you lovely beast — oh God, I love you,” But soon after that he became a famous black gospel singer and sang gospels in her voice and then he went outdoors to embrace all of nature and crawled low in the snow because he thought one of the other LSD takers was trying to kill him with a rifle and then he was in a circle with three other naked people in a dungeon, all with their heads yoked between the thighs of the person in front of them and turning a horizontal wheel for what would be an eternity and then he was a bug on the dungeon floor and human feet were trying to smash him. He was given a strong tranquilizer and while he was coming down he told his wife he had gone mad and nothing would ever make him sane again and he’d be completely dependent on her or in a squalid institution for life, “so listen, your friend with the gun before, get him to put it to my head and shoot perfectly.” Then he fell asleep and the next morning his wife said to him “I know how you hate I told-you-so’s but I wish you’d listen to me on things like this,” and he said “You’re right, no need to hedge around it, but I’ve seen the darkest I can become and nothing so much before has made me appreciate sanity and day-to-day sameness and simple sleep and just sitting here with you, for instance, and admitting any of this.”