Stephen Dixon - Time to Go

His older daughter gave him a tie for his last two birthdays and the last Christmas. His wife had a big laugh over the last one. “Don’t you know what it means?” she said and he said “I don’t believe in that stuff or not that much. She just knows I always stain or wrinkle my ties but thinks I look handsome in them.”

He got an anonymous typewritten note from a student. “You are my favorite teacher ever and I’ll tell you why. Some teachers study to teach, you were born into it so didn’t have to study. A born into it teacher is both smart, patient and kind and something else no one can define. Thank you. Signed: a student (female, but that’s not important) but a lifelong friend.”

Today’s his birthday and his watch stopped on the morning hour his mother said he was born. He wound it up but it didn’t start again.

That was when he thought about the hour and day he was born. He took it to a watchmaker who said it would cost more to repair than if he bought the watch new. “The parts now are worth more than the whole. Buy the new nonwindup kind — quartz, the only thing today. Those watches will eventually put me out of business, but they’ll save you a lot of trouble.” “No, I’m an old fogy on things like that — sell me a good windup watch.” The watchmaker said “You have a birthday coming up?” and he said no. “You have a wife though, right?” and he said “Divorced.” “Children?” and he said “Two daughters.” “Old enough to buy a watch?” and he said “The oldest might be, if I wanted a cheap watch, but the youngest is only five.” “A girl friend then?” and he said “None and none in sight.” “I was only suggesting all these because no man should buy his own watch.” “I don’t believe that. Just give me a round one that’ll work even better than the last and which has numerals and has to be wound once a day.”

Georgia and I are getting our son dressed to go to the dentist when the doorbell rings. Jimmy wants to wear shorts and Georgia’s insisting he wear slacks and I’m saying as I go to the door that I don’t care what he wears so long as she gets him out of here and I can continue practicing for my recital tonight.

It’s our landlady, Mrs. Longmore, who says “Quickly, hurry, turn on your radios, turn up the TVs, war’s been declared, the whole country’s going to ruins.”

Mrs. Longmore has been known to use any excuse or lie to get into one of her apartments to see if the tenant’s installed a new heavy appliance without notifying her for the surcharge on the rent, so I tell her to calm herself, the only war currently raging is between our son and his folks, and to quiet my own nerves I turn on the radio to a classical music station which at this hour only plays Baroque.

The announcer’s speaking only a little less hysterically than Mrs. Longmore about a civil war taking place. I figure it’s this very station’s radio play about a war that’s disturbing her. I switch stations to prove my point, but they’re all giving the same kind of news.

The insurrection, as the newscaster I settle on puts it, began last night in a northeast college community when a band of students beat up three policemen who the students said had for no reason clubbed a friend of theirs, though the police claim the student they clubbed had first beaten up an elderly park employee who had courteously informed the student of the park’s curfew law. Though opinions differ on how the disturbance started, the police then called for reinforcements, who came with the suburb’s one armored car. The police tried breaking up the students’ demonstration in the park with nightsticks, the students beat them back with rocks and chemical sprays, the police fired tear gas canisters, and when these were hurled back with makeshift fire bombs, rifles, and two students were killed. Hundreds of enraged students on campus banded into an armed mob and overwhelmed the police guarding the park, with several fatalities on both sides, and used the cannon in the armored car to blow up the police barracks. They then seized the local radio station and broad casted appeals to students and workers to join them in the streets to rid the area of its homicidal police and those public servants who use these police for private self-serving ends. The radio station was destroyed by armored cars summoned from nearby suburbs, though by this time thousands of students and some workers were battling guardsmen and police in the area and eventually throughout the Northeast Region. Students in many university communities in the North and Southwest Regions learned of the fighting and also rebelled. Over commandeered radio stations they declared a national revolt in the name of sanity and peace against all institutions, groups and persons who opposed the revolt, and that they soon hoped to meet their Eastern and Central revolutionary comrades to form a united provisional government that would coordinate the postwar effort if they won, or else all underground activities if the open rebellion failed.

Georgia, Jimmy and Mrs. Longmore huddle around me when the newscaster says the president’s about to make an address of unprecedented importance from his emergency headquarters. We turn on the television and stare at the president’s seal for a while. Then the president appears, looking no more harried than he was in all his previous heralded addresses of proven unimportance, and says his historical residence, Defense and Justice Buildings and National Art Museum have been shelled and nearly taken this morning, but the Capitol and entire Central Region surrounding it are now back under complete government control. “By late today, or early tomorrow, this so-called rebellion by university thugs, high school toughs, innocent dupes seduced by the slogans of strife, and those alien agitators working for the countries most likely to gain by the collapse of our political and economic system, will have ended. And then that part of the world still in chains though ever hopeful of future freedom, and those allied nations not in chains only because of the military might behind our country’s freedom, will once more breathe easier knowing our nation is at peace again.”

He’s suddenly cut off. There’s nothing on the screen now but the jittery specks we usually only get with bad reception. Then the word “liberated” appears, followed by a voiceover saying “In the name of the common people of this country and those, via television satellite, of the world.”

A young man in work clothes and with a rifle strapped to his back faces the camera from behind a lectern. He says he’s the regional spokesman for the national revolution and gives a report of the war up to now. Guerrilla units are fighting counterrevolutionary forces in all Northern and Southern regions, and despite what the president just said, in the Central Region and Capitol as well. Many large sections of small major cities and many small sections of large major cities are in the hands of the revolutionaries. The battle for the country’s principal war-works city was lost at a cost of hundreds of lives to both armies, though military production there has been set back for years. “By tomorrow evening, or the evening after, half the population will be under rebel control. And once all five regions and the Capitol have been completely liberated, and it can only be with a second successful revolution here that the first real world revolution can begin, we will help all the common people of this globe free themselves from the international political-economic arrangement that is keeping them hungry and enslaved and the world perpetually on the verge of war and total annihilation. For a new day of eternal peace and freedom is fast approaching us,” he says, when he collapses from a bullet fired off-camera. Two soldiers in recognizable military dress drag him out by his hair. His cameraman’s ordered to stand before the camera with his arms raised. A third revolutionary — the director of the newscast — is rifle-butted to the ground for reaching for a concealed weapon, though she gave ample warning to studio guards and home audience that she was going to search through her pockets for a handkerchief because she was about to sneeze.