Stephen Dixon - Time to Go

An army officer kicks over the lectern and sits behind a desk.

He says the country’s first widespread internal armed conflict in a hundred years has all but concluded and that every annexed radio and television station will be returned to its rightful ownership by tonight. He reviews the counterrevolution in progress. All sections of cities the revolutionary spokesman said were in rebel hands have been recaptured and pacified. Guerrilla units are rapidly being smoked out and eliminated and no longer pose a national or regional threat. The president is returning to a thoroughly becalmed Capitol and will spend the evening in his historical residence. The country’s leading defense industry city will resume normal production at the start of the regular work day tomorrow. “All citizens in this area are urged to return to their homes till further notice, as an indefinite curfew begins in two hours. Stay tuned to this or any of your other legitimately run stations for a continuation of the president’s address and important news bulletins, advisements, and information regarding the country’s planned victory celebration.” Then there’s an unusually long series of commercials followed by the soap opera Mrs. Longmore says she always puts on at this hour. She returns to her apartment to watch it.

“I guess this means Jimmy’s dental appointment is canceled,” Georgia says, “and it took two months to get. And what about your recital, Phil? You’ll have rented a hall nobody’s allowed to come to. And Dad!” meaning her father who lives with us and spends every day in the park’s chess house downtown. We run to the window, but he isn’t on the street. At the windows of brownstones across the street and on either side of us are people anxiously eyeing the pedestrians hurrying to get home or to buy goods before the curfew begins.

“Check the refrigerator,” I say.

“Forget the refrigerator. We’ve got to find Dad.”

I yell out the window if anyone’s heard if our city and particularly the park has been physically touched by the war. But it seems the people in the buildings don’t want to be distracted from catching sight of their close ones and the people in the street are in too much of a hurry to answer me.

I switch to every radio and television station to see if there’s any news about the city’s involvement in the war. All the radio keeps saying is for everyone to stay tuned to his television, and the only television programs are the ones normally on, with messages moving at the bottom of the screen urging all viewers to remain home or return home but stay tuned because important news bulletins will follow.

I dial the chess house, parks department, police, newspaper and the two cronies my father-in-law always meets at the chess house and then the telephone operator as to why I can’t reach any of these numbers, but right after each dialing a recorded voice tells me the number I’m calling is temporarily out of service and that I should stay tuned to my television set because important news bulletins are going to be made.

I ring the doorbells of all my neighbors. The only person who’ll tear himself away from his television long enough to speak to me briefly through the door says he hasn’t heard anything about the city’s part in the war. “Though there was an announcement just before that tomorrow and the next day will be wage-paid holidays for all workers and government-subsidized ones for all businesses because the rebellion was crushed. And that all TV programs will be preempted in a few minutes for a four-hour special on the revolt, with live coverage of the most damaged areas in the country, videotape highlights of the last bloody battles, and the president conducting a walking tour of the partially ravaged Capitol.”

Georgia pleads with me to try to find her father in the hour we have left before the curfew. “That way I’ll always know we did everything possible to find him.”

I leave the building. The weather’s clear and the neighborhood as peaceful as on an average summer Sunday: stores grated and locked, most of the apartment windows shaded and closed, an occasional car or motorcycle driving past, a solitary couple at a bus stop. They know less than I about what’s happened in this city, as their television broke down an hour ago and they’re going to a friend’s house to watch the special.

I start to jog to the park’s chess house. Little by little I see signs that perhaps a minor disturbance took place. A broken car window…an abandoned bike…a row of garbage cans turned over…a speeding police car and army truck with their emergency lights on. Then that a riot if not a fierce battle took place, with stores without windows…buildings without walls…streets without buildings, and smoke, flames, bodies, limbs, teeth, hair…I head home. This time across the park, which was bombed and strafed. Past the gutted chess house. Through several residential neighborhoods: now smoldering mounds of debris. My own street’s been torn up while I was gone, my building blown apart. Only the old-fashioned marble staircase remains, ending in the sky. “Georgia,” I scream. “Jimmy!” I shout their names repeatedly as I dig and pick away at the rubble.

The super comes out of a hole in the ground where the entrance to his basement apartment was. “No use wasting your energy and voice doing that, Mr. Devine. Whole building’s occupants either been wiped out or buried under or went scrambling out of here between the time the explosions started and the place caved in. Really can’t say who was responsible for it all. Either the revolutionaries who rushed into the building and for one strategic reason or another set it off, or else the government tanks that came up the street chasing them. Didn’t see any of your family leave, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t. I just know nobody else is around but my wife and me. We were the lucky ones, living so deep in the ground with no floor to fall from. All our friends used to say ‘Why do you want to live in a dungeon like that? Steam pipes all over your ceilings and no view but the next building’s blank wall.’ Now they know. Because I always felt this would happen one day, which is why I took this place and job. What do you think you’re going to do now?”

I haven’t been back in this city for nine years. First thing on arriving I go to our former street. Twenty-to thirty-story apartment buildings have gone up where our five-story buildings used to be. There are trees and shrubbery on the sidewalks now, and all the stores have become so sophisticated with their wares and window displays and exorbitantly priced: ours was a neighborhood of apparently poorer workingmen.

I check the tenant directory in the apartment house where our building and several others once stood. Only name I recognize from the old days is the super’s and I ring his bell.

“Who is it?” he says over the intercom. He can’t quite place the name so I say “You know: Georgia, Phil and Little and Big limbo from number thirty before it was blown up.” Now he remembers and he tells me to take the apartments A to L elevator to basement two.

“So how goes?” he says in the basement corridor. “And did you ever find any of your pretty family and your wife’s dad?”

“Nope. They just never turned up or were found. How’s your wife, father-in-law and son?”

“First wife cracked up, got a new one now, and I never had any in-laws or son. You must be mistaking me for another super.”

“How do you like your new building?”

“The walls are like cardboard, most of the plumbing and wiring’s already shot, and it’s either way overheated or drafty and cold. But it’s a more cheerful looking and social place. And there are no rounded hallways and big staircases and high ceilings and such like the old one, which makes it easier for my staff and me to clean. Well, it’s been good talking to you, Mr. Devine. And every bit of luck in your future living, okay?”