Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

“He looked dead just now,” Gould says, after the elevator door closes, and a man says, “Couldn’t be. I saw his heart going, pump-pump, pump-pump; he’ll pull through and will be back here in a week as if nothing happened,” and Gould says, “I hope so, but he looked dead to me, I swear: his body limp, head just hanging. I bet that’s why they took him out of here. There just wasn’t any sense working on him any longer,” and someone else says, “If he was dead they would have kept him here to write up a report because there wouldn’t have been any hurry to get him out. They must have thought they could do better on him in the ambulance to the hospital and of course even better than that in the hospital and that they got enough of the arsenic out of him now to get him to start surviving again. Believe me, though I didn’t get a look at him the last few minutes, no hospital’s about to waste the time and cost of one of its emergency units on a dead man,” and Gould says, “As I told this fellow, I certainly hope you’re right. “Where can you buy that stuff anyway? You’d think it’d be outlawed, it’s so lethal.” “Chemistry labs,” someone says, “and he was going for his Ph.D. in the area, wasn’t he?” and someone says, “By area do you mean Columbia?” and the woman says, “Columbia, I knew he was a student there, in chemistry.” “I thought it was history or political science,” Gould says, “since that’s all he seemed to talk about, politics and spheres of influence and such. And he knew everything about the subjects no matter what the era.” “And I thought ladykilling,” a man says, “because Jesus, if there ever was a guy in this building who scored well with the ladies, he was it. In fact, he had so many of them and at all hours that it’d be difficult to think he had time for anything else.” “So taking that into consideration,” another man says, “and his good looks, which is part of it, and the impressive way he spoke, and his intelligence and obvious charm, you have to think, Who had more to live for than Ronald?” and a woman says, “Roland . And always the last one to leave the elevator, always there to help you with your packages or say a nice word: things like that. A lovely person, an absolutely lovely person, with no sign of the slightest sadness or distress. That’s why it’s such a shock, what they say he did, and why I’d have to think he swallowed it accidentally.” “No, I’m sorry,” Gould says, “and really, shouldn’t we all pitch in, or at least the ones who live on this floor, and clean up the mess he and the hospital people left? Anyway, Roland happened to bang on my door for help when he was in the worst throes of it and told me he took the arsenic because he at first wanted to die but that he now didn’t want to, maybe because he found how painful it was or just getting so close to death he realized his mistake.” “He probably didn’t think it’d be that slow, either,” a woman says. “But you have to admit that if he was a chemistry doctoral student—” “He was,” a man says. “I know his dissertation adviser, and Roland and I talked about her.” “Then he knew what he was getting into and how long it’d take, and at the time, as this man here stated, he must have meant it but then had a sudden about-face. Now I guess all we can do is pray for his poor soul, for I’m sure he took enough to kill several men.”

A tenant on this floor tells the police that Roland’s door is still apartment and everything,” a policeman tells her, “and we’re about to attend to it, thanks. Just tell us if you know if he has any animals in there,” and she says, “No, I remember he once said he thought it unkind and a nuisance keeping pets.” A few police officers go into Roland’s apartment with the super and find the arsenic with the container capped, the super later tells some people, the empty can of soda he took it with, the glass he mixed the solution in, with a note pasted to it saying something like Don’t drink from this! It might contain poisonous residue! Throw out but break first, if I can’t because I’m suddenly incapacitated by the drink and a suicide note. It’s addressed to Apt 7J, a man whose name I once knew but I apologetically say I can’t recall now: his next-door neighbor and someone he vaguely said boo to, the man tells Gould a week later while they’re waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor. “He might have seemed friendly to others, from everything people here are saying of him since he died, but he acted to me like I cooked the worst-smelling fish in the cheapest corn oil every day and never dumped my garbage, cleaned my room, or took a bath.” The note, which the police held for a few days before giving him—“Let’s say that was stretching a bit their constitutional privilege of holding evidence,” the man tells Gould, “but since he meant relatively little to me and I was dumbfounded he chose me out of anyone to write the note to, I let it slide and didn’t make a legal case out of it, as I could have and conceivably got compensatory damages from the city and made it a test case against these kinds of questionable practices of the cops”—said he wants to die by his own hand because of a number of convincing articles and books he’s read the last year on how life’s not worth living in spite of the many little exciting if not fleetingly thrilling short-term things that can happen to adults. “You have to assume he meant orgasms, both of the masturbatory and copulative sort,” the neighbor says, “and good hash, a few brief poems and paintings over the centuries, several smashing sunsets and maybe a sunrise or two, and seeing the aurora borealis the first time.” Also because of a love he had for a certain woman who’ll go nameless because she’s blameless—“You wonder, at a time like that when he’s writing his death scrawl, and from such a bright and I suppose well-read guy, why he’d resort to such trite rhyming,” the neighbor says — but who didn’t return his love for her one iota, or perhaps, for half an afternoon at the most, just a trifle more than an iota—“You can imagine what happened during those few glorious hours,” the neighbor says, “since I’m sure he’s underestimating the iotaness of them.” The neighbor must have seen him with her once or twice, Roland wrote, but he tells Gould, “I saw him with, in my two months here, over a dozen different girls — I’m in and out of here ten times a day, so I miss practically nothing in this building — and of a wide variety of races, colors, shades, nationalities, and languages. And all lookers, and once three in a single day, so why’d he think, unless he described her for me, I could distinguish this one from the others because of maybe a particular glitter in his eye or bigger bulge in his pants that day?” Also because he’s going nowhere fast: he can’t stand historical research, writing bibliographies and papers, or other scholars and academics; the last thing he wants to spend two years on is a dull derivative dissertation, and the last thing he wants to become, he’s found, is a teacher or father, besides knowing he’ll never be even half fulfilled in any profession or capacity or with any woman over a long time or in any city or climate in the world. Life has been relatively to deeply depressing for most of his life, especially when he was a boy, so it seems the most sensible thing is just to end it. Could the neighbor personally tell his grandmother how much Roland appreciated her for bringing him up (here he gave her Bronx phone number, which turned out to be a disconnected one, the neighbor says, and with no listing of such a name in any of the city phone directories), when his parents died — both from cancer and just months apart, which had to influence his dark outlook and attraction to literature holding such a view — and how sorry he is for the sadness his death will cause her. He didn’t have the courage to write her directly and thought it best that what he would have said to her come secondhand in abbreviated form from a stranger. Please be patient with her; if she wants the neighbor to come to her apartment for tea to talk about it, please do, though he only has to go once. He also wishes he had a lot of dough to leave her so she could live comfortably in her last ailing years, but he dies, as she well knows and the bank- and checkbooks on his dresser will confirm, just about penniless. The young woman he loved, if anyone does discover her name, is not to be blamed one bit for his suicide, as he said, and the writers of those articles and books he read, some of which the neighbor will find in Roland’s bookcases and by his bedside (a few should go back to the library), are only to be commended — the ones still alive (most died natural deaths twenty to a few hundred years ago) — for having told the truth about what life is: endless tasks, meaningless efforts, illusions, repetitions, titillations, the occasional high, and tons of horseshit, this letter and statement about what life is included. “When I first read the last part,” the neighbor says, “I thought, Well, we’ve all heard that before and never thought much of it, but in the final line he sort of covers himself.” Gould says, “I’m surprised at that last part too, if you’re being accurate in your paraphrase of it, since I always thought of him as one of the deepest and most knowledgeable and clear-thinking guys I’ve known, and I’m not saying that now just because he’s dead.”