Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

Anything else? His neurodegenerative disease, of course, which he thinks he showed small signs of his wife’s last two years but was first diagnosed for it a year after she died. His doctor said he’ll never be cured of the disease but he won’t die of it. He got it so late in his life that it’ll never get that bad. His father died of it forty years ago, but the doctor said medications and treatments for it have vastly improved since then. Still, he’s scared. Sometimes his right hand shakes. Some days he feels weaker than he does other days. He never stumbles but he has lost his balance a number of times during the same period his hand shakes and he feels weaker than usual. When he tries to run, he runs clumsily. That never improves. Short jerky strides; nothing like he used to do, and he can only run a quarter of a mile at the most before he has to stop. He wouldn’t even call it running anymore. It’s closer to something like speed-walking, but a little more than that. So he sometimes thinks he’s getting worse. Is this something to bring up to the therapist? His fear? But the doctor said he’s showing fewer signs of the disease than he did in his last checkup a half year before. “It might be that I’ll only need to see you once a year,” the doctor said. He’s also afraid he’ll get sick again with the bowel obstruction he had two years ago and he had to be operated on twice in three days to turn a section of the small intestine around. He thinks that’s what the surgeon did. One operation to straighten out the kink in the small intestine and the second operation to see if the first one worked. Something like that. Almost every time he’s just a bit constipated or he has even a slight stomachache, he worries the obstruction has come back. He doesn’t want to go back to the hospital and be operated on again. And maybe twice in three days again, the second to see if the first operation worked. He doesn’t understand. They couldn’t have done that with x-rays? Did he ask? He forgets. He felt he almost died in the hospital. His regular physician said he could have with what he had. And the pain before he was operated on the first time was about as bad for twelve hours as he ever had in his life, but the pain after the operations was for a while even worse. They gave him pain medication that made him crazy for almost an entire day. He hallucinated, heard voices, thought he was in hell, that he was being punished for things he did in the past but wasn’t told what they were. A woman in a lab coat stopped in front of his room and held up to the window a clipboard and pointed to a long list on it without looking at him. He yelled for her to help him, or thought he did, but she quickly left. He kept yelling for someone to help him, screamed sometimes or thought he did, but nobody came to his room. His door was wide open and he heard people walking past or standing outside it, talking about obscure things — space shuttles, metallurgy, a 16th century pope — all of it in a language he understood only a few words of. It sounded more like a combination of several languages of different origins plus pig Latin. He also pressed the call button a lot, or thought he did. Nobody came into his room or asked on the intercom, as they usually did, “Yes? What is it?” Then he remembered he had a cell phone and put on his glasses and found it and called one of his daughters — this he knows he did — for them to come and take him home right away or else he’s going to escape from the hospital, in his hospital gown if he has to, and make it home on his own. It was around two in the morning. They were at his house, a five-minute drive away. They’d come down for the operations. They called the hospital and he was moved to a room much closer to the nurses’ station so someone could look in on him more often. The voices he’d heard turned out to be that of hospital workers on the floor, standing and chatting in front of the employees’ lounge across the hallway from his room before they went inside it or after they came out of it. So how come one of them didn’t check to see what was the matter when he was yelling for help, if the yelling wasn’t part of his hallucinations? He’s also worried he’ll get very sick at home. Something he can’t take care of himself. A minor stroke or a major one, or something equally as bad, and no one would be there to help him and he couldn’t reach the phone or didn’t have the energy to even dial 911. He’d die in his bed or on the floor. Who’d look after the cat in the time before they found him? He’s serious. For how would anyone know he was dying or dead? After awhile his daughters, when he didn’t answer the phone or call them back for a long time — a day, two, maybe even longer — would call a friend of his in the neighborhood who they know has a key to his house, just as he has one to his, and he’d find him, maybe alive, maybe dead. He worries about all of that. Also what it’d do to his daughters if he died that way. Aren’t most of these good reasons to go to a therapist and talk about? Probably. He’d think so. He doesn’t know.

One thing he doesn’t need to go to a therapist for is his work. He’s never had a writer’s block for more than two days or three, if you could call that a block, and it only seems to happen after he’s finished something he’s been working on a long time and is having trouble starting a new work. But he knows something always comes, so it’s never really a problem. It was more of a problem for the first ten years of his writing, which means up till about forty years ago, when he didn’t know something would always come. He writes every day, always gets something done. Page a day, most times; 300 pages a year, on average, enough for a book if he was writing a short one. That publishers, for the most part — major publishers and the prestigious small ones — aren’t interested in his work, also doesn’t bother him. Or bother him enough to stop him from writing for even a single day or slow him down. He still has a good time writing. Finds it interesting, what he writes: the contents and different styles and so on. He likes what he’s doing — always has — is what he’s saying, or maybe repeating. Likes what he writes. Though maybe, because he feels so good about his work, that that’s something that should be talked about with the therapist. Why? Is that a problem? He has a high opinion of his work, maybe higher than it deserves, and a fairly low opinion of the fiction of just about every living writer he’s read except for a couple in Latin America and one in Europe and maybe a few from some other places, or one or two of their books, but he doesn’t say so about any of that either. He never says anything good about his work to anyone, or never beyond saying something like “Maybe I did okay with that one,” and rarely badmouths another writer’s work, at least a living writer. But maybe he should say to the therapist what he thinks about his own work. “To be honest,” he could say, “since I think that’s what’s expected of me in therapy — absolute honesty,” he doesn’t think his work is getting, or has gotten, the attention and honors it deserves. No, don’t start something that might hurt his writing. That, above everything else, he wants to avoid. Skip the honors and big-time publishing. They really don’t mean much to him. They once might have — thirty years ago, maybe; thirty years ago, definitely — but not now. It’s enough for him just to continue writing and like what he’s writing and getting published, no matter how small and little known the publishing house. The money that comes with major publishing and honors would be nice to get, but not worth getting bitter and upset over and have that affect his writing. Talking about it won’t help his writing — it doesn’t need help, he feels — so what would be the reason to discuss it? So some things he might have to hide from the therapist. Things he knows would hurt his writing if he brought them up, or at least not talk about them till the time comes to. What does he mean by that? He doesn’t know or isn’t sure. It’s obvious he’s confused by the whole thing — conflicted is a word that’s often used in therapy — that he remembers his mother-in-law, a psychotherapist, using a lot — which also might be worth talking about eventually, his conflict over this. One thing he knows is he always feels lousy about himself after he thinks too highly of his writing. So maybe he could talk about that, why he feels that way, or something close to it. But there he goes again. Of mixed minds about it. He should probably only talk about things with the therapist that he’s sure he wants to talk about.