Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

And my bowels, he thinks. The medications I take for a number of things are affecting my bowels and my sleep and my mind too. It’s not as clear and sharp as it used to be before I started taking them, that’s for sure. I feel I’m losing my memory. Maybe that has nothing to do with my illness or disease, and it’s just age. But sometimes it takes me a week to remember something that used to come to me instantly. For instance, I was talking to my older daughter on the phone two weeks back or so. I said “Do you remember the name of the opera we all went to at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore? I’d say about fifteen years ago, before you started college. It’s on the tip of my tongue and has been there for a week. It’s in Russian, Tchaikovsky, and your mother’s favorite of all operas.” She said “I never knew its name except probably when we went to see it. I do remember a grand ball scene and lots of dancing and that the scenery was huge and pretty and the opera was very long and I wanted to go home before it ended.” “Funny what one remembers,” I said. “And it’s not Prince Igor . That’s Borodin, if that is an opera and not a ballet. But something with royalty in it, I think. It’s not Boris Gudunov , either, which is about a czar, and another of your mother’s favorites. I’ll remember it, though it’s been killing me that I can’t. For some reason I feel my mind depends on it.” She said “Don’t be silly, Daddy. Everybody forgets.” It took me another week to remember it was Eugene Onegin . I could have looked it up online or in the encyclopedia of music book we have, but that would have been too easy. I wanted to remember it as sort of a memory test and to prove something, but it did take me two weeks and that worries me.

Face it, he thinks, I’m getting worse in almost every possible way. I know it and I know my daughters know it, but they don’t want to say. It’s why they call me every night and come down from New York every two to three weeks, or why I think they do. And it’s why I never go to New York. I never go anywhere. My joke is I never leave Baltimore County. That’s an exaggeration. I go to Baltimore city about once a month, cross the border between the city and the county to go to a Whole Foods or the Starbucks next door to it. But that’s as far as I go. I never go deep into the city unless I’m with my daughters and we go to a movie or restaurant or museum there. I feel uneasy when I’m alone and not near my home. Not near my desk and my bed to rest or take a nap on whenever I want to. Not near my typewriter, even though I don’t type anywhere near as well as I used to. Oh, what’s the difference? I still type, with two fingers now instead of the three a year ago and the four a year before that. So I’m getting very anxious about my health. Not my health: my sickness, my illness, my disease. What it’s doing to me. What it’s going to do. And there’s no cure, and the medication, my doctor says, only works up to a point, was the way I think he put it. But there are other medications I can take for it, he said, if the one I’m taking stops being effective. “But one medicine at a time,” he said, “at least for the same illness.” So he refers to it as an illness too. I just realized that.

I used to run, he thinks. Mornings, almost always, and before I had breakfast. Up, wash, exercise, dress, and out I’d go. If my wife was still in bed, and this was after she got sick, I’d check up on her, see that she was all right, and then leave. Three to four miles a day, and I did this almost every day for about thirty years. Snow, rain, bitter cold; nothing but ice coating the streets stopped me, though they might have slowed me down, and when it was that icy outside I ran in place at home for twenty minutes or more. I was as compulsive about running as I am about writing and have been about a number of other things. Then, starting a few years ago: two to three miles a day and then just two and then one and then even less than that and then no running. My legs couldn’t do it anymore. Or something couldn’t. So I started to walk a couple of miles a day. Maybe just a mile. First a fast walk — what might be considered a power walk, but that didn’t last long. When I couldn’t do that anymore, then a normal walk for about a mile. Then half that and so on, till I could only walk about five hundred feet, and not every day. I also tried to take a second walk early evening, if it wasn’t too hot, but by that time my back and leg hurt so much that I could barely make it to my mailbox and back, a total of about a hundred feet. So what am I saying? What I’ve been saying. I’m getting worse in almost every way but I don’t want to go to the doctor to be told so. Of course I’ll have to eventually go to him, but what will I do if the new medicine he prescribes for my condition — my illness, my sickness, my disease — doesn’t slow it down for even a little, or does but just a little though not for long? And the medicine after that does nothing, or very little, but even for a shorter time, and so on. Till it ends up where no medicine works and I can’t do very much for myself. Where my hands and feet are practically useless. Where I can’t get around by myself except in the house, and there mostly by holding on to things as best as I can — grab bars, tables, chairs, walls — as I move. Where even a walker doesn’t help much. I won’t be able to shop for myself. Maybe not even dress myself. Brush my teeth, hold a fork or spoon, cut my food with a knife, turn a book page, get off the toilet ten times a day, clean myself up. Where someone needs to help me with almost everything. I know what it’s like from my wife. Get her in bed, out of bed, down for a nap if she didn’t want to do it in her wheelchair, hold the glass or straw to her lips. She hated all of it. Seated at the computer most of the day. Same will happen to me. At my typewriter, not that I’ll be able to peck anything out on it by then. Learn how to use her old computer for that, or even a new one? Oh, yeah, I can just see myself doing that. Voice-activation system, as she tried to do for her work? Took her two years of private instruction to learn how to use it where she got something done. And it still didn’t work half the time, and that drove her nuts. She’d cry and cry and I’d rush into her study. Forget it. And I couldn’t expect my daughters to do for me even half the things I did for her. They’re my children; she was my wife. So what’ll happen to me then? An assisted-living facility? A nursing home? One of those? Both, if there’s a difference between them. Oh, no. Not for me. Not so long as I can do something about it. If I can’t, then I think I’d go the same way she did. No food, water, nutrition or medicine or fake air through machines of any sort. But my hands. They’re all right now, aren’t they? No stiffness or pain? I open and close them several times and they seem fine. See how it goes when you don’t think of them? Same with my legs. Feet feel a little cold, but no pain anywhere, and I stand. Back, too. Well, it never hurt all the time. And my mind? It’s all right, right? It’s not in that bad a shape. Quick, a test: What are the three early Stravinsky ballets, starting with the one I think was first performed in 1910? Yeah, 1910. And that one I almost always get. The Firebird . The other two, 1911 through 1913, I almost always forget when I try to think of them all as three. Sometimes takes me a couple of days to come up with those two, if I don’t look them up. Petrushka and The Rite of Spring . And if I need another one as proof of how well my mind’s working, and I never thought of them as four: Pulcinella , in 1920 I’m almost sure. And even another one: Agon , ’56 or ’57—anyway, when I was still in college and saw it done several times at the City Center on West 55th Street, by the New York City Ballet. Allegra Kent, the principal dancer. I think I went to this ballet, alone or with friends, just to see her, not that I could see much from so far up in the second balcony or if I managed to sneak down to the first. She was such a beauty, and what a dancer, and she was my age — if I remember, a year younger.