Late Stories

by Stephen Dixon

  The Dead

  Bartok’s dead. Britten’s dead. Webern’s dead. Berg’s dead. Górecki’s dead. Copland’s dead. Messiaen’s dead. Bernhard’s dead. Beckett’s dead. Joyce is dead. Nabokov’s dead. Mann’s dead. de Ghelderode’s dead. Berryman’s dead. Lowell’s dead. Williams is dead. Roethke’s dead. Who of the rest of the greats isn’t dead? The past century. The start of this century. Bacon’s dead. De Kooning’s dead. Rothko’s dead. Ensor’s dead. Picasso’s dead. Braque’s dead. Apollinaire’s dead. Maybe all the greats are dead. My last brother will be dead. My two other brothers are dead. Robert. Merrill. My last two sisters will be dead. Madeline’s dead. My parents are dead. My wife’s dead. Her parents are dead. Their relatives in Europe are long dead. My two best friends are dead. I lie on a hospital bed. I can’t get up. I can’t turn over. I’m stuck to the bed by wires and tubes. I can’t get comfortable and I feel so hopeless and I’m in such pain that I almost want to be dead. I ring for the nurse. Usually someone responds. This time no one answers. I wait. I don’t want to antagonize them. I ring again. What will I say? “Make me dead?” “Yes?” “Pain medication, please.” “I’ll tell your nurse.” “I need it badly.” “I’ll tell your nurse.” She comes. “Pain level on a grade from one to ten?” “Nine.” I want to say “ten” but there’s got to be a pain worse than mine. She gives me the medication through my I.V. I fall asleep. When I awake I begin to hallucinate. Too much pain medication, they’ve said. What can I do? It’s the only way to stop the pain and sleep. The room’s become a prison cell. Bars on my windows and door. Then it’s an asylum cell. No bars; just extra thick glass. People pass. I hear low voices. “This,” they say, and “That.” I’ve got to get out of here. I yell for help. People keep passing my room both ways but no one seems to hear me or turns to my glass door. They all wear white doctor outfits. Gowns. Robes. Whatever they’re called, but very white and clean. Lab coats, maybe. Hugging clipboards to their chests. “This,” they say. “That.” Then some muttering and they’re gone. “Help,” I yell. “I need help. I’m going to defecate in my bed.” They continue to walk past. “Okay,” I say, “I’m going to shit in my bed.” Dummy, I think; the nurse. I ring for her. I can barely manage the little box. The summoning device. Whatever it’s called. The thing that turns the TV on and off and raises and lowers the two ends of the bed. I don’t know what anything’s called anymore. Not even what brought me in here. Bowel interruption. Obstruction. Even if I got the right term, two operations after I got here, I don’t even know what it is. “Yes?” “Thank God. Pain medication, please.” “I’ll tell your nurse.” She comes. “It should be no more than every four hours. But we’re ten minutes away, so close enough.” “Thanks. And it must mean I’ve slept most of the last four hours. That’s good. More I sleep, the better. And I think I need changing.” She looks. “You’re imagining it. Do you need to go now?” “No. I don’t want to sit on it for the next hour. And I haven’t eaten anything for days, so there’s probably nothing there.” I fall asleep. I dream I’m being devoured by lions. I fight to get out of the dream and wake up. So what was that all about? Literary lions? Ah, who cares for interpretations. I close my eyes and hear voices. I open my eyes and see people in white smocks walking past, all of them holding clipboards. “Build,” they say. “Don’t build.” “Then cut.” “Okay.” I’ve got to get out of here. Dreams, awake, there’s always something to be afraid of. The doctor the other day, who was just a resident making the rounds and not even my regular doctor, who said he read my x-rays and I might have to have a bag outside my stomach to collect my shit. If I’m to die, and I’d want to if I had to have one of those bags put in, let me die in my own bed with a big overdose of whatever we got there or they send me home with. And if I’m to live, I need a less frightening room. I want to call my daughters but I can’t find my cell phone. They recharged it today and said they put it in a place I could easily reach, but I don’t see it. I feel around me. There’s the summoning device. A handkerchief. A pen. I’ll say I know it’s late but I’m going crazy and you have to get me another room. “It’s the drugs. But without them I’m even in worse shape. I’m probably not making much sense,” I’ll say, “but I’m hearing voices. Other people’s voices. And seeing people walk past my room who are either dead or intentionally ignoring me, but they never answer my cries for help. If I don’t get another room, I’ll pull all the wires and tubes out of me, even the Foley, no matter how much that might hurt, and escape.” But don’t scare them or wake them up. They’ve been so good to you, flying in from different distant cities and staying in your room eight to ten hours a day. Reading to you, though you didn’t want to tell them you didn’t want to be read to. Holding your hand and doing things like putting damp washcloths on your forehead, though you didn’t want those either. Angels, you’ve called them; so let your angels sleep. And you’re not in that much pain now. Comes more often than it goes. And the muttering voices have stopped and no one’s walking past your room but the regular nurses and aides, who’d come if you called out for them. Try to sleep. Time will go faster. I pull the covers up to my chin. I’m warm but not too warm. I’m comfortable. My body feels normal. I fall asleep. I dream I’m in Tokyo, where I’d always wanted to go, but got there without having to take a plane. I wake up and it’s the beginning of daylight. Dusk. Dawn. What’s it called again? I should know. That one’s so easy. Words are what I do. But I’m in pain again, which always makes me confused. I ring the call button. That’s what it is. Call button, call button; remember it. “Yes?” “Pain medication, please.” “I’ll tell your nurse.” A different one comes. “Hi. I’m Martha. Your tech’s Cindy. The new shift.” She erases from a white board on the wall the names and phone extensions of the previous nurse and tech and with a marker writes their own. “You slept poorly, your last nurse said. Lots of agitation and talk. Like you wanted a hot thermal bath. Sorry, fella. We don’t have that here. And how dragons were out to get you and something about your arms being cut off at the elbows by a sword. And you perspired something awful. She had to wipe you off.” “I don’t remember any of it. Well, dreams.” “Because of all that, I want to hold off giving you the pain medication as long as I can. Still hurting?” “Level nine or eight.” “Think you can tolerate it for another half hour? And you could use a fresh gown.” She takes off my wet one and puts a new one on. “Anything else you need?” “My cell phone.” “You’ve been sleeping on it,” and she pulls it out from under my arm. She goes. Poulenc’s dead. Prokofiev’s dead. Mahler’s dead. Granados is dead. Did I say Bartok’s dead? Pärt’s not dead. Who else isn’t dead? Tanizaki’s dead. Solzhenitsyn’s dead. Hamsun’s dead. Borges is dead. Conrad’s dead. Konrad’s not dead. Did Lessing recently die? The Italian writer whose first name starts with a D and who in one book wrote too much like Kafka is dead. Kafka, of course, is dead. Cummings is dead. Stevens is dead. Auden’s dead. Yeats is dead. Pollack’s dead. Leger’s dead. Kadinsky’s dead. Malevich is dead. Moore, Maillol and Matisse are dead. My pain isn’t dead. I shit in my head. I mean in my bed. Suddenly it came. I piss into a catheter, so there I’m okay. I want to clean myself up in the bathroom. I want to drink a glassful of icewater. I want to stand up and walk out of here. I press the call button. “Yes?” “I’m sorry, but I need serious cleaning up. And I presume new bedding and a new gown and my bed remade. I’m lying in slime. I’m sweating like a pig. I need the thermostat lowered. Please have someone come right away.” “I’ll tell your tech.” A young woman comes. Almost a girl. She has a new gown for me and sheets and washrags and a basin of water. “Oh, I see you already have my name on your board.” “You’re the tech? I’m sorry for the mess I made.” “I’m actually a nurse in training but a tech today. So let’s have a look. Roll over on your side.” I grab the side rail and pull myself up. “I don’t know where it came from. I haven’t eaten for a week. Nor drunk anything. All the nourishment and liquid I get comes from ice chips and what’s in those bags. And this time it’s n
ot my imagination and did I defecate?” “In abundance. Won’t take a minute.” She takes off my gown, wipes and washes and dries me and shakes a can of baby powder over my behind. “Smells nice, doesn’t it. It’s one of my favorites.” “This must be awful for you. Cleaning up an old man. It made me hesitant to even call for you, but I had to. I’m locked in here.” “Don’t worry. I’m used to it. And when I become a full-fledged nurse in a year, I’ll mostly have a tech doing it for me. You have an abscess in your anus. Has your doctor or one of your nurses spoken about it?” “Nothing.” “It must hurt and you don’t want the infection getting worse. Tell them.” She puts a new gown on me and then changes the sheets with me in the bed. “It’s a wonderful profession, nursing. Look at the good work you do. I had to go into one that helps no one.” “And what’s that?” “Writing.” “I don’t read much myself. I’m more interested in the sciences.” “Good for you. Keep at it. Every man should have as a wife one who is or once was a nurse. That’s not a proposal. I was just thinking. Once you get sick the way I did, it’d be so comforting to know I could be taken care of like this by my wife, but at home. My wife’s dead.” “I’m sorry.” “Two years and a month. Greatest loss of my life.” “I can imagine. There, you’re as clean as new. And you smell nice too.” “Thank you again. As I said, you do wonderful work. Can you give me something for my pain now?” “The nurse will have to do that. I’m not allowed. Ring for her.” “If I have another accident, and you never know, I hope it’s another tech who takes care of it. I’d hate for you to have to do it again. Once, at least in a short period of time, should be enough.” “Honestly, I’m good with it. I’m on for twelve hours and it’s one of the things I’m here to do.” She goes. I ring. “Yes?” “Pain medication, please.” “Your nurse is very busy with another patient, but I’ll tell her.” “Isn’t there another nurse who can give it to me?” “It’s very busy out here. Sometimes it gets like this, patients who need immediate attention all at the same time. I’ll get you a nurse as soon as I can.” Hemingway’s dead. Faulkner’s dead. Paley’s dead. Sebald’s dead. Lowry’s dead. Camus’s dead. Eliot’s dead. Mandelstam’s dead. Akhmatova’s dead. O’Neill’s dead. Williams is dead. Miller’s dead. Hopper’s dead. Giacometti’s dead. Klee’s dead. Miro’s dead. Sheeler’s dead. Soutine’s dead. Arp’s dead. Sibelius is dead. Strauss is dead. Hovhaness is dead. Vaughan Williams is dead. I have to shit again. I need a basin. Whatever that thing is to put under me in bed. It’s comparable to a urinal, but for the behind. Not a chamber pot. I ring. Nobody answers. I ring and ring. “I told you, sir. All the nurses on the floor are tied up with other patients. One will attend to you soon as she can.” “But this is for a bowel movement. I don’t want to do it again in my bed. All I’m asking for is that thing that goes under me while I’m lying here.” “A bedpan?” “A bedpan, yes. You can get a tech to do it. But not the same one; Cindy. She already did it once, and expertly, but I made a mess and I don’t want her to go through that again.” “You don’t get a choice, sir. If she’s available, I’ll get her. And if not, someone else.” If it wasn’t for my daughters, I’d like to be dead. But I can’t have them going through their other parent dying so soon after the first. A different tech comes, gets the bedpan out of the bottom drawer of my side table, “Raise yourself,” and puts it under me just in time. “At least this time I’m not making a big mess in bed for you to clean up as I did with my regular tech.” “There’s always something that makes life look a little brighter. Think you’re done?” “No.” “Ring for me when you are. It’s a crazy house out there today, worse for the nurses than the techs, so one of us should come.” “Thanks.” Bergman, Fellini, Antonini, Kurosawa, Kieślowski—all dead. And Babel. How could I have left out Babel? Babel’s dead.

  On or Along the Way

  The announcer on the classical music radio station says the next piece will be a symphonic poem, “or what’s also called a tone poem,” by Rachmaninoff. The title is “The Rock,” and the piece is based on a short story by Chekhov called “Along the Way.” The story, she says, is about an elderly destitute man and a rich young woman who meet at an inn during a blizzard. “They’re sort of thrown together in a room the innkeeper calls ‘The Traveler,’ since it’s reserved for travelers passing through or stranded there.” The man and woman talk for hours and gradually warm to each other. “There’s a chance—one could even say a hope—they could become good friends or, at the very least, traveling companions for the rest of their journey. But the woman leaves the next morning in a sledge that the man, standing in the road, follows with his eyes till it disappears. He eventually begins to look like a huge rock covered by snow,” she says, “hence the title.” He doesn’t know the story, but the ending is a familiar one for Chekhov. Two people from vastly different backgrounds or economic circumstances or both who meet for the first time and talk intimately together, often after having lived in the same district their entire lives and known about each other for years, and whose lives … Well, there’s a possibility that after their first meeting they could come together … their lives could … even marry, or help each other in some way … but … Anyway, what seemed promising suddenly stops, usually because one of them doesn’t say something to keep the other from going, or the weather’s cleared or the wheel or axle of one of their carts has been fixed or the obstacle in the road’s been removed, and they go their separate ways, with little chance they’ll meet or speak to each other again. He was never good at summarizing stories, not even his own. But the ending to this story, from what the announcer said, is one Chekhov used several times in a similar way, and maybe a lot more than that, since he’s read only about fifty of the 568 stories and sketches his wife said Chekhov wrote. The Rachmaninoff piece comes on. For the last minute or so there was an announcement for a free lieder concert at the music academy downtown and a recorded ad for this radio station saying sixty percent of its budget comes from listener membership contributions, “so won’t you take a few minutes of your time and become a member by dialing the following phone number or pledging online?” He listens to the music for a minute, doesn’t particularly like it, then doesn’t like it at all and turns the radio off. Sometimes what to him is awful music can be depressing. This station plays a lot of it, most of it in the morning till around ten—oompah marches, schmaltzy waltzes—although it plays a lot of good music too. As for becoming a member, he and his wife have been one for about twenty-five years, though he now takes the senior citizen membership. But the story. If his wife were here he’d ask her about the Rachmaninoff piece. She’s the Chekhov expert. His stories are what she did her master’s and doctorate on: her thesis on the beginnings of his stories—about twenty of them—and her dissertation on the endings: ten. He’d say “Do you know of a Chekhov story called ‘Along the Way’? I don’t. And how can a symphonic tone poem, which is what I always called them, be based on a short story? Especially one with a plot like what the announcer gave, for we’re not talking opera here, which seems mostly like a long conversation between a man and woman in an inn and ends with the man standing in what I assume’s deep snow and looking like a rock.” She might say she’s read more than 300 of his stories and sketches in Russian—she once told him that—and about half the 400 or so translated into English, and the one he mentions isn’t familiar to her, although the ending is like several of his. “‘Along the Way’? Are you sure the announcer didn’t give another title? Though there are a number of his stories that have different titles for each new translation of it. ‘Grief,’ for instance, which I’ve also seen as ‘Heartache’ and ‘Misery,’ and in one translation, ‘Sadness,’ though I could be wrong on the last one. I know there are at least four different titles for it in the English versions. If you want, I’ll go through my notes on his short stories, and if I don’t find anything I’ll look at my story collections of his, both in Russian and English. If I find the story in English, do you want to read it?” He’d say “I would, and then maybe you could read
it for the first or second time and we’ll talk about it. That’s always fun. And it won’t be a waste of time. I’ve never read a story of his, except for some of the minor sketches, which aren’t stories, right?—that wasn’t anything but clear and readable and good, and twenty to thirty of them were great. I don’t think I can say that about any other short story writer. Maybe Hemingway and Babel come closest.” So she’d check, she might say, maybe not now but by the end of the day. She has the entire 16– or 17–, or whatever the number is—he could go into her study and find out—volume collection of all of Chekhov’s stories and sketches in Russian. He’ll check the collections of Chekhov’s stories he has in English. He goes into the living room, pulls the three collections off a bookshelf and finds the title “On the Way” on the contents page of one of them. Has to be it. He turns to the last pages of the story. A man, standing in a snowfall “as if rooted to the spot” and gazing at the tracks left by the woman’s sledge-runners, soon begins to resemble a white boulder. He then reads the first few pages of the story, flips through the rest of it and goes into her study with the book. “Hurray, hurray,” he says, “I found it. In an old Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s stories that I think I bought when I was in college, translated by that old reliable, Constance Garnett. Or I think it was by her. It doesn’t say who the translators are, except for around five of the stories on the acknowledgments page, and she’s got all of them but one. Maybe it’s at the end of the book,” and he looks and it isn’t. “But it’s almost got to be by her. The copyright is 1932.” “Nothing out of the usual,” she might say, although she’s gone in to this before. “And other than for the top translators today, who are almost as well known as the authors, things haven’t changed much since. Translators were always poorly paid and often didn’t get credited in the book. But woe is me if the translation didn’t read that well or the story in the original wasn’t that good. Then they got the blame. ‘Sloppily translated’; that type of criticism—the writer, of course, getting off free. Let me see it.” He holds open the story to the first page. “Oh, yes,” she might say, maybe after reading a paragraph or two, “now I remember it. Not one of my favorites, which is why I never taught it in class, but still, as you said, a good story. Two people at an inn during a tremendous snowstorm. Howling wind. He relied on that a lot. Also the storm beating on the windows and roof. If he had a weakness, it was that. The woman’s supposed to be a good deal younger than the man, who’s described as elderly, though he’s in his forties, so maybe only old for that time and place. She’s a landowner, or her brother is, whom she’s traveling to by sledge. The man was once fairly prosperous—I believe he even once owned an estate, or ran one—but for a long time has been down on his luck. At first they don’t seem to be a likely match. But by the end, because they’re so kind and frank and helpful and even solicitous to each other, you think, if you didn’t know Chekhov better, they might team up. I don’t think it ever happens in Chekhov, in his fiction or plays, or it’s rare when it does. He’s traveling with his young daughter. A very nice little girl, but sad, like so many children in his stories—so put upon and being dragged all over the place by her father.” “The synopsis of the story the announcer gave,” he says, “never mentioned the daughter. She probably didn’t have the time, or the program notes for the Rachmaninoff piece didn’t say so.” “If I remember correctly,” she might say, “the woman has some money of her own and is very sympathetic to the young girl and would have made a wonderful surrogate mother to her and a good wife to the man. I forget what happened to the man’s wife. I think she died or deserted him for someone else, and he was left with the daughter. That would explain his descent.” “What I’d like to know is how you make a symphonic tone poem out of a story like that,” he says. “An opera, as I said—a one-act one—I can see, although the snow might be a problem.” “Oh,” she might say, “they know how to do snow on an opera stage. La Bohème, for instance. But I have to confess I don’t really know what a tone poem is.” “I guess what Richard Strauss did in his Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel and so on, and what Sibelius and Smetana did in theirs. A narrative in music, though I’d think it’d be a very difficult form to put across. But we’ll forget the music and read the story—I’ve already started it and I know how it turns out—and talk about it sometime today?” “You finish it and I’ll catch up,” she might say. “I’ll also read it in Russian, if I have the time, in case the translation misses some of it.” “See you later, then,” he says. He goes into their bedroom, plumps up and piles the four bed pillows, her two and his, on top of one another against the wall, and lies back on them and reads the story. After he finishes it he goes back to her study. She’s not there.