What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  “Seven,” I said, and she said “Oh,” and shut her eyes for another ten minutes. Then we got up, washed and dressed and started preparing breakfast.

  “I had an incredibly creepy dream this morning,” I said at the table as she set before me my Wednesday breakfast of poached eggs on buttered toast and half a tomato. “A man hit me so hard that it feels as if my head still aches.”

  “Sounds like the dream you had two nights ago, or was it three?”

  Three. But this time I was shot. Twice in the stomach and once in the head.”

  “Ug,” she said, “I’m glad I sleep peacefully,” and wrapped my lunch sandwich in aluminum foil and stuck it in a paper bag with an apple and lots of vegetables. “You’ll be late.”

  I kissed her on the lips goodbye. “Be careful,” she said. “And please don’t run for the local again. I don’t want you getting another heart seizure, as this place gets very lonely without you.”

  I was sort of hustling like a marathon walker to the subway entrance when a man said “Like to win a free ticket abroad just by answering a few questions, sir?” I stopped and this well-dressed young man approached me carrying a briefcase. “I’m with the Transiberian Travel Service,” he said, “and we’re conducting a very essential poll.” I told him I was in a hurry to get to work, but remembering my wife’s advice on the subject and curious about the free trip abroad, I told him I could spare only a minute. “Wonderful,” he said, and reached into his briefcase for what he said was his short question and answer sheet concerning potential intercontinental travelers and transoceanic flights and pulled out a very rusty Luger.

  “In broad daylight?” I said, and he said nobody was around but if someone did come by before I stopped stalling and handed over my wallet, he’d be forced to shoot me. “You can’t do that; this is supposed to be a civilized society. Hasn’t there been enough violence in the world already?” Just then a woman turned the corner and headed our way. I quickly reached for my billfold to give the man, but he said “Too late.” He pulled the trigger; the bullet grazed my arm. I begged him not to shoot again, but a bullet tore through my throat. The man ran off. I was on the ground, dying, no doubt. A few people kneeled and stood above me, first asking me and then one another what they could do to help. Then two hands stroked my head and the voice belonging to them said that someone had gone to call for an ambulance. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you’ll come out of this alive. I’ve witnessed three street shootings this year and the victim has always lived,” and I passed out.

  The radio alarm buzzed. It was 7:50—fifteen minutes later than I usually got up. “Jan,” I said, “it’s 7:50. You set the alarm for too late again. Get up; I’ve barely a half hour to get out of the house.”

  “I think you were the one who said it,” she said, turning over and shutting her eyes.

  I touched her back; she felt so soft and warm. I snuggled into her from behind and fondled her backside.

  “You feel so soft and warm,” I said.

  “Can I sleep another five minutes?”

  “You can if you let me lie close to you like this. In fact, sleep for another hour. I’ll make sure Frilly’s all right and get out of the house by myself.”

  “You’re a love,” she said, and made a kissing sound. I lay close to her for a few minutes. Then I got up, checked our baby and saw she was safe and asleep, made two poached eggs on buttered toast, a dish Jan always complained was too much trouble making for breakfast—and after sticking a container of yogurt and dietetic cookies into my attaché case for lunch and again peeking into the baby’s room to see that she was all right, I left the house.

  I started down our quiet suburban street to Charlie Ravage’s house at the corner, as this was his day to drive us to town. “Say, Mr. Greene,” a man said, signaling me from the passenger seat of an expensive new car, “do you remember me? I used to be your next-door neighbor in Lumpertville—old fat man Sachs.” I walked to his car and told him his name was as unfamiliar as his face, but maybe he’d gotten a little thinner since the time I was supposed to have known him.

  “I’ve actually gained twenty pounds.” He opened the door and pointed at me what looked like a sawed-off shotgun and invited me to step inside the car for a business conference, “No fuss,” he said, “and you’ll be able to leave with your good health intact.”

  “How’d you know my name and where I used to live?” I said, sitting beside him when he moved over.

  “Oh, Mr. Greene, I’ve watched you numerous times coming out of your garish pink house, all fresh with your darling wife’s adoring smells still on you and with your low-caloric breakfast in your gut. I know all your history and comfortable habits, especially the precise time you leave for work every day. Eight-fifteen, am I right?” and I nodded and asked what he had in mind doing with me. “You’re the vice-president of the town’s most prominent bank, aren’t you?” and then described the relatively simple bankrobbing plan he’d devised. He would drive me to town, I’d get the bank guard to open the front door, he’d follow me in, disarm the guard, I’d open the bank’s safe and in a matter of minutes and before the bank officially opened, he’d be gone with about fifty thousand dollars in untraceable cash. “Not bad for a half morning’s work, wouldn’t you say?”

  We drove to town. I was let in the bank, George the guard was disarmed, bound and gagged. I opened the safe, the man took all the paper cash in it and then bound and gagged me. I could have set off one of the many hidden alarms before I was tied up, but the chance of saving the bank thousands of insured dollars and getting a bonus if not a promotion wasn’t worth the risk of being shot. Just as the thief was about to leave through the only side door, George freed himself and ducked behind the tellers’ counter. The alarm went off; the entire bank lit up, and customers waiting outside for the bank to open began banging on the windows and door. The man tried the side door, but because of the alarm all the exits were automatically locked from the outside. He shot out a window and was about to leap through the opening when a police car pulled up in front. He reloaded the gun, said This is what you get for hiring loyal but dumb bank guards,” and while I pleaded for him not to shoot by shaking my head from side to side, he pulled the trigger and in an instant it seemed I’d lost my chest. Someone ungagged and untied me, through darkening eyes I watched the man gassed out of the president’s office and taken away; then I was lifted onto a gurney and slid into an ambulance. I was given blood, and just before an oxygen mask was put over my face I asked the doctor if she thought I would live.

  “No question about it,” she said, but by the tone of her voice and the look of the attendant next to her, I knew I’d never reach the hospital alive.

  “Dad,” someone said—my son or daughter. “Dad, get up.” It was Ford, my six-year-old son, who since his mother died four months ago when some madman seated behind her in a movie theater shot her, woke me up every morning. “It’s past eight. Dad, and you’re going to miss your first class.”

  “Eight? Why didn’t you wake me sooner?”

  “My alarm didn’t go off. You set it wrong again last night. But Frilly’s already making your breakfast.”

  Frilly, my ten-year-old daughter and a lookalike for her beautiful mom, kissed me when I came into the kitchen. My regular workday breakfast was on the table. Two five-minute eggs, just as I liked them, not boiled for five minutes but spooned into the saucepan and covered after the gas under the boiling water had been turned off, and corn muffins that Frilly had made the previous night. “Get your math homework done?” I said, and she said “Math’s a snap. I can whip through it in the short ride to school.”

  The school bus honked twice, and the kids kissed me goodbye, I walked them to the bus, told them I hoped they’d have a gloriously happy day at school and that tonight we were going to dine out fancy for a change and later catch the concert at Civic Aud.

  “Morning, Mr. Greene,” the driver said, and I said “Morning, Will; great day out,” and waved at
my children waving at me till the bus was out of sight. I got my briefcase, which Frilly had laid out for me with my lecture notes and a bag lunch inside, and rode to campus on my bike. The air was chillier than I was dressed for and I was sorry I hadn’t taken a sweater, which I usually throw over my shoulders and tie the sleeves at my chest.

  “Cooler today,” Sam Rainbow said, cycling past me from the opposite direction and wearing a sheepherder’s coat.

  “Hiya, Professor Greene,” one of my former grad students said, a pretty, intelligent young woman in a short skirt and high boots. She had such gorgeous legs. I stopped, said “How are you, Roz? Magnificent morning, isn’t it? Listen, if you’re not in a hurry, how about a quick coffee with me in the campus lounge?” and she’d just said she’d love to when I heard a barrage of gunshots and she flopped to the ground.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “not again,” as people were dropping all around me, some hit by bullets, others dodging behind bushes, cars and trees. Roz had been shot in the head, part of her brains on my sleeve. There was nothing I could do for her, and I was still out in the open. I ran for a car parked about thirty feet away, but the sniper in one of the top floor windows of the Arts and Sciences building cut me down with a bullet in the foot, and while I was crawling the last few feet to the car, another bullet in my back. I regained consciousness after the shooting had ended. “We got him,” a man told me. “Some overpressured poly sci student who went nuts. Don’t know how many got hit, but that dead bastard sure’ll serve a good lesson for anyone else thinking of using a repeater against innocent people like that. And don’t fret about yourself, Professor. Doctors here say you’ll be up and walking again in a matter of weeks,” which, when I began heaving blood and feeling as sick as I ever felt in my life, I knew was a lie. “Have somebody pick my kids up at school,” I said, and he said “Sure, sir, anything you wish.”

  “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Daddy, happy birthday to you.”

  That was what I woke up to this morning after all those disturbing dreams. My wife and two kids singing the happy birthday ditty on my fortieth. Thank you,” I said. Thank you one and all for reminding me what I most didn’t want to be reminded of. And now, if you can bear with more of my impoliteness, I have to hurry and get dressed.”

  I took off my pajamas and grabbed my underpants. “Aren’t you going to shower first?” Ford said, and I said “Why? Do I smell so bad that you don’t think I can wait till I get home tonight?”

  “It’s not that. We’re all meeting you at your studio later where Grandpa’s coming to treat us to dinner and a show.”

  “Has that been agreed to by your mother?”

  Jan said “On your birthday, Saul, you know your father always takes charge.”

  “Agreed, then,” and I got in the shower. My family undressed and got in with me, and though it was crowded and we each did our share of horsing around under the spray, we did manage to get our bodies soaped, and Frilly even got in a shampoo.

  We sat at the kitchen table for breakfast. Frilly lit candles, and when I said “At breakfast?” she said “It’s a special occasion, did you forget?” and handed me a box wrapped with the front page of today’s newspaper and decorated with quartermoons and tentacled suns and stars. Inside were two nylon brushes, a number 14 and 17, which I needed badly. I hadn’t sold a painting in months and I was again starting to put the touch on my closest friends. Ford gave me a pound tube of Mars black and Jan presented me with twenty-five yards of the best unprimed duck canvas. “You’re all saints,” I said, “and I worship you as others might worship the great god Moolah, but now I gotta get going and live up to your faith in me.”

  They walked me outside. I unchained my motor scooter from the building’s fence, hugged my family and headed for my studio, which was in a municipal-run building of artists’ lofts in the poorest section of town.

  Once there, I promptly began the completion of a huge painting I was calling The Birth of the Earth,” and was working feverishly, laying on heavy long strokes of the Mars black with my new 17 brush, when one of the other artists in the building knocked on my door and said I was wanted on the pay phone downstairs.

  It was Jan, saying don’t worry, everything will be all right, I should prepare myself for some pretty rough though not totally catastrophic news—while I was practically screaming for her to come out with it already—but a boy had entered my father’s junior high school classroom without a late pass and when my father told him to go to the guidance office to get one, the boy shot him in the hip. “But Dad’s okay,” she said. “He’s going to live; be thankful for that,” but my knees wobbled and I fell back against the wall and slid down to the floor. She said, when I told her where I was sitting, to stop acting like a wimp and meet her at the hospital right away.

  I went outside and signaled for a cab. One stopped, and I ran to it, but a man beat me to the door. I told him that not only had I hailed the cab first but that it was possibly a dying father I was going to see, and he took out a handgun from a concealed shoulder holster. I feinted left, sprinted right, but the man shot me in the leg and, after I bounced off a car fender to the street, he stared straight down at my face and cursed me before putting a bullet into my head.

  “Saul, Saul, what are you still lying there for? You have to get up,” my wife said, leaning over me and looking distressed. Had I really survived? I thought. Was I in a hospital or still on the street? “And what about Dad?” I said.

  “What about him? Because if you aren’t out of bed and dressed in half an hour, we’ll miss the 11:15 to Morganburg Lake, and the next train doesn’t leave till three.”

  I got up, began dressing, told Jan about these scary repetitive dreams I had overnight, and she said the rich food she made for dinner last night must have affected me. “My stomach didn’t feel too good either when I woke up.” I asked if the kids were all right and she said “Sure, why shouldn’t they be?” I didn’t want to alarm her with the very real fear the dreams had left in me, so I said “Because of the food. How are they feeling?”

  Those two? They’ve stomachs like a shark’s. That’s because theirs haven’t been tampered with years of cocktails and cognacs.”

  We all sat down for breakfast. Frilly already had her swimsuit on under her sundress, and Ford, while eating, was stuffing his school-bag with books, sports equipment, and little action figures. Then we cabbed to the station and boarded the train.

  I was looking out the train window at the fields and farms we passed and feeling a lot more peaceful than I had this morning, when a woman shrieked at the front of the car. Another woman screamed, a man yelled “Turn the damn thing up,” a radio was made louder and a newscaster, trying to hold back his sobs, said There’s no uncertainty about it now: Senator Booker Maulson, without question the nation’s leading spokesman for the underprivileged and poor and its most ardent activist for world peace, was shot in the back of the head while making an Independence Day speech to a picnicking crowd of thousands.”

  “God help us,” Jan said, and started crying. Frilly broke down also, and Ford pulled my arm and asked why everyone was so excited.

  I went to the front of the car where most of the passengers had gathered around the radio. The newscaster said Maulson was killed instantly and his murderer beaten to death before police could pry him away from the outraged mob. Many of the people in the car were now weeping uncontrollably. The woman beside me said she was sure Maulson’s murder was part of a worldwide conspiracy: “People just don’t want peace, that’s all.” Two men who seemed to be traveling together told her Maulson had got what he’d been asking for, with all his peace marches and speeches against big business and the military and war. The man holding the radio said these men were talking cruelly and stupidly, and out of respect for Senator Maulson, his grieving family and the millions of people around the world who will mourn his death, they should shut their mouths. The men said they didn’t have to, this was still a dem
ocratic country where freedom of speech was accepted as nearly a sacrament, and this man was an ignorant liberal patsy who maybe ought to be shot in the head himself. The man handed the radio to his son and jumped at the two men. He knocked one of them to the floor and kicked him in the face and was beating up the other one with his fists when the man on the floor shot him in the back.

  I pulled the emergency cord. The train stopped and I led my family to the rear of the car, where I forced open the door and we jumped out. We’d follow the tracks to the last station we passed, about six miles away, and from there take a train back to the city. Then, Jan and I would decide on doing one or two things: buying a used car and finding a quiet, remote part of the country to live and work in, or using all our savings to fly across the ocean and settle in a much safer and saner land.

  We’d walked a few miles when Jan said we should stop: she and the kids were exhausted. We rested on a shady hill near the tracks. I felt tired and tried to fight off sleep because of the dreams I might have, but I soon dozed off. Someone was shooting BB holes through the windows of our new house. “Come on out or we’re going to come in and drag you out,” a boy yelled through a bullhorn.

  The telephone rang. The woman who answered my hello said They’ve just killed your son at school, and because he’s the son of yours, we’re all glad.”

  Our neighbor, Mrs. Fleishman, yelled from her window across the narrow airshaft. “Two army men smashed down our door and shot Mr. Fleishman and then threw him down the stairwell. Help me, call the police.”

  I called the police. The officer said Mr. Fleishman deserved to be killed and so did I. “Without doubt, Mr. Greene, your family’s next. None of you people can think you’re safe anymore,” and when I asked for his badge number, he said “Shove It Up, Nine One One.”