What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  Mrs. Fleishman screamed for me again from her window. They’re coming to get me now, Mr. Greene. Hurry, call the police.”

  My wife came into the bedroom. Three state troopers are at the door. Should I let them in?”

  “Of course, let them in. What did we do that we have to be afraid of?” Right after she left the room, I shouted “No, no, Jan, I was wrong.”

  Frilly was being dragged out of the apartment when I ran into the living room. I started after her down the stairs, heard a gun discharge, and covered my eyes. Jan demanded I go to the window to see what had happened. Frilly had been shot by a firing squad as she stood against our building’s courtyard wall.

  “Six soldiers and Marines are at the door,” Jan said. They say if I don’t let them in they’ll shoot the doorknob off.”

  “Where’s my gun,” I said, “where’s that damn gun?” Jan said I didn’t have a gun. “You’ve always been firmly against even holding a gun. You don’t even know how to load or shoot a gun,” and I said “I’ve got one, all right,” and searched frantically through our dresser and pulled out Ford’s cap pistol and aimed it at the front door and pressed the trigger, and real bullets came out, I had firing power in my hand, I kept shooting at the men Jan had said were behind the door and yelling “You’re all dead, you bastards; I’m getting back at every last one of you; you’re all getting exactly what you deserve,” and the door crashed to the floor, the men fell in after it, about ten of them, half of them dressed like soldiers and state troopers and police, and all dead, I had killed them all.

  They’re dragging Frilly away again,” Jan said.

  “Ford, where’s Ford?”

  They’re dragging Ford away also. Stop them, Saul. Do something before I go crazy right here.”

  They’re killing my dog,” Mrs. Fleishman screamed. “Help me, Mr. Greene. They’re murdering my dear Dovetail with bullets.”

  “Dad,” Frilly said, “you’re sweating something awful. Mom’s awake and says we should get a move on.”

  Police cars and ambulances with their sirens going were speeding on the country road paralleling the tracks, no doubt heading to the train we’d been on. I asked Jan how she was and she said “Still sad and frightened but not so tired anymore. I slept also and also had bad dreams.”

  I told her I’d carry her to the station on my shoulders if she wasn’t so tall and big-boned, and she laughed, said she could make it on her own, that maybe we should have stayed to help that poor wounded man and his son, that she supposed we shouldn’t feel too guilty, as there must be several other people on the train, including a doctor and nurse or two, who could do a much better job than us. Then the four of us resumed our walk to the station, calmer now, on probably the worst day of our lives.

  PIERS.

  He dials the California number Chloe sent him last week when she wrote that she and Lucia had finally found an interim home. She also said they’d be driving east for a vacation in a few weeks and was Pennsylvania before or after New York? He hasn’t seen them in three years. He wrote about that last afternoon with them in a story that opens with Chloe saying she’s pregnant by him, though she was living with her husband at the time, and closes around two years later with Chloe and Lucia driving onto the San Francisco freeway on their way back to L.A., though in real life the cities were reversed, as he wanted the story to end with the letter A because it began with the woman’s name Zee. Nobody noticed the alphabetic artifice or the twenty-four others he planted in the story, as they haven’t in the story where all the men have names that could be women’s, like Robin and Dale. Or in another where all the city names start off with Saint, San or Santa and the women are named after ores, alloys, metals, gems and semiprecious stones.

  “Chloe’s on the property but a half mile through the woods from here,” a man says. This long distance? Give me your number and we’ll have her call you back on our magic free telephone.”

  Last commune she lived in was vegetarian, Chloe wrote, and so authoritarian that when they found her and five-year-old Lucia sharing a beef jerky, they forced Chloe to eat six bowls of cold porridge made from organically grown hand-ground oats, and Lucia three. Lucia became so hysterical after the third bowl that she had to be injected with a tranquilizer, and they were evicted the next day. Always mistakes, she wrote in another letter, all but the last he’s included in an epistolary story composed solely of edited versions of the letters she’s written him the past few years, with all the people’s names switched around and the same dates and locations other than for the exact building, RTD and box numbers reproduced.

  This year she fell in love with a junkie, she said in the letter and story, and the year before that with an alcoholic, and she hoped both would say “Ah, at last a woman who turns me on, someone to communicate with, to be with; now I can throw away my junk, my gin, my jive, forget my literary critiques and satirical cartoons and great American hovels and go off with her and start a farm and finally do something worthwhile.” One man she recently met at a psychodrama, the incident he closed the story with. “Everyone was putting him down. So I said to him ‘What you want and need most is to mount a woman and really jam it all the way in there, am I right?’ Everyone hooted at me to sit down, but the man said ‘Lady, you just knocked the nail on the nose. But no chick will let me do it because they think I’m too horny or homely or both.’ ‘Well, let’s first end this pressing need you have, and after that we can get down to the weightier issue of why you think you’re homely or have to be horny, but not in front of these unfeeling creeps.’ The rest of the psychodrama participants began beating up on me when I refused to be mounted in front of them, and when the man tried tearing them off me, they broke a few of his teeth. They only let us go after they’d ripped, bit, scratched and clawed most of our clothes off and some of our hair and skin, and later in my place we went to bed. He turned out to be leery, weirdy, a bad lover, a born loser, I think syphilitic and infanticidal, maybe even sapropelic and homosexual, certainly sadistic, sodomitic, satanic, septic, scabietic, scrofulous, carious, dystonic, dyspeptic, dysuric, the worst. Mistakes. Always mistakes.”

  She calls an hour later. “Piers?”

  “Hey, Chloe, how are you?”

  “Fine, thanks, how are you?”

  “And Lucia?”

  “Fine? Family’s doing fine? You know I’m untalkative on the phone. What do you want?”

  “Um, glum…to hear you say you’re untalkative on the phone?”

  “Very untalkative on the phone.”

  “Lots of untalkatives on the phone.”

  “Can’t we stop with the untalkatives on the phone?”

  “To find out if you’re still writing your journals?”

  “Daily. I was in fact logging today’s account when they said you wanted me to call back, which I also wrote down. And now, as I’m talking to you, I’m trying with my other hand to transcribe everything you said before, as this is an unusual event. So far I’ve the journal question, your untalkatives on the phone, ‘Um, bum,’ and ‘And Lucia?’ and ‘Hey, Chloe, how are you?’ Verbal equivocals and punning abound in your talk, Piers. Despite everything I’ve done and might do in my life, do you think I’ll post-Chloe be known wholly as Lucia’s madonna and your occasional chronicler and letter recipient and one-time mistress as Ka'a’s Milena now is? But we’re starving and haven’t any food and neither does the main house, so we have to drive down the mountain to the supermarket. Lucia wants to speak to you too.”

  “I don’t think I’m prepared.”

  “You need a script? It’s all right—she doesn’t know who you are. And unlike me, she likes to speak to anyone who calls. Here.”

  “But I’ve never really spoken to her before. Help me out if it gets rough. And don’t forget to come back. Chloe? Chloe?”

  “Could you repeat that for my journal jottings starting from ‘to her before’?”

  “Hello,” a girl says.

  “You speak,” he says.

&n
bsp; “I speak. Lucia speaks.”

  “You wouldn’t remember me, Lucia. I’m Piers. Did you, about a month ago, get a postcard from a person named Piers?”

  “Postcard?”

  “Do you know what a postcard is?”

  “He says postcard,” she says away from the phone.

  “Tell him they’re neither made from recycled paper nor nourishing.”

  “Lucia,” he says, “did you ever get a postcard over the phone?”

  “I know a postcard.”

  “Good. Because, you see, I’m a long ways away. So far away from you that if you got on a plane to fly to the city I’m in, it would have to be in the air for many hours to get here. And a regular postcard takes days and days to get to you, so to speed things up I’m going to send you one over the phone instead. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine, then; here goes. A postcard for Lucia over the phone. ‘Dear Lucia.’ That’s your name, right?”

  “Dear Lucia Maria Dorn.”

  “Good. ‘Dear Lucia Maria Dorn. I’m sending you a postcard from a place far away that takes hours to fly in the air to and I hope you like getting my card very much. Love, your friend, Piers.’”

  “What?”

  “I just sent you a postcard over the phone. There’s not much room to write on a postcard, so I had to keep it short.”

  “He’s sending a postcard on the phone.”

  “Lucia, how old are you?”

  “Five.”

  “Five. I see. Do you like to go swimming?”

  “What?”

  “Swimming. Do you like to run through the forests with the animals?”

  “Are no animals here. No pets allowed.”

  “No wild weather-wise animals like woody woodchucks in the woods?”

  “No.”

  “Skunks, chipmunks?”

  “No.”

  “No raccoons, baboons?”

  “No.”

  “Goose, moose? Grouse, mouse? Cockatoos, kangaroos? Chickadees, wallabies?”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  “Well, then, do you like to fly in the sky with the magpie and other birds?”

  “Are no birds here.”

  “Do you like to swim in the ocean with the fish?”

  “No fish.”

  “Sure, there are fish.”

  “He says there are fish here.”

  “In the ocean, I said. I didn’t mean in fishtanks. And you’re near the ocean. I know where La Honda is. I used to live around there. And you and your mom and I once built a whopping bonfire on a beach nearby that burned through the night, but that was too far back for you to remember.”

  “I remember.”

  “You remember the potatoes we roasted? The wieners as big as big bed pillows we toasted?”

  “We have to go for food now.”

  “She’s right, Piers. We gotta go.”

  “She speaks; does she read?”

  “Only the words ‘flash’ and ‘cards’ on the giant flash cards I hold up. ‘Giant’ she only knows by my accompanying drawing of one, and ‘I’ she thinks is a bed on its headboard, and the flash card set doesn’t have a card for ‘hold up’.”

  “I also wanted to know when you’re driving east.”

  “To…know…when…I’m…driving…east. Got you. To that I say ‘I don’t know if I am.’”

  “You can stay with me. There’s enough room.”

  “In the unlikelihood that I even start out from here and then get past my friends in Pennsylvania, I’ll stay with you if I don’t get stuck in New Jersey, yes.”

  “And if I flew out tomorrow on a twenty-seven-day excursion flight, would I be able to stay with you?”

  “My camper’s too small for us all.”

  “No double sleeping bags or available space in the main house?”

  “If he…means…he and I…then I…tell…him—”

  “Stop that.”

  “I’m with someone else.”

  “No one else. You and I. Someone else you can always be with. You and me. Woman and man. Man on woman, woman on man. Side by side, grunt to grunt, stomach to stem, my woman, my man.”

  “To fall in love?”

  “We’ll see. But just to be with me.”

  “For two weeks?”

  Three weeks. Past the excursion flight mini-maximum into the unknown beyond. I don’t know. That’s the unknown. I don’t know if that’s the unknown. What do I know? What I knew? What I know now? That’s it, no. Even what I knew as the well-known turns out to be unknown again and again. What I know is that I can’t say I don’t know anything, as that’s not implicit in my saying I don’t. Nah, maybe not even that. But you’re with someone else. A man?”

  “He is. I am. Quote he is, I am, unquote. I’m sorry. It’s exhausting enough chattering this stuff over the phone. And my despicable compulsion to write everything down simply because I began doing it when I was six. For you, I’ll tear up this journal page. Book 85, page one twenty-two, lines nine through eighteen. I tore it up. Eliot’s piaculative and I’m not sure about Pound’s, but now mine. Did you hear the tear? There’s a lit fireplace a hand’s toss away from here and the expiatory ultimate would be for me to throw in my hands. The penultimate would be this entire journal’s death fire. Naturally, not my other eighty-two books, as throwing them in has no estimable sacrificial grading and is less likely to occur than self-immolation, and I’d also sear my arms pulling them out as Nora did with Stephen’s Arsonist, and then I couldn’t drive. And Lucia can’t both reach the floor clutch and steer. And we’ve really got to go. I hate belaboring the point, but the all-night supermarkets in the valley don’t stay open all night. There was a suit to that effect and the county ruled that ‘all-night’ means only till midnight. The stores could stay open past then if they liked, but they couldn’t put ‘all-morning’ on their signs unless they meant to stay open till at least noon from twelve-o-one on. ‘Bye.”

  “Don’t go.”

  He turns on the TV. The movie is about a young writer who trains to New York from Texas with a huge novel and falls in love with a rich woman twice his age. His editor is secretly in love with him and warns him about the older woman and her circle of culture hounds. They have a single gift and unsparing craving of preying on talented writers and transforming them into puny hacks in half the time it takes me to edit their hulking novels. Leastwise with me the author has every right to reject my deletions and corrections, which if stubbornly done to excess could mean the manuscript’s rejection no matter how fat the advance. While none of her young men have had the grit to resist being regaled and eventually devoured for new meat by the insatiable Hazel Brawn and her highborn ravenous friends.”

  “Since I’ve the lifelong incurable disease of cacoethes scribendi,” the writer says, “they’ll either find me stuck in their throats or be suffering from my cramps and blocks, but massively incapacitating.”

  “I still think you’ll be what they eat.”

  One of the commercials ends with Anne Hathaway saying to Shakespeare, who’s slavering over the cardigan sweater she bought him after he fretted about being chilled at his desk and unable to finish Richard III, “As someone once said, Bill, ‘All’s wool that wraps Will.’ Or was it ‘Ill’s Will no longer with his garret chill’? No, I think it was ‘All’s better in belles lettres with a swell Metre sweater.’”

  “You mean,” Shakespeare says, “‘All’s ill that rends Will’s.’”

  “Aye,” Anne says.

  “‘Neigh,’ I should have the beleaguered Richard say.”

  While watching the movie, Piers writes Lucia a letter. He folds the writing paper into quarters and with magic markers draws a picture in each square. The top right one’s a self-portrait, the caption beneath reading “Hello, Lucia, I’m Piers, the man you telephone-talked to the other night, remember? I decided to send you this letter instead of a postcard—think back. As you can tell from that think back. I don’t like repeating
words like remember in so short a space made even shorter by the little space I have to write, and I’m sorry not only for this long sentence, which could have been broken up with a period in place of a comma twenty or so words and a contraction ago, but also for using plurisyllabic words like repeating, remember, shorter, little, sentence, contraction and maybe even sorry, broken, period, comma, using and maybe even maybe and even even and surely surely and plurisyllabic. I’m sure I left out one or two but not one and two, as they’re not plurisyllabic words. Though if I hadn’t used all those underlined words in that sentence before the last (please turn over and continue reading in box 1), the sentence would have read ‘As you can tell from that I don’t like words like in so short a space made by the space I have to write, and I’m not for this long, which could have been up with a in place of a or so words and a, but for words like and and and and and.’ Not that I couldn’t find any meaning in that quoted sentence no matter how unwittingly it was written, but I would have used an an instead of a in front of in place of. Anyway, I promise not to write any more big words like anyway and promise. But since I don’t know if you can read these big words I promised not to write, I’ll just write them without assuming you can’t read them or that they can’t be easily taught to you. By the way, I don’t have yellow hair but felt I should use that color in my self-portrait, since I already drew my face red and neck blue.

  The above drawing in square B is my dictionary. I don’t think you’ll be interested in seeing it, but a book is an easy thing to draw.

  “Above is my typewriter. I write stories and letters on it. This letter to you, though, I’m writing by hand. I could write it by foot, but I have slippers on. The man in the first joke tells bad squares. Turn that sentence around a bit and you’ll see what I mean when I say ‘Maybe that’s what makes his red so face.’ Turn red so face around and you won’t have a proteron hysteron. Keep turning and you’ll get dizzy. (From now on TPO means turn page over, so TPO to box 2.) Getting back to the more rollicky topic of sad jokes and bad oxymora, I guess in my second letter my face will have to be purple, which might be your primary art lesson, though I won’t tell you what I heard or said to make my face that way.