Time to Go

by Stephen Dixon

  Two men tried to rob him on the street. He went crazy, screamed “You can’t do this to me or anyone else in this neighborhood,” and started to swing wildly and one went down and stayed down after his knife flew into the street and he ran after the second one, caught him and picked him up and threw him through a store window and then punched and kicked him till the man said “Please, I give up, get a rag for my neck,” and held them both on the ground till the police came. The newspapers wrote about it the next day. “Male dancer beats up toughs,” the headline of one article said.

  “I have to stop teaching,” he told his wife. “I know we need the money and health insurance but I can’t take another week of it no matter how good the kids might be some days.” She said “Just stick in there, you’re only going through a bad period in your work, and in ten years you can retire at half pay and still be young enough to do what the hell you want for the rest of your life and with never a complaint about it from me.” “Maybe I can take up painting now,” he said, “or classical piano playing. Creativeness runs in my family, or did.”

  His dead brother has showed up in his dreams about once a month for the last five years. Usually he was guiding or lecturing him. “You’re not loving enough to your wife…You don’t pay enough attention to your daughters…Be more tolerant of mom, she’s getting old…Go back to choreography if you can’t think of anything else—you never really gave yourself a chance.” “How is it where you are?” he asked the last time and his brother said “Don’t get nervous about it—it’s fine for everyone, but do what you can to take the normal time and beyond to get here.”

  One image keeps on coming back to him. He could be anywhere, on a subway, lying in a bed, in his classroom or listening to music, and it just drops into his head. It’s of his mother drying him off and powdering him after he was through taking his own bath.

  His older daughter gave him a tie for his last two birthdays and the last Christmas. His wife had a big laugh over the last one. “Don’t you know what it means?” she said and he said “I don’t believe in that stuff or not that much. She just knows I always stain or wrinkle my ties but thinks I look handsome in them.”

  He got an anonymous typewritten note from a student. “You are my favorite teacher ever and I’ll tell you why. Some teachers study to teach, you were born into it so didn’t have to study. A born into it teacher is both smart, patient and kind and something else no one can define. Thank you. Signed: a student (female, but that’s not important) but a lifelong friend.”

  Today’s his birthday and his watch stopped on the morning hour his mother said he was born. He wound it up but it didn’t start again.

  That was when he thought about the hour and day he was born. He took it to a watchmaker who said it would cost more to repair than if he bought the watch new. “The parts now are worth more than the whole. Buy the new nonwindup kind—quartz, the only thing today. Those watches will eventually put me out of business, but they’ll save you a lot of trouble.” “No, I’m an old fogy on things like that—sell me a good windup watch.” The watchmaker said “You have a birthday coming up?” and he said no. “You have a wife though, right?” and he said “Divorced.” “Children?” and he said “Two daughters.” “Old enough to buy a watch?” and he said “The oldest might be, if I wanted a cheap watch, but the youngest is only five.” “A girl friend then?” and he said “None and none in sight.” “I was only suggesting all these because no man should buy his own watch.” “I don’t believe that. Just give me a round one that’ll work even better than the last and which has numerals and has to be wound once a day.”

  Encountering Revolution

  Georgia and I are getting our son dressed to go to the dentist when the doorbell rings. Jimmy wants to wear shorts and Georgia’s insisting he wear slacks and I’m saying as I go to the door that I don’t care what he wears so long as she gets him out of here and I can continue practicing for my recital tonight.

  It’s our landlady, Mrs. Longmore, who says “Quickly, hurry, turn on your radios, turn up the TVs, war’s been declared, the whole country’s going to ruins.”

  Mrs. Longmore has been known to use any excuse or lie to get into one of her apartments to see if the tenant’s installed a new heavy appliance without notifying her for the surcharge on the rent, so I tell her to calm herself, the only war currently raging is between our son and his folks, and to quiet my own nerves I turn on the radio to a classical music station which at this hour only plays Baroque.

  The announcer’s speaking only a little less hysterically than Mrs. Longmore about a civil war taking place. I figure it’s this very station’s radio play about a war that’s disturbing her. I switch stations to prove my point, but they’re all giving the same kind of news.

  The insurrection, as the newscaster I settle on puts it, began last night in a northeast college community when a band of students beat up three policemen who the students said had for no reason clubbed a friend of theirs, though the police claim the student they clubbed had first beaten up an elderly park employee who had courteously informed the student of the park’s curfew law. Though opinions differ on how the disturbance started, the police then called for reinforcements, who came with the suburb’s one armored car. The police tried breaking up the students’ demonstration in the park with nightsticks, the students beat them back with rocks and chemical sprays, the police fired tear gas canisters, and when these were hurled back with makeshift fire bombs, rifles, and two students were killed. Hundreds of enraged students on campus banded into an armed mob and overwhelmed the police guarding the park, with several fatalities on both sides, and used the cannon in the armored car to blow up the police barracks. They then seized the local radio station and broad casted appeals to students and workers to join them in the streets to rid the area of its homicidal police and those public servants who use these police for private self-serving ends. The radio station was destroyed by armored cars summoned from nearby suburbs, though by this time thousands of students and some workers were battling guardsmen and police in the area and eventually throughout the Northeast Region. Students in many university communities in the North and Southwest Regions learned of the fighting and also rebelled. Over commandeered radio stations they declared a national revolt in the name of sanity and peace against all institutions, groups and persons who opposed the revolt, and that they soon hoped to meet their Eastern and Central revolutionary comrades to form a united provisional government that would coordinate the postwar effort if they won, or else all underground activities if the open rebellion failed.

  Georgia, Jimmy and Mrs. Longmore huddle around me when the newscaster says the president’s about to make an address of unprecedented importance from his emergency headquarters. We turn on the television and stare at the president’s seal for a while. Then the president appears, looking no more harried than he was in all his previous heralded addresses of proven unimportance, and says his historical residence, Defense and Justice Buildings and National Art Museum have been shelled and nearly taken this morning, but the Capitol and entire Central Region surrounding it are now back under complete government control. “By late today, or early tomorrow, this so-called rebellion by university thugs, high school toughs, innocent dupes seduced by the slogans of strife, and those alien agitators working for the countries most likely to gain by the collapse of our political and economic system, will have ended. And then that part of the world still in chains though ever hopeful of future freedom, and those allied nations not in chains only because of the military might behind our country’s freedom, will once more breathe easier knowing our nation is at peace again.”

  He’s suddenly cut off. There’s nothing on the screen now but the jittery specks we usually only get with bad reception. Then the word “liberated” appears, followed by a voiceover saying “In the name of the common people of this country and those, via television satellite, of the world.”

  A young man in work clothes and with a rifle strappe
d to his back faces the camera from behind a lectern. He says he’s the regional spokesman for the national revolution and gives a report of the war up to now. Guerrilla units are fighting counterrevolutionary forces in all Northern and Southern regions, and despite what the president just said, in the Central Region and Capitol as well. Many large sections of small major cities and many small sections of large major cities are in the hands of the revolutionaries. The battle for the country’s principal war-works city was lost at a cost of hundreds of lives to both armies, though military production there has been set back for years. “By tomorrow evening, or the evening after, half the population will be under rebel control. And once all five regions and the Capitol have been completely liberated, and it can only be with a second successful revolution here that the first real world revolution can begin, we will help all the common people of this globe free themselves from the international political-economic arrangement that is keeping them hungry and enslaved and the world perpetually on the verge of war and total annihilation. For a new day of eternal peace and freedom is fast approaching us,” he says, when he collapses from a bullet fired off-camera. Two soldiers in recognizable military dress drag him out by his hair. His cameraman’s ordered to stand before the camera with his arms raised. A third revolutionary—the director of the newscast—is rifle-butted to the ground for reaching for a concealed weapon, though she gave ample warning to studio guards and home audience that she was going to search through her pockets for a handkerchief because she was about to sneeze.

  An army officer kicks over the lectern and sits behind a desk.

  He says the country’s first widespread internal armed conflict in a hundred years has all but concluded and that every annexed radio and television station will be returned to its rightful ownership by tonight. He reviews the counterrevolution in progress. All sections of cities the revolutionary spokesman said were in rebel hands have been recaptured and pacified. Guerrilla units are rapidly being smoked out and eliminated and no longer pose a national or regional threat. The president is returning to a thoroughly becalmed Capitol and will spend the evening in his historical residence. The country’s leading defense industry city will resume normal production at the start of the regular work day tomorrow. “All citizens in this area are urged to return to their homes till further notice, as an indefinite curfew begins in two hours. Stay tuned to this or any of your other legitimately run stations for a continuation of the president’s address and important news bulletins, advisements, and information regarding the country’s planned victory celebration.” Then there’s an unusually long series of commercials followed by the soap opera Mrs. Longmore says she always puts on at this hour. She returns to her apartment to watch it.

  “I guess this means Jimmy’s dental appointment is canceled,” Georgia says, “and it took two months to get. And what about your recital, Phil? You’ll have rented a hall nobody’s allowed to come to. And Dad!” meaning her father who lives with us and spends every day in the park’s chess house downtown. We run to the window, but he isn’t on the street. At the windows of brownstones across the street and on either side of us are people anxiously eyeing the pedestrians hurrying to get home or to buy goods before the curfew begins.

  “Check the refrigerator,” I say.

  “Forget the refrigerator. We’ve got to find Dad.”

  I yell out the window if anyone’s heard if our city and particularly the park has been physically touched by the war. But it seems the people in the buildings don’t want to be distracted from catching sight of their close ones and the people in the street are in too much of a hurry to answer me.

  I switch to every radio and television station to see if there’s any news about the city’s involvement in the war. All the radio keeps saying is for everyone to stay tuned to his television, and the only television programs are the ones normally on, with messages moving at the bottom of the screen urging all viewers to remain home or return home but stay tuned because important news bulletins will follow.

  I dial the chess house, parks department, police, newspaper and the two cronies my father-in-law always meets at the chess house and then the telephone operator as to why I can’t reach any of these numbers, but right after each dialing a recorded voice tells me the number I’m calling is temporarily out of service and that I should stay tuned to my television set because important news bulletins are going to be made.

  I ring the doorbells of all my neighbors. The only person who’ll tear himself away from his television long enough to speak to me briefly through the door says he hasn’t heard anything about the city’s part in the war. “Though there was an announcement just before that tomorrow and the next day will be wage-paid holidays for all workers and government-subsidized ones for all businesses because the rebellion was crushed. And that all TV programs will be preempted in a few minutes for a four-hour special on the revolt, with live coverage of the most damaged areas in the country, videotape highlights of the last bloody battles, and the president conducting a walking tour of the partially ravaged Capitol.”

  Georgia pleads with me to try to find her father in the hour we have left before the curfew. “That way I’ll always know we did everything possible to find him.”

  I leave the building. The weather’s clear and the neighborhood as peaceful as on an average summer Sunday: stores grated and locked, most of the apartment windows shaded and closed, an occasional car or motorcycle driving past, a solitary couple at a bus stop. They know less than I about what’s happened in this city, as their television broke down an hour ago and they’re going to a friend’s house to watch the special.