14 Stories by Stephen Dixon

14 Stories - Stephen Dixon pops off a batch of urban tales where we catch up with men and women just at the point when all hell breaks loose. One piece opens: "Eugene Randall held the gun in front of his mouth and fired. The bullet smashed his upper front teeth, left his head though the back of his jaw, pierced an earlobe and broke a window that overlooked much of the midtown area." We're talking midtown Manhattan aka The Big Apple.

Take a gander at the first lines of Cut: “They want to take my leg away. Cut if off just a little below the hip. Gangrene’s set in around the ankle.” And the opening from The Intruder: “I go into our apartment. She’s being raped. They’re both naked. He’s on top of her but not inside. He holds a knife to her neck.”

I’ll say nary a word more about any of these; rather, I’ll move on to reviewing in detail a story I’ll never forget, a short Dixon D-zinger entitled The Signing.

THE SIGNING
Opening lines: "My wife dies. Now I'm alone. I kiss her hands and leave the hospital room. A nurse runs after me as I walk down the hall."

Vintage Stephen Dixon with his unnamed narrator pushed to the edge. So there he is, walking down the hall but when the nurse catches up with him, she asks if he's going to make arrangements for the deceased. "For the deceased" - you gotta love the cold, brutal language typical of hospital personnel, eons away from something like "your dear wife." The narrator replies flatly: "No," to which the nurse asks what do you want us to do with the body? Again he answers in a flat tone: "Burn it."

I'll give our narrator a name: Cal. The nurse tells Cal that's not their job. Cal then lets the nurse know they can give her body to science. At this, the nurse informs him he'll have to sign proper legal papers. "Give me them." But the nurse says it will take time to draw up the papers and he should have a seat in the guest lounge. And besides which, the nurse goes on, the toilet things, radio and clothes left back in the hospital room have to be dealt with. Cal's having none of it; he says he doesn't have time and has to go. As he steps into the elevator and the doors close he can hear the nurse yelling, "Doctor! Doctor!"

After stopping at seven different floors on the way down (ah, an elevator in a hospital!), Cal finally makes it to the revolving door leading to the street. There's a security guard, a guy with a beard and shoulder-length hair (very unusual for a NYC policeman) sitting on a stool next to the door. Cal's on the street and hears the guard call out. He turns and the guard waves for him to come back and says he has to sign some papers. Cal tells him: "Too late. She's dead. I'm alone. I kissed her hands. You can have the body. I just want to be far away from here and as soon as I can."

The guard wants to bring him back to the hospital but Cal says he can's since this is a public street and nobody has the right to put hands on him. Meanwhile, the doors of a bus open and Cal steps up and puts his change in the coin box. The guard tells the bus driver not to take this man but the driver, egged on by annoyed passengers, says he can't stop, says he has to finish his run.

The guard thinks it best to hop on the bus and take a seat next to Cal. He pulls out his two-way radio and lets his boss back at the hospital know what happened. The boss wants to speak directly with Cal. The guard holds the speaker in from of Cal's face and the boss says the papers are ready so please return to the hospital. Cal says "No.  Do what you want with her body. There's nothing I ever want to have to do with her again. I'll never speak her name. Never go back to our apartment. Our car I'm going to let rot in the street till it's towed away. This wristwatch. She bought it for me and wore it a few times herself." Cal takes off the wristwatch and throws it out the bus window.

Cal's on an emotional role. He tells the hospital boss his wife purchased and mended his cloths. He takes off his jacket, tie, shirt and pants and throws them out the bus window. The security guard tells Cal to settle down.

More exchanges with the guard but in his current emotional state, Cal is not a man to be stopped. Thinking about all these streets and buildings, streets and buildings he and his wife spent years living with, Cal gets even more excited. The bus driver stops the bus. Everyone piles off. Maybe he and his wife rode this very bus. Cal tries uprooting the seat in front of him. The guard claps the handcuffs on. "This life," Cal shouts and smashes his head through the bus window.

An ambulance arrives. Guess which hospital they take Cal to? They bring a cot and roll him to the very examination room where his wife was taken when she first came to the hospital. Here's the way Stephen Dixon ends his tale, an ending that speaks volumes about the steps institutions will take to get exactly what they want:

"A hospital official comes in while the doctors and nurses are tweezing the remaining last splinters out of my head and stitching me up. “If you’re still interested in donating your wife’s body,” he says, “then we’d like to get the matter out of the way while some of her organs can still be reused by several of the patients upstairs.”
I say, “No, I don’t want anyone walking around with my wife’s parts where I can bump into him and maybe recognize them any day of the year,” but he takes my writing hand and guides it till I’ve signed."


American novelist and short story writer Stephen Dixon, born 1936