Read Online Friends by Stephen Dixon - Free Book Online Page A

novel’s run flat. I don’t want to go on with it. But after 221 pages? 220 I mean. And it’s not true I don’t want to go on with it. I do. I’m sure I can too, but I’m just bogged down. I have him where he’s on a bridge. He has to make a decision about something. This has been the main point of the novel up till now. To have him go through the novel till the moment where he makes a decision that will change his life and also change the direction of the novel. I didn’t know where he was going to make the decision. After the first hundred pages or so, it could have been almost anywhere in his journey through the city the novel takes place in. I didn’t block out the novel from the beginning, just as I haven’t with any of the novels I’ve written. But he should make the decision now. On page 221. There’s no place else for him to go. It’s late at night, he’s alone on that bridge. Looking at the river about fifteen feet below. He knows he has to make the decision. He’s been talking about it on and off through the entire novel. He left his apartment at dawn on page one to make the decision. A decision he knows will change his life. He hasn’t revealed yet what the decision’s about. Really hasn’t revealed anything about the decision: just that he has to make one. What the decision’s about is supposed to be revealed when he makes the decision. The reader’s supposed to follow himaround the city right up till the time when he makes the decision. I think I said that. Then he’s supposed to make the decision. If he doesn’t make it now there’s nothing else he can do. He’s done everything else in the novel but make that decision. At least everything else that would apply to his personality and life and actions and whatever other things apply, before he makes that decision. But what’s the decision he has to make? He has to know what he has to decide on if he’s to make the decision, and he has to make it. So make it. I’m telling him to make the decision. Say something out loud or in your head or even write it down if you want that will change your life and also change the direction of this novel. If those devices don’t work, say it some other way. By a gesture or just one word or any way you think to say it, as long as it’s clear to the reader that what you’re doing is making that decision, but make it. If you don’t, this novel’s finished. It was all supposed to come to this. It has come to this. Right now there’s no place else for you to go, nothing else for you to do but make that decision. So make it. I’m telling you to. Ordering you, damnit, I am ordering you to. The decision. Now.
    Nothing comes. I wait. Nothing. No decision and nothing about the decision. I return to page 221 an hour later. Nothing comes. He doesn’t move or say anything. He stays on the bridge. In the same spot, without a thought, gesture or word. Without doing anything, and everything around him stays the same too. I try to make something come to him or happen to him, so the novel could continue till the time he does make the decision, but nothing happens or comes. I return to page 221 a few hours later and do everything I can to make the decision come, to make anything happen around him or anything come, but nothing does. Then the next hour and then the next day. Each day after that, and many times a day some days, for two more weeks. Nothing.go to a bridge with the 220 pages, the same bridge I left him on, in the same city I’ve lived in for years and walked him through these last twenty to twenty-one months and throw the whole thing into the river. Most of the pages just sink. A couple of dozen or so float for a while downstream and sink. A few pages keep floating downstream till I can’t see them. Four of the pages I threw float in the air till they land on the shore. One rolls into the river