Read Online Time to Go by Stephen Dixon - Free Book Online

with Dad—can you look after my plants?” He said “I’d like to come too,” and she said “What for?—you two were never close.”
    His wife said “Let’s renew our marriage vows, just together, Carole can stay with my mother. We’ll write the ceremony ourselves, be our own witnesses and judge, go on the Caribbean honeymoon we never took, not tell anyone what we’ve done and only my mother where we’re going—it’ll be our one secret we’ll keep from everyone for life.” “Let me think about it,” he said, and that was the last they spoke of it.
    He was thumbing through the phone directory looking for the zip code page when his wife said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you if you’re doing anything important, but would you like to go to bed for fifteen minutes?” “I just want to find this,” he said and she said “What are you looking for? A zip code; for Christ sakes. Forget my proposal,” and he said “No no, I have it now just let me mark it down,” and she said “Next time I should try to catch you when you’re reading page five of the Post , because I’m not asking too much, am I?” and he said “No, I can always do it; just it might take a little more time.”
    His wife said “Please don’t take it—it can’t be good for you. The others here are all heads and know how to handle the stuff,” and he said “I always wanted to take a trip—now’s my chance, and I swear I’ll be okay,” and swallowed the LSD tab. First they were all gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus and his wife, who hadn’t taken any, said “If this is all it’s going to be, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all,” and he said “Drop another grape in my mouth and then come kiss me, you lovely beast—oh God, I love you,” But soon after that he became a famous black gospel singer and sang gospels in her voice and then he went outdoors to embrace all of nature and crawled low in the snow because he thought one of the other LSD takers was trying to kill him with a rifle and then he was in a circle with three other naked people in a dungeon, all with their heads yoked between the thighs of the person in front of them and turning a horizontal wheel for what would be an eternity and then he was a bug on the dungeon floor and human feet were trying to smash him. He was given a strong tranquilizer and while he was coming down he told his wife he had gone mad and nothing would ever make him sane again and he’d be completely dependent on her or in a squalid institution for life, “so listen, your friend with the gun before, get him to put it to my head and shoot perfectly.” Then he fell asleep and the next morning his wife said to him “I know how you hate I told-you-so’s but I wish you’d listen to me on things like this,” and he said “You’re right, no need to hedge around it, but I’ve seen the darkest I can become and nothing so much before has made me appreciate sanity and day-to-day sameness and simple sleep and just sitting here with you, for instance, and admitting any of this.”
    â€œYou’re being hired for your musculature and height, not your potential to teach,” the assistant principal said to him, and an hour later, after he introduced himself to the class as the new permanent sub and asked the students to one by one tell him their names, a boy stood up, the first student to ever respond to him in his own class, and said “I’m not taking orders from any white man,” and left the room. “Come back,” he said, “you come back.”
    He was in college, dating a girl from New Jersey. He took the bus from Port Authority and was walking in the rain along the street to her house when she jumped out from behind a tree just to the side of him and said “Boo,”