Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (8 page)

It seemed to Faye an odd remark at the time, but she ignored it and kept talking, about the job, the weather, the flu epidemic. It was the first conversation she’d had since she’d been sick and she clung to it, needing desperately to talk, aware the entire time of how Aldo was watching her.

And later, when people would ask them how they met and fell in love, it was always Aldo who would answer. “Flu.” He’d smile earnestly. “It all started with flu. I still haven’t recovered.”

Swing

The mute boy was dragging the great stalled clock from his father’s study to the trash heap that smoldered at the edge of the woods when an old man with a stick chased him.

Back when the boy’s father was alive, he’d tried to console his son, and maybe himself as well, by telling him that, in ways mysterious, God always compensates. In place of speech, God must have given the boy some gift—perhaps a rare gift of the spirit, one the boy would recognize only when he grew older. His father was mistaken, not about there being a gift but about when the boy would recognize it, for even as a child he knew his compensation for silence was speed—winged heels. The boy believed that he was fast enough to outrun everyone, any danger, too fast to be overtaken even by the stride of the stilt-legged shadow of Death. But he kept this a secret from everyone, including his father, because he was afraid his father would be disappointed. Speed wasn’t a rare spiritual gift. He didn’t reveal it even when, to the resounding, impassive tick of the study clock, his father lay weeping on his deathbed. His father wept because he was leaving his dumb son with a stepmother who cared more for her ferret than him, and with the stepmother’s bitter twin sister, who, expelled from the convent, paced the halls of the mansion at night moaning her beads and tearing at her newly grown-out hair.

The boy kept his secret until the old man with the stick came after him. The old man swung the stick in an arc that would have dislodged the boy’s head had he not ducked and darted away. He could hear the whine of air swatted behind him as the old man pursued him. The man might have been old and his trousers droopy, but he ran surprisingly well, and the longer he chased, the more determined he seemed to catch the boy. They were racing along a puddled forest path strewn with deadfall and, afraid he’d trip, the boy didn’t dare look back. The rush of his running drew the skin tight over his face, as if he were masked in latex. As he ran the boy unclasped a silver penknife that had belonged to his father and butchered his unkempt hair so that it no longer streamed behind him, snagging on the branches that shredded his clothes. To protect his eyes from the pressure of velocity and from the blurred birches with their slashing limbs, the boy kept his gaze on the earth scrolling beneath his feet.

He could outpace the flailing stick that had elongated into a hooked bone, he could outdistance the shouts of the old man’s threats and curses, the baying of the greyhounds the old man had summoned, the shadow of the falcon he’d released; he could leave his own fear behind, though to do so required that the boy outrun everything he knew—every memory, every dream, every thought, every emotion, all burning off like the tail of the icy comet that was his past. He ran in the vacuum of his own momentum, a stitch splitting his side as he threatened to outrun his own breath. It was then he realized, in a way that would have pleased his father, that such impossible running could only be a rare gift of the spirit.

*   *   *

When he came upon the swing in a glade that opened like a neglected garden at the heart of the forest, he finally stopped. He waded into sunlight as if it were a pool. Scarred by thorns, his outgrown clothes reduced to rags, the boy stood half immersed in the solemn shafts streaming through a canopy of green. He felt overwhelmed by an emptiness that never would have caught him had he continued running. He knew he couldn’t retrace his steps and retrieve all he had discarded; except for the silver penknife, the past was lost. But as the whistle of velocity echoing in his ears dissolved into silence, and the silence dissolved into birdsong, toad-trill, insect-drone, the boy gradually became aware that in his blur of acceleration he had learned about the forest—its birds, berries, mushrooms, roots. Instinctively, he had given them all names, and in order to do so, he had created a lexicon. Perhaps he’d been mute because he’d been born into the wrong language, into a tongue with unspeakable words. Now he possessed a language he could speak, one he could sing, if only there was someone to listen.

He imagined that somewhere else on earth people were conversing in the language he had created.

The boy sat on the weathered swing that dangled at the center of the glade like an amulet the forest wore. It rocked of its own accord—a rowboat riding gentle swells, a pendulum that would ticktock for infinity now that someone had nudged it into motion. The soles of his shoes, near worn away from running, brushed over the weeds and hissed a breeze. He unclasped the penknife to dig his initials into the wooden seat, but he couldn’t recall them. A memory found its way back to him, of a day at the park with his father. His father had lifted him into a baby swing and carefully secured him with a bar that fit across his lap—it prevented accidents but also escape. Having secured his son, his father seemed to lose control. The boy couldn’t see his father’s uncharacteristic glee, but he heard him laughing each time he pushed from behind. His father swung him gently at first, then gradually higher and higher until the boy’s mouth gaped open in a mute scream, a scream his father could not hear. He was pushing so wildly that the swing careened and its chains twisted, and the boy imagined they might snap. Between convulsions of his father’s hilarity, the boy heard a nurse, who was pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair, exclaim: “Oh, Lordy! Look at that crazy white man flingin’ that boy!”

If his father heard the comment, he ignored her, and continued flinging him up until, dizzy, the boy could hear an otherworldly vibration—solar wind, the music of the spheres, seraphim—whatever it was, its dissonance was terrifying.

Later, as they walked home hand in hand, his father asked if he’d glimpsed the angels who played their harps on clouds, and the boy shook his head no, a moment of defiance for which he now, at least in memory, felt petty and ashamed.

Oh, Lordy! This was no baby swing he was riding. He swung earnestly now, easily pumping over the trees. He swung in a straight arc to a steady rhythm, and the memory of his father vanished. He no longer needed its companionship, no longer felt empty and alone. It was as if he and the swing, sharing a single passion, were becoming one. Each pump of his body carried them farther into blue sky. The wind of his swinging gusted blossoms from orchards and parted fields of grain below. If I were a girl, he thought, I’d look up her blowing dress. He gripped the ropes as gently as he might the braids of a girl. Still, his palms grew callused. He swung standing, kneeling, sitting; at night, he slept oscillating beneath the whorled Milky Way and dreamed of traversing luminous oceans that rose and fell in time to the gravity of the swing. Each morning he woke to find the swing had taken them farther than the day before.

Perhaps he would have remained one with the swing, and be swinging still, if not for the day when he heard a name being called in the language that he’d learned as he ran through the forest. A name—his name?—was being called out over and over. He listened and couldn’t be sure. When he called back, frayed tendrils sprouted from the swing’s ropes and vined his wrists, arms, and chest, coiling at his throat and choking off his voice. He swung as if caught in the rigging of a ship, but he managed to pry open his father’s penknife and cut himself loose before a violent backswing shook the knife from his hand. On the upswing, he let go.

*   *   *

Think of dreams in which you fly. By which you fly.

How does it happen?

Sometimes, I fly unaided, as if flight were natural, although even in the dream I know it’s not. I’ll be running hurdles on a dark track like the one I’d train on alone at night in high school after the stadium gate was locked at ten p.m. I’d scale the cyclone fence to sneak in, and then lug the hurdles onto the track from where they’d been stacked along the sidelines. They weren’t modern aluminum hurdles, but old-style heavy wooden ones that bruised your knee when you clipped them, if you were lucky enough not to have your legs knocked out from under you. In those days of cinder tracks, athletes wore spikes gracile like ballet shoes. The spikes made you run on the balls of your feet, almost up on your toes; just tying them on made me feel lighter and faster, as if I were attaching winged heels. I’m wearing spikes in my dream, so maybe I don’t fly unaided after all. A friend once told me she had a dream in which she could fly after lacing on red ice skates, and that while she skated ecstatically over the rooftops, her mother kept shouting from below, “You be careful, young lady, you’re skating on thin air!”

There are three strides between each hurdle if you run them right, but in my dream, all I need is a single stride before I’m skimming the next hurdle. And then I realize I don’t need to touch down at all. I can glide from hurdle to hurdle, and gliding becomes flight.

It’s always night in my flying dreams. Sometimes, I fly unaided, or relatively so, but other times there are conveyances: a kite that pulls me up as it rises, a unicycle on which learning to balance becomes learning to levitate, an anti-gravity air taxi shaped vaguely like an inflatable life raft that hovers at my fifth-floor window while I climb aboard. A crew not unlike the Marx Brothers pilots it. Their names are Rosco, Bosco, and Moscow.

A woman once told me of a dream in which her blue Toyota was able to fly. The Toyota was the first car she’d bought herself, after graduating from college, with money from her first real job.

“Was it night when you could fly?” I asked, envisioning the taillights of her Toyota firing like rockets while her radio blared Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.”

“You mean like a witch with her broom? No, I was driving down a two-lane past fields Technicolor with wheat, and green pastures where horses grazed. It was bright! I was wearing sunglasses, and had the windows down, and the car filled with the smell of fields and horses. A breeze that looked so gentle combing through the wheat whipped in, blowing my hair, and I noticed that on the other side of the barbed-wire fence the horses were racing my car. Their manes and tails streamed, and I realized I was seeing them from above. I could see the shadow of my Toyota gliding among the horses, sailing off with the herd across the pasture, and that’s when I knew I was flying. It was so free, beautiful, like being able to do anything. It wasn’t a sex dream, but it felt physical, almost climactic. When I woke I thought about it all day, carried it with me like a secret. I could still feel that buoyancy, and when the feeling began to slip away I knew I didn’t want to live without it and would do what I had to do so as to keep it. A week later I moved out on my husband and filed for a divorce and … and here we are playing hooky, having a drink,” she said.

“I never had a flying dream like that,” I told her, “one where I wake and know it’s an omen.”

“How can a flying dream not be an omen? What could it mean but that you could be untethered, free of all that’s holding you down, holding you back? The gift is yours to accept, you have the power if you’re willing to exercise it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Freud says dreams are wishes, and who doesn’t sometimes wish to fly? A wish is just a wish, it doesn’t have to be unriddled like an omen or have a moral like a fable. Flying doesn’t necessarily have to have a meaning. A bird doesn’t have to analyze why he flies.”

“What makes you think that what’s apt for birds applies to you? Flying’s natural for birds.”

“Sometimes it feels almost natural,” I said.

“Natural?” she scoffed. “Must be those inconspicuous wings of yours.”

“If it’s completely unnatural then we’re back to witches and brooms—deals with the devil, not to mention Icarus and all the other myths that warn against defying nature and the gods.”

“How do you feel when you fly?” she asked.

“Wonderful. Free, joyful.”

“Ecstatic?”

“Sure, sometimes.”

“You call feeling that way
natural
?” she asked. “What world are you living in? The ecstatic is by nature unnatural.”

I laughed, not just at her cynicism but also at her deadpan delivery.

She stared back silently, and then said, “In my favorite novel,
The Great Gatsby
, Nick recalls a moment when it was as if he and Gatsby were in ecstatic cahoots. Ecstatic cahoots, the way we are sometimes, moment by moment. What kind of dream do you have to have to know when you’ve met someone you should change your life for?”

*   *   *

Here, on the island,
yesterday
and
tomorrow
are the same word. It’s a language of inflection that’s spoken—punctuated by sighs, lisps, growls, consonants suddenly expelled, vowels swallowed back into the shadow of a throat. On this coast of platinum sand, ravens have interbred with gulls. They perch on the horizon, disrupting the border between sea and sky. The elocution of birds echoes through the nacre vaults and conch cathedrals that litter a shoreline, along which he finds himself wading among schools of candlefish at an hour when the sun is setting. Or is it rising? Here, the word for sunset and sunrise is the same.

Midday. He hikes the hill path through the lemon groves. A snake slithering into shadow inscribes in cursive an undecipherable message in the dust. Ravens, gowned for graduation, take flight, and he pauses before the tire track he’d caught them studying, a staff on which white stones are arranged like notes. A melody he’d hum if he could read music.

Later, in a tiled courtyard called Palm Passage, he sits at a café table, sipping rum mixed with iced espresso. If he still had his father’s penknife, he’d carve his name on the green coconut that has rolled beneath his chair—or, if not his name, then the name he heard them calling while he swung, a name he’s since assumed.