Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“No problem. I’m making eighteen an hour to sit behind a desk all day. This is a significant raise.” She dug out a disposable lighter and a pack of Virginia Slims and stood. “I’ll be outside giving myself cancer,” she said. “Don’t forget John le Carré.”

George picked up his book, paid the cashier with his credit card, and went outside.

Britt was leaning against the brick wall, smoking.

“That money’s yours, no strings attached,” George said. “I know being a single mother’s no picnic. My mom raised me and my sister after our old man ran out on us.”

“Do you think that was about charity for either of us, George? I’d offer a receipt, but no paper trail,” she said.

“I don’t need one,” George said. “I’ll remember everything about it.”

“I’m glad you’ll get your money’s worth.”

Faye’s illness transformed her in a way no diet or face-lift could have. After days of nausea, vertigo, diarrhea; a fast of toast and tea; fever; dreams that came and went more like mirages; an aching lethargy that demanded fourteen-hour sleeping spells from which she’d wake confused but only too aware of how terribly alone she was, Faye felt better.

The usual grim weariness was gone from around her lips. Her eyes no longer peered out like a miner’s from sallow tunnels smudged with mascara. They seemed enlarged with light, glowing limpidly from her pale face. Even the shadow beneath her chin where her darkness most accumulated had burned away. It was as if everything unessential had burned away.

“What happened to you?” Aldo blurted, startled by the sight of her sitting, legs crossed, back behind the reception desk.

“Flu,” Faye said. “Everybody’s getting it. I mean, you sit up here in front all day and you’re going to come in contact with everything anybody walks in with.”

“Everybody should get so sick,” Aldo said.

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.”

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!”