Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

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.