Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Nothing has changed, the coat believes. It’s said a coat can make the man, but the coat knows that the man shapes it as wind does a sail. It’s a man who brings a coat to life, then shrugs it off and leaves it waiting.

All the time spent hanging in the dark on the hunched shoulders of the wooden hanger from the Hotel Luna seems to the coat merely an extended change of season, a predictable cycle in which nothing more significant than weather has happened. Take a coat off; put a coat on. What occurs in between isn’t the coat’s concern.

The coat may be right, the man thinks. He recalls the impulse to go away and leave the coat behind, but not what, if anything, he was hoping to find. Now it seems almost as though it were someone other than himself who was off strolling in shirtsleeves and sunglasses through a palpable brightness — a figure in rolled-up duck pants disappearing down a dazzling road that unaccountably ended in a maze of goat trails twisting into mangroves where the only other pedestrians were mobs of crabs brandishing their claws like machetes. Perhaps whoever it was behind those mirrored sunglasses is still throwing a shadow where the sea slops over rotten tennis shoes; perhaps whoever it was has made his way past smoldering coal pots and old men slapping down dominoes outside of rum shops, to one of a run of hotel rooms that seemed to rotate beneath the crank of a ceiling fan, rooms smelling of empty bottles, with scorpions in the shower and closets that were never meant for an overcoat, rooms in which each morning he sorted through a mildewed suitcase of strewn laundry for a shirt without discolored underarms.

And all the while he was gone, the coat hung suspended and believed that the man, too, hung somewhere, in storage, asleep on a hanger of bone, dreaming as the coat dreamed, of snowy light shafting through dusty windows into a drafty warehouse of disrobed mannequins.

Put a coat on, and it’s resurrected, standing tall in a full-length mirror, a timelessly fashionable knee-length gray-green herringbone reappraising itself at the threshold of a familiar reflection.

What if stepping back into a life could be as simple as slipping on an old coat? Suppose, as if in some tale, the coat might serve as a magic raiment that a man beloved by a goddess puts on to receive a gift of power, the way an ancient hero might attire himself in invincible armor, a cloak of invisibility, winged sandals.

It’s not invisibility or armor that the man needs, but a coat of attachment, a garment that when buttoned back on might reconnect him to the time when he was still recognizably himself before he stepped over the border of who he’d meant to be. He turns from his reflection, which also turns, retreating into the mirror and refusing to follow him out. The coat doesn’t retreat, and the man allows it to guide him as they step onto the street.

It was a labyrinthine route we used to take, the coat recalls, a journey via fabulous conveyances that instead of detachment should have caused a daily astonishment: down the vanishing steps of escalators, through turnstiles that one cranked with the hip thrust of a lover — long lines of commuters bundled in coats, thrusting, each morning, through ringing turnstiles. A dash along underground corridors, past blue switches still burning from night. Doors slam. The train shoots through the tunnel like a memorandum through a pneumatic tube.

The man in the coat emerges, a part of the crowd with its collective consciousness of fragmented headlines and daydreams, filing into a glass door revolving like a device that sorts crowds back into individuals. He ascends in an elevator that climbs a glass column as silently as a fever reading in a thermometer. Chrome doors slide open onto a floor of office space where walls of windows eye-level with the undersides of smoldering clouds overlook the gray projections of downtown. Beside each desk, a coat draped with the banner of a scarf waits on a hook shared with an umbrella. The man, still wearing his coat, sits at a desk, flicks on the computer, recalls his password DeusAderit , which he lifted from the inscription on Carl Jung’s tombstone: Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit. Called or uncalled, God is present. He types, Welcome back , but the words refuse to appear on the screen.

Evening: luminescent empty offices stacked against the sky; the cry of a street musician’s trumpet counterpoints the percussion of rush-hour L trains. A misty drizzle dissipates the odor of mothballs and the coat releases its true scent, not smoke or the perfume absorbed in restaurants or bars, but woolliness that the man imagines to be the smell of sheep musky with salt fog on some craggy island in the North Sea. The man doesn’t mind when the coat hurries them past Goodwill and used-clothing shops. He doesn’t mind stopping when the coat, vain as always, pauses to regard its reflection in the black plate-glass window of the Twenty-first, a bar where they would go regularly after work for an Irish whiskey. Just a quick one to burn off the aftertaste of a workday, though more often than not he’d end up throwing dice for drinks with a boisterous bunch from the “Subs”—the Foreign Subsidiaries Department.

“Max, old boy, take off your coat and stay awhile,” they’d urge.

When the Subs said they regarded themselves as a cosmopolitan crowd it meant that that was an evening when they were drinking cosmopolitans. There were cosmopolitan evenings, Manhattan evenings, Black Russian evenings, mojito evenings, highball evenings, absinthe evenings …

“Max, my friend,” one of them — Willis — might ask, “have you ever endured a time when something in your life felt as corrosive as the rim of salt on a margarita?”

And another — Ricardo — would add, “Ah, Max, our dead-language scholar, always the loner, did I ever tell you, my friend, how I once had a girlfriend named Carmelita who made me feel like the libre in a Cuba libre. Have you ever loved a woman like that, Max? Skin the shade her name suggests, and when she was aroused, a smell to her body of scorched sugar and fermented cane.”

“ Salute! ” the Subs would chant in chorus, raising their Cuba libres to Ricardo.

With the coat flopped over an empty barstool beside him — as it is now — Max would drink a simple double whiskey, or two, or three. And when finally back outside — as he and his coat are now — he’d feel flushed with the addicting mix of excitement and anesthesia that drinking in the early evening never failed to bring on. He feels that flush again. Welcome back , the words that refused to form on the computer screen, glow on the window of the bar. The reflection makes it appear as if the coat is alone, with no one wearing it, as if it stands levitating, ghostly beneath a dripping awning.

Evening surges in gusts. While he was inside the bar the drizzle became a drumming rain. Rain falls in four dimensions. Whether the window of the Twenty-first reflects the present or the past is uncertain. In the present, memory smells like rain and there’s time to inhale breath after breath. But in the past, where remembering is inconceivable, Max needs to catch a cab or he’ll be late for a first date with a woman he’s met earlier that day in the employees’ cafeteria. She was sitting by herself sipping a coffee and reading a paperback. He sat down at the next table and asked, “Good book?”

“Not bad.” She smiled. “Dante.”

“Shhh,” he cautioned, “you don’t want to say things like that too loud around here. It’s bad enough that you’re making a spectacle of yourself reading in public.”

“It’s for a night class I’m taking,” she said.

“No excuse,” he told her. “A class in what?”

“‘A History of Visions.’”