Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

He declares the next day a holiday as well, and that morning he boards a train without so much as looking at a schedule, and then, at a stop where a field of sunflowers overlooks the sea, he impulsively disembarks. Across the tracks sunflowers border a vista where fishermen in red wooden boats work their nets.

He sets off hiking to a town carved into the cliff face, along a trail that climbs through olive and lemon groves and steeply terraced vineyards. After she’d left him in Genoa, he had reduced his belongings to what fit in a backpack. He sweats under its straps and imagines this is how it would have felt to tour Europe when he was young. The year he’d graduated from college, he had a girlfriend who wanted to travel together. Her name was Paulette — a wonderful adventurous girl, whose dorm room was decorated with posters of palm-fringed foreign coasts whose bleached-white houses overlooked indigo water. After making love, her idea of pillow talk was planning trips. He wanted to go with her but was afraid it would seem like more of a commitment than he felt ready for, and when an internship in an advertising firm was offered, he took that instead. Paulette joined the Peace Corps and went off to Africa, and he never heard from her again.

Along a rocky cliff, he stops to watch the gulls soar in the updrafts. He has always tried to remember that through no accomplishment of his own, in this war-torn, exploited, impoverished, unfair world he has enjoyed the relative privilege of being born an American, and now he feels guilty, self-indulgent to regret decisions made in his youth. He’s never regarded himself as a regretter. A line from a philosophy course he took back in college comes to him: Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. He wonders if he’s ever known what he’s most wanted. Then it comes to him with a force like tears that for once at least he does know: he wants this, to be here now, climbing with his belongings on his back; he wants this moment of looking out to sea.

The town, etched into the mountainside, is terraced like the vineyard. The streets corkscrew in turns of cobbled steps. He wants to stop here where nothing seems out of sight of the sea, but at a café he’s told the only pensione is closed due to a death in the family. The waiter who speaks some English knows of an inexpensive apartment for rent, but doesn’t know if the man would like it. Americans, the waiter says, don’t feel that they’re on holiday unless they have a vista di mare . That’s why the available apartment is so inexpensive.

“What does it look out on?” he asks.

“ Cipressi ,” the waiter says.

“ Non capisco ,” he says.

“Cypress trees.”

Three stories above the alley, Marty steps onto the back porch for a smoke. He’s down to three — morning, afternoon, evening. Clouds smolder above the roofs. The ring of church bells blocks away sounds diffused by the misting drizzle. It’s been overcast for weeks, a time during which Marty has come to feel increasingly indistinct. Across the gangway between apartment buildings, a lightbulb softly illuminates a bathroom window. Someone, also indistinct, has stepped into a shower.

As Marty watches, the distorted, fragmented reflections on the marbled glass reassemble into momentary glimpses of a woman. She doesn’t know he’s watching. If she did, it would alarm her even though he can see no more than the blurred flesh tone of her back as she turns closer to the pane. It’s an opaque window, as open to the public gaze as the weathered brick wall it’s set in, and yet, on the other side of the glass, the hint of a woman showering makes a bathroom light intimate. Probably there were once plastic curtains, but now it appears the water from her shower must be jetting against the inside of the pane and splashing off a tiled sill. He imagines the steam rising around her as a downpour flattens her hair and rivulets pour down glass, tile, skin, down her legs, puddling at her bare feet before swirling into a gurgling drain.

If, rather than a misting drizzle, the force of her shower pummeled the city, flooding the gutters and swirling into echoey sewers, Marty wouldn’t be standing out here. Along the streets the blurred shapes of pedestrians like a population of mourners under stately black umbrellas would pass silently through fuming exhausts and the distorted beams of vaporish headlights. Marty would have cracked opened his back door and, rather than venturing onto the porch, he’d have exhaled the day’s last smoke through the sieve of a rusted screen door studded with droplets. He wouldn’t be aware of the nearness of her nakedness. He’d be a voyeur only of the shape-shifting rain.

Above the alley, a gray squirrel tightroping along a slick black phone line sends perched starlings skyward. Marty wonders if it’s the same squirrel that has managed through death-defying gymnastics to visit his bedroom windowsill each morning, lured there by the stale peanuts Marty sets out. The peanuts were stale from the start. Marty bought a bag of them from a blind vendor who had been guided by his muzzled pit bull to the steaming grate of a subway. Marty could hear the trains rushing below and feel their vibrations rising through his soles. He dropped loose change into the coffee can stuffed with dollar bills and as he took a bag of peanuts from the vendor’s hand, Marty wasn’t sure whether he’d misheard the man. He didn’t bother to ask, “Pardon?” and simply said, “Thank you,” and walked away, but in a voice scrambled by the updraft of trains, it sounded as if the vendor had said, “God bless, asshole.”

Perhaps he’d said, “God bless your soul.”

The nuts were stale and tasted of mold, but rather than pitch them, Marty set two peanuts on his windowsill each evening before going to sleep. In the morning he’d wake to see the squirrel nibbling one of the nuts on the sill. The other nut the squirrel took to bury.

“Top of the morning to you, little fellow,” Marty would say, his first words of the day — sometimes his only words.

A couple of nights ago, Marty realized he was out of peanuts. That next morning — actually in the semidark before morning — he was awakened by a voice in a dream whispering, “Awake, asshole.” The words were spoken at the same pitch as the scrape of claws shredding the window screen. At first light, Marty could see the silhouette of what appeared to be a flying squirrel affixed to the screen. Its yellowed rodent teeth were gnawing into Marty’s room. He had never noticed, until he saw the underside of the squirrel clinging to his screen, how closely squirrels resemble rats.

Instead of buying more nuts to dole out, or finally opening an ancient box of Cracker Jack — the box he had stolen from a burning candy store when he was a child (a fire Marty sometimes wonders if he set), a singed box of Cracker Jack carried with him ever since from place to place — Marty decided the time had come to stop feeding the squirrel. The following night he dreamed that rats had invaded his apartment. They wanted to pick out his eyeballs as if they were nut meats in a broken shell, one eye to eat and one to bury, and all that prevented them from doing so were the tears he wept. He woke in moonlit darkness to a pillow soaked in either sweat or tears. The squirrel was spread-eagled again, furiously scratching and gnawing at the screen. Marty latched the window and pulled the shade. He had enjoyed the fresh breeze at night, and now the small apartment felt even more confining. But Marty has run out of reasons to leave. There’s no longer a pay phone at the subway station that he would walk to in order to call in sick. The pay phones have disappeared overnight and Marty doesn’t have a cell. Even if he did, he can’t remember what number to call.