Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

From behind the counter, Sandra locks them in a nonstop stare.

With his free hand, Rick raises his teacup to his lips. Gwen’s eyes are closed, she’s breathing heavier, nostrils flared and her lips parted, revealing a silent lemon-yellow sigh. When she slides toward his finger so that it enters, Rick whispers, “We can’t let on we’re from the future. They don’t want our kind here. Sweetheart, you have to at least make like you’re sipping your tea.”

A mime is climbing stairs. He climbs reluctantly, each leaden step an act of resignation, which may explain why, despite his effort, he’s not ascending. He no more wants to reach the top than a man mounting another kind of stage — a platform where an executioner stands waiting with an ax.

Or perhaps the executioner is seated in a portable director’s chair, puffing through a slit in his hood the cigarette meant for the condemned while stropping the blade of a guillotine that has just failed the cabbage test.

Or perhaps the stairs lead to a hangman tying a knot with the care that his wife expended just that morning braiding their daughter’s hair.

The mime climbs and climbs, but cannot conquer the three-step flight that peaks in the space reserved for him in the mercy seat.

Or perhaps … but wait!

There’s been an error in interpretation. The mime isn’t climbing. All along he’s been marching in place. Still, from his body language, not to mention the look engraved on his face, it’s clear that misinterpretation is not to be confused with a stay of execution.

Okay, then the mime is marching —marching down a buzzing, fluorescent corridor in the bowels of a prison, toward a gurney for an operation that requires only an anesthesiologist and a chaplain.

He is marched at dawn across a deserted square to a send-up of pigeons, and takes his place against the riddled wall that faces an unshaven, disheveled firing squad. Their hungover master of ceremonies, a captain, smelling of women, stands sipping menudo from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, sheepishly aware that he has just smoked the cigarette prop. Instead of a sword, the captain raises a blood-red parasol that theatrically pops open. Instead of a sidearm to deliver the coup de grâce, he’s holstered a cell phone that is carrying on its own nonstop, one-way, outraged conversation. As for the blindfold, well, each member of the audience seems to be wearing it. On further inspection, each soldier in the firing squad is wearing one, too. And yet, despite the disordered proceedings, and just before the Ready, aim , etc., command, the captain remembers to ask, “Any last words?”

Old Man Martin checks into a cheap hotel to die. He winks when the Desk Clerk asks how long he’ll be staying, but the Desk Clerk mistakes that to mean he should send up a woman. The woman doesn’t notice the old man’s haggard expression, his pallor, his jaundiced eyes. What she’s alert to is the man lovingly slipping his belt out of the loops of his trousers or studying her scars with too much fascination.

“What you here for?” Martin asks, his voice the backside of a cough.

“Come for sex,” the woman says as if sharing a confidence. She’s not a native speaker.

“Say what?” Martin yells, as if she’s the one who’s deaf.

“Come for sex.”

“Comfort the sick? You a doctor? I don’t want no more doctors.”

“Pesos, hole,” the woman says, keeping it elementary, gesturing that hole includes her flabby breasts.

“Soul? What’ll you pay? You the devil?”

“Hole!” she says, and strips off her maid’s smock.

Old Martin breaks into a demented grin. “The whole enchilada? Know the price of the whole enchilada? Holy moley!” He collapses on the bed, laughing like a lunatic, chanting, “Holy, holy, holy moley,” and drubbing the mattress with his heels and fists so that the bedsprings squeal like they’re doing it, and the picture of the ghost ship emerging from a fog of dust sails from the nail above the headboard to the floor.

“You holy, holy loco?” the woman shouts, and throws up her hands.

“Hole? You the grave digger?” Martin sits up cradling an air guitar. You can dig my grave with a bloody spade , he sings in a rasp befitting of Blind Boy Martin. Oh, Lord, dig my grave with a bloody spade, but just make sure the grave digger gets paid . He fumbles on his specs — one lens is missing, the other’s cracked — and, squinting, fishes a coin from his worn change purse and places it in her outstretched palm. “That why you dressed in mourning?”

“I’m naked,” she says.

“You the Dark Angel? Where’s your wings?” Martin grabs her arm and tries to claw the coin back from her clenched fist. “Give it up, you damned imposter,” he’s shouting. “That’s my life’s savings.”

She tears away, slams out the door leaving her smock behind, and races dizzily down the spiral of back stairs, Holy, holy, holy looping her brain. She can’t say why she’s sobbing. The life’s savings has seared her fist shut so tightly that she can feel the face stamped on the coin. It’s her face, and on the tails side there’s a heart, her heart, wreathed in flames like the Virgin’s heart in holy pictures. Heat scalds through her veins and renders fleshiness down to sinew. Body supple again, scars erased, lacquered with tears and sweat, she busts out of the sheet-metal door, nearly knocking it off its rusted hinges.

In the alley, men are drinking rotgut between wars. Their rap anthem whines as they debate the day’s pack order of has-beens, coulda-beens, and wannabes. They’ve been one-upping one another’s bullshit tales of conquest as if auditioning for the Poontang Monologues . Whatever her native tongue, she’s had to become fluent in the dialect they speak. They gape as if at an apparition. Before she can whirl back up the stairs, she’s tackled. There’s no confusion here between whole and hole. They want most what she conceals and when she won’t unclench her fist, swearing she can’t, one of them smashes a bottle against the banister, and one opens a straight razor, and another slides a bayonet out of a cowboy boot.

Her cries echo and dim along twenty-watt corridors. Holy, holy, holy. Old Martin starts from his nap. In his dream of fog and dust was the voice praying so fervently his own? He hugs himself in the nest of soiled sheets. The mattress smells of urine, the pillow of hair. He tries whispering a prayer into the megaphone of an empty water glass, and the water glass fogs, as does the dusty window and bureau mirror. He presses the glass to his ear and hears what’s left of his breath awash in a seashell. Out at sea, lost in fog, the ghost ship with its cargo of souls plows toward the lonely ringing of a distant buoy.

The Bellboy stands on the other side of the door pressing a cell phone to his ear. He’s a Filipino kid whose bleached hair ponytails from beneath a bellhop’s hat. His faded red uniform recalls the hotel’s grander days. He looks as if he just might shout, Call for Philip Morris! Perhaps, beneath his makeup, the Bellboy is older than he appears to be. The Desk Clerk, who has misinterpreted Old Martin’s rejection of the woman, has sent the Bellboy.

“Ahoy?” Old Martin shouts into the water glass as if it’s a disconnected rotary phone. There’s no dial tone, though the ringing in his ears continues to grow louder.

“ Amor ,” the Bellboy answers, and tries the doorknob. Locked. Locked out is the other side of being locked in. The Bellboy has learned that lesson at every reform school that’s reformed him. He’s learned it on Rikers Island, and learned it again here, where working has resembled explicating a trope: the body is a hotel. Transients enter, becoming guests. Until they arrived, the Bellboy was unaware of all his vacancies. He thought there was only one room available. When the deadbeat guests refused to leave, it became obvious there were other, secret rooms. Instead of checking out, the guests moved down a corridor lit by a red EXIT sign and lined with unnumbered rooms that didn’t require keys or maid service; rooms that call for Philip Morris. The closer to the EXIT sign, the smokier and smaller the rooms, until they are too narrow for anything but bedbugs, an ashtray of butts, and a single guest who lies with his arms crossed over his chest, puffing smoke rings through a whistling hole in his throat.