Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Outside, night billowed like the habits of nuns through vigil lights of snow. Kraków was only blocks away, just past Goldblatt’s darkened sign. Bells tolled from the steeple of St. Casimir’s, over the water towers and smokestacks, over the huddled villages and ghettos of Chicago.

And at the center of my body, Busha’s rosary-pinched fingers picked at that knotted opening that promised to lead inward, but never did.

They stepped carefully onto the pond as if they were about to walk on water. Its surface was inscribed with a cursive of scars resembling those faintly visible on the daylight moon frosted to a faint blue sky. The farther out they walked, the more flawless the ice became.

“I think we’ve gone far enough,” she said, gazing down, a mittened hand shading her eyes. Wind, nearly unnoticeable so long as they kept moving, blew her hair. “Ice this clear can’t be safe.”

“It’s thicker than you’d suppose,” he said.

“Can you feel the pressure of our weight forcing up water? Each step makes the bottom bubble up. You can see the bubbles frothing against the underside of the ice,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

“Those aren’t water bubbles,” he told her.

“Then what are they?”

“Last summer, during a wedding in the park, after the bride and groom cut the giant palace of a cake, instead of waltzing, they turned their backs on the orchestra and set sail across the pond in a rowboat. They left all their gifts behind except for a Methuselah of champagne that was supposed to be for toasts. It was propped in the stern, poking up like a lopsided chimney on a transatlantic steamer, and the boat listed under its weight, but they’d have made it across the pond if not for a sudden summer storm that blew up and capsized the boat. The bottle, Taittinger, if I remember correctly — I’m never sure how to pronounce it — sank to the bottom. It must have just popped its cork. In our honor.”

They walked farther out. The pond wind had a skating quality. It slammed against their calves when she stopped again suddenly. “Oh, my God!” she said. “There’s a huge, dark fish rising from the bottom, a giant catfish or a carp, something too big for this pond. Look at it, just beneath us, opening its enormous maw as if to swallow us whole once the ice gives way. I can see its grinning teeth. Please, we must turn back.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not a monstrous fish. It’s the distortions in the ice that make it appear to be. At that wedding last summer, during the storm, when the rowboat capsized, the distraught, drunken guests wheeled the concert grand with its black tuxedo finish from the pavilion and down to the pond, and launched it to save the bride and groom. It floated out, but sank before it reached them. It’s still submerged, playing Strauss, perhaps. What you thought were teeth is the keyboard.”

They walked out farther still. The wind they hadn’t noticed on shore felt round, like the pond, resisting their progress even as it pushed them from behind. If not for the pond, there’d have been no awareness of there even being a shore.

“I see a candle flame following us, rising from below like that line of poetry from Dr. Zhivago you are so fond of. I can’t recall the words exactly, but I see it flickering just below.”

“You mean, It snowed and snowed, the whole world over … A candle burned on the table; / A candle burned ? If memory serves, I recited it to you the evening we met. You said it warmed your heart.”

“Look! The flame has formed a halo around us, as if we’re standing on a frosted windowpane that the candle is about to dissolve.”

“But that doesn’t happen in the poem. Maybe you’re thinking of the movie, which I haven’t seen, but in the poem it’s The blizzard sculptured on the glass / Designs of arrows and whorls. / A candle burned…”

“I see a drowned girl veiled in white, holding the candle, and a tiara of flowers is coming apart in her flowing hair. We have to go back!”

“But we’re perfectly safe. The ice is two feet thick.” He began to jump up and down to make his point, rising higher with each jump as if the ice had the spring of a trampoline, and landing harder and harder on his boot heels.

Beneath them the ice began to shudder. Jets of froth obscured the clarity as if a fuming fissure had opened at the collapsing bottom of the pond. Giant flukes and whorled flame conflated, enmeshed in veils of milky froth. A rumble boiled to a thunderous crescendo, the sound of cracks shooting through ice like jagged lightning through a summer storm. She screamed and turned to run.

“Wait, wait, don’t move,” he called after her.

She slipped and went down in a graceful slow motion, then slid back up at hyperspeed and kept running.

“It’s only a train,” he shouted over the roar.

Far off, on the other side of the pond, behind a scrim of skeletal trees, the scuffed silver salt-stained train arrowed across a metal trestle.

“It must be some weird echo,” he yelled. “Not a Doppler effect, but there’s no doubt a scientific name for it that we’d recognize if we were as up on acoustical engineering as we are on Russian poetry.”

She went down again hard, ungracefully this time, crawled back to her feet, and kept going. To watch her was like seeing, from the perspective of consciousness, someone struggling to run in a dream.

He caught up to her at the edge of the pond. She stepped onto the bank and when she turned to look back, her face was streaked with tears. It was the first time he’d seen her cry. Her salt tears had pitted the freshwater ice and left a trail. Wasn’t it she who had told him, shortly after they met, that in every relationship there’s always one person who scatters a trail of bread crumbs for the other to follow? He’d written it down in a notebook where he kept quotes he wanted to remember from books he’d read.

“I’m sorry it upset you,” he said. “I thought you might like walking out on the ice together. It’s so quiet now in winter, the summer buskers and crowds all gone, the band instruments hibernating in their cases, musical shapes like the pavilion muffled in snow, the organ grinder and his neon-green monkey migrating south like the songbirds — it’s too cold for a spider monkey. Just us, walking across a pond as peacefully as if we were walking across the daylight moon.”

“I saw a dead girl holding a candle and staring up through the ice, and she looked like me,” she said. “She looked like me enough to be me. As if the ice were a mirror.”

“Well, she wasn’t you. You can’t be both dead and alive any more than you can be in two different places at once.”

“I can be in two places if I am in two different times.”

“But you’re here now with me in this time.”

“Who knows for how long? Someday I may be looking back on being in love, and which me will be more real?”

“And who said the girl, if there was a girl, was dead? More likely is that she’s only sleeping in a cryogenic state of suspended animation. I’ll go back and wake her with a kiss.”

“She’s under two feet of ice.”

“It’s so transparent she’ll feel the impression of warmth on her lips.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you, she’ll break through the ice and pull you under.”

“Nonsense,” he said, “I’ll be back in a jiff.”

He started out across the pond again, retracing the pitted trail of her tears. From way out, he turned to smile and wave, but if she was there at all, he could no longer distinguish her from the background of winter.

Mist hangs like incense in the trees. Obscured trains uncouple in a dusk that is also obscured, and later, a beacon sweeps across the faces of a crowd gathered at the shoreline, standing knee-deep in mist.