Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Or rather than a sound, or even the absence of sound, the story might at first be no more than a scent: a measure of the time spent folded in a cedar drawer that’s detectable on a silk camisole. For illumination, other than the moonlight (now momentarily clouded), it’s lit by the flicker of an almond candle against a bureau mirror that imprisons light as a jewel does a flame.

The amber pendant she wears tonight, for instance, a gem he’s begun to suspect has not yet fossilized into form. It’s still flowing, imperceptibly, like a bead of clover honey between the cleft of her breasts. Each night it changes shape — one night an ellipse, on another a tear, or a globe, lunette or gibbous, as if it moved through phases like an amber moon. Each morning it has captured something new — moss, lichen, pine needles. On one morning he notices a wasp, no doubt extinct, from the time before the invention of language, preserved in such perfect detail that it looks dangerous, still able to sting. On another morning the faint hum of a trapped bee, and on another, a glint of prehistoric sun along a captured mayfly’s wings. Where she grazes down his body and her honey-colored hair and the dangling pendant brush across his skin, he can feel the warmth of sunlight trapped in amber. Or is that simply body heat?

The story could have begun with the faint hum of a bee. Is something so arbitrary as a beginning even required? He wants to tell her a story without a beginning, a story that goes through phases like a moon, the telling of which requires the proper spacing of a night sky between each phase.

Imagine the words strung out across the darkness, and the silent spaces between them as the emptiness that binds a snowfall together, or turns a hundred starlings rising from a wire into a single flock, or countless stars into a constellation. A story of stars, or starlings. A story of falling snow. Of words swept up and bound like whirling leaves. Or, after the leaves have settled, a story of mist.

What chance did words have beside the distraction of her body? He wanted to go where language couldn’t take him, wanted to listen to her breath break speechless from its cage of parentheses, to travel wordlessly across her skin like that flush that would spread between her nape and breasts. What was that stretch of body called? He wanted a narrative that led to all the places where her body was still undiscovered, unclaimed, unnamed.

Fiction—“the lie through which we tell the truth,” as Camus famously said — was at once too paradoxical and yet not mysterious enough. A simpler kind of lie was needed, one that didn’t turn back upon itself and violate the very meaning of lying. A lie without dénouement, epiphany, or escape into revelation, a lie that remained elusive. The only lie he needed was the one that would permit them to keep on going as they had.

It wasn’t the shock of recognition, but the shock of what had become unrecognizable that he now listened for. It wasn’t a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of common sense that loving her required.

Might unconnected details be enough, arranged and rearranged in any order? A scent of cedar released by body heat from a water-stained camisole. The grain of the hair she’d shaved from her underarms, detectable against his lips. The fading mark of a pendant impressed on her skin by the weight of his body. (If not a resinous trail left by a bead of amber along her breasts, then it’s her sweat that’s honey.) Another night upon which this might end — might end again, for good this time: someone out on the misty street, whistling a melody impossible to re-create …

I wanted to tell you a story without telling the story.

Horizon, a clothesline strung between crabapples. The forgotten dress, that far away, bleached invisible by a succession of summer days until a thunderstorm drenches it blue again, as it is now, and despite the distance, the foam of raindrops at its hem sparkles just before the wind lifts it into a wave that breaks against the man framed in a farmhouse doorway.

I dreamed in negative exposure of a room where night and light sound nothing alike and so are not balanced in opposition. A room expelled from a children’s story because its clock won’t go ticktock and there’s no hat for a cat or a spoon to reflect the moon. The only illumination a levitating dress, a handkerchief bidding farewell from a steamer, the gossamer curtain suspended on the thermal of a hissing radiator.

Beyond the curtain, a window open on to outer space.

Beneath stars like those that Dante sees again— a riveder le stelle —when he emerges from the Inferno, she led the blindered horses of childhood from a burning barn and woke to a momentary scent of cigar smoke.

I’ve heard it defies the conventions of dreams to touch a ghost animal. Yet, when for one last time I was allowed to gather that beautiful contradiction called cat — twelve silky pounds of wildness — into my arms, I didn’t want to let him go. It was only a moment before I awoke from his familiar warmth, so maybe the restriction against touching ghost animals was enforced, only not quickly enough.

Freud said dreams are wishes. Once, I cut off my mother’s hands.

Whatever else dreams may be, they’re a kind of recollection. It doesn’t matter that mostly they’re forgotten, vanished like those theoretical elements conceived in a cyclotron whose existence is measured in nanoseconds.

Whatever else dreams may be, she said, they make for conversation.

We were trading dreams in a Jeep Cherokee that smelled of hay. Ours were the only cars left in a parking lot that was vanishing in a snowfall. When the neon sign blinked out, the flakes went from pink to white. We’d met for a drink at a restaurant fittingly called, given the snow, the Lodge. It’s been gone for years, but sometimes I’ll still see it when I drive by if I ignore the seedy antique shop in its place. A mutual friend had mentioned to her that I might be of help in suggesting journals to which she could submit her poems. I was teaching “Your Life as Poetry”—not a title I’d chosen — at a community center for seniors. My students all wanted to know what ever became of rhyme. She taught riding to the blind, the friend told me, and lived on a horse farm. I don’t know what I expected — cowboy poetry, greeting-card verse about horses running free? At the very least her poems were the work of a sophisticated reader, written in a current style: free verse in which the poet addressed herself as you . Their subject, besides the you , was abandoned barns — a sequence that explored old barns as photographers do, but the barns in her poems could have only been constructed out of language. Barns the horizon showed through, composed more of slatted light, motes, and cobwebs than from warped siding, their tattered roofs askew beneath the frown of crows; barns like beds unmade by tornadoes, weather vanes still dizzy; washed-up barns, driftwood gray, flotsamed with rusted, mysterious tools; barns shingled in license plates, their only history a progression of dates — different colors, same state: decay. Unhinged doors gaping shadow and must, recurring hints about divorce and childlessness — a few would make it to the pages of literary magazines. Instead of real drinks, we both ordered tea, which at the Lodge was hot water and Lipton’s with a wedge of lemon. And here we were, past midnight, in the front seat of her Jeep, a woolen horse blanket over our laps. I was telling her how I once woke with only a phrase in mind: primary play at binary speed .

Meaning what? she asked.

Maybe the motto for the way I’ve lived my life, or should be living it.