Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“A med student, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

The Lifeguard leans back toward her lips but at that moment a cough jolts her body, she spits up water and snot, and opens her eyes.

Now that she is no longer a corpse, the boys in the crowd press in to memorize the shriveled nipple of the breast popped over her hot-pink bikini. An ambulance, its siren dropped to a pitch that resonates more in molars than ears, churns toward them across the sand.

“Why’d you do it?” the Lifeguard asks softly.

The med student scowls at him, shakes his head in disapproval, then removes his sunglasses as if it is important to his bedside manner that the girl sees his eyes, and asks, “Feel dizzy? Nauseous? Do you want to throw up?”

“You’re so pretty … so young … why?” the Lifeguard repeats, nudging the med student aside, although, even as he asks, he knows the question is wrong. But the invisible imprint of the kiss on his lips is shaping his words. There’s a sudden, compelling bond between him and this girl just back from the dead, an intimacy of a kind he’s never felt before, an urgency to keep saving her that is ruining his judgment. He has to resist the desire to take her in his arms, hold her close, and resume kissing her. For the moment whispering is as close as he can get.

“Why’d you do it?” he whispers, as if to reassure her that her secret will be safe with him.

“Do what?” the girl asks, and looks at him dazed, lost, her trembling fingers tugging at her tangled, waterlogged hair.

It’s clear from her confused blue eyes that she’s brought back nothing she can share, no forbidden secrets to confide to the living. She doesn’t remember where she’s just been; her few moments of death are harder for her to recall than a fleeting dream. She doesn’t remember the mouth on hers that brought her back, or his breath searching for her through the darkened corridors of her body, trying dead end after dead end until he found a pathway to her will. She doesn’t remember the kiss. It has remained a part of her total absence from herself. Soon, no one will remember it but the Lifeguard, and he’s right to suspect that it’s the one kiss he’ll recall for the rest of his life. The connection between them is slipping away and the Lifeguard lets it go as if releasing her body back to the water.

“Any of you her friends?” he asks, looking into the crowd that’s reflected on the med student’s sunglasses.

She accepts a half-smoked cigarette from a hand in the crowd, and the Lifeguard, still able to feel the terrible press of coldness against his lips, rises from his knees in the sand. He stands watching, no longer necessary, as they bundle her in a faded beach towel, and she leaves without so much as a thank-you, or a wave goodbye.

While we were kissing, the leather-bound Obras completas opened to a photo of Federico García Lorca with a mole prominent beside a sideburn of his slicked-back hair, slid from her lap to the jade silk couch, and hit the Chinese carpet with a muffled thud.

While we were kissing, the winter wind known locally as the Hawk soared off the lake on vast wings of snow.

While we were kissing, verbs went uncommitted to memory.

Her tongue rolled r ’s against mine, but couldn’t save me from failing Spanish. We were kissing, but her beloved Federico, to whom she’d introduced me on the night we’d first met, was not forgotten. Verde que te quiero verde. Green I want you green. Verde viento, verdes ramas. Green wind, green branches. Hissing radiator heat. Our breaths elemental, beyond translation like the shrill of the Hawk outside her sweated, third-story windows. Córdoba. Lejana y sola , she translated between kisses, Córdoba. Far away and alone. With our heads full of poetry, the drunken, murderous Guardias Civiles were all but knocking at the door.

Aunque sepa los caminos

yo nunca llegaré a Córdoba.

Though I know the roads

I will never reach Córdoba.

Shaking off cold, her stepfather, Ray Ramirez, came home from his late shift as manager of the Hotel Lincoln. He didn’t disturb us other than to announce from the front hall: “Hana, tell David, it’s a blizzard out there! He better go while there’s still buses!”

“It’s a blizzard out there,” Hana told me.

It was then we noticed the white roses in a green vase that her mother, who resembled Lana Turner, and who didn’t much like me, must have set there while we were kissing. We hadn’t been aware of her bringing them in. Hana and I looked at each other: she was still flushed, our clothes were disheveled. We hadn’t merely been kissing. She shrugged and buttoned her blouse. Verte desnuda es comprender el ansia de la lluvia. To see you naked is to comprehend the desire of rain. I picked her volume of Lorca from the floor and set it beside the vase of flowers, and slipped back into the loafers I’d removed to curl up on the jade couch.

“I better go.”

“It’s really snowing. God! Listen to that wind! Do you have a hat? Gloves? All you have is that jacket.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Please, at least take this scarf. For me. So I won’t worry.”

“It smells like you.”

“It smells like Anias.”

At the door we kissed goodbye as if I were leaving on a journey.

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”

Hana followed me into the hallway. We stopped on each stair down to the second-floor landing to kiss goodbye. She snuggled into my leather jacket. The light on the second-floor landing was out.

“Good luck on your Spanish test. Phone me, so I know you got home safe, I’ll be awake thinking of you,” she called down to me.

“ Though I know the roads I will never reach Córdoba .”

“Just so you reach Rogers Park.”

* * *

I stepped from her doorway onto Buena. It pleased me — amazed me, actually — that Hana should live on the only street in Chicago, at least the only street I knew of, with a Spanish name. Her apartment building was three doors from Marine Drive. That fall, when we first began seeing each other, I would take the time to walk up Marine Drive on my way home. I’d discovered a viaduct tunnel unmarked by graffiti that led to a flagstone grotto surrounding a concrete drinking fountain with four spouts. Its icy water tasted faintly metallic, of rust or moonlight, and at night the burble of the fountain transformed the place into a Zen garden. Beyond the grotto and a park, the headlights on Lake Shore Drive festooned the autumn trees. For a moment, I thought of going to hear the fountain purling under the snow, but the Hawk raked my face and the frosted trees quavered. Green branches, green wind. I raised the collar of my jacket and wrapped her green chenille scarf around my throat. Even in the numbing wind I could smell perfume.

* * *

By the time I slogged the four blocks to Broadway, it wasn’t Lorca but a line by Emily Dickinson that expressed the night: zero at the bone . No matter which direction I turned, the swirling wind was in my face. My loafers felt packed with snow. Broadway was deserted. I cowered in the dark doorway of a dry cleaner’s, peeking out now and again and stamping my feet. The snow-plastered bus stop sign hummed in the gusts, but there wasn’t a bus visible in either direction. A cab went by and, though I wasn’t sure I could make the fare, I tried to flag it down. It didn’t stop. The snow had drifted deep enough so that the cabbie wouldn’t risk losing momentum. Finally, to warm up, I crossed the street to a corner bar called the Buena Chimes. Its blue neon sign looked so faint I doubted the place was open. If it was, I expected it to be empty, which I hoped would allow the bartender to take pity on me. I was twenty, a year shy of legal drinking age.