Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Beside a pool along the green bank of a river, a faun reaches through the transparent reflection of his nakedness and catches hold of the current.

Or the current has seized him, coiling his wrist like a submerged line. A rope of rough hemp slick with moss, the kind of rope that’s left a groove across the shoulders of civilizations, a rope that might harness slaves to the giant stones of the pyramids or connect the collars of captives as they march to the auction block, a hangman’s rope, a rope for tying rebels to the whipping post, for binding witches and heretics to fire, for fettering the mad as if they were barn animals, for dangling suicides at the crossroads, a rope with which the conquistadores might set their anchor like a fishhook in the maw of the New World, a rope whose knot even the great Houdini could not undo.

The faun, his muscles bulging, strains against the current, and a silently exploding cloud of scum rises as if he’s engaged in landing a monstrous fish, some bottom-feeder with a beard of barbels and popping eyes, dislodged from its underwater cave yet refusing to be yanked up into dappled sunlight.

As the faun struggles, the bank beneath his feet bunches like a fabric pulled out of shape by a loose thread. Its pattern of cattails and reeds, ferns and water lilies is slowly drawn together until distinctions among species disappear in a tangle of green. He pulls as frogs hop and turtles crawl from their devastated kingdom, and even the hovering dragonflies no longer recognize where they were hatched. He continues to pull, and farther off, a field, despite the weight of cedars, moves like a Persian rug beneath a grand piano.

The silent tug-of-war beneath the sun’s lidless eye exhausts him — but not in a way that makes him sweat and pant for breath. Instead he’s filled with a sudden, drowsy lethargy, and collapses beside the small harp he has dropped in order to grasp the current. As he sinks deeper into sleep, first the field and then the riverbank gradually relax, reassuming their recognizable shapes. The turtles and frogs return to their stations, dragonflies ride the shimmering air. He has begun to dream.

His dream spreads across the pooling river where his reflection floated before he disturbed it. In his dream a young woman bathes amid water hyacinths, and the dream itself seems even more exposed and vulnerable than the reflection of his naked body. Damselflies dip to it and alight for a glistening instant. Naiads of mayflies and water skaters dimple its placid surface, while circles expand from where darting minnows have kissed its shadowy underside. A breeze scented with cedar blows through the harp strings, making music. Kingfishers, egrets, and blue herons wheel and land, pacing around his bare body with the marionette strides of waterbirds. Even the loon’s manic laughter echoing eerily through the cypress swamp doesn’t wake him. And the current that he still clutches now flows through his fist, unraveling between his fingers like a braid coming loose down the spine of a virgin.

After days of drifting, the man arrives at a confluence of doors. Had he been adrift on a river instead of the ocean, it would seem as if he were encountering a logjam from some long-removed past when the virgin forests were being dismantled. Had he been adrift on city streets, he might have come upon these doors hammered up into a makeshift barrier, a dead end walling off the wrecking site of a condemned neighborhood.

From afar, their surfaces shimmer like an ice floe. As he floats closer they appear like a Sargasso Sea of wood instead of weed, a gigantic deck without a ship, a floating graveyard where doors come to rest, undulating with the gentle roll of the sea.

The man rises unsteadily, shading his eyes, balancing his weight in the gently rocking life raft. From where he stands, the doors appear tightly butted against one another like pieces of a gigantic puzzle. He can see doors of all designs — plain and ornate, hardwood and pine, some varnished, others painted, all of them weathered. Some have peepholes, some have mail slots, some have numbers, foot plates, knockers, locks, doorknobs of brass, wrought iron, glass, and some have only puttied holes where the doorknobs are missing. He can’t see any hinges. The doors are all floating with their outsides up, facing the sky, and their insides facedown in salt water.

He paddles the raft along what seems the shore of a strange, uncharted island, and moors it, carefully securing the line to the knocker of what must once have been the stately door of a mansion. He bellies from the raft and stands, accustoming his legs to bearing his weight again and to the slight roll. With each undulation of the sea a clear film of water washes across the surface of the doors, glossing them like a fresh coat of shellac. As he walks he can hear the slosh of his cuffs and the creak of his footsteps on the warped wood. It’s too quiet. He’d hoped for the bustle of nesting seabirds, sunning turtles, fish leaping up and plopping back at the edge where the water laps. He’d hoped, at least, for the company of his shadow. After so many days at sea, he was looking forward to having a shadow again, a real shadow, with its long legs striding in time to his own. When he can’t detect one, he is suddenly, inordinately disappointed. All that keeps him from weeping is his realization that, in isolation, his emotions have grown childish. He has begun each new day of drifting by promising himself that, whatever happens, he will not panic, and that promise now restores his composure.

He walks farther inland, a single figure on a wooden plain, and then whirls as if he’s heard someone following him. For a moment he could swear that he’s heard footfalls other than his own. Of course, there’s no one there, just isolation playing its tricks. But, standing quietly, he hears a sound that can’t be ascribed either to his own footfalls or to the rhythmic slap of water along the shoreline. He hears it again — a steady, nearly imperceptible knocking.

He proceeds inland and now not only can he hear the sound, but he can feel its vibrations through the soles of his bare feet. Each door he steps on knocks back from the other side. From the elegant doors there comes a polite rap, from the ornate, stately doors a firmer, more commanding knock, and from the nicked, peeling doors comes a battering of knuckles that threatens to build into an abusive pounding.

The farther he walks, the more insistent the knocking becomes. It is no longer restricted to the doors he steps on. The doors all around him have picked up the sound — each door with its own particular rap, its own pitch and rhythm, its own demand or plea, though he can’t tell if he is hearing the blows of someone desperately trying to enter, or of someone locked in and trying to escape.

The barrage of fists and feet against wood is becoming deafening. The flat landscape of doors trembles as if straining at hinges he can’t see. He seizes the knob of a plain pine door and tries to yank it open, but it’s locked. He tries a charred-looking black door on which the darkened paint has been buckled by intense heat, a door that sounds ready to split under a rain of blows, but it is locked as firmly as if it has been nailed shut.

“Hello!” he yells. “Who’s there?”

There’s no answer except for the knocking, which becomes still more furious.

All the doors are locked. He knows this without trying them one by one. They are shut tight, as if the weight of fathoms, the pressure of a deep ocean trench, is holding them closed. And even amid the pounding he has an odd flash of memory: how, as a child, he would tease his younger brother mercilessly, until his brother, who had a terrible temper, lost all control and came at him with a baseball bat or a hammer or a knife. He would run from his brother through the house into the basement, or slam himself behind a shed door, holding it shut while his brother pulled furiously from the other side, shouting, “I’ll kill you!” When he couldn’t force it open, his brother would expend his anger by hammering at the door, kicking it, hacking it, beating it with the bat, but they both knew that he would never get it open, and that they were both safe from the sum of his rage, and safe from facing each other. What would have happened if just once he had opened the door his brother thought would never give way?