Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

He remembers other doors he’s hidden behind, and doors that he’s pounded on that remained closed. Perhaps it’s doors like those that have drifted until they’ve gathered here: doors never opened, doors that remained mute and anonymous, doors slammed in faces, doors locked on secrets, and violated doors, doors stripped of their privacy — pried, jimmied, axed. If not for the crescendo of knocking, he might lean his ear to each door and hear its story, listen to the voices muffled behind it, the singing or laughter or cursing or weeping, and perhaps he would recognize voices, so that it would seem as if he were walking down a long corridor lined with all the doors of his life.

But by now the pounding has become too terrible for him to even consider listening for voices. It is a racket beyond control, rage or panic desperately unleashed, like someone beating at the lid of a coffin. He covers his ears. It seems impossible that the doors can continue to withstand such a battering. And if one of them should give — split by the fury of blows — would all the pressure from beneath come gushing through that single doorway, spouting like a monstrous wave into the sky, then storming down, crushing, drowning, sucking the surface under, leaving only the bobbing flotsam of shattered doors behind?

The vision terrifies him. He turns to run back across the doors, his footfalls drumming as he retraces his steps to the edge of the sea. Now it is as if all the various knocks have been reduced to a single, massive fist pounding as steady as a heartbeat against a single, massive door. Each concussion knocks him off his feet and sends him sprawling across the wooden surface. As he dreaded, he can hear the wood begin to splinter and a network of cracks spread as if it is ice rather than wood that he flees across.

At the edge of the doors, surf pounds in, in time to the pounding of the fist. The surge of breakers buckles his legs. He’s rolled back across the doors, then, caught in the backwash, sucked out toward the sea until the next wave sweeps him back again. He manages to catch hold of a knocker and he clings to it while waves slam over his body. With his free hand and his teeth, he works to untie the knot to the line of the raft, while, at the other end of the line, the raft jerks and strains like a terrified dog at a leash. Finally the knot comes loose, and he times the backwash so that its momentum sweeps him into the raft. He’s thrown in on his face, water piling onto his back, while the raft bucks wildly in the surf, spinning away from shore. At any moment he expects it to capsize.

He is on the sea, drifting once more toward the horizon, staring out into a monochromic blue, and not a bird in the sky. He paddles aimlessly, waiting for a current to seize the raft. Behind him, the doors gleam like a beach in the sun. They have fallen silent again. Whatever was awakened must be sinking back unanswered into dark fathoms. When he turns the raft for a final look, ripples slap the bow like the last reverberations of those desperate blows.

Not everyone still has a place they’ve come from. So Martin tries to describe a single version of his multiple nowheres to a city girl one summer evening as they stroll past anonymous statues and the homeless camped like picnickers on lawns that momentarily look bronzed. The shouts of Spanish kids from the baseball diamond beyond the park lagoon reminds him of playing outfield for the hometown team. They played after the workday was over, by the mothy beams of tractors and combines, and the glow of an enormous harvest moon. At twilight you could see the seams of the moon more clearly than the seams of the ball. He can remember a home run sailing over his head into a cornfield, sending up a cloudburst of crows …

Later, heading with her toward a rented room in a transient hotel, past open bars, the smell of sweat and stale beer dissolves into a childhood odor of fermentation: the sour, abandoned granaries by the railroad tracks where the single spark from a match might still explode. A gang of boys would go there to smoke the pungent, impotent, homegrown weed and sometimes, they said, to meet a certain girl.

They never knew when she’d be there. Just before she appeared the whine of locusts became deafening and grasshoppers whirred through the shimmering air. The daylight moon suddenly grew near enough for them to see that it was filled with the reflection of their little fragment of the world, and then the gliding shadow of a hawk ignited an explosion of pigeons from the granary silos.

They said, beware, a crazy bum lived back there, too, but if so, Martin never saw him.

She was dozing on a faded Navajo blanket with the filmy shade of a maple tree drawn like a veil across her skin. Her blouse was still opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky-blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy.

Rob was lying just beyond the edge of the shadows thrown by her eyelashes. He had removed his shirt and spread it beneath him on the grass. It was hot, and lounging in her company seemed to intensify the light. Even the birds were drowsy. Only a single ant was working. It had him by the toe.

“Trying to tow me away,” he would have called out to her but for the lassitude, and her aversion to puns. The Woman Who Hates Puns, she sometimes called herself.

With his eyes closed and the sun warm on his lids, it seemed as if he and the ant were the only creatures on the planet still awake. At first, Rob was simply amused by its efforts, but after a while he began to sense a nearly imperceptible movement across the grass. He squinted up into the high blue sky, not caring really where he was headed. It was a day for such an attitude, but then almost any day spent with her could trigger a mood like that — could require it, in fact. Since he’d met her, Rob had increasingly spent his days in a trance for which he had no name. To describe this state of mind, he joked that he was living in Limbo.

This was Limbo: high, heavenly-looking clouds that threw no shadow and assumed no shapes. No wind, yet a faint hiss in the trees. Sunlight faintly weighted with perfume. In Limbo, where dream ruled, siestas were mandatory. The grass slid gently beneath him without leaving a stain along his spine. Grass blades combed his hair as he went by until his hair assumed the slant of grass.

So long as it was only a single ant, Rob didn’t mind. He wouldn’t tolerate them marching up his body in black columns, swarming, entering his mouth, ears, nostrils, and eyes in a pulsing stream, as if he were just another corpse to clean.

It was a morbid vision, not in keeping with such a lovely day.

Even here in Limbo, Rob thought, one apparently never recovers from having had “Leiningen Versus the Ants” read to him as a child.

He could still remember his anticipation — a mix of excitement and terror — on those Sunday afternoons in summer when his uncle Wayne would arrive with a storybook under his arm. Uncle Wayne would come to babysit for little Robbie while Rob’s parents went out to the backyard barbecues from which they would return “pickled,” as his father called it — though they looked more as if they’d been boiled — smelling of Manhattans, and laughing too easily and loudly.

“Remember,” his mother would caution conspiratorially before she left, “don’t ask Uncle Wayne about the war. He doesn’t like to talk about it. And don’t worry if he doesn’t talk much at all.”

As young as Rob was, it was clear to him that the babysitting was as much for Uncle Wayne’s sake as it was for the sake of Rob’s parents or himself.

Uncle Wayne usually didn’t talk much when his parents were there. He seemed shy, embarrassed, almost ashamed. His face was pitted from acne, which gave him the look of a teenager. Sometimes, Rob imagined that Uncle Wayne’s face had been pitted by shrapnel.