Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“It’s a miracle!”

“It is,” he insisted, “it is. I see trees, their barks like rich textiles. Bolts of birch like sailcloth, and aspen like linen. Elms like a corduroy, and hickory like a patch of burlap. Quilted sycamore, I see. Silken cherry.”

“Genug, I am fartootst!”

“I do,” he insisted, “I can! I see plants, I see flowers. Not just art’s abstractive, generical shapes, the wallpaper posies and the bouquets on ties, but trillium, cattleya, dahlia and quince. And see, in what even a blind man would recognize as the dark, the shaded mosses and shielded ferns — all drizzled ground’s weathered cover.”

“Gevalt, what a gesheft!”

“And shapes like a geometer — triangles, rectangles, pyramids, wedge. Cones and spheres, cylinders and tubes. The rhomboid, the quadrature, the octagon, the pill. All nature’s jigsaw doings.”

“And otherwise?”

“What, my balance you mean?”

“Otherwise.”

“I walk across tightropes and stand on the flyer’s narrow perch as lightly as the most casual man on the trapeze.”

“Oh,” I said, “the trap eeeze .”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Eddy, forgive me, you sleep in your bed with the rails up.”

“I’ve no vertigo in dreams. I’m as surefooted as an Indian. Comfortable in height as a steeplejack.”

“It don’t make you nauseous?”

“It doesn’t,” he said, “it really doesn’t. I’ll be riding downhill on a bicycle. Untroubled by curves, negotiating the hairpin turns and spirals, the violent mountain switchbacks, momentum at my back like a gale-force wind. All derring do, all derring done. All will’s and spirit’s exuberant, unencumbered Look-Ma-No-Hands.”

“And Eddy, if you fell, who’d say Kaddish?”

“Listen to me, Rabbi. You’ve known for years about my mazed bearings, my perturbed compass loose, free as a roulette wheel. I’m a guy who doesn’t clean his teeth because I can’t hold a toothbrush in my mouth, because it falls off my teeth. Because I lose track of where everything goes and gag on the bristles. I see, I see in my dreams. And not only see — I’m graceful.”

“You have them often, these dreams?”

“Last night. I had one last night.”

“Ahh,” I said, dovetailing as expectantly into his tale as a psychiatrist.

“So I’m walking along beside this river,” he said, as if breaking into his own story, “when suddenly I realize why those clouds are called ‘cumulus.’ Why, of course, I thought, it’s for the idea of accumulation implicit in them. That’s just what they look like — huge piles, great mounds, high white heaps of accumulated cloud stuff. I saw this reflected in the water — their dense, well-defined, straight-edged bases, their rounded, fluffy tops like the fluting on scallops. In the water, the imposed, accumulated clouds glanced off the current like a bunch of balloons.

“From the swiftness of the current in that latitude, and the light and color values reflected in the river, reduced, packed, tamped by the filters of the air and climate like an image in a lens, I judged it to be about one P.M. Time for lunch. And, indeed, I was starting to feel peckish, not outright hunger, understand, just the crisp snap and bristle in the throat and belly that is the beginning of appetite. I thought to bring it to the boil with some light exercise and determined to go for a swim before I ate. There was a very high, very narrow railroad trestle about a hundred yards ahead which I could probably climb by clambering up the sides of its steep ramparts. I pulled off my shoes and socks, placed them beside a low bush, and began my ascent.

“When I reached the top I heard a train. Well, no,” he corrected, “I didn’t hear the train so much as feel its vibrations on the tracks. There was a palpable shimmy, the rails, it seemed to me, like loose teeth, and swaying with what I could only hope were the factored, mathematical givens, the wobbled, engineered allowances of skyscrapers in a strong wind, say. Though of course I knew better.”

Edward’s voice was cracked now, dry, his tongue thickened around the story of his dream like spoiled meat. His handsome face had lost its poise, and I saw moisture collecting along the black rims of his dark glasses, spouting from God knew what pale and awful skin, tender, vulnerable and secret as a genital.

“It was a dream,” I said dismissively.

“I looked around,” Edward said, “trying to get my bearings.”

“It was only a dream.”

“By my best estimate I was maybe thirty-eight-and-a-half meters high. Throw in my height, I was probably forty-and-a-half meters from the surface of the river.”

“It was just a bad dream, Edward,” I told him.

“Light travels faster than sound. I could see the train, the locomotive, though I still couldn’t hear it.”

“Take it easy,” I said, “you always wake up from these nightmares.”

“I gazed down into the surface of the water. You have to do your calculations and make your allowances in split seconds. Two flattened piles of gray cumulus rushed toward the trestle and flowed under it. You know that moment when you look at something and can’t tell whether it’s you or the object that’s moving? You know that instant of vertigo and confusion?”

“A dream, Eddy. A lousy dream.”

“Is it hot in here? Did it get hot in here all of a sudden?”

“It is a little warm,” I said, to reassure him.

“I could see the train, the locomotive, its black tatter of burned diesel tearing away from the engine like a dark pennant. And heard it now too. And felt the vibration of the rails, and what weren’t vibrations but the drunken sway and stagger of the actual wooden trestle. Did I tell you I had to scan the water, search beneath and between its surface reflections to determine its depth? I mean, I knew mine. Not my depth, of course, my height. A hundred and eleven feet — and, from the apogee of my dive, probably more like a hundred fourteen — above that taut, flowing skin of cloud-bearing, sky-bearing water. Searching, as the speed and weight and sight and sound, and smell now, too, of that train came bearing down on me, for the exact and singular depth between the reflections where it would be safe for me to dive into the river. And did I tell you I not only had to do all this, not only had to find those needle-in-a-haystack clearances almost half a hundred meters beneath me, but that I had to find them through my opaque, black glasses, because what with that charging locomotive and my straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back weight on that flimsy trestle and all, there just wasn’t any time to take them—”

“It was a dream.”

“—off?”

“Edward, please, don’t make a tsimmes. It was only a—”

“So I dove. Or danced. Or maybe just fell, my arms furiously pinwheeling, rotating about some imaginary axis that ran through my armpits — diving, dancing, falling, stumbling along that shaking perimeter of trestle. And recovered. And entered the water at the perfect angle, an angle so perfect, in fact, that if I hadn’t felt the wetness climbing up my fingers as if I were pulling on a pair of gloves I’d have actually thought I was still diving.”

And it was as if he actually had dived into that river he’d dreamed. He was soaked clean through now, what I’d come to think of as his relaxed, summery bearing, his picnic-hamper, seersucker demeanor ruined, soiled.

“After all that,” he said, “boy, was I hungry!”

“You were?”

“Famished.”

“Sure,” I said, “all that climbing, the excitement, that dive that you dove. Who wouldn’t be hungry?”