Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 4

  I listened to it buzz before hanging up. If I rang again, I knew she wouldn’t answer. I sat with the soles of my feet in my hands, rubbing the warmth back into them, waiting to call Hana, thinking of all the years to come, still young enough to wonder who I’d be.

  Ordinary Nudes

  She stands before the full-length mirror that’s framed by the bedroom door, observing how her nipples, navel, and the delta of copper hair, which has grown back at the confluence of her thighs, shimmer in the dusky light. Her reflection dimples and ripples like the surface of a pond where fish rise to feed on a mayfly hatch. Imagine his wonder when in the years to come he’ll realize that she was not to be confused with ordinary nudes—not some nymph frolicking along the shore, or goddess ascending from sea foam, or ballerina poised to wade into her morning bath. Those photographs she let him take, kept in a drawer, beneath his underwear as if hidden in the depths, will age as she does.

  Current

  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.

  A Confluence of Doors

  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?

  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.

  Hometown

  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.

  Ant

  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.

  “Do you like stories?” his uncle had asked him during their first visit.

  “Sure,” Rob said.

  “Good. Stories are what kept me sane,” Uncle Wayne said, then laughed in the odd, stifled way of his as if at a private joke between them.

  But reading aloud, his uncle lost his shyness. Uncle Wayne didn’t simply read stories, he lived them. During “The Most Dangerous Game,” Rob had to run from room to room while his uncle, reading aloud the entire time, stalked him, the storybook in one hand, and in the other a bow made from a clothes hanger strung with a rubber band and armed with an arrow fashioned from a cardboard pant guard.

  When they read “The Monkey’s Paw,” Rob hid behind his bedroom door while his uncle mounted the stairs with the heavy-footed, ominous tread of someone dead who’d been summoned back from the grave. Nearly quaking with fear, Rob had tried to wish him back into his grave while his uncle Wayne pounded on the door.

  His uncle would open the book by Edgar Allan Poe and turn to his favorite story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the boy would force himself to watch his uncle’s face so as not to miss the instantaneous transformation when his uncle’s eyes assumed a maniacal gleam and his mouth twisted into a malevolent smile as he read the opening words: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” And then he’d burst into a spit-flecked spasm of psychopathic laughter.

  But of all the stories they read together, it was “Leiningen Versus the Ants” that was the most frightening and memorable. How many Sunday afternoons, while other boys watched double-headers or shot baskets at a hoop suspended above a carport, had Rob sat sweating and listening intently as Uncle Wayne read about Leiningen making his way through the jungle, evading the hordes of army ants?