Free Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories by Stuart Dybek Page B

gliding among the horses, sailing off with the herd across the pasture, and that’s when I knew I was flying. It was so free, beautiful, like being able to do anything. It wasn’t a sex dream, but it felt physical, almost climactic. When I woke I thought about it all day, carried it with me like a secret. I could still feel that buoyancy, and when the feeling began to slip away I knew I didn’t want to live without it and would do what I had to do so as to keep it. A week later I moved out on my husband and filed for a divorce and … and here we are playing hooky, having a drink,” she said.
    “I never had a flying dream like that,” I told her, “one where I wake and know it’s an omen.”
    “How can a flying dream not be an omen? What could it mean but that you could be untethered, free of all that’s holding you down, holding you back? The gift is yours to accept, you have the power if you’re willing to exercise it.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Freud says dreams are wishes, and who doesn’t sometimes wish to fly? A wish is just a wish, it doesn’t have to be unriddled like an omen or have a moral like a fable. Flying doesn’t necessarily have to have a meaning. A bird doesn’t have to analyze why he flies.”
    “What makes you think that what’s apt for birds applies to you? Flying’s natural for birds.”
    “Sometimes it feels almost natural,” I said.
    “Natural?” she scoffed. “Must be those inconspicuous wings of yours.”
    “If it’s completely unnatural then we’re back to witches and brooms—deals with the devil, not to mention Icarus and all the other myths that warn against defying nature and the gods.”
    “How do you feel when you fly?” she asked.
    “Wonderful. Free, joyful.”
    “Ecstatic?”
    “Sure, sometimes.”
    “You call feeling that way natural ?” she asked. “What world are you living in? The ecstatic is by nature unnatural.”
    I laughed, not just at her cynicism but also at her deadpan delivery.
    She stared back silently, and then said, “In my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby , Nick recalls a moment when it was as if he and Gatsby were in ecstatic cahoots. Ecstatic cahoots, the way we are sometimes, moment by moment. What kind of dream do you have to have to know when you’ve met someone you should change your life for?”
    *   *   *
     
    Here, on the island, yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. It’s a language of inflection that’s spoken—punctuated by sighs, lisps, growls, consonants suddenly expelled, vowels swallowed back into the shadow of a throat. On this coast of platinum sand, ravens have interbred with gulls. They perch on the horizon, disrupting the border between sea and sky. The elocution of birds echoes through the nacre vaults and conch cathedrals that litter a shoreline, along which he finds himself wading among schools of candlefish at an hour when the sun is setting. Or is it rising? Here, the word for sunset and sunrise is the same.
    Midday. He hikes the hill path through the lemon groves. A snake slithering into shadow inscribes in cursive an undecipherable message in the dust. Ravens, gowned for graduation, take flight, and he pauses before the tire track he’d caught them studying, a staff on which white stones are arranged like notes. A melody he’d hum if he could read music.
    Later, in a tiled courtyard called Palm Passage, he sits at a café table, sipping rum mixed with iced espresso. If he still had his father’s penknife, he’d carve his name on the green coconut that has rolled beneath his chair—or, if not his name, then the name he heard them calling while he swung, a name he’s since assumed.
    Instead, he writes a letter. It’s unaddressed. Are letters to no one inescapably written to oneself? To the self yet to be?
    Those questions are how the letter opens. A chameleon skitters over the page and stops to do push-ups. They’re part of the letter. Caught in a sudden updraft, hibiscus blossoms