Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories by Stuart Dybek Page A

considered for a moment telling her that the watch had belonged to his father and was the whole of the inheritance his father had left him.
    That would have been starting off (if this was the start of anything) with a lie, the kind of finagling tale his father was infamous for. His father, a gambler—he referred to himself as a joueur —was a man who, if going to the track was impossible, would settle for bingo. He was still alive, a little demented—or was that just drink—and living in a retirement community outside Vegas. He had visited his father there once and the place struck him as a subdivision gated not to keep the riffraff out, but to keep its population of bookies, hustlers, and scam artists in.
    He had actually bought the watch in a secondhand shop after an acupuncture session with Dr. Wu had left him euphoric. Dr. Wu was treating his spring allergies, allergies he’d inherited from his father along with a tendency to squander money as well as his given name, Julian. Like his father, he went by Jules; neither he nor his father could tolerate “Junior.” Dr. Wu’s office was downtown, and after treatment Jules would find himself at some pricey men’s store buying clothes he didn’t need. Perhaps Dr. Wu, in collusion with local merchants, was inserting a needle in a point that triggered buying sprees. One particularly radiant afternoon, Jules walked through downtown crowds feeling as if the vital force, qi, were emanating from his body. He noticed that women, and men as well, glanced as he passed as if the force were visible to them, too. On Jewelers Row, under the L tracks, he stopped before a window where a watch with a face the color of rose champagne caught his eye. An L train reverberated overhead like a drumroll. Until that moment he’d never considered buying a vintage watch, but suddenly he had to have it. When he entered the shop, the immediately attentive saleswoman stared at him in the way that people on the street had stared, while he described the watch in the window. “Yes, sir,” she said, “right away, sir,” and rushed to get it. Not until he saw himself in the mirror on the counter did he realize that Dr. Wu, who only an hour earlier had inserted a four-inch needle in the Baihui point at the top of Jules’s skull—a powerful point where all the yang energy of the body converges—had overlooked removing the needle, which was sticking from the top of his head like an antenna.
    If Clair had noticed his watch in the bar, Jules would have told her how he had come to buy it, much as she had told him about the clear plastic umbrella. But now wasn’t the time to launch into a story.
    “You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asked.
    “You’re leaving on your cross?”

 
     
    The Samaritan
     
    On a humid night when it’s quiet enough after a rain to hear the drainpipes dripping into the alley, a voice—if a moan can be called a voice—passes like vapor through the rain-plugged window screen. It’s only another night noise at first, inseparable from the static that passes for silence in a city—traffic, insects, nighthawks, leaking rain gutters, someone doors away playing a radio or practicing on a cello. But gradually the moan grows more insistent. There’s a rhythm to it that Marty begins to detect, a resonance in its tail of ragged breathing—and out of a half sleep Marty’s eyes open, alert in the dark, and he listens, alarmed.
    Someone is hurt, the victim of a hit-and-run or a rape or a mugging, or someone is sick, or perhaps grieving, expressing each throb of a wound—a muffled, irrepressible cry, the mouthing of a single, aching, mournful vowel. Alarm is his first reaction and his second is a kind of paralysis, as he lies listening, realizing that if someone is hurt, it’s his responsibility to help. He doesn’t want to think of himself as one of those alienated people in cities who will trade off their humanity rather than risk getting involved. He needs to do