Inattention Versus the Ant

The first time I read Stuart Dybek’s “Ant” from Ecstatic Cahoots, I failed to perceive its motion. Even primed for the fantastical (though not trained to expect it unfailingly by the collection it’s in), the story opened feeling static and flowery. Dybek’s never shy with allegorical language, but here, the adjectives piled up and he seemed to be paying an almost cloying amount of attention to light and shadows.

A couple lays outside; everything is languid. There’s the hint of intimacy with the narrator’s attentions on the woman’s blouse, “opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy,” and with the man’s own shirt off and beneath him, but it’s relegated to the past. There’s no suggestion of any specific discord, only that some quality of the day has arrested them. Heat and warmth and the absence of wind are mentioned, yet the sun evades direct accusation. There’s no acute gripe. It’s a muted scene, ripe for disturbance. 

Rob stifles a pun, anticipating the woman’s negative reaction to it. Being “in her company seemed to intensify the light,” but this heightened energy is not kinetic. The narrator attributes to her Rob’s trance-like feeling that he calls Limbo. It’s this not unpleasantly numbed clouding that foiled my readerly intuition causing me to initially skim sentences like “Only a single ant was working. It had him by the toe,” and “At first, Rob was simply amused by its efforts, but after a while he began to sense a nearly imperceptible movement across the grass.” On first pass, I did not notice what I thought to be impossible because I did not know to look for it, and Dybek, while being plain about it, doesn’t go out of his way to call attention to the oddity. These early causes for alarm are easily merged with the bad joke he declines to make, and the first indication of “movement” isn’t attributed to anything specific, so far removed from its grammatical subject it barely has one. He slips in reality’s rupture, deliberately understated to avoid detection. He’s lulled us into the protagonists’ very stupor.

So many things in the piece sneak up but never stand prouder than a suggestion: the oppressiveness of the heat, the weight of resigned dissatisfaction in their relationship, the way the narrator telegraphs persistent delight and wonder beneath what on the surface purports to be some sort of scarring from Rob’s childhood relationship with his shellshocked, storytelling uncle. I’m reluctant to assert that any of those things are even there, but wondering about them, parsing the layered ambivalences serves as adequate distraction. It’s masterful sleight of hand.

When, after the recollection of Rob’s uncle’s animated storytelling, Dybek writes, “Rob had forgotten the ant,” so had I, and thus was I carried away with him by the tiniest and mightiest of things visible to the human eye.