D and His Deer

 
D always felt, somehow or other, double. He was an upright line, but then again, he was a curve. When he looked in the mirror straight on, he saw the dapper features of the diplomat he was. But sideways, if he took off his horn-rimmed glasses, he imagined he could be taken for a rather distinguished Dame. He always saw both sides to everything.
     Would he ever find his dæmon—the divine spirit within? Did he really have one spirit? D seemed to be singing a duet with himself.
     Seeing both sides made him a champion procrastinator. D dilly-dallied. Waited till the last minute to decide anything. At every posting, he drove the staff crazy. But that was diplomacy.
     Now dusk dropped on the gated embassy grounds. D flipped on his desk lamp, and the pool of light shut out the trees, looming and dissolving. D drew the drapes, deaf to the delicate drone of insect wings. He returned to his desk, trying to distract himself from a strange little pain that had come to him all his life, like a recurrent dream. (Except, he had to confess, he never dreamed.) The pain was a distinct tiny stab in a spot, well, what would you call that? D called it down there.
     For years, since he was a little d, he considered all the options about this strange pain. It was nothing, really. He went long times between feeling it. Maybe it was too slight to worry about, but then again . . . At last D decided to see a doctor. As a matter of fact, he saw a number.
     “Tell me your dreams,” the first doctor said.
     “Don't bother to ask me, I never dream,” D said.
     “In dreams begin responsibilities,” the doctor quoted.
     D demanded a referral.
     “I've got a very specific pain,” he said to the next doctor. He pointed to, well, down there.
      “Your testicle,” the physician said. Which required a test. Several. And more.
      Finally the second doctor read all the results and announced, “Aha, a dermoid cyst.” What? Inside the cyst were hair follicles and an eye-type thing with eyelashes and a tooth.
     “Do you think I was a twin?” D wondered with a weird kind of delight as he examined the x-ray.
     Well, the doctor wouldn’t go that far. These dermoid cysts were usually removed in childhood. No reason, however, to remove it now. D wouldn’t dream of having it removed! It explained everything! That slightly creepy darling little creature in there must have been a twin, someone D had grown around as she dissolved. D was convinced it was a twin sister.
     And D had absorbed her. Of course he wanted to keep her with him.
     That very day, he had his first dream.
     Exhausted after his discovery, he had returned to the embassy in the late afternoon. Unable to face his office, he diverted his steps from the front walk toward the deserted path on the grounds where no one ever seemed to stroll. He walked deeper into the woods. The path sloped into a shaded dimple in the earth.
     It was dusk in the dell.
     D heard the drone of insect wings. In the mottled light a dragonfly dove straight down. Up curved a damselfly.
     Impulsively D lay down in the leaves in his three-piece suit and curled up like a praying divine, two hands under his chin. He felt himself melting a little. All the old bedevilments dispersed into a delicate dampness. The world softened from darkling to darling . . . 
 
. . . A stately antlered stag appeared in the distance and slowly, with a calm command, walked closer until D could see that he wore a diamond necklace around his neck. The stag slowly bowed his head, doffed his entire rack of antlers, and raised his head up again, looking directly at D.
     Now the deer was a doe! The doe blinked her eyes at D, as if waking. Then she donned the antlers, and turned and walked away . . .
 
D woke up ravenously hungry—and overjoyed.
     He dusted himself off and drove straight to dinner. As he stared out the restaurant window, eating his dumplings, he wondered if responsibilities really do begin in dreams.
     Maybe dreams are responsible to us, he thought.
     He felt his sister inside him. She was the reason he was a debonair man, a man who understood that everything has two sides: inner/outer, yes/no. D thought both in lines as sharp as the creases in trousers, and in curves like the swirls of a skirt.
     What do I really know? he asked himself. Only that he had woken strangely endeared to himself—and satisfied. Now he understood the necessity of delay. To wait, and then to discover. Never to have only one answer.
     The napkin at the restaurant had come rolled inside a little sparkly ring. “Add this to my bill,” he said to the waiter. And pocketed the little diadem as a reminder of the dyad he was.