Lynerkim's Dance and Other Stories

Dance

They leave us, our lovers, one way or the other. They go to different jobs and new lovers and tenure tracks at universities and high-tech companies and military service and hospitals. Maybe there ’s a homeless one, as well, selling blood and screaming on street corners, perhaps a crook or two, even a murderer; oh, and some just disappear, their bones shedding flesh until nothing remains.

We were playing cowboys and Indians—one dead already, a neighborhood girl we didn ’t really know but who came over. Janie was the school marm, Alan a homesteader, me a dead-shot marshal. Alan pretended to die falling from a rock, but it was his collarbone that ended up broken. Later Alan became a minister of the gospel. Blessed be, he told us. We laughed, thinking of that long-ago time he was falling and falling. But he was insistent. Blessed be. Who? Us? I wondered.

When you wander a cemetery, listen while the ghosts tell their stories. They alone never lie. Once upon a time, in the fall, Janie and I lay on a red-checked cloth beside the headstone of an ancestor, gone these many years. There was a picnic hamper with bread and cheese and jam and egg salad and wine. Do you love me? Janie asked. But I did not want to surrender. The sun flickered through the skeletal fingers of the trees. Clouds scudded like fleeing inmates. I nodded and said, Of course. She studied my eyes. Now and forever? she wondered. I sought for an answer.

For a time we lived in an old house on the side of a mountain that leered over a shapeless valley. A path wound down to a stream running through a dark forest which wore many disguises (but never fooled me.) There was one spot beside the stream where the sky appeared; that was Janie ’s favorite place: fireflies and falling stars. As I sat with her, I tried to decipher what the stream was trying to tell me. Janie was being sickly then, and I would touch her bones and tell her all would be well. Do you think there are some things that can never be healed? she asked me. Was she talking about her illness or something else, I wanted to ask but didn ’t.

That old house, like something ancient excavated from the sand, or maybe an old photo creased and brown at the edges. (At the time I hadn ’t yet lost the one of me somber in my Roy Rogers shirt, Janie with a bonnet studying me.) The way the house groaned, whimpering like an old man being summoned for his unknown journey. It made me uncomfortable. One time I even called up Alan, a minister by this time, and asked him the question everyone wants an answer to. What do you want me to say? he told me. We ’ll all know soon enough. Well, even ministers can have bad days, I suppose.

I remember a cemetery we visited above the fishing village on that last vacation we took. Janie and I watched an old man and an old woman placing flowers. The old man stood and looked out across the boiling ocean and the reckless black sky and said to his companion, Let ’s get going, if we drive fast we can beat the storm. They went over to their car. And that ’s how, we learned later, that for a half an hour more they lived on before they too became ghosts. I wondered about the results of Janie ’s latest tests but couldn ’t bear to ask.

Janie always liked for me to read stories to her. Pioneers braving the prairies. Ship captains in a storm. Ghosts who appear to their loved ones. No more stories, Janie said to me. I can ’t bear any more stories that begin and end. But, but, I said. I reached over from the bedside chair and held her as if I were the hammock her bones needed. Janie sighed and looked up at me. Her eyes slowly became a different color.

Having left my lover—an excellent cook, diligent housekeeper and graceful dancer but totally indifferent to those issues which startled me awake in the deepest hours of the night—I decided to return to my childhood home for a period of reflection.

What were these issues that thrust me shuddering out of sleep? No, they had nothing to do with the current Regime, but rather were symptomatic of our modern age in general. For instance, I would suddenly jerk upright in the pitch dark with the overwhelming sense I needed to go to the window, throw back the drapes and reassure myself that the searing moon still hung whole and uneaten in the relentless void of the sky. My lover, awakened by my leap from bed, would sit up, regard me with glaring eyes I could feel boring into my back, and grumble: So what if the moon disappears? Why do you persist in worrying about what you can ’t change? Didn ’t Einstein say that was the definition of insanity?

Well, no, but we ’ll let that pass. (Idiot.)

Oh, you dear and lovely moon, how much longer will you be with us? Will we be granted advance warning of your going, like all the other things we ’ve lost? But about my childhood home. A small white cottage with green shutters, it stood just below the crest of a grassy hill in the middle of a forest clearing. All around was a gathering of heroic trees. Forest creatures great and small gamboled beneath those sheltering branches. How as a youngster I loved to play in that forest where I knew those stately trees would protect me! Grumbling lovers weren ’t on even the most distant horizon, and heavenly bodies were assumed to be with us forever.

So, homeward-bound it must be.

Since my childhood home lay in the most distant part of our dilapidated country, the journey there would be long and fraught: but such journeys should be. As the Bible tells us: The path of the righteous is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.

The train trundled along the ill-kept rails, rattling and bucking. Passengers swayed back and forth like storm-tossed sailors. Some bore the worried expressions of travelers being propelled into a future they now weren ’t sure they ’d clearly thought out. Others tried to hide smiles; they were the absconders, relieved to be gone. Some passengers were thinking, Oh woe! What is to become of me! While others did all they could to suppress a shout of Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!

As for myself, I concentrated on rejecting unwholesome thoughts. My new regimen! I was leaving behind those bad times when my thoughts would grow dire, sprouting like dark weeds I couldn ’t kill no matter how much mental pesticide I ’d spray. Those bad times when, realizing with absolute clarity how the disappearing moon would take with it all the light of the world, I would turn to thoughts of the knife. I would imagine the silver mystery of its edge, honed to such an infinite sharpness that it disappeared into itself.

(Sometimes the poetry of the blade would arouse my blood to the point where I ’d point at my lover and order, Stay there! Then I ’d scurry to the computer and fire up Google to search out images of that exquisite moment when the edge first kisses flesh and draws forth into life that tiny wondrous red bud. Such images were difficult to find, but when I did, my blood would blast through my veins like an IV of cocaine and I would hasten back to my lover, who had stayed in bed as I ’d ordered, and we would engage in… Well, I will leave the rest to your imagination. But to ease your mind, no, I never cut a lover, even in fun, except once.)

So, I knew what I was leaving behind and what lay ahead and I was happy about it. I ate my ham-salad sandwiches with contented chomps and filled my mind with the lush and lusty forest of my youth while the brown, wasted scenery of today passed slowly by in the train ’s filthy windows.

Oh, that forest! My dog Sean and I would wake up long before my parents and set off for a day of adventure. Above us a great tide of brilliant stars would wash across the night sky while the moon gleamed unabashedly. (I assure you, it was like that in those days!) We would hasten out of the clearing where the cottage slumbered and make for our breakfast spot, sheltered in the ample bosom of towering firs, to eat corncakes I ’d baked the night before. Then, satisfied and eager, we ’d spend our day roaming among the rabbits and the deer and the squirrels and all the other forest creatures who were our friends. Birds we knew would flutter around, telling stories about what they ’d been up to. (Stories that were probably made up; you know how birds are. Except crows, who always tell the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Oh, how much we need the return of crows these days!) When night came again, we ’d head home. My parents would already be locked up tight in their room; they might as well have been dead.

That ’s the way I remember growing up—until I met my first lover and Sean was found dead and I was alone.

So, the train carrying me home clattered on. Slowly, of course, the tracks being one more bit of crumbling infrastructure. I often dreamed about infrastructure. After checking to make sure the moon still clung to its precarious perch, I would return to bed and fall asleep only to be pursued by a dream of everything crashing down, highways, bridges, aqueducts, buildings, you name it, all crashing into fiery ruin while I ran frantically about calling out for past lovers—possibly to save them, but I doubt it; more than likely I was seeking one final opportunity for orgasmic release among the bloody ruins. (I will relate more of my dreams later if I have the time but not the really creepy ones.) I would write adamant letters to every politician I could think of, from the Leader on down, demanding action or else there ’d be dire consequences. (What these consequences might be, I never spelled out; nevertheless, two Regime agents, one male, one female, paid me a visit. Needless to say, they entered my dreams: as Sean watched, waiting his turn, we frolicked, sometimes the three of us together, other times one on one; how earnest were the howls!)

At any rate, as I said, we were making our slow way west across the vast prairie. During the day, dark storms of high blue wind occasionally raced past, tossing the prairie grass into black teeming waves before the sun blazed again. You ’d look out expecting to see a wagon train or a band of wild Indians, but the landscape would be vacant except for the shadows dragged across it by soaring carrion birds. That ’s the way the boring days went. But the nights! The nights thundered down with a blackness so profound it was like dying and being sealed inside a coffin interred in the blackest depths of the earth. I would sit rigid and guarded, lest I slumber and, awakening, look out at the night sky and find all my worst fears confirmed.

You ’re probably wondering about the other passengers. They were a varied lot, but typical of what you see these days on a public conveyance. Workmen searching for jobs. Brides going to meet new husbands. The usual orphans hoping for new families. Footloose middle-aged