Wait Till You See Me Dance

by Deb Olin Unferth

  “Bad,” we said. “Awful.”

  The next day they did sit next to us at dinner, the two worst composers. One on either side of us. Worse had come to worst: here we were, sitting with the composers.

  But it turned out not to be so dire, having dinner with the composers. They were fine. One was a little worse than the other, but not much worse. He left soon after, went home to whomever he had there—fish, dog, bone. I don’t believe there was a wife. Then another composer left, a woman, she packed up and took a bus out of town. Another composer went after her and he didn’t come back, though he’d said he wouldn’t be long.

  Now there’s only one composer left, one of the ones we thought we didn’t like, but he seems to be pretty nice. He played a few tunes for us on the piano. Sad songs, since he was all alone now, without any of the other composers—songs about lost love and death. He told us that usually a woman friend of his sang these songs with him because she is sad since her son grew up and moved away, just like he is sad since all the composers went away, one by one, and now he’s just standing here by himself, the last composer. We wish him luck. “Best wishes to you,” we say. “Nice tunes you’ve got on the piano!” We walk out the door, leaving him there, his pencils rolling off the bench, his scores all over the floor. His notes huff out the window.

  Yesterday

  The dog and I spent the day in our cages, he in his smaller one, I in my bigger one, and we were quite content. At a certain moment he grew impatient and at a different moment I did, but we were each there to comfort the other both times. As night came on we crouched and listened for the man of the house to come home and rattle our bars.

  Abandon Normal Instruments*

  Abandon the Mind

  I already abandoned my normal instruments. One by one all the useful pieces of me have been left behind on a workbench or at a rest stop in Ohio or on a lunch counter. For some reason I just got up and left without them, although the containers for those instruments are still scattered around my brain, the pockets and file folders that once held information: who my friends are, what sort of work I’m supposed to be doing. I keep looking inside but the pockets are all empty. I tossed away what was in them, and now look where I am—nowhere, because I turned out the lights and left.

  Abandon the Assistance

  First the computer has to go, and the sheet of paper too. Next, your glasses, though you’re blind without them. Then the backpacks and the briefcases and bags you carry around and all that’s in them, the files and electronic devices and keys and extra socks. Then the shoes that bring you here: you have to admit you have a strong relationship to them and they are normal. They must go. The coffee—that’s an instrument. Then the rest of the clothing. Then the family, because you use them a bit, and the friends too. The past in general, but most specifically the few years after graduate school when you didn’t know what you were doing and were grasping at any straw, hoping someone or something would latch and take hold—those years: you can no longer use them. Abandon them. Then the helpful mate, he has to go, and all the mates who helped in the past—or didn’t help, because sometimes their unhelpfulness was helpful too. Desire, that, too, must go (or is that already gone? for how long has it been missing?). Also, all other deep beliefs and dark roads in the mind. And core pieces of me—work ethic and so on.

  We are talking about an awful lot of instruments to be shorn off and tossed. And once they’re gone, what is left? What can I write with? With no pen, no story, no greed? I might just sit here awhile. Look at the long desk, the wood patterns on it, unless that, too, is gone. I could float in space, a lone meteor. Who knows, maybe I’d meet up with others like me. We could band together. Form a new world. It’s possible.

  Abandon the Body

  Inside the little cottage I was renting, I thought I might be suffocating, that there was a gas leak in the contraption the owner called a stove. Or I imagined the ground was falling away beneath me, that the rock on which the cottage sat was choosing that moment to collapse. Or maybe I had a fever or a stomach virus, or maybe I was having a massive attack. I wondered: Would I die here? Of natural-gas poisoning or of a stomach virus or suicide or rock slide? How long would it take to find me? Would it have been so bad to live?

  Normal Airplane

  Surely the wicked lady in front of me—who was so rude to me an hour ago when her seat was pressed so far back that I couldn’t move my head or arms and was pinned to my seat like a fly, and had to maneuver over the arm of my seat to get out and ask her if she might raise her seat a little and she yelled, “Too bad!” and “There’s no problem with my seat!” and when I said I was squashed, she yelled at me to “Live with it!”—surely she has lost control of her instrument, or abandoned it completely.

  Abandon Normal Music

  It’s what musicians do when they don’t know what to do anymore. They take out a wineglass or a handkerchief and try to play their cellos with that. Or they rub a balloon and tell people that this is their new instrument. Or they hang on to the bow and toss the cello, and they play their bow on the radiator or piano or a piece of wood. They make a sliding or scratching sound and this is their new music. Or artists, they do it too. They put away their pads and pull stuff out of the garbage. They’ve been doing that for so long, it’s unnerving—this little segment of the population going around, saying that they see art everywhere: trash bin, mountain, sidewalk, plank, person, disease. Some people find it almost annoying. Why can’t those artists let a thing be? they say.

  Let it be what it is, sitting there, they say. It doesn’t need some human to come along and tell it that it’s interesting. All objects are interesting—isn’t that the point? Why else would we name it? Stick with your own instruments, you artists! And you musicians too. Stay on your side of the line. Don’t come sneaking over here and grabbing stuff and running off with it. You want to abandon your normal instruments? Fine. Go ahead. Just sit quietly there with nothing to play with. Close your eyes. Watch the movie inside your eyelids.

  Normal Instruments

  Whoever said they were normal? Every instrument I know of is either obviously unsound and raving, or at least what people used to call “not right.” They are the sort of instruments that quit working halfway through whatever you’re doing, or they suddenly turn difficult to work with, or mean, or they take it into their workings to suddenly abandon you.

  Or they are the type of instruments that stop working slowly, bit by bit, so at first you don’t notice, and when you do begin to notice your instrument is “off,” you make small adjustments to keep it working, to keep you working, because once you start to do this, it is as good as admitting that for you to work, it must work. So you keep up your end, you make all the minor adjustments necessary, a few more all the time, and each adjustment requires a different type of patience from you. It always seems that if you make just this one small additional adjustment, it will keep working. Soon you are attaching antennae to your head, you are chanting, holding things out the window, you are staying up all night, waiting for it to come home. All this is normal (you tell people). But by this time you yourself are no longer a normal instrument and anyone in their right mind would abandon both you and your instrument for good.

  Citizens of the World

  The citizens of the world are walking along a path. As they go they are abandoning what they don’t need, casting aside their normal instruments, because they have too much to carry. The path is cluttered with all the crap they’ve tossed aside and that pile of crap grows because they’re leaving behind a lot, so much that after a while you don’t even see the people anymore, just the hills of crap tossed on the road. Mountains of it stand all around and somewhere, deep at the bottom of the canyon, a scrawny line curves through, people heaving their belongings, which piece by piece they abandon. As you move farther up the line, the mountains shrink because they’ve thrown onto the road everything they owned and have less and less to discard. Finally, hundreds of miles up, there’s
just a straight path, people walking empty-handed, with hardly any clothes on, a smock or a pair of loose pants, and at the side of the path an object every now and then—a final keepsake, a packet of Kleenex, or a compass tossed aside at last because the owner admitted there was little point in trying to determine one’s direction. And farther up the line, another seven hundred miles along it, the people are barely bodies anymore, they’ve left so much along the way. You see only shifting colors and thin shapes. Who knows where they’re headed, whether the line ever ends, whether you ever come to a point where there’s nothing left to abandon. Is there always something?

  * Inspired by a card in Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s 1975 card deck, Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.

  The Magicians

  There were two of them, and I hated them with everything in me. When I first sat down across from them, I didn’t know who they were, but then they said, “We’re the magicians,” and I remembered.

  “Oh, I saw you last time,” I said. “But you’re not really magicians.”

  “Yes, we are,” they insisted.

  “No, I saw you,” I said. “I saw the whole thing. I read it in the program and I was excited. Then I watched. You don’t do magic.”

  “Yes, we do,” they said.

  “Not real magic.”

  “It is,” they said, nodding solemnly, “real magic.”

  “My brother was a magician,” I said.

  Suddenly they looked uncomfortable.

  “Yeah,” I went on, “he was a magician, so I know what a magician is. That’s why I said you aren’t magicians.”

  “Was?” they said. “Is he not anymore?”

  I said, “My brother is dead.”

  “Dead?” They looked more uncomfortable. “What was his name?”

  I said his name.

  I shouldn’t have said his name, because he didn’t have a magician’s name like they obviously thought he should—I could tell by the looks they gave each other—and I hated them even more.

  “Where did he do magic?”

  Now I looked uncomfortable. The truth was, when he was alive, he didn’t perform all that much. “He worked in a magic shop,” I said. “He did shows on weekends.” Sort of true or not true, or least not that I knew of. He did work in a magic shop.

  But anyway I knew what magic was and these guys were not it.

  They put their hands on the table and said, “We’re meta-magicians, plus we’re magicians.”

  “All magicians are meta,” I said. “You’re not even meta.”

  “Magicians are ridiculous,” they said.

  “You’re ridiculous,” I said. “You’re a couple of bozos, a couple of clowns.”

  I hoped I had made them uncomfortable when they went up to do their act, which consisted of them dressing up like clowns and calling themselves magicians and running around on the stage and finally doing a single trick, a sloppy, uninteresting, obvious one.

  That’s pretty much how it went. Until they talked about the elephant room.

  This was later, at the party. A crowd was gathered around them, calling out to them and laughing, but they turned serious.

  “Once, Houdini made a room,” they said, and they raised their hands to show the dimensions. “He called it the elephant room, though no elephant could have fit in it, because it was a very small room. Even a truly tiny elephant, a baby, could not have come in, because it couldn’t have fit through the door.”

  “But why did he call it the elephant room?” said the crowd, but I knew.

  Houdini had called it what it couldn’t be, but merely by calling it the elephant room he made me imagine the elephant in that room, made me see it standing there, taking up the whole space, its giant feet pressed into the corners, its trunk curled against the door. It became the elephant room by magic. And since the magicians had made me see it, they were doing magic, though in that moment there was nothing real about the room, the elephant, or the absence of an elephant.

  Dirty Joke (in translation)

  This is the one about the salesman and the whorehouse and how he goes in and asks for a girl. He’s got the money for it, so the lady of the house brings a woman out and instructs her to sit, legs spread, on the floor. The salesman’s job, the job he paid to do, is to climb the scaffold (there’s some scaffolding set up) and jump. His dick has got to land inside her hole. If not, he loses, he goes home.

  The joke has a pretty flimsy premise. What would a man pay to do that? It might be better if the girl is a princess who’s been captured and these are the terms of her release. The princess version could be the younger person’s version, the one to tell to tots.

  So the salesman climbs the scaffold. The old hag shouts up, “Remember, you only get one chance!” In the princess version the lady of the house is an old hag because in a fairy tale the things the hero doesn’t want are all around and the thing he wants is far away, above or below. So the salesman climbs the scaffold. He jumps, he misses. “Oh hell,” he says. “Let me try again.” The hag says, “Sure, when you’ve got the money to pay for it” (which he doesn’t, because he gave it to the lady in the last joke, the prostitute one).

  Or if not that, then the girl is a daughter and this is the family’s search for a suitor.

  Or he’s a war prisoner and this is a prison-and-warden game.

  Or she’s a bad girl and she’s being punished, or rewarded, or he is.

  Or it’s a sister. It’s a test to see, well, who’s a brother.

  The salesman goes home, heavyhearted, wanting his sister. He practices. He builds his own scaffold at home. He climbs to the top, takes his penis out, points, throws himself off, falls to the floor. He doesn’t damage himself this way. He does it for days. He goes back and says, “Pull her out. Set her up. I’m ready.”

  As a side note, there’s also a joke about a penis that pops. The salesman puts a cream on the thing to make it grow. It gets bigger and bigger and then bursts. The joker could say he put on too much cream, that he kept putting it on for some reason, hubris, say (so there would be a lesson involved), or courage (to teach the brave to be meek). That’s not this joke but the two are related.

  So the salesman doesn’t hurt himself and he goes back at last. He pays, climbs to the top of the scaffold, and jumps.

  He does it three times altogether, like most jokes: three bald guys, three lost buttons, three long walks to the gallows. The salesman climbs, he jumps, he misses, goes home, has a sad heart, returns, climbs, jumps again. This time it looks like he’s headed the right way, flying straight toward that lovely girl. He’s going toward her, he’s almost there, and suddenly the bride shifts her hips.

  “You missed!” says the hag!

  “Did I?” says the salesman, because it seems to him like he didn’t.

  Here’s the punch line.

  “You got the wrong hole,” says the hag.

  Mr. Creativity

  If, one day, a man should appear on the campus, summoned by the college president, a man in a generous suit, old enough to have had a long career elsewhere but young enough that it was not yet time to retire, and announce that his charge was to increase creativity, and that to this end he would go on a little tour of the departments, have lunch with the department heads, meet in small groups to solicit ideas and in this way determine how creativity might play a bigger role, then how delighted the professors should be and how eager to meet and participate.

  Or perhaps they would not be delighted, but would suspect that the man was there to spy and to think of more jobs for them to do, add to their workload with his “creativity” ideas, or, worse, could decide they were inessential, uncreative employees, and the professors might ignore him as best they could, put off meeting with him, laugh at him when he left the room, loud enough that he might hear a trace of it as his steps echoed away down the hallway. Besides, what does that mean, “increase creativity”? They might call him Creativity Man or Mr. Creativity and stubbornly give hi
m no ideas or ideas that were ridiculous, to throw him off, ideas that he’d then chase for weeks, only to present to the president, who would raise one eyebrow, tent his fingers, and frown.

  But if, the year before all this, the man himself, Mr. Creativity, had been living far away on the other side of the country, when his wife of twenty years had left him, his employer of twelve had let him go, and his kids had gone away to college, then he might look to places he’d never lived, jobs he’d never held, with trepidation but also hope. He had not wanted to make trouble, but he’d been in such a low state when his old friend from high school, now the president of a college all the way on the other coast, asked him to come, doing Mr. Creativity a turn in honor of their long friendship, showing in him a faith that he, Mr. Creativity, no longer expected from others and didn’t have in himself. He had welcomed the chance to go east, restart his life (by God he could do it—hadn’t he done it before?), and, who knew, maybe he’d meet someone, a woman he could grow old with. Among so many faculty living in that cold region in that small town, there must be one who is divorced or widowed, though of course one didn’t wish such a thing on anyone.

  So it was with this determination—not quite enthusiasm but the sheer human stubbornness that causes those worse off than he to grab hold and climb back into the world of the living, “optimism,” one might call it—that he snapped the suitcase shut and readied himself for the flight.

  Acknowledgments

  With grateful thanks to Ethan Nosowsky, Diane Williams, Clancy Martin, Ben Marcus, Terri Kapsalis, Lorin Stein, John Jeremiah Sullivan, David McCormick, Suzanne Buffam, Marco Verdoni (for “Fear of Trees”), the brilliant folks at Graywolf, Bob and Nancy Unferth, Katherine Colcord, Henry, and above all, Matt Evans.