Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  “Dance! You mean—?”

  “What do you think I mean?” He is surly with compromise. “Dancing. Dancing. You’ve heard the word, haven’t you? ‘Blue Danube.’ Shake yer bootie. Get up and get down. What do you want from me?”

  “Is this a dare? Somebody’s put you up to this.”

  “Nobody puts me up to nothing.”

  “Okay, all right. Calm down. Just tell me how in the world you came up with . . .”

  “I don’t know,” he says, as preoccupied as she’s ever seen him. He takes off the ball cap and runs a hand over his parchment-papered crown. The gesture is perfect, something he must have seen bald men do in some ancient cartoon. “I just have this . . . feeling we gotta learn some steps. That we’ll need it if . . .”

  “If what? Who’s we?”

  He tenses his gray temples and grits those teeth that have not yet fallen out. “The girls’ll be thrilled to their ditsy little anklets. And the guys will do it and like it.”

  Why not? A group movement lesson is just one two-step away from her own therapies. She gets away with half her rehabilitating sashays only because the hardened, proto-criminal street toughs, in their sick and wounded conditions, can’t believe she comes from this planet. But even she would never dare suggest something like this without Nico’s bankrolling.

  Beyond all credibility, he gets his minions to turn out for a class in the Virginia reel. Clumsy, hulking, umber gang members barrel down the chute of the longways set like bombs pouring out of a carpeting bay. She gives them folk weaves and figure eights, kicks and turns that aren’t “too femmy,” keeping bodily contact to a fleeting minimum. She rolls out all sorts of pieces—Hopi, Mexican, Ashanti. Best are the enchaînements and positional formations that even the crutches and wheelchairs can roll through.

  They rapidly outpace Linda’s passing competence. The best of them began beyond her. The Rapparition, recovering, concocts this elaborate triple-level, supersyncopated, free-falling gymnastic routine like nothing Espera has ever seen a body do. Its nearest living relatives are those dim, almost-forgotten jump-rope choreographies, the bastard inheritances of her confused, crosstown shuffle-up. Double Dutch, Double Irishes, Red-hot Peppers, here mutated, further displaced until nothing but the skipping fear, the shaky shake breakdown is still recognizable.

  Last night, night before,

  Twenty-four robbers at my door . . .

  I was born in a frying pan;

  Can you guess how old I am . . . ?

  Little Miss P, dressed in blue,

  Died last night at quarter of two.

  ’Fore she died, told me this:

  You better run or you gonna get hit. . . .

  Call the doctor, call the nurse.

  Call the lady with the alligator purse. . . .

  Grandpa, Grandma, you ain’t sick. All you gotta do is the Seaside Six.

  Everything she can give them is not enough. Not anywhere near what they need. Nico comes to her after a workout, vaguely distressed. “Hey, you’re okay and all. But we gotta call in the pros.”

  She phones around, she herself now suckered into believing lessons to be necessary for their collective next step. The last of her calls is to the one she’s been avoiding by mutual consent these however many generations. “Want to take a girl out dancing?”

  Dancing? Girl? Capillary action works its sap into Kraft, unwelcome but irresistible. Bits of his skin crinkle like new clothes at the sound of her invitation. Take a girl dancing: template words that elicit images all over the cortex map. They promise the long-abandoned hope of heart-stopping prom night. Rustles of sweet silk delay, even here, the abrasive apotheosis of the land of instant gratification, where the pinnacle of sexiness is to lightly goose the twin cams at every stoplight, blasé behind double-polarizing wraparounds, blister-packed into phosphorescent sweats inscribed all over with slogans and retail insignia. (Why, Kraft has wondered since coming to this state, must one pay double for the kind of legible ads that they used to hire sandwich-board men to peddle?)

  But: take a girl dancing. A girl, she says, offering up to him the regressive, politically objectionable term as decadent concession, crepe wrapped, shameless for an evening. Who would have thought a night of dance-floor romance was still possible, here, of all the world’s sprawls? Who would have suspected there were dance floors left anywhere in these hundred and thirty incorporated hacienda nightmares, slipped in somewhere along the split fault-lip, wedged between the million-dollar, ranch-house historical destinies of capitalist revengineers and the noir-punk, cut-you-for-fucking-me-over disinherited who drift through downtown in a state of perpetual pre-aftermath?

  But take a girl dancing. Yes. Oh yes; anywhere you lead. Yes, even the—where?—Pasadena Women’s Club. Well, so be it, if that’s the last bastion of fox-trot in this fifteen-million-souled nation flying point for westward expansion’s cliff-dive into the Pacific.

  Come Beginners’ Night, Kraft hops behind the wheel and lets the vehicle do its thing. He’s come to use the car more or less like a laser-guided toilet seat these days. Just slide in, snap down, plug into the man-machine interface, think the coordinates, and watch them come up like magic on the old plasma display pasted over the former windshield. Worktime playtime mealtime snacktime anytime. Sometimes he just likes to corkscrew up and down the parking garage ramp for relaxation. Last week he drove around the corporate limits for a good hour or two, trying to find a place to drop off his empties for recycling.

  He pulls into the Women’s Club parking lot with five minutes to spare before the departure of the first batch of box-steppers. He’s got his best shoes on. They’re oiled up and ready for anything short of jitterbugging.

  She’s waiting for him, swaying softly to herself on the steps. O beautiful for spacious! She’s wearing the lightest conceivable summer cotton dress, embroidered all over in magenta and cyan mythical foliage, a weightless drape that hugs her perfect hips, clinging up and down her like a train of little-boy puppy-lovers on market day in some fairy fiesta town from the southerly extremes of magic realist fiction. This woman is half from another, completely foreign country. What does he know about her, about any alien land, let alone his own?

  He rests his hands on her cottoned waist, too ephemerally thin. She curls like desert vegetation, the feathered tip of a talipot palm in bloom. What must he do—light a candle, leave a handwritten gracias recibido to the little unwed mother of God, cast a bit of homemade ceramic to hang by the altar in the shape of the revitalized part? She kisses him, takes him by the elbow and leads him inside, where he pays his two-fifty and she shows her receipt. They enter the meeting-turned-dance-hall, and before he can register, turn, and run, they ambush him. Dr. Kraft. Dr. Kraft. We knew you would come.

  It’s most of the baseball consortium, plus a new cadre of recruits. Some of the tenderfeet, to put it bluntly, will do no dancing tonight. A few are beyond motor maneuvering, beyond torso control at all. Ben, for one, a case Kraft helped on, is beyond a lower torso altogether. But each is grim and determined, demanding lessons to prepare them for some unspecified ballroom showdown.

  “We had a spot of trouble at the door, let me tell you,” Linda tells him. “Soon as they saw us coming up the walk, they were going to call the police for one of those discreet little arrests, like they slap on folks who heckle the president while he’s addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce?”

  She’s racing, trying to forestall his mouth from spilling its cries of treachery. “If they could have arrested a dozen kids without attracting attention, they would have. Tried to shag us off, but this is Beginners’ Night. There’s no other time we could come, and I paid full price for everybody, and isn’t it illegal to discriminate by age? Huh? Somewhere?” Linda tugs at his sleeve while lovingly grinding his toe beneath hers. Isn’t it, you cradle robber? She cops a feel, smiling like she hasn’t had so much fun since college, t.p.-ing the rival sorority house.

  The dancing teacher, redder than Moira Shearer
’s pumps, and her Korean step-modeling partner are both still in the throes of major-league embarrassment at the army of child cripples who have come for the Arthur Murray treatment. Teacher opens with one of those effusively flustered protests of liberal tolerance.

  “As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we have a number of little visitors tonight. . . .” Place is at least packed, which reduces the vulnerability. “And everyone, as always, is very welcome. So will all those who want to dance and who need partners form two lines and pair off.” Then to the portable tape player, where the first of tonight’s soundtracks lies in wait.

  And the first song? A great big American lunar crooner, Bingle or Johnny Fontane, sliding around on “Stalag by Starlight.” She plays it to accompany the somber, stricken threading together of the two partner-seeking lines. Kraft, still stunned by the subterfuge, falls into line behind the last male. He watches the mating gears mesh—man in eye patch falling to woman with Parkinson’s, man with heavy loop of keys hanging from his belt going to tiny, terrified Filipina who came to dance class seeking the one social activity in this newfound land that she thought would require no English.

  He notices how the kids have rigged the line, counting off furiously in tandem, then weaseling into position so as to draw each other as opposites, the lesser of available humiliations. Yeah, it’s starting to come back to him. All that lunch-line, recess, sports-field, field-trip, bus-stop practice in positional long division. Numbering backward by fours. Converting hours to the final bell into minutes and seconds and heartbeats. Turning margin inches into inch-and-a-quarters. Figuring necessary goals or runs per period, minimum final exam scores for a passing GPA. Around-the-world flash card drills—the countless calculations of departure. How many miles to Babylon?

  All but the most incapacitated join in, grab a partner, spread themselves dubiously across the makeshift dance floor. Joy, who could limp through the calls better than a few of those who grimly but gamely take part, sits out the first set. She takes a seat next to the carved-up Ben, where they whisper and giggle to each other behind cupped hands, pointing out mismatches and clunky practice turns. Across the improvised ballroom, like munchkin cadres infiltrating the Emerald City Residenz, the urban disinherited prepare to stage a naturalist production of Rosenkavalier.

  Something more than fear of Nico’s wrath compels them, although a few well-timed glares from the boss do their bit to keep the ranks in file. The dance-capable among them pair off with a minimum of foot dragging, with only the Rapparition being dealt to an adult, a blue-rinsed lady in snugly tummy-tucking sequins, completely dazed by the consort that fate’s conga line has assigned her tonight.

  Kraft reaches the head of the snaking cue, only then discovering that another once-child has remembered the lingering, line-rigging trick of early education. “Hi there, hunk,” Linda baits him, taking him by the stethoscope skitcher and hauling him to a corner up near the stage, where they can get a good view of the terpsichorean demo just now getting under way.

  God knows how these folks justify billing festivities as Beginners’ Night. The pedagogical Ginger, outfitted with a wireless throat mike, begins by chirping, “You all remember last week when we learned . . .” Well, Kraft doesn’t remember last week. He has trouble remembering this afternoon. And trying to isolate the beautiful, liquid steps that she and her Asian Astaire float upon is like trying to parse flowing Arabic script. “Come on, Ahab,” Linda implores him. “Shake a leg.”

  It’s either that or become a spectacle, gawked at, even shown up by the same shabby underage irregulars he himself sewed together. You all remember the fox-trot, don’t you? The bit from last week? The pogo stick, the frug? Teacher sets the tape machine turning again, heads sensing, speakers singing out a simulation of “Night and Day,” a tune that dispels the nonballroom world, consigns its latest flash points to somnambulist thrashings. The song, the woman swaying gently up against him, the kids stumbling through instructed motions on all sides, the pathetic Women’s Club two-hundred-watt spot standing in for a harvest moon seduce him, like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom. Okay, let’s have at it then. Hum a few bars and I’ll fake it.

  The songs queue up in what quickly becomes a full-color historical atlas of the dance academy at large. The complete curriculum, fiendishly arranged to lead them from fox-trot to tango to don’t-mean-a-thing-if-you-ain’t-got-that-swing. A step for everything, and everything its step. They dance to “Blue Skies,” to “Stormy Weather,” to “Misty,” to “Paper Moon,” to “April Showers,” to “I Can See Clearly Now (the Rain Has Gone).” Oh, how they dance to “The Anniversary Waltz.” They samba their way through show numbers of those good, God-fearing, nativer-than-thous, Friml and Romberg. They do these mongrel North American polkas to tunes half Protestant hymnody, half “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

  They do a slogging “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” a passel of barn dances, a reconditioned “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” a “When the Saints” packed with imminent expectation, and a resigned boxcar deportation of “Hobo’s Blues.” As a hat-tip to the Mother Country, they get a buttered-up rumba version of that pseudo-franglaised Fab Four hit (one of Kraft’s least favorite of his childhood’s Top Forty). This being the Unided Snakes, the tape bears a fair share of ballistics motif, from “Fired Our Guns (but Those Whoosits Kept A-Comin’)” to “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” Kraft watches his recent small-caliber facial-trauma cases prancing to “Put it down before you hurt someone.”

  They do wild shimmy-Charlestons not approved by any tango-tea ever sponsored by the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing. Their steps whisper of suppressed or denied covert influences—Iberian, Cuban, black, black, black. Alongside the handgun hop, they do the walkaway, the stamp-and-go shanty, the old Chisolm trailblaze. We’re homeward bound, I hear them say. Good-bye, fare you well, good-bye, fare you well. We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.

  When they can’t quite control the proper heel-toe, they make up a sequence of their own. It hobbles Kraft to see, peripherally, just what naturals they are. Teacher goes around the room privately tutoring each clinch. That’s it; you’ve got it. And out . . . two . . . three-and-now-sweep-through, two . . . three-and-come-back-home, two . . . Some of the band are more than competent. Even good. And only the periodic “Get off my bloody foot, you Homo sapiens; your epidermis is showing” betrays the fact that tonight’s class is packed to breaking with third-age quarter-sized fifth columnists.

  The regulars—who are these people? If they come, as their packaging advertises, from the right side of the tracks, they are still living testimony that even the better berm is everywhere shard-strewn. The twosome just tangent to Linda’s twirl exchange bios. She is a thrice-singled mother whose last husband has recently kidnapped her youngest girl and disappeared into the invisible consumer ratlands between Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. Her dancing companion for this first set has recently been convicted of drunken driving manslaughter and sentenced to pay the parents of the victim a dollar a month for each of the eighteen years of the victim’s life.

  Everyone: Arabs in black glasses, would-be aerobiots with legs like stovepipes, homeowners destined for a hotel death, mestizos of every conceivable blood-cocktail concoction, timid souls who’ve done time in the self’s prison for removing manufacturers’ stickers from mattresses. A powerfully built man, Karok or Modoc or Yurok, turns the prescribed box step into a sad stenographer’s account of the ghost dance, shuffling, dragging left foot, humming hu-hu-hu in hope of a return to aboriginal safety away from this place where promise and threat both push to breakpoint.

  Across the crowded hall, Kraft thinks he sees Dr. Burgess thumping away obediently at the lesson assignment. Now how the hell? Here? This? Repeated stolen cowering looks, and Kraft still can’t decide whether it’s really the Chief or somebody else borrowing the man’s body, taking the hackysack of digesting flesh out for an evening spin while Burgess himself stays home reading Dead White Male Classics.

  The
density of the dance floor, the sampler of tunes listing out of the cheap speakers—a checklist history of the country’s sins as rich as a Puritan’s embroidered alphabet—the golf shirts, the Mary Richards toreador pants, the endangered species shoes all shuffle-ball-changing for whatever the moves might still be worth wring Kraft’s ribs, pound him, pump on him like scouts on a CPR dummy. Pathetic, pitiful, insistent, begging for scraps of social club love, each mass that he narrowly maneuvers past, the colostomy bags, the mastectomy implants, the bungled tummy tucks all but rubbing up against him, ravish his chest and lay him open.

  Linda laughs, forced to step on his gunboats to keep them from keelhauling her. “Whoa there. Get along, little doggies. Left. Left. Right hand over your heart. Yes, even when you’re facing south.”

  All he can do is hold this woman tighter to him, follow her as if she were his advance probe through this explosive field. This woman, who thought it productive to haul half the ambulatory pede ward here, and a third of the inerts. This girl, a tube of selflessness running through her as unfillable as those empty Torricellian columns pleading for the United Way. Teacher comes by to try to straighten out his ambling shambles. Yeah, smack in the middle of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” the entire junior element stops in its tracks to enjoy a good yuck at his expense.

  At break, as their carrion flock swoops down and devours the entire folding-table spread of Tang and spritz cookies before the forty-plussers can even get close, Kraft asks Linder, “Time to call it a night?”

  “What, are you crazy? We haven’t learned the lindy hop yet.”

  A four-foot person of color at Kraft’s elbow mutters,

  “So these the moves that the White Ruling Nation

  Take to when they do their White Station gyration.

  Lindy hop don’t put me no closer to elation.”

  The Rapparition’s companion from the first set, grown fond of the poet, his street metric—although she can’t understand a word of it—apparently taking her back to her glory days as Marie Louise’s governess, embarks on matching him recitation for recitation. “Blake’s ‘Little Boy Lost,’” she says, in a spectral whippoorwill. “‘The mire was deep and the child did weep and away the vapor flew.’ ‘Little Girl Lost,’ from Songs of Experience. ‘Children of the future age, reading this indignant page, know that in a former time . . .’” Limbs as frail and thin as an ultra-fine pen point on onionskin reach down to take the Rapparition’s hand, and he low-fives her.