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.
Just as these two impossibly inimical hues slap startlingly together, the four Mills Brothers break out of nowhere. You're nobody. Till somebody. Loves you. It's a call to fall in, line up for new partners. A song, a performance in debt to every indigenous ditty ever tried out in these parts.
In quick planar section, Kraft takes in the whole converted hall at once. The guy with the huge loop of keys; the frightened Pacific woman, Kon Tiki on the return leg; the drunk driver carrying his unbearable penance; the mud-masqueing, ion-corrected, thirtyish professionals in their air-cushion shoes; the Parkinson's patient holding one shaking claw in the other; the vet trying to hide the fact; the off-duty cops and their split-shift robber opposition; the movers and movees and shakers and shook; longshoremen and short shrifters; palefaces and redskins; the old folks at home; the fast crowd that stomped at the woodpile a half century before, here tonight only pretending to be beginners all over again: too much for him. How can he live? This place, this heartbreaking, magnificent, annihilating, imperialist, insecure, conscience-stricken, anarcho-puritanical, smart-bombing, sheet-tinned, Monroe Doctrined place… The searing, seductive, all-palliating, caramel curative of the been-through-the-Mills Brothers (sure, who else? you always hurt the ones you love) do their patented, slowed-down, lip-simulated, bastard-son-of-Dixieland instrumental interlude, returning only to insist that you're nobody. Till somebody. Cares.
Come on, join in, kick up your heels. "OK, ladies and gents. Are you ready for more of what you came here for?" Kraft, terrified at the prospect of going back through the unforgiving partnering line, swings around looking for Linda. His escort protection has wandered off to visit Joy and Ben, demonstrating, up close and contagious, all the subtle foot movements that those on the sidelines are missing. Kraft comes over to snare her for the next round. As Linda laughs good-bye to the two wallflowers, Ben calls out something to her. What? Anything, nothing. Nobody till somebody. You look great out there. I like this tune. Enjoy yourself! I'm glad I'm around to watch. Can you get my cost of admission back?
Kraft loses the message in the general hilarity of regrouping. Whatever Ben says, it stops the woman, bruises her, knocks the breath from her plexus. Espera turns, fighting with her lip, twists from Kraft's grip, and runs back to pick the boy up. She lifts him up bodily, the upper half remaining of him anyway, the brutal living stump, pruned back to nothing, to the nib, the stubborn nub, the germ. Flushed with pleasure, Ben breaks into a shamed-puppy grin. The band box strikes up a sleek, sexy "Satin Doll," and Linda, in perfect time with the teacher's "Ad-vance, and together, and glide, and back," travels across the parquet for both of them.
The Cheese stands alone. Or not alone; worse. Kraft stands five feet away from the one soul whose presence most upset him on arrival, the one girl he would avoid with all the power of a pubescent crush. He can feel Joy appraising him from her seat in the empty chairs pushed against the wall. Her silence is articulate, more oppressive than ever. He hears himself, how he might yet have to tell her, to administer her hero worship a lethal injection. How he has perhaps wrecked her, killed her, or worse. Your ankle — I… The incursion could spread. All the way up your leg, beyond. She stares passively at him, already knowing everything.
He half-steps over to her, and he must tell her now. You tell me your dream, and I'll… Tell her the odds against her. Tell her what she will never live to hear any adult male tell her. Tell her in that almost common language she can half-understand and he, despite an adulthood of effort, cannot more than half-forget. He takes her by the hand, hers held out for his before he even extends. She looks at him, adoring, waiting politely. Dr. Kraft? Looking away, he asks, in his child's Thai dialect, "Care for a spin?"
But she belongs to someone else. The dancing expedition does little to placate Nicolino or stave off the next maniacal enterprise. He begs broken parts from the tech equipment jockeys, and he and the inner circle set to work on a Wellsian apparatus whose function they refuse to disclose. He institutes a strict regimen of daily exercise, combat-readiness stuff. He casts about frantically to answer the summons nagging at him.
The thing, the revelation, is so close that he goes gradually bananas with the jitters. It looks, from the outside, like a burst of senile activity. From the inside, he is cranked up worse than a teen, a year before the flood of gonadotrophin that might account for it.
"Son of a Bisquick. This place is so, mind-alteringly, boring. We gotta get something going. Quick. While it's still possible."
He sits splayed under a pull-up bedside table, scribbling furious letters abroad, guarding the texts with a sheltering arm. He struggles with the pen-driven alphabet the way a first-year French horn player might fight through the valved scale. Certain of his letters get sealed TOP SECRET. Others he actually mails, Linda picking up the postage. One of those pathetic local television news-drink-spread shows picks up on the story Nicolino feeds it. "There's a little girl lying in Carver Hospital tonight who hasn't been on our shores for very long. But even where she comes from, they know what get-well cards are. Her name is Joy, and nothing would bring this Joy more of the same than to go down in the record books as the greatest