Dancer

Jacob dances so that we won’t die. The dance is simple. A shuffle of his feet, a throw of his hand, a bobbing of his head. Jacob dances in his house while the television plays the news. He dances at breakfast after coming awake suddenly, flushed with guilt. Jacob dances to the store, dances in line at the DMV, and he dances in his therapist’s office during their sessions.

“Jacob,” she says. “Could you sit for a moment today?”

He shakes his head and wags his index finger at her as he smiles. She is a small child asking to stay up too late to watch David Letterman. No, no, no.

“Sharon, we’ve talked about this,” he says.

He shuffles back and forth, a soft shoe and his hands come together in front of him before they swing back behind and away from him. Sharon has convinced him that he shouldn’t clap during these sessions and that was something of an accomplishment. Perhaps someday, the dancing. Jacob knows better and smiles as he executes a turn.

He asks her, “since you’re asking that question again, should I assume that we will also be talking about Henry again? Is it time for re-runs already?”

“We can talk about Henry if you would like to, Jacob.”

“If you would like to, then we will. I would just as soon dance and not talk at all.”

Instead of talking, Jacob begins to hum. Sharon sits back in her chair and removes her glasses. She folds them carefully and places them in a grey folding case. She flips the lid closed, open, closed and open again. She repeats this three more times and then realizes that she is doing it. She sets the case on the coffee table before her and immediately wants to pick it up again to be sure that the glasses are in there and that she has closed it properly.

She shakes her eyes away from the case and turns back to Jacob who is still dancing and humming. The song is familiar, but she can’t place it. Jacob is as thin as ever, but flushed and his face looks healthy. He wears his usual smile.

“You’ve eaten today?” she asks.

“Mm-hmmm.”

This, he hums, but it is clearly an answer to her question and not part of the song. He goes back to humming and she wonders again what it is.
She looks quickly at the case in which she is fairly certain her glasses lie.

“What and when?” she asks.

“Hmmm?”

She closes her eyes on the eyeglass case, turns her head and opens them on Henry who is looking puzzled.

“What did you eat and when did you eat it?” she asks.

“Egg sandwich and juice at breakfast. Burger and fries with a shake about half an hour ago.”

He goes back to humming.

“What song is that?” she asks.

It’s not a therapeutic question, but Sharon is starting to worry that she has to know. The song is in her head now and she knows that it will keep her awake if she doesn’t know what its name soon.

“I think it’s called ‘Good Morning, Good Morning,’” he says.

He keeps moving back and forth before her and sings a bit of it.

“Good morning, good morning. We’ve talked the whole night through. Good morning, good morning, to you.”

“Singing in the Rain,” Sharon says. She smiles and nods. The humming in her head is replaced by Debbie Reynolds’ voice singing the familiar tune.

“That’s the one,” Jacob says.

“We’ve talked the whole night through?” Sharon lifts an eyebrow and looks at Jacob for a moment. He sees and keeps dancing. He executes a series of turns and lifts his face up to the imagined rain.

“I love that movie,” he says. “Haven’t seen it in years.”

“They stayed up all night,” Sharon says.

“They did.”

“And you?” she asks.

Jacob shrugs and then repeats the motion so that it becomes not so much a shrug as another move in his routine. He bounces his shoulders up and down as he glides across the carpet. He begins tap dancing on the soft pile.

Sharon asks, “how much sleep did you get last night?”

“A little,” he says, still shrugging and tapping.

He dances so that he is moving toward and then away from Sharon, keeping his face in profile. He watches out the window as the snow flies in the light of the street lamp burning at the corner.

“And the night before?” she asks.

“Some,” he says.

She asks how he slept Sunday night and Jacob doesn’t answer. He dances faster, tapping harder at the rug and the floor beneath it. His breathing is audible now.

“Sunday, Jacob. How did you sleep Sunday night?”

She watches him dance and listens to the tapping and thumping. The dentist’s office downstairs closed before Jacob’s appointment. They won’t hear Jacob’s dance and wonder. Earlier, long before Jacob arrived, while Sharon worked with another patient who sobbed at the thought of two impending wars, a cold front moving through the region, and the opening of a new Wal-Mart super store, Sharon had heard the clear sound of a woman screaming from down there. The scream had come on quickly as Sharon’s patient blew her nose, and had stopped suddenly. Sharon had heard the screaming and she looked to her patient to comfort her. It’s nothing, she was ready to tell the woman. Just someone having trouble with her teeth. But her patient hadn’t heard a thing. Sharon, for the rest of their session, could think of nothing else.

Sharon watches Jacob. He has not answered the question.

“Did you sleep at all on Sunday, Jacob?” she asks.

“I was, I, I was busy,” he says.

“Doing what?”

“Watching the television,” he tells her.

He keeps moving, tapping, shuffling and nodding. He has stopped humming and this dance doesn’t go at all with the song from a moment ago.

“CNN?” Sharon asks.

Jacob nods. He holds his lower lip with his teeth and nods. He looks down at the rug and keeps dancing. His hands are up in front of him, in loose fists, pumping up and down.

“Slow down. It’s alright,” she tells him.

He shifts his weight from his left to his right foot and back and forth, lightly pumping his hands before him.

“Were you upset about the space shuttle?”

Jacob stares at the floor.

“Tell me how you found out about the space shuttle,” she says. “Did you see it on the television?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“How did it happen?”

Jacob keeps shifting right to left and pumping his fists but now moves he starts moving his upper body in rhythm with his hands. He is vibrating back and forth, his head bouncing up and down as he his body swings. Sharon waits for him to answer.

“I woke up,” he says, “and I looked at the screen and it said ‘Breaking News’ and I had a bad feeling so I got up real quick and I, you know, I did a couple quick turns at the side of the bed, real quick turns, like to catch up, like I could make up for it, but, well, I mean, you know it was too late and they, they, they kept showing the, the pictures, the video, in slow motion and all jerky, you know, because it was so, it was so far away and all there was, was blue, blue sky, blue sky and the white, the bright white comet and, it looked like a comet, and the, and the tail, the grey white smoke tail and, oh, I don’t, I kept, you know, I danced, I moved, and I did all my, my my, my best moves, the spins and turns, the footwork and I smiled, I smiled, and I sang, I sang loud, and, but the t.v., the television, it, they just kept saying, they kept showing it, and it was still breaking, you know, breaking news, and they, the, the, they were, you know, the astronauts, the ones on board, they were, you know, they were, you know?”

Sharon watches Jacob shake his head hard. He wobbles it on his shoulders and tries to smile but can’t pull it off. His eyes are shut tight and a smile isn’t possible in the middle of what he’s telling her. His dancing is erratic, his arms moving up and down, his feet barely coming off the carpet.

“You know?” he asks.

“I know,” she tells him.

The radio is on as Sharon sits with Liz in the living room of their townhouse. Sharon holds a pad in her lap with a pen lying across it. The pad is blank. Sharon is thinking about her glasses which may or may not be in her purse which may or may not be in the front hall. Bill Evans is on the radio playing snatches of a tune, teasing his way through a song.

“He was so tired,” Sharon says.

Liz is reading the paper on the couch. She doesn’t look up but asks, “you mean Dancer?”

“Yeah,” Sharon says. “Dancer. He must have been doing since Saturday morning. Non-stop. Just dancing.”

Liz looks up at Sharon. It’s been three nights in a row that Sharon has been talking about Dancer. Liz knows him now, more than most of Sharon’s clients. She knows parts of the story though none of the names other than this nickname Sharon has given her so as to make the storytelling easier. Liz looks at Sharon who is looking across the room at a mirror in which she can see the kitchen. Liz folds the newspaper and sets it aside.

“Hell of a workout,” she says, wondering if Sharon is even listening.

“What?” Sharon asks.

“Dancing all the time. He could eat anything. God, think about it. Baskin Robbins and Krispy Cream every day, three times a day and not an ounce of flab.”

“Yeah,” Sharon says.

She’s still staring at the mirror.

“Hello,” Liz says, waving to Sharon. “Anybody home?”

Sharon jerks herself back into the world. She smiles and folds her hands in front of her, holding them out toward Liz like a supplicant.

“I’m sorry,” Sharon says. “I don’t know,” she says and leaves it at that.

“Why was he so tired?” Liz asks.

This talk of Dancer worries her, but it’s what they have been able to talk about. She knows that Sharon needs to say.

“It’s the burden,” Sharon says. “He’s decided that it’s up to him. That he has to keep dancing to keep us all alive. He is absolutely convinced that, if he stops, we will all die horrible deaths. Fire, blood, devastation. All if he stops dancing even to sleep.”

Liz watches Sharon.

“He stopped on Saturday, early in the morning. He fell asleep at three or four and didn’t wake up until nine-thirty. It was the most rest he’s had in months, a real sleep. He was even in bed instead of standing somewhere in the middle of a dance. He slept and when he woke up he knew that falling asleep had cost the lives of the astronauts on the Columbia.”

“He knew?” Liz asks.

“He knew.”

“You mean, he believed that falling asleep had cost them their lives.”

“Yeah.” Sharon says. “I mean that he believed that.”

“Are you okay, honey?”

“Yeah,” Sharon says. “Yeah, sure.”

“It’s just that,” Liz begins. “I don’t know.”

Sharon says, “He napped two weeks ago and the Israelis and Palestinians killed a few of themselves. Last week there was that barn fire that killed all the cows. He fell asleep on the bus. And then Saturday, he killed the crew on the shuttle for Christ’s sake.”

“He believed that he killed them,” Liz says.

“Yeah, he believed it.”

“Sharon?”

“And all this over Henry,” Sharon says. She looks at Liz, holding her hands out in front of her. “All this over a dead brother. I know that it’s tragic, and I know that he feels the usual guilt of having lived while Henry died, but,” she stops.

“Sharon?” Liz asks.

Sharon looks out the window. The snow on the lamp post is three inches high and it’s still snowing. The song ends. It’s eight o’clock.

“From NPR News in Washington, I’m Craig Windham.”

The news recaps the latest in the shuttle investigation, the looming war in Iraq, and the threat of war in North Korea.

Sharon doesn’t hear any of it. Liz watches as Sharon fades from the room. Liz hears the news but can’t hear the song playing inside Sharon’s head over and over. “Good morning, good morning.”

Liz gets Sharon to take Friday off. Jacob, the last patient Sharon saw before this imposed vacation, stays in her mind. Jacob, Dancer. He isn’t Sharon’s most troubling case but he is the one who stays with her now. She hasn’t had a moment without him since their last meeting. She lies awake now seeing him dance in the darkness of the bedroom humming “Make ‘em Laugh” and running up the walls into flips and pratfalls, never for a moment stopping the dance. The song plays on an infinite track and repeats that same line over and over for her. “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh.” Jacob is smiling throughout and throwing himself around the room.

She gets up at three thirty and goes downstairs. Liz stirs but doesn’t wake up enough to notice that Sharon is gone. Sharon goes out into the hall and downstairs to the kitchen.

She puts water on to boil for tea. She turns the radio on low. BBC World Service. This is Newshour. It’s time for the sport. Sharon listens to the cricket scores and highlights. Sharon sits at the kitchen table thinking about the war in Iraq. The Israelis and their gas masks. The soldiers in desert camouflage. The oil wells ablaze and the white flags of surrender. The President has been saying that he’s ready, that the military is ready, that the American people are ready. He keeps talking about what is right and what must be done.

Sharon can’t get that song out of her head.

She sees Liz’s newspaper folded in quarters on the table and reads a cover story about smallpox vaccinations. She reads until the words roll around the edge of the folded page and under it. Sharon doesn’t see a point in unfolding it to finish the article.

Jacob, she thinks, must be asleep. He has to sleep. He can’t keep dancing forever. No one could. The water, boiling in the kettle on the stove over a blue flame, makes tremendous noise in the night kitchen. The radio too, now that the BBC is playing its fanfare, seems too loud. She stands, takes a step toward the radio, then turns toward the stove, leaning, and steps toward it. She moves back toward the radio and then to the stove and back and forth. She pumps her hands up and down in time with the song stuck inside her head.

Jacob is dancing out of doors as Sharon moves between the tea kettle and the radio with Donald O’Connor. He shuffles down Salina street, block after block, touching lamp posts and newspaper boxes. He kicks softly at the snow and is careful not to slip on the ice as he turns and spins.

Jacob thinks of Henry and Sharon. He knows that Sharon believes that the dancing is a defense mechanism, something Jacob uses to protect himself from the guilt of Henry’s death. But he knows too that she is wrong.

“Maybe wrong is too strong of a word,” he says.

It’s more that she doesn’t understand the bigger picture. Yes, Jacob is crippled by the guilt of living while Henry has been dead for so long. But Sharon doesn’t understand what it is that Jacob has to do and the power of it. She doesn’t believe. Jacob has tried to explain to Sharon, to a number of people, but no one can understand the depths of it. Dance can bring rain, quiet the spirits, appease the gods, heal the sick, spark true love, and maybe raise the dead. Jacob’s heard stories. And he believes most of them. But he has yet to find another who understands that his dance keeps people alive.

“It does,” he says.

The dancing matters. It’s the most important thing that there is. The war is coming if he lets it. The terrorists are out there waiting for him to stop. Hurricanes and earthquakes are ready for the moment when he stops. He has to dance until someone else is chosen to dance in his place.

For now, for this moment, there is only Jacob. The dance is his. It has chosen him.

“Gotta dance, gotta dance, gotta dance!” he sings.

He’s got to dance and he loves the dance though it is wearing him down. It’s not the dancing itself so much as his understanding that he has to stop some time, to rest, to sleep. It’s the understanding that at those moments something terrible will happen. They have to happen because the dance isn’t there. Like water behind a dam. If the dance isn’t there, what’s to hold back the terrible things? It makes sense and history proves him out on this. Henry knows that he has to keep dancing and that’s okay. It’s that he also knows that he has to stop that hurts.

Gotta dance.

He turns twice, takes two steps back, then runs into a take off from the edge of the curb to cross the street. He closes his eyes on take off and the snow becomes down feathers falling on him. The streets are his stage, the lamplight his spotlight. He lands in the street, turns toward his audience with his legs spread wide below him, his arms spread wide above him. He wears a giant Gene Kelly smile, his eyes closed and his face turned up into the snow. He hears the movie songs instead of the van driving without its headlights.

The impact spins him twice, whipping his arms about him, but his legs stay together and his fall is a pirouette gone wrong. He lands on the side of his face and his dead body crumples around him, rolling until it rests against the side of a building.

*     *     *

Liz wakes up just after six with the idea that someone is sobbing. She throws off the covers and stands up. From downstairs she hears the radio and someone moving around. No sobbing. It was a dream, she decides. Still.

She slides her feet into slippers and pulls on a sweatshirt. The wind pushes hard against the windows and the house is cold. Liz walks down the stairs, through the hall toward the kitchen. She hears the radio, still playing BBC news.

Sharon is dancing. She moves across the linoleum in circles and spirals, holding an invisible partner. Her eyes are shut tight and she keeps dancing round and round the kitchen, looking for all the world like she will never stop.