Глен Хиршберг - Dancing Men

It sat next to the squat grey cactus I’d always considered the edge of my grandfather’s yard. It looked surprisingly solid, its mud walls dry and grey and hard, its pocked, stumpy wooden pillars firm in the ground, almost as if they were real trees that had somehow taken root there.

“You live here now?” I blurted, and Lucy stared at me.

“Oh, yes, Seth. Me sleep-um ground. How.” She pulled aside the hide curtain at the front of the hogan and ducked inside, and I followed.

I thought it would be cooler in there, but it wasn’t. The wood and mud trapped the heat but blocked the light. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of an oven, of Hansel and Gretel. And it reeked of the desert: burnt sand, hot wind, nothingness.

“This is where you’ll sleep,” Lucy said. “It’s also where we’ll work.” She knelt and lit a beeswax candle and placed it in the center of the dirt floor in a scratched glass drugstore candlestick. “We need to begin right now.”

“Begin what?” I asked, fighting down another shudder as the candlelight played over the room. Against the far wall, tucked under a miniature canopy constructed of metal poles and a tarpaulin, were a sleeping bag and a pillow. My bed, I assumed. Beside it sat a low, rolling table, and on the table were another candlestick, a cracked ceramic bowl, some matches, and the Dancing Man.

In my room in this pension in the Czech Republic, five thousand miles and twenty years removed from that place, I put my pen down and swallowed the entire glass of lukewarm water my students had left me. Then I got up and went to the window, staring out at the trees and the street. I was hoping to see my kids returning like ducks to a familiar pond, flapping their arms and jostling each other and squawking and laughing. Instead, I saw my own face, faint and featureless, too white in the window glass. I went back to the desk and picked up the pen.

The Dancing Man’s eyes were all pupil, carved in two perfect ovals in the knottiest wood I had ever seen. The nose was just a notch, but the mouth was enormous, a giant “O”, like the opening of a cave. I was terrified of the thing even before I noticed that it was moving.

Moving, I suppose, is too grand a description. It. leaned. First one way, then the other, on a wire that ran straight through its belly. In a fit of panic, after a nightmare, I described it to my college roommate, a physics major, and he shrugged and said something about perfect balance and pendulums and gravity and the rotation of the earth. Except that the Dancing Man didn’t just move side to side. It also wiggled down its wire, very slowly, until it reached the end. And then the wire tilted up, and it began to wiggle back. Slowly. Until it reached the other end. Back and forth. Side to side. Forever.

“Take the drum,” Lucy said behind me, and I ripped my stare away from the Dancing Man.

“What?” I said.

She gestured at the table, and I realized she meant the ceramic bowl. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to go over there. But I didn’t know what else to do, and I felt ridiculous under Lucy’s stare.

The Dancing Man was at the far end of its wire, leaning, mouth open. Trying to be casual, I snatched the bowl from underneath it and retreated to where Lucy knelt. The water inside the bowl made a sloshing sound but didn’t splash out, and I held it away from my chest in surprise and noticed the covering stitched over the top. It was hide of some kind, moist when I touched it.

“Like this,” said Lucy, and she leaned close and tapped on the skin of the drum. The sound was deep and tuneful, like a voice. I sat down next to Lucy. She tapped again, in a slow, repeating pattern. I put my hands where hers had been, and when she nodded at me, I began to play.

“Okay?” I said.

“Harder,” Lucy said, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a long wooden stick. The candlelight flickered across it, and I saw the carvings there. A pine tree, and underneath, roots that bulged along the stick’s base like long, black veins.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A rattle stick. My grandmother made it. I’m going to rattle it while you play. So if you would. Like I showed you.”

I beat on the drum, and the sound came out dead in that airless space.

“For God’s sake,” Lucy snapped. “Harder.” She had never been exceptionally friendly to me. But she’d been friendlier than this.

I slammed my hands down harder, and after a few beats Lucy leaned back and nodded and watched. Not long after, she lifted her hand, stared at me as though daring me to stop her, and shook the stick. The sound it made was less rattle than buzz, as though it had wasps inside it. Lucy shook it a few more times, always at the same half-pause in my rhythm. Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and her spine arched. My hand froze over the drum, and Lucy snarled, “Don’t stop.”

After that, she began to chant. There was no tune to it, but a pattern, the pitch sliding up a little, down some, up a little more. When Lucy reached the top note, the ground under my crossed legs seemed to tingle, as though there were scorpions sliding out of the sand, but I didn’t look down. I thought of the wooden figure on its wire behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I played the drum, and I watched Lucy, and I kept my mouth shut.

We went on for a long, long time. After that first flush of fear, I was concentrating too hard to think. My bones were tingling, too, and the air in the hogan was heavy. I couldn’t get enough of it in my lungs. Tiny tide-pools of sweat had formed in the hollow of Lucy’s neck and under her ears and at the throat of her shirt. Under my palms, the drum was sweating, too, and the skin got slippery and warm. Not until Lucy stopped singing did I realize that I was rocking side to side. Leaning.

“Want lunch?” Lucy said, standing and brushing the earth off her jeans.

I put my hands out perpendicular, felt the skin prickle and realized my wrists had gone to sleep even as they pounded out the rhythm that Lucy had taught me. When I stood, the floor of the hogan seemed unstable, like the bottom of one of those balloon tents my classmates sometimes had at birthday parties. I didn’t want to look behind me, and then I did. The Dancing Man rocked slowly in no wind.

I turned around again, but Lucy had left the hogan. I didn’t want to be alone in there, so I leapt through the hide curtain and winced against the sudden blast of sunlight and saw my grandfather.

He was propped on his wheelchair, positioned dead center between the hogan and the back of his house. He must have been there the whole time, I thought, and somehow I’d managed not to notice him when I came in, because unless he’d gotten a whole lot better in the years since I’d seen him last, he couldn’t have wheeled himself out. And he looked worse.

For one thing, his skin was falling off. At every exposed place on him, I saw flappy folds of yellow-pink. What was underneath was uglier still, not red or bleeding, just not skin. Too dry. Too colorless. He looked like a cornhusk. An empty one.

Next to him, propped on a rusty blue dolly, was a cylindrical silver oxygen tank. A clear tube ran from the nozzle at the top of the tank to the blue mask over my grandfather’s nose and mouth. Above the mask, my grandfather’s heavy-lidded eyes watched me, though they didn’t seem capable of movement, either. Leave him out here, I thought, and those eyes would simply fill up with sand.

“Come in, Seth,” Lucy told me, without any word to my grandfather or acknowledgement that he was there.

I had my hand on the screen door, was halfway into the house when I realized I’d heard him speak. I stopped. It had to have been him, I thought, and couldn’t have been. I turned around and saw the back of his head tilting toward the top of the chair. Retracing my steps — I’d given him a wide berth — I returned to face him. The eyes stayed still, and the oxygen tank was silent. But the mask fogged, and I heard the whisper again.