Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

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.

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.

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?