Dancing in Dreamtime (6 page)

A few nights after this exchange, when the sultry air of August smothered the town, Sally lay wide awake, twitching with dread. She could feel, as if in her own body, the sinews of Earth snapping, its flesh withering, its veins running dry. She could sense Earth's creatures perishing, like a galaxy of stars winking out. Her own species was tearing apart and devouring this once-abundant home, the only habitable planet within billions of miles.

Panic forced her out of bed, heart racing. The air in the room was stifling. Mummified in his spacesuit, Kenneth seemed to radiate heat. The air-conditioner whined continuously, with little effect. She took off her nightgown and let it fall to the floor. Why bother to hang up clothes? Why even wear them? Such habits now seemed pointless. She moved to the window and stood there a long
while, looking out, wondering how many experiments in life the cosmos had tried, how many had flourished, how many had failed.

When she turned around, Kenneth was floating a foot above the bed. Rushing over, she touched his booted foot, which set him gliding across the room until he bumped helmet-first against the sliding door to the balcony.

“Kenneth!” she cried.

He did not reply. The helmet thumped against the glass door. She needed to call for help—the police, paramedics, firemen—someone, anyone. But her phone wasn't on the nightstand, where it should have been. So she hurried downstairs to check her briefcase in the kitchen, but the phone wasn't there either. Rattled, she searched countertops and cupboards, pulled out drawers, flung pillows from the couch. She was rummaging through the pockets of coats hanging in the closet when she heard the rumble of the balcony door sliding open.

She raced back upstairs and into the bedroom, just in time to see Kenneth floating out over the balcony railing and into the muggy night.

How she passed the next two hours Sally herself would never be able to recall. Nearly everyone else in town did recall, however, and in gossipy detail, for no public official had ever before done anything half so remarkable.

The mayor ran screaming down the front steps of her house, as naked as the day she was born. She kept pointing skyward and yelling. At first no one understood what she was saying. The
late-night strollers were too distracted by her appearance to notice the ghostly white figure gliding overhead. The sight of her body amazed the men, who had always assumed that beneath her severe workaday suits she was an iron maiden. Even the women found themselves captivated by the spectacle of their naked mayor. Such intelligence, such drive, in flesh so like their own! Anything was possible, the women reflected. Girls thought of running for office or becoming engineers. Matrons vowed to take up yoga and stick to their diets. Young children wriggled out of their clothes and ran after the mayor, who rushed ahead, baying like a hound.

Sally reached the town square just as the cinemas, churches, and dance clubs were letting out from their midnight sessions. Her grief hushed the buzzing throng, which parted to let her through to the courthouse lawn, where she climbed onto the equestrian statue commemorating a Civil War general. Clinging to the general's uplifted sword, she stood on the bronze rump of the horse and shouted at the sky.

No one knew what to do. Call her husband? Nobody had seen him for weeks. Call the sheriff? Wrap her in blankets and carry her to the hospital?

While the townspeople crowded about the statue, stunned into silence by her shrieks, the mayor kept gesturing skyward. At last the onlookers followed her pointing finger and spied the astronaut floating above the courthouse trees. Now the people found their voices and cried out in surprise or delight or bewilderment. Children glanced at their parents to see what they should make of this apparition.

Balanced precariously on the bronze horse, the mayor lifted both arms, fingers splayed, as if imagining she could pluck the astronaut from the air.

“Kenneth!” she yelled, her first decipherable word. “Please don't go!”

Feeling her anguish, many onlookers thrust their arms into the air in sympathy. Toddlers waggled their small hands at the darkness. Soon all of the onlookers, from babes in arms to oldsters in wheelchairs, were reaching for the sky.

The glint of the spaceman's helmet and the glow of his chalky suit reminded young and old of when they had first glimpsed the full moon, and had begged their parents to pluck it down for them. Their parents had merely laughed or frowned or shaken their heads helplessly no. The townspeople felt once again the tug of infinite longing and infinite regret as the astronaut spun slowly in the moonlight like a tethered balloon.

“Stay, Kenneth, stay!” pleaded the mayor. She teetered on the horse's back. “Don't give up on us! We'll survive! We'll come through!”

At that moment the onlookers felt a tug on their uplifted arms, as if the threads of desire they had flung into the sky were actual strings of gossamer. Instinctively they squeezed their hands into fists, and for an instant their feet lifted clear of the ground. The mayor let out a piercing cry. Then with a barely audible whisper every fist opened and the townspeople settled back to Earth. High overhead the spaceman swung about and began to rise. As he ascended, he appeared at first like a small cloud, then dwindled to the size of a minnow, a needle, a star. When at last he vanished, the townspeople slumped down on the courthouse lawn, and for the first time in weeks they slept, and dreamed, and scarcely heard the mayor's wailing.

I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me. In my nightmare I was captured, put on trial, and sentenced to be hanged for refusing to serve in the war. Awareness of the slaughter in Africa rises in my stomach like nausea.

I roll over to find Sharon watching me, her chestnut eyes slick with tears. I kiss her on each wet cheek, but she refuses to smile. Her worried expression has become so habitual that I almost forget how serenely happy she was—how happy we both were—during those early weeks of marriage before the draft summons arrived.

“Gordon,” she says, “I can't bear to think of you in jail.”

“Let's not start on this again.” I've run out of reassurances for Sharon, just as I've run out of appeals for the draft board. It seems more and more likely I will have to choose between prison and exile, if I am to avoid putting on a uniform and crossing the ocean to kill strangers.

“Tell them your ankle's ruined. Tell them it aches all the time.”

“I'm not going to lie.” I throw off the covers and begin to dress.

“They'll never let you do civilian service.” Her voice cracks. “If they honored your conscience, they'd have to question their own.”

“Can we just drop it? I've got to catch the bus.” I wrench a shirt from its hanger and button it quickly as I huddle over the radiator. Water gurgles in the pipes, circling round and round through the system, as I keep circling through this quarrel with Sharon.

“Maybe the X-ray will show your ankle's still a mess,” she says.

“It works fine.” I tug on my jeans, parcel keys and coins and wallet among my pockets, lace my boots.

Lying on her side, head propped on one bent arm, she follows my movements with her tear-slick gaze. “You're forgetting to limp.”

“Limping won't fool the doctor.”

“You promised you'd at least
try
.”

“Maybe the war will end before they arrest me.”

“They'll start another one.”

“Got to go.” I bend down to kiss her, but she rolls away to face the wall. Pulling the bedroom door closed behind me, I realize she's right, which maddens me. Right that war has become perpetual. Right that I could try using my rebuilt foot as an excuse for a medical waiver. But a year has passed since the climbing accident shattered my ankle, and the artificial joint no longer gives me pain. The mended bones and tissues have become as numb as the metal and plastic lodged under my skin.

Descending the stairs, I am gripped by the chill of prevision. I can see the next few seconds of my life laid out before me as if in time-lapse photography—my stumble on the stairs, my grabbing the banister, the phone ringing in my pocket. When I answer, I hear the voice I expected, saying words I expected.

“Gordon,” says my sister, “if you think the doctor would fix this report for a fee . . .”

“Not a chance,” I answer, hearing my words before I utter them.

“Then go to Canada. Go to Argentina. They're accepting resisters.”

“I'd never be able to come home.” I mean to stop there, but I hear myself adding, “Besides, Sharon can't go with me.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's pregnant . . .”

“My God, that's wonderful!”

“. . . but the fetus isn't implanted well, so she might miscarry if she travels.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“We just found out.”

There is a pause, but I know what my sister will say next, and the words duly follow: “That's all the more reason to bribe the doctor to declare you unfit.”

“I can't buy my way out.”

“Can't, or won't?”

“Okay. I won't.”

Even her peevish sigh I recognize before it hisses into my ear. “You're stumbling into this like . . .” While she searches for the word, I hear
sleepwalker
, and then she says, “like a sleepwalker.”

“Good-bye, big sister.” I want to say more, but I see myself ending the call, and that is what I do.

This clairvoyant spell persists through my hasty breakfast. Then as I wash my dishes, I settle once more into the present moment, no longer foreseeing what will come next. The smell
of coffee, the feel of suds on my wrists, the glint of snow-light through the kitchen window—every sensation comes to me fresh.

On the bus ride, as the snowy countryside slides by in stark shades of black and white, I try to read the book I have brought along, Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth
. But I keep being distracted by recalling those moments of prevision. I have experienced
déjà vu
before, but never for so long at a stretch. When the spell comes over me, it's as if a switch has been thrown, and suddenly I foresee everything that will happen in the next moment, and then just as suddenly I slip back into my ordinary mind. I've read the explanations offered by psychologists and mystics—neurological asynchrony, epilepsy, reincarnation, spirit possession—but the phenomenon still baffles me.

When the bus reaches the county seat, I realize I've gone more than an hour without thinking of the war. At least my seizures, whatever their cause, have distracted me from this constant fret.

The moment my boots touch the salted pavement, the switch is thrown again, and I am possessed by foreknowledge. As I crunch over the snow toward the highway, I feel split in two—one version of myself walking ahead, and a second version following, as if dragged along. I shake my head, trying to clear the illusion. But even this gesture I see before I make it.