There are two things you need to get started. First, you have to know how to waltz. When I say “know,” I don’t mean that your sweeping rotations must describe perfect circles or that every subtle lift has to be like the clockwork of the universe. Neither do you have to be dressed up like you stepped out of the ballroom scene in Magnificent Ambersons. My neighbor, Gant, wore his Toledo Rockets cap, an old gray sweatshirt, a pair of gym shorts, and army green Crocs. His wife, Mellanie, wore a pair of pink overalls and a Godzilla tee. She, at least wore socks and sneakers.
Gant told me that if you really can’t waltz, they won’t let you in for “the experience.” There’s a wooden dance floor set up outside under a huge tent, and there’s a woman at an old Victrola, spinning vinyl waltz music broadcast over a loudspeaker. You and your partner are required to take a few turns around, and if you cut the mustard, one of three attendants will come over and stamp the back of your hand with the silver image of a bird in flight. Mel said, “It’ll take weeks for the ink to wash away.”
The second thing you need is a partner. And as long as you’ve known the person, even slightly, for over 5 years and you will admit to some connection—family, love, business, your spiritual guide, be it from a formal religion or not, your old neighbor, your young mailman, your aunt nobody likes but you, it doesn’t matter. You just have to know there is some kind of connection. So far, this traveling attraction, The Pandemonium Waltz, has drawn a lot of married couples, young people on dates, the usual movie-going crowd. It’s old fashioned, and yet mystical, and eschews computers and cell phones. It’s an intimate experience, the touching, the unified movement, the beating of your partner’s heart. Or, at least, that’s what the flyers claim.
Speaking of partners, Gant said he saw these two old guys approach the practice dance floor, both bent and hobbling along with canes, but the second they put their arms around each other, and the music took them, they seemed to float, twirling like a lily pad on a wind-blown pond. Someone in the crowd who knew them said that they had played chess every Saturday night for the last twenty years. “It kinda makes sense,” said Gant.
Once you’re stamped, and you’ve relinquished your cell phone to the attendant, you enter the facility through a small doorway, not big enough for the two of you side by side. It leads into a pitch-black hall just long enough to get creepy. Mellanie said, “It seemed like the path was gradually sloping downward. I had a feeling we were heading underground.” I asked Gant if he agreed. “At that point, I was just trying not to trip in the dark,” he said. “Right before we went through the doorway, somebody called out after us, ‘You’d be smart to stay on your feet.’”
Eventually you come to an enormous circular tunnel lit by old fashioned torch light, actual burning staffs set at an angle in the walls. There you meet a guide who leads you and your partner to one of the wooden stalls that line the enormous bordering circle of the exalted dance floor. Just to reassure the reader, I have all this firsthand from Gant and Mellanie. They said the guide told them that they were to stand apart, staring at the gate that would eventually lift to allow them access to the experience. At that point, they were to come together, assume whatever waltz pose was comfortable for them and start turning slowly. They were to keep in mind that the dance floor was packed and in motion, all the couples spinning to a single rhythmic unspooling. “So,” said the guide, “you need to start very slowly and look for an opening to insert your spinning selves. It’s like merging onto the highway during rush hour.”
Gant said, “While we waited to get in, I thought about how much it reminded me of a rodeo. You know, when they release the riders and their bucking broncos from the holding pens.” Then the music filtered in. “Wouldn’t you know it,” he told me. “‘Blue Danube.’ That was the song we practiced to the most. Must have heard it a thousand times. Both of us were happy to hear it again. It gave us confidence.”
When the gate whooshed open, they were awed by the immensity of the dance floor, the rush of the dancers, the distant stars. “I could have sworn we were underground,” said Mellanie, “but it did seem the true night sky was overhead and there was a soft, warm breeze coming from all directions.” When I asked Gant if he thought it was the true night sky, he said, “I didn’t even pay attention to that. What I noticed was the synchronization of the hundreds of couples that whirled in unison, like organic gear work, and at the center of the dance floor, somehow magically ascended in spirals to who knew where. I was so worried that the quality of my waltz was gonna throw a wrench into the cogs, bring the whole thing crashing down—couples colliding, broken bodies strewn on the floor. But then, we had to move, and we did. We merged seamlessly into the flow, and it gave me this surge of affection for my wife.”
Mellanie nodded, “Yeah, like we did something nearly impossible together and didn’t fuck it up. When you’ve been married for 30 years, that’s a good feeling.”
The dance floor is bright orange and well-lit from halogen lamps positioned at its borders. One would think with the cost of the attraction, there would be a live orchestra, but the music is pumped in from somewhere else. There is, though, a conductor—a droopy old man in a white tuxedo, his long hair and mustache frizzled and gray. He stands on a tall white box near the center of the fray, his name sloppily spray painted in flat black across the front—Maestro Callus. Gant said, “The guy was Einstein on a bender. His tuxedo was rumpled and tattered like he’d been rolled in the parking lot before the show. Whatever song he was frantically waving his baton to was not the ‘Blue Danube’ but one trapped in his head. After we waltzed for about ten minutes, the conductor screamed, ‘Bring the Blur.’”
Slowly at first, issuing from the darkness above, tiny violet flowers with the delicacy of mimosa blossoms, soft as feathers, sift down toward the dancers. Gradually, as the music rises and falls and propels the waltz into the future, they fall harder and what starts as a light dusting becomes a blizzard. The violet squall disintegrates as the tiny blossoms come in contact with the glare of the lights. In their vanishment they leave behind a pale purple effervescence bubbling in the air; a scent of wisteria.
“Whatever was in that Blur, Jesus, it fucked you up,” said Mellanie. “My mind was all over the place, but the one thing I didn’t give a thought to was the movement of the waltz. I felt us being carried along in its current, and my own performance was steady as a beating heart.” Gant nodded in agreement. “It was sort of like a hash high, but there was no clumsiness, no sudden realization that I was in over my head. In fact,” he said, “I distinctly remember having a kind of vision while dancing along. I accepted both realities—the one of the waltz and the one in my head.”
Gant and I were on our second whiskey sours. We were sitting on my back porch as the sun went down. Mellanie and my wife, Lucille, had gone to the mall in Threadwell and hadn’t returned yet. It had been a week or so since my neighbors had participated in “the experience.” I felt I was starting to put Gant off with all my questions about it, but I needed to know, needed data for my analysis.
Gant, who’d not responded the prior day outside the post office to my questions about the possible size of the ballroom and the makeup of the flooring, now sipped his drink and said, “I was in the living room of this old house. I thought perhaps it was my grandmother’s house like in a dream. While all this was transpiring, I could still feel the relentless box stepping of the dance vibrating in some distant part of me. The room was dimly lit and out the window I could see it was overcast and tilting toward night. The stranger sat across a coffee table from me in this odd shadow that clung about him or her like a personal storm front—the voice was fairly non-committal as to gender—and said, ‘We call this part, Sunday Evening.’”
Gant told me he found the scene menacing, something he’d never bargained for, and absolutely connected to his being drugged by the Blur. His time with the shadow was brief. It said to him, “Open your lips wide.” He did as he was told and from within the human gathering of night came a tiny glowing bead that moved slowly but directly across the table for his gaping mouth. At this juncture, Gant became emotional in his recounting and flicked tears from the corners of his eyes. “I tried my damndest to turn away from it, but I was paralyzed. I felt it’s sting on my tongue and swallowed. The stranger’s voice, called as if from a great distance, ‘Sleep.’”
On our third whiskey sour, Gant confessed that at the moment that word “Sleep” was spoken, he awoke out of the dream of the old house to the commotion of the dance, and simultaneously the music changed to the Sleeping Beauty waltz by Tchaikovsky, which moves, at its outset, much more quickly than the “Blue Danube.” He said that he worked incredibly hard to stay with the rhythm, but it was no use. He tripped, fell, dragged Mellanie down with him. His fear of interrupting the other dancers was unfounded. Even as they were surrendering to the clutches of gravity, the floor snapped open, and the two of them fell into a hole. Before the next couple could traipse that portion of floor, it snapped back. They were deposited, after a long spiraling slide through the darkness out an opening covered by a flap of corduroy into the area where possible waltzers were tested on the dance floor under the tent.
As he finished relaying the incident of his downfall, he closed his eyes. It was just past dusk and there was still the merest crack of light at the horizon. He set his drink on the small table between us. The scene had a sense of Sunday Evening to it, if I do say so. He rose, without a word, and walked away toward his house.
I wondered, sipping my drink, “What’s the point of the whole enterprise?” Waltzing, an outdated dance to outdated music, in unison with whoever can get it together to find a partner and do a passable version of the timeless box step? OK, but then what? A little while later, Lucille returned from the mall. She joined me out on the patio with a glass of white wine. I asked her how it went, and she said, “It was all fine until we started home. Then Mellanie told me Gant has been acting strange since they’d been to the waltz.”
“Strange, how?” I asked.
“He goes out walking at night for hours and comes home smelling like rotten leaves. There’s a thicket of hair growing from either earhole.”
“Did she tell you what happened to him during the dance?”
“You mean with the purple shit falling out of the sky and whacking the two of them out? Yeah. Sunday Evening, that whole mess?”
“Precisely,” I said. “That dream, vision, whatever he had—the encounter with the shadow—so nuts.”
“Mellanie told me she thinks he’s just using it as an excuse because he tripped and fell like a loser.”
“Did she say, loser?”
“That was the word she used.”
The next day The Pandemonium Waltz packed up its tent and portable dance floor, its Victrola, and bird stamp, and, as I imagined, with Maestro Callus at the wheel in the lead truck, headed recklessly out of town for the next engagement. After our night on the patio, I saw neither hide nor hair of Gant or Mellanie. One night, in bed, just as I was dozing off, Lucille turned to me and said, “Oh, you know I forgot to tell you this. That night Mel and I went to the mall, she told me she had her own kind of vision while caught up in the Blur.”
I sat up and blinked. “What do you mean you forgot to tell me?”
“Yeah, yeah, calm down,” she said. “Mellanie told me her vision was of a long greenhouse in a meadow at sunset. Inside the greenhouse an old woman was growing lilies whose petals were human flesh. When the sun went down, a vulpine creature of human aspect, crept out of the woods across the field to feast. The gardener stood at the upstairs bedroom window of the nearby house and watched the creature approach in the bright light of the moon. Mel confessed to sneaking into the humid, glass enclosure and tasting one of the petals for herself.”
“A vulpine creature of human aspect?” I said.
Lucille laughed. “I guess kind of a mix between a fox and a human…Isn’t vulpine fox-like?”
“What’d she say about the petal of flesh? What did they taste like, chicken?”
“No, she said that it tasted like the meat of the holy spirit.”
“I wonder if that’s good or bad,” I said.
Lucille shook her head and shrugged.
I’d nearly given up my fascination with the Waltz until one afternoon in late August, I was downtown, trying to get to the grocery before it closed. As I made my way along the sidewalk on Main Street the glass door to the deli swung open in my path. I was brought up short and made eye contact with the person exiting. It was Maestro Callus. I’d have bet my eye teeth on it. He scurried away, his gray hair fuller than ever, his white coat lifted in the wind. I let the door close as he scrambled across the street. Back when Gant described to me the Maestro, the way I saw him in my imagination, at the center of a storm of twirling couples, it was the twin of this person leaving the deli. For that, alone, I had every reason to follow him.
It was a goose chase of sorts. The Maestro’s personal movements were frantic in and of themselves, the jaw work, popping joints, and tremors of his inner music, but his speed was negligible to the point where even I could easily keep up with him. His frayed white suit glowed against the gathering night and kept him in view at a bit of a distance. I don’t think he knew I was behind him, and I don’t think he could have recognized me, unless of course, upon seeing Gant and Mel waltzing by, he imagined them telling their neighbor the secrets of the ballroom, and he imagined the neighbor to look exactly like me. What were the chances?
He led me on a tour of the alleys behind the businesses on Main Street. They were all dripping wet, as if a localized rain had recently fallen only back there. Voluminous mists rose out of dumpsters. Occasionally a string of lights above reaching from one building to another dimly lit the way. As I kept up with my quarry, I could hear conversations in the backrooms of restaurants and stores, some mere whispers, some harangues. One response I caught, apropos of nothing, from an old man—“She stays in bed all day and reads the funny papers.” Cats, vermin, pigeons, and some small wriggling creature, like a brown snake with legs and the head of a bat, scurried at our feet. I made a note to myself to think twice about patronizing the local restaurants.
Finally, we broke free from the canyons of red brick, through a small gate that led to a path through an empty lot. By then I had no idea where I was and considered giving up. I stopped, about to turn around, and gave one last look to find Callus. Through near-night, I caught sight of him ahead. The path led out of the lot, across a field and to the crest of a small hill. His suit caught the last light of day, and then he disappeared down the other side. To see him there for a moment, though, perched atop that rise, was, for me, like seeing him on his stand conducting the Pandemonium Waltz. I followed.
On the opposite side of the hill, I took the path down into what appeared to be a park with great lawns and gatherings of oaks. He was nowhere, I could make out. The sun was completely gone by then, a light wind had risen, but somehow the moon made a sudden, theatrical appearance. Whatever its current phase was a great stroke of luck for me as it allowed me to see some way ahead. I walked on without the benefit of the Maestro to lead me, and as I went further and further into the park, I again considered turning back while I still had a vague sense of how to reach the hill I’d come over.
All of those concerns vanished, though, as I cleared a thicket of trees, and beheld before me in the moonlight a greenhouse. It must have been fifty feet long, made all of glass, some windows levered open but most closed. Here and there along its lustrous sheen, I saw dark holes where the panes had been shattered. I pictured a child throwing rocks and running. A little way beyond the enchanting structure a mansion rose out of the shadows. There was a light in the upstairs window, and a long-haired figure, dressed in pink, peering out. It was unclear if they’d be able to see me from there, so I dashed for the glass door that stood ajar.
Upon entering, my senses were torn between the oppressive humidity and the beauty of the moonlight passing through the glass panels. Where the light came in it was glorious, but there were also large pools of shadow. A moment passed wherein I stood stock still and listened, and then the sweet aroma of the place broke over me like a wave. I looked along the tables upon tables lined up in rows that stretched the entire length of the place. Atop them were plants in pots. I found a spot of moonlight and leaned down to see what was growing. Yes, orchids, the petals of which were every shade that human flesh can be.
I walked well into the place, reviewing the ranks of plants, and had just stepped into a pool of night. From within that pitch black, I heard a voice, say, “Open your lips wide.” I reached for my cell phone and hit the flashlight app. Its glare illuminated a haggard-looking woman, who was reaching toward my mouth, her trembling hand holding forth one of the orchid petals. I backed away, not wanting it to touch my lips, and it was then I recognized Mellanie. Something fierce and organic had happened to her. She was pale and lumpy and her eyes were the violet of the Blur. I bolted back down the aisle, passing through light and dark. Behind me, I heard her scream for Gant.
When I was but yards from the greenhouse door, it opened wide with a great shriek of the hinges and in stepped something to do with Gant. It was his form, and he still wore the gym shorts and Toledo Rockets cap, but no shirt or Crocs. He was covered with long red hair. There were claws and curved incisors, and his eyes were not violet but had gone yellow and beadier than usual. I froze in my tracks. He growled and took a step closer.
“Gant,” I said, “you don’t look so good. What the fuck happened to you?”
“I ate the flesh.”
“You mean the flowers?”
He grunted. “Me and Mel are working for the Maestro now. It’s what happens to losers.”
“You’re not a loser,” I said.
“We don’t care what you think.” Spit flew from his mouth. “Before I carve you up and we use your blood and organs to feed the orchids, I have just one question.” The animal resonance almost took over his voice before he could finish speaking.
I didn’t answer him. For Christ sake, he was set to tear me apart. The urge to run was consumed by stultifying awe. I couldn’t move.
Gant conjured up enough human to ask me his question. “I want to know, exactly whose story you think this is.”
I didn’t get a chance to answer, Mellanie leaped upon my back and Gant lunged, leading with his claws. “Good Lord,” I yelled, a phrase I’d never used before in my life. Even in the heat of the attack, it struck me as ridiculous. At the last second, I managed to grab Gant’s hairy wrists and keep those gnashing fangs from my cheeks. Meanwhile, Mellanie was pulling my hair and trying to bite my ears. I swung my body wildly trying to shake her off. Fox-man Gant continued his assault. With his forward motion, and me trying to shrug off his wife, eventually, as one, we moved in circles down the aisle, smashing into the tables holding the orchids. At times I twisted so violently Mel’s legs flew out behind her and her sneakers cleared whole rows of pots. Gant, the son-of-bitch, kept snapping, his spittle all over my face, and he made some noise from deep in his core that reeked of panic and joy.
We spun out of a pool of shadow and into the moonlight, and I became aware that the petals from the broken plants strewn on the floor were being lifted around us by the vacuum of our gyre. “Snow in August,” said Gant with a fox-like drawl and his wrists broke free of my grasp as Mellanie bit my head. I started to go over on my ass, but then, I felt a firm hand upon my back.
Lucille said, “Snap out of it,” as we turned across the ballroom surrounded by a sea of couples.
I immediately located within me the metronome of my waltz. “I’m ok,” I said.
“We’re only a minute or so to the spot where you dance up into the sky, so stay with it. I want to try that.” I turned my head to the left as we turned to the right and caught a glimpse of the dancers ascending into the night. There was a spotlight aiming upward to light their journey. I wanted to wonder where they were going, but I needed to concentrate on feeling the waltz, being lost in it. Lucille and I were never so in synch as in those moments, performing our carousel turns as one. A distant breeze, the whirlwind created by the rising dancers, reached us and we knew it wouldn’t be long. Before that thought had cleared my head, the music changed.
We’d been dancing like pros to a difficult and frantic Mephisto Waltz by Liszt, and in an instant the song “Moon River” sung by Audrey Hepburn had replaced it. I saw Lucille’s reaction in a widening of her eyes, a momentary glitch in the dance. It took me only that long as well to realize the song was a perfect waltz. I adjusted instantly, as did she, and the seamless perfection of it, born of endless hours in the July night, practicing on the patio, gave me a surge of affection for my wife. It was then that I lost a step. What happened from there was a cascade of mishaps and errant gesticulations.
There were only two couples ahead of us on the line to ascend, and as I lost my footing, one of them was already on its way into the night. “Good Lord,” I said. On the way toward the opening floor, Lucille blew me a kiss. I squeezed her hand before we were separated in the tumult. As the floor closed above me, and I plummeted through the dark, I wondered if this story could have been mine.
(Editors’ Note: Jeffrey Ford is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2023 Jeffrey Ford
