Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

  He had planned to take the music world by storm. But the scout was fired by the record company and no one else at the company seemed particularly interested in Jacobs’ band. The band had landed a few club gigs, but that hadn’t been nearly enough to pay the rent.

  The sax player had a friend who knew someone who worked for Odyssey Cruises. And the steel drum player had heard rumors that London clubs were more receptive to new talent than the American clubs. One thing led to another and all those things led to this: Twisted Band was playing on the Odyssey, en route to London. And here he was, watching a buxom lady in a purple velvet gown and a white-haired lady in sequins limbo for the honor of leading a conga line.

  The song that Jacobs had selected to play for the conga line that night was a new composition that incorporated the rhythms and melodies of ritual music. Jacobs surmised that this song, which he had titled “Dance All Night,” would serve as a superstimulus for dancing. The crowd would not appreciate the artistry behind the composition, Jacobs reasoned, but at least it would get them to dance. That would make the cruise line happy, which would be useful if the band needed to arrange for a ride back to the States at some future date.

  Jacobs watched the end of the contest. The white-haired woman—remarkably limber for her age—wriggled under a bar that was a good two inches below the buxom lady’s best.

  Gene Culver announced the white-haired woman as the winner, holding her arm aloft like the referee at a boxing match. Then he announced that Twisted Band would play an original dance tune, composed just for the conga line.

  Twisted Band began to play, starting with a simple rhythm line on the steel drum. The guitarist echoed the rhythm, adding a simple, repetitive melody. The sax joined in, and then Jacobs began to sing:

  Sunbeams

  Moonbeams

  Nothing is the way it seems

  Your dreams, My schemes,

  Dancing through the night.

  One chance to dance

  Don’t leave it to circumstance.

  A trance, A dance,

  Dreaming through the night.

  The white-haired lady who had won the limbo contest beckoned to an elderly man in a tuxedo. He clasped her sequined waist and followed her lead. Another couple quickly joined them.

  The service companionway had led to a kitchen area, from which Susan found her way to a passenger corridor that paralleled the Promenade. She was hurrying along the corridor, looking for a door that led outside, when she looked out a window. Her view was partially blocked by a stack of deck chairs, piled into a corner for the night. Beyond the chairs, she caught a glimpse of two figures in the shadows. She stopped, torn between the need to find a way out and the desire to see what was going on.

  Was it Weldon Merrimax and Ms. Murphy, struggling in the darkness? Or just a honeymooning couple, necking in the shadows. Susan caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of the figures before they moved and were hidden by the chairs.

  She rushed down the corridor. At the far end, she finally found a door that led out onto the Promenade.

  Outside, the air was cold—a sharp contrast to the overheated air of the corridor. A layer of low-lying mist hid the waves; the ship seemed to be sailing on clouds.

  Susan dashed back to where she had seen the shadowy figures. She found the stack of chairs beside a window, but no one was there.

  Under normal circumstances, Ian did not dance. But the circumstances in the Atrium were not normal. It was strange how this music got into your head, he thought. Stupid words, but a catchy tune, and the rhythm seemed to be a part of him—as if his heart were beating in time to the music.

  The white-haired lady had led the conga line in a circle around the dance floor, then off into the crowd. As Ian watched, a man set his champagne glass on the tray of a passing waiter and joined the end of the line, hands on the waist of a young woman in silver lame. A matronly woman in an evening dress laughed, set her champagne glass on the edge of a potted plant, and joined the end of the conga line, hands on the waist of the young man.

  “Come on!” Pat called. She was heading for the conga line, clearly planning to join in the dance. A little startled by her enthusiasm, Ian followed.

  The music was very loud—Ian realized it wasn’t just the music from the band. People were singing along with the vocalist. He found himself singing, too. Strangely, he didn’t feel at all self-conscious about it. “Your dreams, my schemes, dancing through the night.”

  He tried to stop singing, but the music wouldn’t let him go. The beginning of the conga line was moving out the doors that led onto the Promenade deck. He followed the others, dancing out into the cool air. He felt like he could dance forever.

  Tom stood on the second level of the Atrium, surveying a scene of wreckage and confusion.

  He had been asleep, laid low by the antihistamine he had taken, when a panicky call had wakened him. Don, his second in command, shouted over a pounding rhythm. “Tom! I need your help in the Atrium. The dancing …” Don was interrupted by a crash that sounded like breaking glass. “The dancing is out of control.”

  “What the hell …? Dancing?” Tom said. The phone went dead in his hand. He had dressed immediately and rushed to the Atrium.

  The band was playing an idiotic, repetitive song and someone had cranked up the volume, filling the Atrium with pounding sound. People were dancing, but it wasn’t the usual, civilized, cruise-ship sort of dancing. No, this was your drunken, frat-party kind of dancing that leaves destruction in its wake.

  A conga line circled the shattered remains of the champagne fountain—a heap of sparkling glass fragments, a puddle of champagne, and a half a dozen overturned champagne bottles. The conga line continued up the spiral staircase and out the double doors onto the Promenade deck.

  The music was loud enough to penetrate Tom’s stuffed up head, but just barely. Tom was too tired, the music was muffled by the cold. He could ignore it.

  It was a party gone out of control. The dancing passengers were not actively engaged in any acts of destruction—Tom imagined that the champagne fountain was an accidental casualty. Even so, the cruise line did not approve of this sort of spontaneous fun. Fun, on the Odyssey, was an organized activity. Cruise-ship fun was sometimes silly, but that silliness was in the control of the cruise staff. This silliness was way out of control. It was Tom’s job to restore order without, in any way, upsetting the partying passengers.

  He looked for his security staff. There was Don, dancing in the conga line. There was Fred, also in the line. This just wasn’t right.

  Tom headed down to the stage to stop the music. He glanced around, searching for Gene Culver as he approached the band. He figured he would ask the band to bring this tune to a graceful end, then let Gene take over. But there was no sign of the cruise director.

  None of the band members noticed when Tom joined them on the small elevated platform that served as a stage. The guitarist was staring into space, his eyes glassy and unfocused. The steel drum player continued the rhythm without hesitation, even when Tom stood in front of him and ordered him to stop. The sax player had his eyes closed; he kept playing the simple melody, over and over. The vocalist did not look at Tom, even when he tugged the micro phone from the man’s hand.

  Tom jumped down from the platform and unplugged the band’s microphones. Unamplified, the pounding of the rhythm lost its driving urgency. The shuffling of hundreds of dancing feet drowned out the unamplified music. But the people kept on singing.

  Tom grabbed the radio on his belt and called the bridge. “Sound the horn,” he asked the officer on duty. “Three long blasts.”

  Susan heard people singing, heard the rhythmic shuffling of dancing feet. Coming toward her on the Promenade, dancing through the fog, was a white-haired woman in sequins, followed by an elderly man in a tuxedo, followed by a buxom woman in velvet. As Susan watched, more dancers appeared from the fog, a seemingly endless line of singing, dancing people.

  These did not look
like the sort of people given to excessive dancing. As they approached Susan and passed her, she noticed that many of them were sweating heavily, even in the cool night air. One man’s hairpiece had come loose; it was half off his head, revealing a large bald patch—but he was oblivious, singing cheerfully and dancing with enthusiasm.

  The words they were singing made no sense—something about dreams and schemes and dancing—but the tune was catchy. Susan found herself tapping her foot in time, caught by the rhythm.

  As the dancers passed her, she spotted Pat and Ian in line and blinked. Pat was clinging to the waist of a paunchy, bald man and singing happily. She saw Susan and grinned at her. “Come on!” Pat called. “Join the dance!” just then, the ship’s horn blared, cutting through the music, drowning out the words and the rhythm.

  In the Atrium, Tom watched as the people in the conga line faltered, missing one step, then another. The guitarist blinked and looked around. The sax player stopped playing. Tom picked up the MC’s microphone, which lay at the edge of the stage, and switched it on. “Good evening, everyone,” he said. “This is Tom Clayton, the ship’s security officer.”

  The conga line was breaking up. The dancers were looking around with the confused expressions of people waking from a dream. A man tugged his tux jacket back into place. A woman, whose hairdo had come loose during the dancing, fussed with her hair, frowning.

  Tom hesitated, searching for the right words. On the Odyssey, the passenger was always right. He couldn’t just order them all back to their staterooms. “We’re glad that you are all having such a good time.”

  Tom spotted Gene Culver halfway up the spiral staircase. The Cruise Director had stepped away from the conga line, as if to pretend that he hadn’t been dancing. All those other people had been dancing, but not him.

  “We wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to thank the man who brought you this evening’s entertainment,” Tom went on. “We want to thank the Odyssey’s own cruise director—Gene Culver!” He waved a hand toward Gene. “Come on up here, Gene.” As Tom had expected, the cruise director automatically snapped into entertainment mode. He was smiling and waving to the crowd as he made his way down the stairs.

  “The party here is over,” Tom said as Gene made his way through the crowd, “but the casino is open, and there’s a fine show in the Singing Sirens Theater. And here’s Gene to tell you about all the ship’s other entertainment opportunities.”

  Gene stepped onto the stage, holding his hands up as if to silence applause. There was no applause. He looked wide-eyed and disheveled. He smoothed his hair back over his balding head. “Get them out of here,” Tom whispered in Gene’s ear as he handed the microphone to the cruise director and stepped off the stage.

  It took more than an hour to clear the room. Tom rounded up his security staff and they circulated through the crowd, helping people find friends they had lost in the dancing, directing people toward the theater, the casino, the bars. Anywhere but the Atrium.

  Sleepy from the antihistamine, debilitated by the cold, Tom stayed for a time, directing the security staff and looking for Susan in that vague and distant way that one looks for something lost in a dream. He didn’t find her.

  “I guess I got a little carried away,” one man said to Tom, blinking owlishly. “I seem to have lost my wife.”

  “You were just having a good time, sir,” Tom said. “Perhaps your best bet is to return to your stateroom. She’ll probably do the same.” They called the ship’s doctor to the Atrium to deal with a few minor injuries: a woman wearing sandals had cut her foot on broken glass; a man had twisted his ankle while dancing up the stairs. Tom contacted maintenance and a team of maintenance staff swept up the broken glass, mopped up the champagne.

  People left humming the tune that the band had been playing.

  Susan sat on a deck chair that Ian had pulled from the stack by the window. Pat sat on another one, rubbing her feet. “I don’t know how it happened,” she was saying. “One minute I was thinking about how I could incorporate the limbo into a discussion of quantum physics. The next thing I know I’m dancing like an idiot.”

  Other people who had been in the conga line were milling about. “Great dance music,” one woman murmured. She sang softly, “Sunbeams, moonbeams….”

  “Don’t!” said her partner, an older man in a tux. “I hope I never hear that song again.”

  “But it was such a lovely dance,” the woman said.

  “I don’t like to dance,” the man said.

  “Everyone likes to dance,” said the woman. Susan didn’t catch the man’s reply—the couple was walking away, following the rest of the crowd back into the Atrium.

  “Everyone likes to dance,” the woman had said. Susan remembered where she had heard that before. The Trancer in There and Back Again had told Bailey, “Everyone likes to dance.”

  Susan leaned back in the deck chair. The ship shifted and rolled on the waves and she was glad that the movement did not match the rhythm of the song in her head. “Sunbeams, moonbeams, nothing is the way it seems.” She had only heard it for a moment, but she could still feel the pull of its rhythm.

  “Can’t get that damn song out of my head,” Pat said, echoing Susan’s thoughts. “It just keeps repeating over and over.”

  “Certain patterns of rhythm and melody affect the human nervous system and induce trance states that lead to the internal physiological repetition of the rhythm,” Susan said, quoting from There and Back Again.

  “Yeah?” Pat said.

  “That’s from Max’s book,” Ian said. He was sitting in the shadows on a third deck chair. He was trying, Susan thought, to pretend that he had never been dancing. “Max wrote about Trancer music, songs that people can’t help dancing to.”

  “Like that damn song we just heard.” Pat made a face. “Trancer music, huh?”

  “I thought Max had invented the Trancers and their music,” Susan said.

  “I thought so, too,” Ian said. “But maybe not.”

  “How did you manage to escape the dance?” Pat said. “I was out here when it started,” Susan said.

  “Yeah? What were you doing?”

  Susan shrugged and reluctantly explained why she was on the Promenade deck. She had caught a glimpse of Weldon; she had seen a couple of shadow figures. Nothing really. “But I can’t help worrying about Ms. Murphy. I hope she’s okay.”

  Pat had a practical solution. “It’s easy,” she said. “We’ll call the ship’s switchboard and ask to be connected to her room. If she answers, we’ll know she’s okay.”

  Susan agreed.

  They said good night to Ian and returned to their stateroom, where Pat called the switchboard.

  “I’m sorry,” the operator said. “You seem to be calling from stateroom 144 on Calypso deck.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s Pat Murphy’s room.”

  Pat laughed. “Right again. But I want to call the other Pat Murphy. There’s another one on board.”

  “I’m sorry,” the operator said. “You must be mistaken. We only have one Pat Murphy on the passenger list.”

  That night, Susan dreamed of Mary Maxwell. They stood together on the Odyssey’s observation deck, looking out over the sundeck. It was a warm, clear night.

  Susan looked at Mary. “So who is dreaming now,” Susan said. “I think it’s me.”

  “I think you’re right,” Mary agreed.

  “That means you aren’t real,” Susan said.

  “You know, I’ve always felt most people have a view of reality that’s much too confining,” Mary said. “I think we’d all do well to listen to the Clampers. Their motto is Credo Quia Absurdum, ‘I believe because it is absurd.’ Quite an appealing notion. You must entertain all the possibilities, however absurd.”

  Susan shook her head. She knew she was dreaming, but she couldn’t help arguing. “You can’t do that,” Susan protested. “Some possibilities make others impossible.”


  Mary frowned. “Are you saying that you can’t believe in impossible things? I’ll bet you do it all the time. You believed that a little girl could survive among the wolves in the Sierras, didn’t you? That’s really not possible, you know.”

  Susan thought of Wild Angel, then said crossly, “I suppose. But that’s fiction. We live in the real world.”

  Mary blinked at her in mild surprise. “Do we? I live in a world I made up. It’s like the monsters that live under the bed. You make them up; you give them power.”

  “There are real monsters in the world,” Susan said, thinking of Alice and the monster who killed her.

  “That’s true. There are real monsters—but they’re few and far between compared to the monsters you invent. It’s the imaginary monsters that keep people from living the lives they want to live.”

  Susan frowned. “Is Weldon an imaginary monster?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Was he trying to kill Ms. Murphy?”

  “Can you kill someone who isn’t here?” Mary asked.

  Susan shook her head in annoyance. “I don’t care whether she exists, I’m worried about her. Weldon said this was a question of who was going to be the Creator. What does that have to do with Ms. Murphy? Or Patrick Murphy or my friend Pat, for that matter. And I’m worried about Max. I think he’s in trouble.”

  “He’s working on a new book,” Mary said. “Writing is a creative process. It often involves a descent into madness.”

  Susan shook her head again. “I think there’s more to it than that.”

  “You may be right. You see, there are times when pen names take on a stronger reality than the original name. Consider Mark Twain. You can know his name was really Samuel Clemens, but most people can remember that only with an effort. It’s Twain that has the reality. Or Lewis Carroll. He’s the fellow we remember, not that stuffy Reverend Dodgson. That Weldon—he’s getting more real by the minute.”

  “What about you?”

  Mary shrugged. “I’m not struggling for a place in Max’s reality. “And Weldon is?”