It was a solo again – this time to a sort of peculiar tune called, apparently, Elephant (the reason for this was not clear). It was in an unusual and irregular time signature, with a pounding bass drum below a rather tender and lyrical tenor voice. I believe I already mentioned – I have a penchant for unusual time signatures. The words were evocative but obscure – something about a “muddy arm… I wonder, I wonder what everyone is doing at home… the skin on my tree is growing back again… I’ll move a little foot to the right, oh heavenly…” And being a literalist, the moth moved a little foot to the right.
Since the line was repeated several times, she eventually nudged herself entirely out of the picture. The rest of her movement phrases seemed, as in her prior choreographies, to be based on some weird grammar. I thought, for some reason, of the first chapter of Mark Franko’s book, Dance as Text, in which he recounts the birth of theatrical dance in France. He says that a particular genre of baroque dance – “geometrical” choreography – was contrived to present the body of the dancer as a written text. These dances used “figures” – static or directional patterns – which were metaphors for writing on the page.
In reading these patterns, Franko quotes Pascal’s Pensées: “Figure porte absence et presence, plaisir et déplaisir.” The figure brings absence and presence, pleasure and displeasure.
This was precisely my experience in watching this video.
I couldn’t really say what was going on tonally in this piece. Both the music and the dance hovered in a space I’d call, for lack of a better term, irresolute. Or rather, it seemed almost like she was being intentionally misleading.
There was one decisive element: a new representational painting on the wall depicting an ominous, actually terrifying, male figure in a cowboy hat and an eye patch. The background was black. In fact, not just black, but blacker than black. It seemed to suck the light out of the room. I think it may have been black velvet. The ominous cowboy’s one good eye seemed to be trained on the moth throughout her dance.
The email jerk had been the first to weigh in: “i luv it!!! bout time u put up ‘A CERTN PRSN’…”
The cab freshener said, “I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d…”
To which Nethermost answered (reassuringly? mockingly?), “ ‘Why do I love’ You, Sire?”
And then somebody called “BogusRetroCorn” wrote: “I can tell you why I love her. I have a lust for her dignity… I think of wonderful, exciting, decent things when I look at her…”
This really gave me pause. I thought it was maybe the sexiest and most gentlemanly thing I’d ever heard, with the possible exception of the way that guy Stefanos had introduced me to his girlfriend. But for some reason, I also found it vaguely menacing. Depending on how you read it, the conflation of “lust” and “decency” could either open up all kinds of possibilities – or shut them down.
And then, as if to confirm my discomfort, he added: “Get off your butt and join the Marines!”
omg. It was him. The elephant in the room.
The Duke.
A couple of days later I was hanging out at Sven’s while he was at work. I did some barre exercises (always frustrating at his place, which was kind of cramped), took a quick shower, and decided to walk around the neighborhood even though it was already dark. I headed down Katarina Bangata. I walked by a little café we sometimes went to called Twang. They had a great vegetarian pâté, and excellent coffee. But I was a little low on cash so I just looked in the window.
As the name implied, this was a theme café. There were guitars suspended from the walls, and in the window, a lot of ukes. They were just hanging there, innocently, in the window. They struck, as it were, a chord.
I rushed back to Sven’s to check in on the moth.
As I mentioned, my response to that BogusRetroCorn comment on her dance was one of ambivalence. But the cab freshener really didn’t take it so well. In fact, he seemed to be reading it as a threat to the moth. He’d written two comments in rapid succession: “democracy… ma femme…” and then, “I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.”
BogusRetroCorn snapped back: “Every time you turn around expect to see me. ’Cause one time you’ll turn around and I’ll be there.”
Oh God. Maybe this was serious.
When Sven got home I had to pretend everything was normal, but I was itching to get back to New York.
When I got back to my sublet, I unpacked. The first thing I pulled out of my suitcase was the scarf Sven had knit for Bugs Bunny’s sister. It was made out of an off-white yarn with little flecks of other colors in it. I thought it would go nicely with her winter coat, which was also off-white. This set off her tan, which she seemed to maintain in the winter months by sitting outside as often as was possible. Even on chilly days, if the sun was out, she’d sometimes sit in it.
I went down the hall with the scarf. I heard the television on in her apartment. She was watching Jeopardy and the volume was up very loud. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t hear me if I knocked, so I went back to my place and found one of those paper gift bags stored in a closet. The bag was silver and had an unused gift card attached to it. I wrote a note on the card. I said, “From your neighbor, Gray (15E).” I hesitated for a second, and then I wrote my phone number and said, “Call if you need anything.” I left the bag with the scarf and the note outside her door.
That was about 7 p.m. I straightened up a bit, showered, heated up some soup, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer I checked in again on the moth’s channel. No action whatsoever. I watched the confusing dance one more time, scrolled through the list of related videos (largely elephant-themed), and then gave up for the night. I was shutting down my computer when I thought I heard a tap at the door. When I opened it, it was Bugs Bunny’s sister. She was wearing the scarf, and she had the gift bag in her hand. She wagged the bag at me and said, “DIDJOO PUT DIS IN FWONT O’ MY DOAH? I WAS PUTTIN’ DA GAHBAGE OUT AN’ I ALMOS’ FELL OVAH DIS.”
I said, “SORRY, YES.”
I was a little worried she might be mad at me, but she said, “DAT IS SO NICE. TANKS VEWY MUCH. YAW A WEAL NICE FELLA, I’M TELLIN’ YA. I WASN’T SO SHUAH AT FOYST.” She winked.
I said, “MY FRIEND MADE IT. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT.”
She said, “IT’S BYOOFUL, I LOVE IT, BUT HEAH, TAKE YA BAG BACK SO YA CAN USE IT AGAIN, IT’S STILL GOOD.”
I looked at the silver bag. Indeed, there was nothing wrong with it.
I said, “OKAY, BUT HERE, KEEP THE CARD, IT’S GOT MY NUMBER IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.”
She looked very closely at the card and said, “IS DIS YAW NUMBAH? OH, I’M GONNA NEED DAT. OKAY. GIMME JUST DA CAWD.”
I carefully detached it without tearing the number. She looked at it closely again and repeated, “I’M GONNA NEED DAT.”
This made me feel simultaneously flattered and a little afraid. That one time I’d tried to help her with the Access-A-Ride number I hadn’t really accomplished anything. Still, if I could be of help, I thought I’d like to. We both smiled a kind of wan smile and nodded at each other, and she inched her way back home with her walker. I watched her until she made it in her door, and I went back into my apartment.
I was pretty tired because of the time difference in Sweden, and because of the journey, which, even when it went smoothly, was fairly grueling.
I went to bed. I imagine Bugs Bunny’s sister did, too.
D.O.A.
Sven texted me, “omg watch d.o.a. :O ”
I put D.O.A. at the top of my Netflix queue and it arrived two days later. Indeed. omg. :O
It’s the story of some small-town notary public who can’t quite bring himself to commit to his very nice but clingy girlfriend. He decides to take a little trip on his own for the weekend and ends up surrounded by a bunch of drunk conventioneers. He flirts a little and ties one on, but nothing extreme. But the next morning he wakes up feeling terrible. It’s worse
than a garden-variety hangover. He goes to a doctor and lo and behold, the doctor gives him some shockingly bad news: he’s been poisoned! He has a “luminous toxin” in his system for which there’s no antidote: he’ll be dead in a couple of days!
At first he refuses to believe it. There’s no reason for anybody to want him dead. Those drunken conventioneers were buffoons, but not cold-blooded murderers. He figures he doesn’t just have a couple of days to live – he’s got a couple of days to figure out who the hell would want him dead.
The girlfriend, who also happens to be his office manager, is dragged through a series of partial revelations that confuse, hurt, and confound her, but she’s determined to stand by her man. She really wants to get married.
His fearlessness (what has he got left to lose?) and her investigative pluck finally expose the reason behind his poisoning. It’s entirely banal. There was some plot involving Eastern European gangsters, an import/export operation, some stolen iridium, a devious accountant, and a couple of illicit love affairs. None of this involved the notary. It was just his bad luck that one of these gangsters had him notarize the bill of sale on his iridium. The notary’s ledger had a record of the transaction, and the only way the schemers could cover their trail was to off said notary.
In other words, the guy got himself killed for a very chump-change reason: for being a small-town, sad-ass notary public.
Even with the academic job market in ruins, I don’t think I could bring myself to work as a notary public. Though that Academic Jobs Wiki would have you believe that when all you’ve got going for you is a PhD in the humanities and a former life as a ballet dancer, you might very well want to explore this kind of career option.
I spent the next couple of weeks piddling away my time. It dawned on me that my post-doctoral fellowship was now more than half over. It was to be disbursed over one calendar year, which had begun in September. We were barreling toward the end of January, and I had only accomplished the title change and a bit of comma fudging. I did write that talk on trench coats, but as I mentioned, that wasn’t even intended to be an academic paper. I was just gathering material for that novel I’d been thinking about writing. For obvious reasons, I’d been considering the murder mystery as a genre.
As I scrolled through my manuscript – my academic manuscript – I found myself fixating on certain passages – the description of Noverre’s Jason et Médée with its pantomimic representations of the motive and weapons of murder (Jealousy, Fire, Steel) – the passage from Die Welt des Tänzers about the ecstasies of terror and hatred, joy and desire – that gruesome account of Forsythe’s dancers dismembered by frustrated passion…
There was something from Decreation that flashed into my head – something about secrets and lies… All these moments in which the attempt to communicate something through gesture led to inevitable violence. I remembered that video of the moth’s, the first psychedelic Gnossienne. I opened my browser and went to her channel. I clicked on “lent (2) satie.”
I couldn’t believe what I saw. A slew of new comments had turned up – and recently. There was a breathless exchange between the moth and the cab freshener, and its apparent urgency had me at the edge of my seat.
A week before, she had written, confusingly: “Better of it – continual be afraid – Than it – And Whom you told it to – beside – ” It seemed to me a desperate warning. Her peculiar syntax could only indicate utter panic.
And yet he wrote back, with apparent tranquility: “Dear friend whoever you are take this kiss.”
Whoever you are?
There was a pause of a couple of days, and then she added: “Going to Heaven! I don’t know when – ” and then: “If you should get there first Save just a little space for me”
To which he answered (reassuringly? alarmingly?): “Be it as if I were with you (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)”
The email jerk butted in: “@AhNethermostFun: As for you an me an our mistical connect. Two pees in a pod babe. Two pees in a pod.”
From Nethermost: no comment.
From ACabFreshenerOnTypos, defiantly: “We are those two natural and nonchalant persons.”
And then finally, the very day of my helpless witnessing of these communications, Nethermost blurted two horrific, urgent, hysterical comments that made my heart stop: “Murder by degrees – A Thrust – and then for Life a chance – ” and then: “Had I a mighty gun I think I’d shoot the human race.”
Which prompted from the cab freshener, devastatingly: “It appears to me I am dying… I love you… I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.”
They were freaking me out!
I copied and pasted the string of comments into a Word document, and then began scanning over the various other comment strings on the moth’s first and second channels, reversing their order to reconstruct the sequence of their appearance. I went back over the other videos that had sparked my interest – the moonwalker in Belarus, Makarova, Lutz Forster, Merce, that Les Paul documentary – collecting every vaguely pertinent quip that might give a clue as to the email jerk’s next move. I combed through my file of trench coat documents, pulling other details that might add up to something. I even pulled the ominous passages from my academic manuscript – anything to help me figure out where this was headed. I shuffled them around, trying to make sense of the timeline. I jotted notes between them, attempting to find some continuity, some sensible plot.
I realized some of the connections were tenuous at best. Even if I were to hand this material over to the authorities, I was pretty sure they’d shrug it off as the product of my overactive imagination. But I couldn’t shake my suspicion anymore: Jimmy Stewart was up to no good. Whether he was acting on his own or under the sway of that creepy sidekick of his, “the Duke,” the moth was in danger, and so was her liberal friend the freshener.
I printed the whole file of evidence. It must have weighed a pound.
I took a blank piece of paper and sketched a rough graph of connections between discrete events and persons, noting the dates of particularly menacing appearances or utterances by the jerk.
I looked around for a binder or folder to put these materials in, but the only thing I could find was that sparkly silver gift bag returned to me by Bugs Bunny’s sister. I put the stack of printouts into the bag.
I’d worked myself into something of a tizzy. I needed to find the jerk. I didn’t know what I’d say to him if I found him, but I knew I had to do something. But where to find him? My last visit to my gentlemen’s club had been a total bust.
Then I remembered the NYU gym. I hadn’t been there in a while. I’d really been slacking off on my cardio workout, although I’d been fairly diligent about the barre exercises. At that moment, I really didn’t need to get my heart rate up – if anything, I needed to calm down.
What did I think I was doing? I’m not sure – the truth is my head was in a jumble.
I suited up in gym gear – sweatpants, an old Northwestern t-shirt, running shoes – and pocketed my NYU identification card and my iPod. As I was about to head out the door, I looked at the silver gift bag filled with possibly incriminating evidence. I thought maybe if Jimmy didn’t turn up, I could use the time on the cardio machine to go over these documents. And then, at the last moment, I impulsively grabbed Kay Ambrose’s little Ballet-Lover’s Pocket-Book. As I believe I mentioned, I’d been carrying it around with me quite a bit. I put it in with the evidence.
It was about 6 p.m. The cardio room was packed. The treadmills were littered with the usual suspects – and I mean that in the colloquial sense. In other words, the wiry, eccentric hippie was there, along with the other familiar 40- and 50-somethings staving off impending decline, but Jimmy Stewart was nowhere to be seen. I propped my silver gift bag against the base of a StairMaster and mounted the pedals, which descended smoothly under my weight. I scrolled through “Artists” on my iPod and settled on Aldo Ciccolini playing Satie. I wanted to give this my full concentration.
I programmed the StairMaster for maximized age-appropriate cardio intensity. And then I started stepping.
On the machine to my right was a woman with dyed black hair, an oversized Obama t-shirt, and bicycle shorts. She was peering down her reading glasses at the TLS as she chugged away. Lots of people read on these machines. I glanced down at my bag of materials, but felt somehow too overwhelmed to look at them right now. I decided to do my usual: close my eyes, step in time with the music, and just think about the problems at hand.
Ciccolini was playing Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois. The rhythm was anxious, and I stepped accordingly. The title of the piece reminded me of that enormous sculpture of Davy Crockett. I felt the massive wooden gentleman thudding away behind me as I climbed, climbed, climbed the never-ending slope of the StairMaster. My mind zig-zagged through the hilly terrain of Phoenicia, the revving engines of the local bikers buzzing threateningly around me. I climbed, climbed up the steep incline of Mesnička Street in Zagreb, where I’d met Dan Ferguson that night at the gbar. I rang again at the unmarked door, slipped in unseen by passersby. I clambered up the echoing stairwell of Lennox Hill Hospital, which became Södersjukhuset, white, hygienic stairwells where I was joined at each landing by a familiar, sad figure: Ellen, the crone in the wheelchair, Sven. I climbed and I climbed. I was looking for the moth. I was looking for the freer of vassals.
But I opened my eyes and I saw Jimmy Stewart.
It was him, in the mirror, unmistakable: he had on that original costume, the tucked-in white shirt and the twill plaid tennis shorts. The yanked-up, pristine socks. His tiny racquet was leaning against his machine as he nimbly stepped on the pedals. He smiled at me. I felt a tingling sensation rising from my feet to the top of my head. I felt my foot slip a little across the pedal as I pitched slightly forward.
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