“In the room,” she said, “I do my dance.”
I froze. It was the same thing my father had said all those years ago, and my heart started pounding at the words.
But we had arrived at the school parking lot and there was no time to discuss what she had told me. I was not even sure I wanted to discuss it. I was a little bit afraid of her now and was grateful when we got out of the car and I saw my friend Devon getting out of Sheri Stillman’s Accord. Holding Liz’s hand, I hurried over to say hi, and all four of us walked into the gym together.
Standing next to Devon, I watched Liz as she and Sharon went to get us punch.
“In the room, I do my dance.”
There was something different in the way she walked, that same self-possession I’d noticed earlier, and I could not help feeling that the Liz Nguyen here tonight was not the same one who had invited me to the dance two weeks ago.
We drank punch, we mingled, but eventually I knew we were going to have to go out onto the floor, and when the DJ put on one of the songs we had practiced to, Liz took my hand and led me into the fray.
She danced differently than she had in her room, and I could not keep up. I thought she might tone it down a little to stay at my level, but she didn’t, and after two songs I backed off and went over to the drinks table, leaving her to dance alone. She was the only one not paired up with a date, and as I watched from afar, I saw that there was something unhinged about her movements, something crazy. I was not the only one to notice it. Others did, too, and gradually the dance floor cleared as students grew uncomfortable around her and moved away.
The thought of being alone with her in the car on the way home gave me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I asked Devon if he and Sheri could give me a ride and drop me off at home before they went wherever they were going to go to park.
“Shouldn’t you tell Liz?” Devon asked, nodding toward where she was twirling in the center of the gym.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
Liz was not at school on Monday, and when I called her house that night to find out if she was sick, I got her mom on the phone, who burst into tears at the mention of her name and hung up on me.
She never came back to school, though her name continued to be called at roll in the Social Studies class we had together, and no one I knew ever saw her again.
I graduated from college with a degree in English. I wanted to be a writer, but knew I had to have a day job to fall back on, and I obtained a teaching job at a charter school in Anaheim Hills. The teaching went better than the writing, and by my second summer as an instructor I had given up even pretending to write the novel that I’d told everyone I was working on. I spent my two-and-a-half months off going to movies, going to the beach, hanging out with friends. I spent the Fourth of July weekend with my mom and sister.
In late August, I was at a school supply store, looking for some new posters to hang on my classroom bulletin boards during the coming year, when I saw through the front window a woman in the parking lot outside waving at someone inside the store. I didn’t recognize her and assumed she was waving at someone else, but when I bought my posters and walked outside, heading across the lot toward my car, the woman approached me. She was nondescript, in her late forties or early fifties, dressed plainly in brown, but there was an expression of purpose on her face that made me quicken my step. I didn’t know if she was going to harangue me about some cause or ask me for money, but I could tell that she wanted to talk to me, and my goal was to get in the car before she reached me.
I didn’t make it.
Our paths intersected some five feet from my trunk, and she stopped and stood there, facing me. “Can I help you?” I asked.
“In the room,” she said softly, “you can write your story.”
Her words chilled me to the bone.
In the room...
“What are you talking about?” I said, trying to sound bolder than I felt. There were goosebumps on my arms.
She grabbed my hand, turned it palm up, and before I could pull it away, she was writing on it with a black marker that I had not noticed she was holding. She was finished in seconds and immediately started walking away.
“Hey!” I called, but she didn’t turn around, and I didn’t really want her to.
I looked down at my palm, turning it around so I could see what she’d written. As I’d feared, as I’d somehow known, it was an address.
In the room...
How had she known I wanted to be a writer? Was “the room” she mentioned related to the one my dad had told me about? There were too many questions and none of them had answers.
The address on my hand was not nearby. I lived in Anaheim, and the street whose name she’d written down was somewhere in Los Angeles. I’d heard it mentioned on newscasts—probably in connection with crimes of some sort. I knew I was going to go there and check it out, and rather than go back home and think things over and try to come to a logical decision, I decided to just head straight there. I filled up with gas at a nearby Arco station, plugged in my GPS and got on the Santa Ana Freeway, heading west.
The address turned out to be downtown, amidst the high rise buildings in the center of the city. I’d had no idea what to expect and on the way over had imagined everything from a warehouse to a mansion to a fleabag hotel. But it was one of those original Los Angeles high rises, a concrete office building with identical rows of small windows, the kind that was often shown in black-and-white movies from the 1940s. It was smaller than the steel-and-glass monstrosities flanking it, but it was still a tall building, and though it was old, it was still in use, and I saw people walking in and out of the glass front doors as I passed by.
It took me a couple of tours around several blocks and down several confusing one-way streets before I finally found a parking spot in front of a closed Italian restaurant. I had no quarters for the meter, but it was one of those new devices that took credit cards, so I charged an hour’s worth of time and walked back down a side street to the building.
At the gas station, I’d copied the information off my hand onto the front of an Auto Club map of California that I kept in the glove compartment, just in case the ink sweated off my palm as I drove. But the information was still visible on my skin, and I walked inside the building s lobby, then looked at the room number: 511. Fifth floor, I assumed, and I headed over to the bank of elevators and took the first one up.
The fifth floor corridor was empty, but I heard music coming from down the hall, and I followed the sound. Sure enough, it was coming from behind the last door on the floor, a wooden door with peeling paint that looked as though it belonged in a tenement apartment building. At eye level three metal numerals had been nailed to the wood: 511.
There was no bell, so I knocked, and when no one responded, I knocked again. I heard other noises in addition to the music, noises I could not identify, but no one opened the door, so I reached out, tried the knob and turned it.
The room before me was dim, if not dark, and there were no windows or lights that I could see. Much larger than I expected, it was crowded and busy, filled with people. One of them was a man in a smock painting an abstract picture on a gigantic canvas. One of them was a woman playing a piano.
One of them was my dad.
And he was dancing.
I stood there, just inside the doorway, rooted in place. He had not changed one iota in all the years that had passed. His hair was the same, there were no lines on his face, he even appeared to be wearing the same clothes. Leaping into the air and twisting around, he saw me.
“I knew you would come!” he shouted, and there was joy in his voice.
It frightened me to see him. Not only because he had not aged, but because of the way he danced, the movements themselves. There was a reckless abandon in his flailing arms and legs, a chaotic freedom that I had never associated with my father. Only it was more than that. The movements were wrong. He danced in a manner that p
eople were not supposed to dance, a spontaneous and horrifying choreography that should not have existed and that frightened me to the core of my being.
Liz Nguyen was there, too, I saw now, and she, too, was performing a terrifying routine that went against nature and everything I believed in. My reaction made no sense—it was only a dance, after all—but it was what I felt and it was true. This was an extreme extension of what she’d been doing the last time I saw her, when she cleared the gym floor of all other students. It was a profane and hateful dance she was performing, and though she was smiling, there was something terrible in that smile. Like my father, she had not aged, and she was the same 17-year-old I had left at the Sadie Hawkins Dance nearly a decade ago.
I waited for my dad to say something else to me. We hadn’t seen each other since I was ten, and surely he wanted to apologize or tell me how much he missed me and loved me or...something.
But he did not.
He continued with his horrible endless dance, and he was no longer even looking in my direction.
How long had he been doing this? Decades? When he spoke those final words to me—
In the room, I do my dance
—he sounded as though he had danced here before. But how often and for how long? And what about since he’d left us? He hadn’t aged at all. Was this all he did? Did he ever stop? Did he ever have to sleep? Did he even eat?
He was still dancing, and the sight was maddening, infuriating. I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to acknowledge my presence. I wanted him to hug me or shake my hand or at least stop dancing.
But he would not, and I wished he would trip and fall and have to stop. Or, better still, have a heart attack and collapse to the floor, clutching his chest.
I wanted him dead.
Liz Nguyen was still doing her own dance, and the other individuals in the room were painting their pictures or playing their music or making their speeches or doing whatever it was that they did.
The nondescript woman who’d written the address on my palm was next to me, though I didn’t know where she’d come from. “In the room,” she whispered, “you can kill your father.”
My dad continued to dance. He hadn’t said a word to me since that initial greeting, and I hated him for it. I noticed for the first time that there was what looked like a lance leaning against the wall to my right.
In the room, you can kill your father.
I didn’t plan on killing him. I just wanted to get his attention. I just wanted him to stop. But when I picked up the lance, intending only to trip him and put an end to that exasperating dance, I swung it hard, like a baseball bat, at his legs. Seconds before, my goal had been merely to get him to halt, but now I wanted to break his legs, and I thrilled to the satisfying impact that jolted my arms as I brought him down. He fell, sprawling on the dirty wooden floor, and before he could get up again, I lifted the lance high and smashed it into his legs as hard as I could. I did it again and again, and then I moved up to his arms and then his head and then he was dead.
No one noticed, no one cared. The painter kept painting, Liz kept dancing, everyone continued doing what they were doing as though nothing had happened.
Sweating, breathing hard, I dropped the lance on the floor.
The woman from the parking lot was still standing next to me. She pointed toward a desk against the far wall, barely visible in the gloom. “In the room, you can write your story,” she repeated.
I ran away. My arms hurt, my chest hurt, my overtaxed lungs could barely suck in enough air to keep me from passing out, but I made it down the hall to the elevators, and I took the first one down and staggered onto the street. Bending over, grabbing my knees, I breathed deeply, trying to calm down. I didn’t want to think about what had happened, what I had done, and as quickly as I could, I started down the street and then the side street, to my car.
Back in Orange County, I drove directly to my sister’s house, hoping this was her day off, hoping she was home. She was. I had regained my composure on the drive over, and the car’s air-conditioning had stopping my sweating, but I was still confused and in turmoil, and Clara sensed that when she saw me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked instantly. “What happened?”
“Dad,” I said. “I saw Dad.”
“You saw him?” Clara grabbed my shoulders. “Where was it? What did he look like? Did you ask him why he left? Why he never even called or sent us a card?”
I didn’t know what to tell her, didn’t know what to say. “Did you talk to him? What was he doing?”
I took a deep breath.
“In the room,” I said, “he did his dance.”
(He went with her to every appointment. Never missed. Diagnosis. Surgery. Chemo. Radiation. When the oncologist gave her the great news—“We’re calling this a complete success, Ruth”—they were off to London for two weeks. Couldn’t really afford it but what the hell.)
“YOU SMOKING AGAIN?”
“Yeah.” Ralph’s sly smile. “You afraid these’ll give me cancer?”
“You mind rolling down the window then?”
“I bought a pack today. It felt good. I’ve been wanting a cigarette for twenty-six years. That’s how long ago I gave them up. I was still walking a beat back then. I figure what the hell, you know. I mean the way things are. I’ve been debating this a long time. I don’t know why I picked today to start again. I just did.” He rolled the window down. The soft summer night came in like a sweet angel of mercy.
“I’ve smoked four of them but this is the only one I’ve really enjoyed.”
“Why this one?”
“Because I got to see your face.”
“The Catholic thing?”
“That’s right, kid. The Catholic thing. They’ve got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up.”
“You’re pretty eloquent for an ex-cop. That enema remark. And also, by the way, whenever you call me ‘kid’ people look at you funny. I mean I’m sixty-six and you’re sixty-eight.”
Ralph always portrayed himself as a swashbuckler; the day he left the force he did so with seventeen citizen complaints on his record.
He took a long, deep drag on his Winston. “We’re upping the ante tonight, Tom. That’s why I’m a little prickish. I know you hate being called ‘kid.’ It’s just nerves.”
I was surprised he admitted something like that. He enjoyed playing fearless.
“That waitress didn’t have it coming, Ralph.”
“How many times you gonna bring that up? And for the record, I did ask for a cheeseburger if you’ll remember and I did leave her a frigging ten-dollar tip after I apologized to her twice. See how uptight you are?”
“She probably makes six bucks an hour and has a kid at home.”
“You’re just a little bit nervous the way I am. That’s why you’re runnin’ your mouth so hard.”
He was probably right. “So we’re really going to do it, huh?”
“Yeah, Tom, were really going to do it.”
“What time is it?”
I checked my Timex, the one I got when I retired from teaching high school for twenty-six years. English and creative writing. The other gift I got was not being assaulted by any of my students. A couple of my friends on the staff had been beaten, one of them still limping years after. “Nine minutes later than when you asked me last time.”
“By rights I should go back of that tree over there and take a piss. In fact I think I will.”
“That’s just when he’ll pull in.”
“The hell with it. I wouldn’t be any good with a full bladder.”
“You won’t be any good if he sees us.”
“He’ll be so drunk he won’t notice.” The grin made him thirty. “You worry too much.”
The moon told it’s usual lies. Made this ugly two-story flat-roofed cube of a house if not beautiful
at least tolerable to the quick and forgiving eye. The steep sagging stairs running at a forty-five degree angle up the side of the place was all that interested me. That and the isolation here on the edge of town. A farmhouse at one time, a tumbledown barn behind it, the farmland back to seed, no one here except our couple living in the upstairs. Ken and Callie Neely. Ken being the one we were after.
We were parked behind a stretch of oaks. Easy to watch him pull in and start up those stairs. I kept the radio low. Springsteen.
When Ralph got back in I handed him my pocket-sized hand sanitizer.
“You shoulda been a den mother.”
“You take a piss, you wash your hands.”
“Yes, Mom.”
And then we heard him. He drove his sleek red Chevy pickup truck so fast he sounded as if he was going to shoot right on by. I wondered what the night birds silver-limned in the broken moonlight of the trees made of the country-western song bellering from the truck. A breeze swooped in the open windows of my Volvo and brought the scents of long-dead summers. An image of a seventeen-year-old girl pulling her T-shirt over her head and the immortal perfection of her pink-tipped breasts.
“You know what this is going to make us, don’t you? I mean after we’ve done it.”
“Yeah, I do, Tom. It’s gonna make us happy. That’s what it’s gonna make us. Now let’s go get him.”
(Six month check-up three years later. Nurse calls and says Doctor would like her to come in and talk about the results. “Stage Four.” She handles it better than he does. He secretly starts seeing a psychologist. Needs to be strong for her. But the terror is overwhelming him. Help me.)
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