2003-04-01 - 11:03 p.m. - excerpt

The Ballroom opens up at the end of the hallway. I mean, it fucking opens. It is like being birthed. You are in this narrow hallway, black and lined with flecks of silver from where the moon sneaks through the cracks in the window boards, and then all of a sudden you are in this giant room bathed in light like midnight, a chandelier dripping down from the ceiling, and walking on a mosaic that is too large, in this darkness, to entirely make out. This room is a castle. No, this room is a fucking palace. But no, still, this room is the motherfucking ocean floor and we are the first to walk it since the water came and drowned it down beneath too many miles to hold breath through. Everytime I first enter the ballroom my spine tingles, just a little bit, a soft shiver like electricity, not like the child who sticks a screw driver into the electrical socket, but like the man who shakes hands with a joy buzzer. And, ah, this room. Directly to my right, and also to my left there are windows that reach from two feet off of the floor straight up into the sky, to about two feet from the ceiling. And the ceiling, my god the ceiling is so high, arched and painted in a scene of a sunset, or is it a sunrise, we could never figure it out, but it is totally northwestern Ohio's answer to the Cistine Chapel. And then there is that giant crystal teardrop hanging down, suspended and lazy dangling in the middle of the room. And beneath our feet tiles of different color and shapes. To think each one was laid by hand, but not just by hand, by the imagination and the heart.

"Everytime we come up here I feel bad about walking on this floor." I whisper, not wanting to disturb the ghosts that are always, inevitably, by the laws of fiction and black and white movies, sleeping in places exactly like this.

"But it was made to be walked on, love." Ellie speaks like a movie star.

"No, it was made to be danced on."

"Then shall we dance?"

"But without song?"

"Song, shmong. Dancing is in our bodies, not in songs, shmongs."

"Then, my dear, may I have this dance."

I place my right hand on Ellie's waist, my left in her hand so that our arms are raised slightly in an 'L.' Her left hand is on my waist. And we dance.

"Ellie, we are dancing."

"Joel, you talk too much."

"Ellie, I have never danced like this before in my life, never slow danced with a girl or anyone. How am I doing this."

"I don't know."

"Are you leading?"

"I have never danced a slow dance in the arms of another either, darling." She pronounces darling more like dah-ling, still the movie star.

"How is this happening?"

"Shush, my love. Do not ask questions that the night will refuse you the answers to."

And in silence we are dancing. There is no ground beneath us, I swear. We are floating on some sort of dust, some sort of cloud has sunken down from the sky to beneath our feet and it is lifting us up. We are magicians assistants, tight rope walkers, and children making snow angels. I am lost in this miracle. As we dance, Ellie begins to sink closer toward me, her body melting, her lips moistening, she becomes the convex to my concave form. I am sunk and she is sinking in to me. The space between our bodies is slowly shrinking and there is no chaperone to stick a ruler between us, there is no DJ to play a fast song. And when our bodies touch I swear that I can hear music. It is drifting down from the ceiling, something soft and I guess it is written, or maybe arranged by Duke Ellington. It has that touch of piano that he is famous for, that muted loveliness that made his ballads bigger than jazz music. I can distinctly hear the double bass strings vibrating, the muted trumpets holding notes, striking them hard, then backing down to a whisper and building back up, and a tenor saxophone is bleeding a solo all over our skin. Saxophones make the sweetest blood. Ellie is humming along now. She can hear it to.

I think that we must have awakened some ghosts up in the rafters. I know that these ghosts, these memories, are looking down at us and weeping and as they unravel this song from the very fabric of their forms. It is odd that we see ghosts as memory, as people who represent a specific moment in time that was too much or not enough and needed resolving. But now we are the memories for the ghosts. And they look down at us and remember all of the dances they danced to this very song, with the very lovers who they later would lay in bed with. And I know that they must be jealous of these two forms slowly melting into one. This is something they knew. This is something that was real for them. This is, perhaps, one of the only things that is truly real anymore. Outside is all of the gray and the bass and the busy people, the drunken staggerings, the frozen words caught in throats, the all too lucid vocabulary of the disgruntled customer, the impatient driver; all of these things are the real world, but not a single one of them feels as real as here, inside, as Ellie and I melt, the molecules of our skin unraveling in red threads and fusing back together, bonding us by skin, two sets of bones wrapped together in fleshy bandages. Our clothes grow into us, through us, and disappear behind us.

The ghosts are watching still. They are not voyeurs. They are children watching their grandfather tell stories, listening to the way his voice rises and falls, the way he trails off when he isn't sure that he wants to remember anymore. They are watching something pure and real. Maybe the last real thing left in the world. And it makes no sense to me. I promised myself I would not do this. I would never do this. This is not something I do. I love her so much. I am in love with her. I am weak. I am a fistful of rotting fruit. I am a wall made of wet sand. And still I melt. I need to do this. This needs to happen. Outside the hotel the sound of our breath is echoed by two dogs running, stopping, panting, and running again. A banner strung between stop lights announcing the approaching summer festival mirrors our body in the start and stop of the wind, gentle sways, whispering bold red letters: "27th Annual Summer Celebration," violent whipping that tangles the banner around its wire, beats it against the glowing green eye that says go. Oh, you lucky ghosts. This is real. You know that this is the last real thing that anyone will ever know. And here, we are giving it to you. Don't think this is for you. This for us. I think. I have never done this before but somehow I am an artist and a craftsmen. Ellie is the same. I do not know if she has done this before. But she is deft and fluid. We are the only living experts in a new language. Is it you? Is this for you, my ghosts? Are you this strength, this beauty, this expertise? Are you filling our veins with your own knowledge, your truths, your experience so that we may better realize this moment, that you might better watch your own most vital moments, your own final bits of truth and reality projected on the mosaic floor of this old ballroom as if it were a projection screen and we were but images, light shining through thin strips of dreams in the form of celluloid. You are the auteurs. We are your players. Move us. Bend us. We are here at your will. You move us. We move us.

After I come. After we both come. We breathe. And between our breaths we can hear the ghosts breathing. Their breaths are slow and calm, floating above the staccato sighs, the rhythmic cadences of our breath. At this moment I can feel everything. I can feel a draft, a warm summer draft sweet with the scent of night, penetrate the humidity that clings to our bodies. I can feel the beating of Ellie's heart inside my own wrists, teeth, and eyes, racing with my pulse. I can feel the sweat slowly dripping from her pores, not her sweat against my skin, but I can actually feel the what the pore feels, feel what the sweat feels. I can feel tears of joy rolling down the faces of ghosts, down their quiet forms and down toward the ground, disappearing before touching anything besides oxygen. I can feel the friction generate by the rubbing legs of crickets, the afternoon's heat rising from the street outside, the thin sliver of moonlight peaking through the window and crawling across my thigh, reaching up toward Ellie's stomach, painting silver the spot where I lay. The spot where we lay. I reach out to touch her face but I stop. I am afraid that she might dissolve into the night if I do. I am afraid that either this is some sort of psychotic hallucination or that this meeting of bodies has somehow rearranged the fabric of what is real, and that maybe neither of us exist in the same way that we did when we entered this abandoned and worn down, but oh so beautiful hotel. I focus my eyes on the soft fuzz that highlights her face. In a moment I know that the moon's light will drip itself onto each tiny hair and it will glow. I want to count every hair on her face. I want to count every hair on her body.

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