Ghost Dance by Carole Maso Read Free Book Online Page A

through linen, through fields of her silks, I recognized him immediately. I could not possibly have missed him; he was the man I had been looking for so long—an enormous man, a man so large he might blot out the sun with his body, a man whose great hands might wring the world of its oceans of salty tears. Did he recognize me, too, as the person he had loved long and hard in a silent, private part of his brain? I think he did, right from the start—that was the brutal handsomeness in his face as he got closer. He knew it all: that our love was doomed and that it had been doomed from the minute we had begun to imagine each other, long ago. He stepped forward anyway and tried to forgive in advance everything he knew would happen, just as I tried, too, as he came nearer.
    He sweats as he comes toward me as if it is through great fire that he walks. Still, he does not rush, he savors each slow step, and with each step I feel a rumbling in my body, a disorder. What is this disturbance, this uneasiness, not altogether unpleasurable, this feeling that there is now here to go, no way out? What is this surrender? He stands in front of me, not knowing either, just staring at me. Beads of sweat collect on his forehead; he wipes them away with a handkerchief.
    “This mildness will kill us,” he says, shaking his head, looking into the distance. He stares at a spot far off. “This haze we are forced to see everything through.” His eves return to me. He focuses in like a camera and holds me frozen in his words, his voice. I shiver.
    “I have seen you here many times,” he says. “I have watched you here day after day. I have spent hours and hours on trains imagining you, your life.”
    “I have never seen you before,” I say, “I would have remembered.”
    “No,” he says quietly, then laughs. “You could not have seen me.” He laughs again. “I often imagine you are waiting for someone who will never return.”
    “That’s not true,” I say.
    “I have seen you look through this station, lost in the past, no hand in the present or future. I know that look by heart. You could not have seen me through such eyes.”
    “I suppose you’re right.”
    “You are waiting here for someone, for something. Am I wrong?”
    I just look at him. His hands are the size of human heads. His thighs are the bodies of sleeping children.
    “You never get on a train. You never rush, you move in slow motion, stand under the clock, move toward that ticket gate over there sometimes, then come back. I have invented many lives for you, made up many stories. But most of the endings are sad.”
    “It doesn’t surprise me,” I say.
    “Yeah,” he says, “but what you don’t know, is that you can change the ending. Close up you are even more beautiful than I had imagined you would be.”
    I blush. I can feel his enormous body lowering onto mine, crushing me. His body could block out the sun. With his voice alone he could break apart people’s thoughts, stop the flow of memory. He could turn the whole world dark.
    “This mildness will kill us,” he says. “November,” he says, shaking his head. He lights a cigarette. The smoke does not rise. “Someone has broken your heart.”
    “It’s a long story,” I sigh.
    “No,” he says. The word is meant to punctuate, to put a full stop to my story. “I don’t mean for you to tell me.” He puts one finger to my lips. “Never tell me,” he says, pressing his finger harder to my mouth.
    With his first touch I begin my descent into a deep, deep valley I half hope I w ill not be able to rise from.
    “You are one of the saddest people I have ever seen.” His voice seems to waver. It has been so long since I have talked to another human being.
    He speaks slowly, gently, knowing to be careful. “You are blurry with sadness,” he whispers, “so passive. This face.” He touches my cheek, moves slowly to my mouth where he lingers, then my chin. Softly: “Your features are lost in sorrow.