by Astor W. Heinemann
Guy was invited to a party; a birthday party. He didn't really feel like going; he simply didn't want to. He was too busy obsessing about the past and how to bring it back; composing his thoughts, fueled by alcohol and microwave dinners, in a darkened room shaded by drapes she had bought for him so they could sleep in late on the weekends and wake up to marathon love making sessions when fatigue from the night before had been upended. These days he didn't have those problems, but the drapes still provided the darkness that a broken heart, a guilty broken heart, needs when still bleeding. The friend insisted he show up; he grumpily groaned "yah, okay" without opening his mouth, barely grinding his teeth.
It was a small gathering. Younglings compared to his quasi-middle-aged, if masqueraded by his adolescent-looking, sun-starved face. He felt oddly out of place. The topics, the slang, the body language; it was all alien to him. Cop, architect, interior designer, psychologist, artist, software engineer, and who knows what else, at hand; mixed and unmatched modern society rat-racers barely springing out of the starting line. At turtle speed he eventually relaxed a bit; surely on account of that very well known old companion; this time in the form of an exotic sounding, but sweet tasting, cocktail of Korean origin which he didn't even bother ask the name of a second time. He was now a part of the crowd; pushing himself in, or being pulled in by the kids; who knows?
They ate, they laughed, they talked over one another in a meteor shower of overlapping conversations, that somehow always ended up converging, making sense, and feeling as if it was all by design; a collective stream of consciousness flowing untainted. He had a piece of a disgusting looking, but delicious tasting piece of coconut cake one of kids had baked for the birthday girl, and he loved it, and said so to the baker, smiling, and the baker smiled back at him; it was one of those moments that we all encounter many times during the day; millions of times during our lives, but never really acknowledge as the first and foremost reason why we exist as societal creatures: to connect eyes and make each other smile.
The music pumped; mostly as a mood-setting backdrop that was occasionally appropriate, sometimes acceptable, but mostly annoying. At a moment's notice a song came on to which he immediately started la-la-laing, bop-bop-bopping, air-guitaring as he had done so many times during his own youth. The pretty, lively Albanian blond who had approvingly commented on, and curiously inspected, that old man's fading tattoos; she with the immense blue eyes that you could swim a whole third of an Ironman in without complaint, and a smile that would make the devil stop dead on his tracks to take a second look, and smile an uncontainable shy smile back at her; she whips her long golden locks forward, and then backward, and yelled out "yeeeeeah, a bitch knows her jam!"
The furniture disappeared. We disappeared. She jumped out of her chair and hurried to the center of the room with an urgency that could only be described as akin to a junkie who had gone cold turkey for a whole week, and now her last fix was being held over there; the way we remember they used to hold carrots stringed to the end of a stick in front of horses to make them go faster in cartoons of our childhood. She started to twist and kick; jump and stump; wave her arms around, and Guy could swear that the whole room went dark and different colored strobe lights were being blasted at her from all directions, like a space alien mother ship hovering over her in the dead of night; all of this shrouded in magical threads of gold streaming down from her head; whipping around and reflecting the strobe flashes, and they almost hurt your eyes, but you still wouldn't look away. And Guy froze. And his jaw dropped so far, that he could taste the dirt on his shoe laces. And this girl; can this be a girl, or mythical creature? She kept going and going, whoo-ing and screaming and laughing so hard, and their eyes connected, and they smiled, and the energy seemed in infinite supply from the sound waves themselves, and she fed her moves back to the music, which kept getting stronger and louder until they were battering rams being thrown at your chest by Paul Bunyan, and the piercing shriek of a million bats zipping by your ears, but you still wanted more; you didn't even flinch. A perpetual energy device, if there ever was one. And the first song ended.
He looked around as the theater stage in his head morphed back into the cookie-cutter combo living-bedroom they were in. He rubbed his hands together and opened them up inquiringly; nobody else thought there was anything out of the ordinary happening. Everyone else carried on, and all this seemed to be normal goings-on in the group. Several more songs played the same scenario; you wouldn't believe him if he had it on tape; there was not a drop of sweat anywhere to be seen, and her clear rimmed glasses didn't move a bit. Fighting an uncontrollable impulse to tell her that those eyes should never be covered, even with the endearing match of her glasses' design to her physiognomy, he held his mouth back for fear of being taken for an old creep. They were friendly, but he wasn't part of the group.
He felt good, and as the night ended he drove back home puffing on his menthols; lights from head on cars and blinkers and traffic signals against the dark urban scenery only added to the experience, and he relived the whole thing on the road by himself, but accompanied by the memories of that dancing maniac with a penchant for sorcery of movement.
A few days later, when the birthday girl called, he inquired if the dancer was drunk, high or what the hell was going on. He was told that's how she was; plain and simple; accompanied by a brief, almost imperceptible remark that would have gone unnoticed, if not by his acutely tuned ear to his sweet birthday girl's voice, and how the tone went down half a cent in pitch as she mentioned that the dancer was always like that, even though she had broken off her own engagement just a short few days before.
The whole party might have gone down the cellars of fun, but insignificant in the grand scheme of things, memories if not for the impact this revelation had on Guy. He had an out-of-body vision of himself; months of struggling to find shred of hope to get back his long lost girl out there, living her life without him, and how he had grow that much older, and sad, and lonely as time stood still in his heart, but the blue sphere we stand on kept on spinning 'round taking along everyone on it but him. He cried; cried hard for himself. "Where is that man that used to live in there, full of hunger for experiences; the man who could do anything he set his mind to; the man who took logs and wire and made beautiful musical devices; the man who could capture souls in a still image; the man who could go to the end of the world and back with nothing but the shoes on his feet; the man who made people smile with his wit and tear up with his prose; the man who understood anything and everything; the man who could rally crowds with his spiel; the man who didn't need role model, leader or teacher; the man who could flick an apocalypse off from his shoulder, as if a speck of dust; the man who envied and needed no-one; the man with the piercing, fiery eyes and heart-melting smile; the man so many called a "genius" (the writer of this piece, who despises the term and considers it blatantly over-used and mis-used, advises all readers to abolish its existence from their minds, and notes that it is quoted here for illustrative purposes only) and could still hold his head down in a shy, humble grin ; the man; that man. That Man. THAT MAN... is this man. THIS MAN is that man; goddammit, I am he!"
Guy stood up straight, tall and proud. He threw his head back; tilted it left, then right; cracking the tension and misery off his neck. He ran out to the street and blew a kiss up at the sky, aiming it in the direction of The Maniac Dancer, and he knew she would get it; coming into her home through an open window, flying at her with wings of appreciation; she would know that it came from him, and that she would simultaneously feel a tinkle on her left cheek, and she would smile, because she was the inspiration, the spark that ignited the hell fire that brought THIS MAN back to his senses. He whispered: "Maniac, thank you."
Ende.
