Page 330 - Some Dance to Remember

300 Jack Fritscher

Maybe this is one of the few honest-to-god human things I
can do for him, something no one else has done: simply be, be
there, be present, when these moments knock him flat. There’s
no denying them. People flicker through life’s flashes all the time
refusing to acknowledge the darkness between the frames of
intense light. The darkness, too, is intense. Sometimes people
make it to midlife without saying, “Okay, this is what is.” They
think they’re never going to have to face some pretty unpretty
stuff, and then, when they least expect it, some evening after
supper when they’re carrying out the garbage, between the third
and second step from the bottom, the full dark Nameless Dread
of what they’ve so long refused to admit existed hits them. They
break down. They go to pieces. The light that shone so brightly
while they were very, very, very young begins to dim as the clock
ticks the dimmer down, and even the most golden see how ulti-
mate is the darkness.

“Somehow,” Kick said, “so many guys think I’m responsible for their
happiness.”
Ryan knew he meant Logan, but the guilty flee when no one pursues.
“I’m responsible for my own happiness. We’re all responsible for our own
happiness.”
“Exactly,” Kick said. “No one needs the burden of keeping someone
else happy.” He meant even more than Logan; he meant half of Castro. He
was a popular man. Guys imitated his Look. They tried to dress like him,
to walk like him, to workout like him. They cut their hair like him. They
wanted to be him. Ryan recognized the adulation other men gave Kick.
He himself, at least every other day, wanted to be, if not Kick, then like
Kick. All their time together had made Ryan’s starving want a hunger, an
endless, aching need; but he kept it under control. “And all this gossip,”
Kick said, “that I may be from another planet.”
“How California!”
“I can’t believe guys are walking around thinking that may be true.”
“Where could they have gotten that?” Ryan feigned Ah-do-declare
innocence. “Those clever Castronauts will believe anything.”
“They better get over it,” Kick said.
Ryan looked hard at Kick, the way Star Children dropped down from
some other galaxy might almost recognize in each other the echoes of their
disremembered home star.

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