Page 413 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 383

He felt the grief surge up from his belly. His sorrow was a mix of loss:
his father and Kick; the only difference between them was that Kick was
unfinished business. He crushed his napkin, meant for syrup, not tears,
to a paper ball in his hand. He feared any more public sorrow in a City
grown so sad with plague. Three years is too long not to see a father loved
so much, especially when those long years are suddenly realized as the
beginning of forever.
Not only do people die, you don’t know where they go or how they
are. Yet some nights, their presences linger. As much as he could touch
Kick in the dark of his lonely bed, he often felt overlain by his father’s
remembered feel, as if neither of them were really gone. More often than
he liked, his father hovered over him those dark nights, just as Ryan had
hovered for years over his father’s hospital bed, touching the man’s fore-
head, afraid to touch his own father’s hands, grown so soft with sickness,
for fear that a loving touch might be felt by the dying man as a pressure
as intense as pain.
He missed his father desperately. He promised: Wherever you are, as I
promised you so often before, I’ll take care of them, meaning his mother and
sister, apologizing for not having taken better care of Thom for whom he
had not cared enough.
One question chewed at his guts.
Who, if not Kick, will take care of me?
None of this is real. The alarm will ring. Everyone will wake up. The bad
dreams will be over. My father will be alive. Kick will return. The plague will
go away. We’ll sit down to toast and coffee. We’ll use our napkins properly,
not for tears, but for syrup and cakes.
But the alarm is ringing, can’t be shut off, won’t be shut off. Everyone’s
lying alone in their beds staring at their ceilings, missing all the sweetnesses
past, fearful of the dead star-vader terrors to come, terrified of traveling alone
to some eternal multiple-choice place, better or worse, up or down, wherever
it is, or is not.
He was a dedicated moviegoer whom Kick had kept away from films.
He made up for lost time. He haunted the sleazy grind houses on Mar-
ket Street, especially the corroding Strand Theater between 7th and 8th.
Blacks smoked. Mexicans sat singly in blue watch caps. Unstoppable cock-
suckers roamed the balconies. His feet stuck to the floor. He saw the world
in mean montage on the wide screen. The violent intensity of film was for
him not an escape. He forked out no admission to escape reality. He paid
to intensify reality in images so big and bright even the blind could see.
In that one month, a sudden late-winter revival of art movies and

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