Page 440 - Some Dance to Remember

410 Jack Fritscher

a diver, lifting up from his toes, flipping up to a backwards swan dive,
through the fine red spray of blood.
He turned the gun to his own temple, but a bodybuilder standing
next to him grappled the gun from his hand. The revolver shot off into
thin air.

9

None of it worked. He shot Kick alright, but he only wounded him.
The brilliant bodybuilder had turned full into the light. The bullet pierced
his flesh and lodged in his spine and crippled him from the neck for the
rest of his life.
In the instant between Ryan’s first shot and his surprise and grief at
watching his lover explode in slow-motion Zapruder crumble, something
in Ryan flamed hotter than an arc lamp burning through a single celluloid
frame caught in a 35-millimeter projector. The dark flicker between frames
stopped for the first time in his life. He saw only the frozen single-frame
moment with the traveling light burning out the melting Technicolor
frame from its center to its edges.
In that pause, muscular hands from the judges’ table and from the
front row of the audience wrestled him to the floor. A crush of bodybuild-
ers fell across him, smothering him. He felt nothing. He saw nothing. The
shots had deafened him. The burning traveling light blinded him.
They took him away. They gave him shock treatments and ice baths
and shot him full of Thorazine. For years, he sat, motionless, speechless,
staring, wrapped in white sheets, a catatonic patient on the deck of a
hospital ship.
He himself had died that night. His soul had left his body, driven
by the logic of his passion. So he sat, for weeks, months, years, frozen,
immobile, feeling nothing, dependent, as he always imagined he would
be, on the blanched kindness of strangers.

10

What is the human heart if not a thing of ambiguity? The truth was
Kick was a lover who wouldn’t die. Good lovers die young. Bad lovers live
forever. That’s a fact of life. Kick could not be murdered. Kick could not
be shot. At least not by Ryan. Kick had rendered him incapable of even
that last act of the incapable: murder.
Ryan had gone to California Hall that night. The gun had been in his

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