Dancing is a way we forget. Breathless loops, swirling baubles, music pulling memories from who knows where and making new ones as we move. We danced together, and that was a cementing moment. You who may be my best friend, my lonely partner, my father, my mother, my siblings in spirit, strangers in the dark. Smiles between us electrify, zap into a freeze frame as our eyes meet and time simply isn’t there.
Oh, I have danced. It was mostly prowling men standing on the sidelines in those beer-smelling discos of decades past, colored laser lines slicing through the dark illuminating intense, predatory eyes in flashing of strobes. Still, it was joy and for a moment I ruled. It did not matter about the other, there only like the music and lights, another object of artifice.
And then there was the dancing in the dark, in the jungles of distant muddy roads and unfamiliar camps. I was in Nigeria and the air was thick with the scent of decay and the buzzing of bugs. We found a clearing against dense trees and vines, a rare thing in those forests. Hefty bats darted and disappeared. I was told to watch out for Cobras slithering under the growth where I placed my mat for the night. But it was too hot to sleep, too early to close out my thoughts, too unfamiliar in every way to keep my curiosity at bay. I did not know where we were, somewhere near Jos or Bukuru but what did that mean? And in the rustle between bats and large, hungry bugs and what animals I could not even guess, I heard it. A strange pounding, a beat that was manmade, drums perhaps. The beat was intense, incessant, fast. An occasional rise in human wailing.
I was fighting off parasites in my digestive track and headaches from a day of bobbing on bad roads in the back of a WWII army transport truck that had become my transportation to this place, this great ride into Conrad country. Still, the beats pulled on me as a thread tugging me harder and harder through the growth on a sort of dirt path beneath the tangles I could almost make out with my flashlight. And the beats were growing louder.
A clearing, an angry fire in a pit revealing shadows in the night, people jumping, kicking, gesturing in a circle dance. The sweat only added to the palpable air and the musty scents. Nearby, two men beat logs in time with each other as if one, not two, with all that was writhing and rising. And I, in shorts and sneakers, not torn and faded cloth and bare feet, joined the circle.
The beats went on, growing more fervent. Others added to the circle, villagers from this hidden jungle place moving in and out in a pattern that would not be broken. Others, sat in the dirt and watched. And for a long time, I did not remember my discomfort but fell into the rhythms as if only the drums existed.
When it was over for me, when I could not go on, I left the circle to sit down and watch. The village chief, an older man thin with wear and dressed in an ill-fitting brown, tattered sports jacket on this beastly hot night, offered me a chair – the village’s only chair — a throne on which he would otherwise be sitting and watching. It was a chair that you might find with a kitchen table in a mid-American house in the 1950s, its brown Naugahyde seat cover fraying against the metal frame. I had nothing to give back but could only sit there staring as he was at me, at him, and smiling. The dust swirled in the night, blunting the brightness of the fire.
It must have been midnight. I did not have a watch. I left the clearing the way I had come, silently, curiously, wondering if I would find my way back to my camp and mat in the thickness of that dark night. And the beat of the log drums continued through the night, strengthening my return to wherever my home was to be on that path and then sending me into dreams of elsewhere.