weekend, his physical surroundings had dissolved from his mind, and he couldn’t perceive distinctly what was in front of him or where he was. Internally, he was transformed to the same great degree as a nonbeliever, who undergoes a past-shattering, instantaneous religious conversion and becomes a completely different person from who he or she was before. Although there wasn’t much religion in the visionary existence that Bill had entered, unless one counts adoration of Donna as a religious act, he traveled back to his apartment, like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, absorbed in a trance, because of the awesome revelation he had had. He didn’t know what time it was, who he was, or what he was doing. The past, the present, the future, their demands on him, their ties to him vanished from his consciousness. There were only two exceptions to his absolute mental emptiness: Donna and the planned outing with Donna in a week’s time. Those two items alone stuck in his head, thoroughly resistant to removal. They filled out his meditations completely. He had become separated from every other person, object, activity, or thought. All sense of their relevance was lost to him, as if he had been suddenly struck dumb with amnesia or lobotomized. If he touched objects, like the steering wheel of his car, he was not aware of them. The sole meaning, purpose, and exercise of his life had become a spiritual and physical union with Donna, even if she was still an inactive participant and unaware of what she should be doing. Those were minor issues to be addressed whenever. He knew that he had found his telos, a word used by the ancient Greeks to describe a person’s ultimate goal in life. And not only had he discovered the goal toward which he had been striving for from birth, he had nearly reached his manifest destination, or so he believed.
Consequently, although he didn’t express his feelings in this way, he felt himself to be in a state of harmony with his true God-given identify and—by the natural extension which exists among all living things—with the very cosmos itself. In such a state of bliss, which, by the way, he had entered before after meeting other women for the first time, it was perfectly normal that he wanted to swing dance.
Going to the console cabinet on which his TV sat, he opened up the cabinet’s front door. Inside was a turntable, a relic from his teenage years that still functioned. It produced a sound that seemed warmer and richer than devices that played digital recordings, but that was not the reason why he still had it. He couldn’t see the need to buy something new, unless something broke and couldn’t be repaired inexpensively. After pressing the “on” switch, he put on his favorite record of big-band swing tunes. There was a scratchy pause—a poor herald of what was to come—as the needle approached the first song. Suddenly, the snappy sounds of swing rhythms and melodies stirred the air, filling his apartment. The glorious music from another era lived again. Bill was in his spiritual element.
The record contained songs like “In The Mood” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”—happy music, music that gets under a person’s skin and speeds up the circulation. It was music made for dancing, composed at a time when dancing was more than people shaking themselves in place, like disjointed puppets. When people hear this music, as Bill heard it, their hearts start to pump a little quicker and a little stronger. Their feet begin to tap along with the beat, and in hardly any time at all, people want to be up and dancing, just like Bill was doing now in his apartment.
At first, his steps and moves were light and easy, because he was floating among the clouds, like an amorous bird born up on air, which mostly glides through space. He was also being careful about his back. There was still some tightness and mild inflammation around his lower spine, which he couldn’t forget, despite the height of his ecstatic raptures. But as the music played on, the pulsing syncopations drew him out, loosening him up, making him forget his physical limitations, and he really began to swing. He was stretching and spinning and fast stepping.
In his imagination, he believed he was with Donna, swing dancing in the grand ballroom of a handsome, old hotel before a live band. Other couples were dancing around them, twisting and