Some chick is blaring through the speakers going ooooooooooooooooooooh, yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah in a sweet, nasally way. Bubby is on the dance floor moving his arms around like he’s shaking maracas in slow motion. Like he’s got both fists clenched and his elbows bent and his arms up and he moves them from one side of his body to the other, real slow, giving them a little shake at the end. The place is called Rondo’s, and it’s dark. People like to come together in here every now and then and dance real slow. Bubby says it’s the only way you’ll revive dancing in this country, is if everyone does it real slow. We’ve had enough of speed. There’s no tension in it anymore, he says. It’s not romantic, it’s just slack, and we’re stuck being dragged along. 

I think it’s sweet the way he’s dancing tonight. I’ve been standing at the ‘bar’, which is just a guy sitting on a cooler, ‘getting us a beer’ for the last 10 minutes watching him. Part of the appeal is doing the same thing over and over again for hours, very slowly. He and I are going to breakup, I know that, but that’s neither here nor there I don’t think. I don’t know if it ever is. Things move so fast we usually reach out and grab hold of anything we can, regardless of what that does to us or the things we grab onto. I’m 23, but I think that’s neither here nor there, either.

I think he’s on to something about dancing real slow. You never know how much fun it is until you stop and you realize you’ve been moving the same exact way for the last 3 or 4 hours. The trick is to do the same two or three moves all night. The people in charge of the music coordinate the playlists very precisely. They don’t throw you off. It’s a very coordinated effort. Everyone has to be committed. It’s rare like that. It ends up feeling like you’re drifting through the songs, and drifting through the night, and it’s powerful because that’s what we’re all literally doing, just drifting through our lives. It’s ironic, but I don’t think coincidental, that we experience the speed of the world as a drifting, or a floating, sensation.

Here’s a story I heard in here recently. I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything:

There was this girl who lived in the small town that sits right next to the Badlands National Park, up in South Dakota. Apparently it’s a very small town, like only a couple hundred people at most, and she works in a Badland’s themed gift shop. She’s discontent, and one day she skips out on her work shift to go into the park with a group of boys. The problem is, however, when they go out there they take acid, and after they take acid they lose the girl. They look and look and of course can’t find her, it’s the middle of the night in the Badlands, and so they go back to the campsite and shiver. It’s only one of the boys in the morning that forces the group to go to the park rangers and tell them they lost the girl, otherwise no one would have known what happened. So now it’s a little news story and there are search teams wandering around looking for her, which really should be easier than it sounds because the Badlands, aside from the rocks themselves, is rather flat. But they don’t find any trace of her on the first day. On the second day all they find is a headband of hers, a couple miles from the campsite. On the third day the authorities are beginning to get suspicious, because it really should be relatively hard to stay lost out there. All the boys are questioned again. They’re all expecting to be arrested at this point, and probably would have been if not for the fact that, on the morning of the fourth day, the girl shows up at her job like nothing happened. Oh my God, what happened, are you okay, where have you been? She just shrugs it all off. She hasn’t really been anywhere she claims. Needless to say the boys breathe the heaviest sigh of relief in their lives. But this doesn’t please the authorities too much, who demand answers proportionate to the amount of resources they’ve spent looking for her. She doesn’t spill the beans. She doesn’t explain anything. She says on the night she went out with the boys something compelled her to leave them, and so she did, and then she stayed out for a while, and that’s it. Well if they could have the authorities certainly would have charged her with something, but there was really nothing they could do beside harass her for a while and then let her go. It’s not exactly against the law to get lost, apparently. It’s only a couple months later that she tells one of her coworkers, nearly unprompted, what she was actually doing. She supposedly tells this coworker that after she wandered away from the group she sat on a hill for a while and looked at the biggest, reddest moon she’d ever seen in her life. She said it took up nearly a quarter of the sky. Then a little while later she claims she talked to a pack of coyotes, but she doesn’t mention what they talked about. All she says about it is that in Native American lore, specifically Lakota lore, the coyote is seen simultaneously as a guide and a trickster. After the coyotes she keeps wandering until eventually dawn arises and she realizes that she may have made a mistake leaving the group. However, the people out there have a distinct sense of direction (she claims) and she easily made her way to the closest interstate, where she’s quickly picked up by a passing motorist. This motorist, by chance, happens to be on his way to the Badlands, and the girl stays mum about living there, essentially, and simply agrees to tag along. Needless to say, the girl supposedly said, the man must have been some kind of weirdo, because he didn’t even enquire whether she was lost or needed to get anywhere. She’s just suddenly his partner, and before she knows it she’s coasting back into her hometown and the two of them are checking into a motel on the edge of the Badlands National Park. Now the two of them being in this motel in the town she’s missing from and that is currently on the hunt for her raises a couple questions, namely, one, how did the motel clerk not recognize her, and two, how did the man not, after a day or two, hear that there was a missing girl, and that she is probably the very same girl he was with. Well there is a simple answer and a strange answer. The simple one is that she didn’t accompany the man into the motel office. She just waited in the car, and then entered the motel room when the man came back out, never running into anyone. The strange answer to the second question is that the girl claims the man probably did know she was the missing girl, but he simply never asked about it or mentioned it. She said the TV was on the entire time, and multiple times during the morning and evening news she was mentioned, and pictures of her were even shown on the screen, but the man never said anything about it. In fact, the girl said, the man hardly spoke to her at all. She’s not entirely sure why she was with the man, or what the man might have wanted from her considering he kept so quiet. All he would do, she said, is sit at the little desk that was in the room where he’d write, and while he was writing he’d have porn playing in the background on his phone. She said at first she was completely weirded out, of course, and even a little bit concerned, she admitted, but it didn’t take long to get used to it. She said all she did was lay in the bed, watch TV, and smoke these little joints the guy would roll up every now and then, all the while listening simultaneously to porn and the TV. She said just about the only time the guy would talk to her was when he would leave in the afternoon and the evening to get something to eat and he’d ask her what she wanted. She said all he ate the entire time were those individually wrapped muffins you could get at the gas station, which anyway happened to be one of the only places you could get food in this town, supposedly. So, allegedly, she just lays around in this guys room for two days while he writes something and she listens to porn and watches the news, and then after those two days all the guy does is ask whether she wants to move on with him or stay there. Completely confused (understandably) and somewhat detached, she makes the obvious decision to stay there. And that’s it. The next morning the guy gets up (he supposedly slept on the floor those two days, and “never once” touched her), packs his little things, and leaves. After a while the girl gets up and goes home, gets dressed, and goes to work like normal.

I heard that story here in from a girl I ran into once, and we got to talking. She claimed she was the coworker who was told that story to her face, straight up out of the blue. Were they friends? I asked. No, that girl didn’t really have friends. Everyone was friendly, and she was amicable, but friends would be a stretch to describe anyone’s relationship with her. The girl in Rondo’s claimed she was simply chosen as the receiver of that story for one reason or another. Nothing interesting happened with the girl after that, as far as the girl told me, and not long after that episode anyway she came down here for school and that’s how we met at Rondo’s.

I asked her whether she did anything with that story, whether she told anyone or anything, and the girl said she didn’t, that there was no reason to tell anyone, that the matter had simply been dropped. What did she think the whole thing was about, I asked. The girl said she wasn’t sure, but that if she were to guess she has a little hunch that boredom had something to do with it, if not everything to do with it. I remember nodding in agreement. And she said it’s not just the usual boredom you (me) may be thinking about, but some other boredom, a new kind of boredom, or the new kind of boredom, that our generation is particularly afflicted with. A cosmic boredom. An existential boredom. A boredom that is imposed from without, the girl said. What do you mean, I asked, imposed from without? The girl said just look around, there is only so little we can actually do. She said the limit of possibilities is not growing, as most people might initially think, but rather constricting, and quite quickly at that. She said the world has entered a lower phase, a degeneration has occurred. She said that we are bored because something is wrong, and there is some kind of force that is trying to correct it and the affect of that is to experience, among other things, she said, a compelling boredom.

Hmm, I remember thinking. How about that? I’m not so convinced at all, really, that there is a force trying to correct anything. However, I don’t for a second believe that that necessarily negates the possibility that, nonetheless, something compels us with a boredom, among other things.

Anyway, after that we went back to dancing, and I haven’t seen that girl in here since.

And there’s Bubby, still doing his move. He’s still moving his arms from one side, giving them a little shake, and to the other side, giving them a little shake. What are we all doing? I sometimes think. Sometimes I can’t help but think this is all our fault. Sometimes when I’m in here I don’t know anything. Like right now. Right now all I know is that it’s dark outside. That is the outer extent of my knowledge. All I know is it’s dark outside, and I know that there are squat little apartment buildings surrounding this one we’re in, and that around those squat little apartment buildings are taller buildings, and around those are buildings that are even taller still. I know that the buildings keep growing higher and higher until they’re up in the sky. I know that there are people thronged throughout the streets of this city, sleeping. I know we’ve lost our grip on things, and we’re just within the timeframe where we haven’t collectively acknowledged it yet. I know we all suffer, and that being kind is all we have left. I know that the way our lives are going to end is currently unimaginable. I know I don’t dream. I know that it’s sodium that makes the streetlights orange, and that if I were to look up in between the skyscrapers I wouldn’t recognize the night sky. I know that something wafts through the air of this city. I know that Bubby goes somewhere when we’re here, and that I do too, and I know that we’re all just looking for somewhere to go, and that for all of us it’s basically the same place.

Alexander Weidman is 26 years old, lives in West Virginia, and works at a cooperative.