TANGO ME TO DEATH

Και εάν έχω προφητείαν και ειδώ τα μυστήρια πάντα

ώστε όρη μεθιστάνειν, αγάπην δε μη έχω

ουδέν είμι.

The box is in front of me. It is tall and bulky. On one of the sides, there is a sticker promising the same advertising that has led me to the purchase: “Its grip is relentless. You will not escape the rhythm”.

I get the box cutter from the toolkit. I know there is a laser one somewhere in the house which would make the task easier (Ryūji had made sure of it), but also in this I am old-fashioned. Ryūji had been the one up with the times. Me…? I will always be technologically challenged and there is no way around it. He used to say that it was a big part of my charm and I loved him more for it.

It is consequently not to wonder that this particular buy has been such a stretch for me. To be honest, it took me two and a half months to make my mind up. Still, the more I read about it, the more appropriate it seemed. I could no longer stand Ryūji’s absence from my days. This would bring me the solution that I needed. It solved a problem and, therefore, I yielded.

With the serious resolve of a ritual, I cut the plastic bands that hold the box together. I see the provisory walls falling to the ground in perfect synchronicity, as the stepbot emerges from it, an anthropomorphic array of gears and cables. I look at the cold and silvery structure, unsure of what to do. I reach my hand tentatively and there is a slight bolt of static electricity biting at my fingertips. It seems to be warning me away, but I am not one to fold the game this soon. After all, I am a man on a mission.

I begin searching for the manual (I know there is one) amongst the debris of the recently dismantled package. Even though I do not really need it – I have read all the instructions several times before settling on this model – I think it wise to make sure that I am programming it right. I can allow for no mistakes.

When I do find the manual, I check all the procedures that I have to go through in order to start it up. It is a useless task, as I predicted. I have already fully memorized it. All that I have to do is go through the necessary paces and everything will be ready.

Yes, this will solve the problem. I know it will. I hope.

You see, I miss Ryūji too much. His embrace. The feel of his arms supporting my body and his own surrendering to mine. I miss him the same way one might miss a lost limb. His absence literally aches. I still wake up in the middle of the night startled by the scent of his skin, sure that he is there, laying on the bed by my side, and when I realize that he is not – how could he? – I rock myself to sleep in tears and to the rhythm of all the tangos that we danced together.

We had met by accident. A few different turns and twists that day and our paths would have never crossed. He usually preferred to think that we would meet anyway, if not at that precise moment, then at some later point in time. We were meant to find each other, that was what he firmly believed.

I needed to have my ID skin graft updated, something that I had been postponing until the very last minute. For one, the procedure was not exactly painless (far from it). Also, it stood for all the things that I loathed. He was there that day auditing the skin graft instruments, a surprise inspection, one of the many that the global council imposed on every public service. In fact, he was almost finishing when I got there. A few minutes more and we would have never met. It had been that tight a coincidence.

It was not so much love at first sight as a magnetic attraction. The inescapable submission to the laws of physics. Or a chemical inevitability. Our eyes met over the wide aseptic coldness of the medical bay. None of us smiled. His countenance remained detached and dully professional. However, there was a glimmer of curiosity (was that what it was?) as he chanced upon me. I stopped paying notice to the attending nurse and had to ask her to repeat what she was saying. When I again returned my eyes to the opposite side of the medical bay, he was no longer there. I recall being taken over by an overwhelming sadness. As if I had just missed on a crucial stepping stone of my life and was left alone to fend for myself. An hour later, when I finally came out of the building, he was standing by the curb. Waiting for me.

I walked towards him. He said at once, before I could even come to halt: “Do you like tango?” Not waiting for an answer, he went on: “I have a class tonight and my partner just bailed. Care to give it a try? And maybe we could grab something to eat afterwards…?”

Of all the things that I could have said, I merely answered: “I’m in.” And I was. I had been long before he had asked any question.

No, it was not love at first sight, but I do think that I fell in love with him that same night, the first time that we danced. I guess the same was true for him. He had been going to tango classes for a month by then, while I was a true initiate. Notwithstanding, as soon as he took me in his arms, there was an immediate connection – pregnant with meaning – that took hold of both of us.

He used to say that we had mastered the ancient and difficult art of reading each other’s minds. Whether it was I or he who was leading, the other one could always guess which step would follow (and that would turn out to be true about every other aspect of our life together). I remember a friend of ours once commenting on how boring that must be, the dreary predictability of it. It was not a matter of routine, though. We simply did not know where one’s body ended and the other’s began.

So, how can I go on with my life, now that such a big chunk of me – body and soul – has been taken away?

Everything seems harder since there is no physical remembrance of him, nowhere that I can go in order to revive his presence in my life. There is of course a memorial plaque which can be accessed online or at one of the virtual terminals. It still is not the same thing as visiting a grave, I am sure. I wish I could visit Ryūji’s grave, look at an epitaph on a tombstone (I know there was once such a thing) and be thus flooded by the evocative memory of his smell.

Although I have never seen a grave, I have read enough about it to be sure of how much it would mean to me right now. How much of a difference it would have made over the course of these last months. But, there is no way around the harsh reality, you cannot fight it no matter how much you would like to, and it has been over seventy years since people stopped being buried. Once the global council presented the double argument of lack of space due to the overpopulation crisis, alongside with the suspicions of soil contamination, bodies have been systematically disposed of through fusion reaction. Even keeping ashes has been deemed both morally censorable and a possible risk to public health. There is therefore nothing on this earth, no shred of physical reality, to attest to Ryūji having ever existed. Pictures just do not cut it, whenever love is concerned. Not for me, anyway.

He has been dead for close to a year. It will be a full year a fortnight from now.

I turn my attention back to the stepbot. Its functioning is fairly simple. The first thing that I do is to browse the list of available themes for the one I need, the one my mind has been set on from the very start. I begin thinking that I will have to upload it but eventually find it right near the end of the list. Probably because it is so outdated, true vintage tango. I try it out and the sound of Santa Maria del Buen Ayre engulfs me at once.

It still amazes me how such things have escaped the rigid scrutiny that has effaced so much of what I hold dear. “Traditionalists will be prosecuted” is the legal mantra that has accompanied me all throughout my adult life. Ryūji knew full well that I was one, he instinctively got that from the very start. Yet, he did not report me, as was both his civil and professional duty.

Then again, maybe it was love at first sight.

Over the years, I had developed a true devotion to everything archaic. I remembered how Ryūji cringed at each new spoil that I brought home, after one of my many incursions into the clandestine antique shops. He would devise new and inventive ways of creating hiding places around the house for each of them. He did not tell me to take them back or throw them away, he never once told me that I could not buy them. Scared as he was, he would abide to my madness and merely tried to protect us as best as he could. You see, he loved me. And that is what you do when you love.

Besides, there was a part of him that could relate to my enamoured courtship with the archaic. The tango part. One would expect that tango, as all things ancient, would have become useless. It required a rapport that people had grown weary of. It challenged the coldness with which we had grown accustomed to relate with one another. Truth be told, until the invention of trance tango, it had been very close to extinction.

I never could understand trance tango, nor had I relinquished to dancing it. Oddly enough, and with all his contemporariness, neither could Ryūji, for that matter. He was a traditionalist at least in that department. “I would never stoop to that”, he used to say. For all the rest, he was a man of his time. When it came to tango, however, he was a firm defender of tradition.

In fact, he had chosen one of the few classes that taught the traditional tango. It was clandestine in its own away. For all pretences, it taught the trance tango that any regular class would volunteer, only using vintage tango as a sort of elementary learning tool, the necessary initial step to understand the tango approved by the normative guidelines. Notwithstanding, all that you could hear and dance there were the archaic rhythms of the vintage tango that both Ryūji and I loved. The one that had brought us together. The one that had sealed our fate. The one that we danced every Friday night for the twelve years that we were together.

Yes, it hurts that I will not kiss him again, that we will never again share a meal, that I will not once more wake up to his loving eyes upon me, that never will we make love as we did… but, above all, it hurts that I have been denied the absolute entrancement of dancing with him.

I had told him once, jokingly: “It’s like fucking in public, but without being arrested”.

He had merely kissed me and said “I love you”.

Yes, I miss hearing him say it as well. That “I love you”, the way he used to utter those words, never once lost its charm or appeared to be devoid of meaning. It always stood for something deep and indestructible.

I reach for the command panel and start inputting the necessary data settings. There is an option that allows the stepbot to recognize specific patterns of movement and, once that is done, it can reproduce every subtle motion to the nanosecond. I insert the collected recordings of my dances with Ryūji – our wedding’s included. I want the stepbot to learn how we did it. Our mating rituals, as some wildlife extinct species. Even though it can be set to be a follower, this will only work if the stepbot is the leader. So, I tell it so, my fingers on the panel’s keyboard tell it after he has enough time to aggregate the movement patterns in the recordings of Ryūji and me. The stepbot is a hard student and a quick learner, just as the advertising promises. It takes it only half an hour.

All there is left to do now is to set the time code. I look at the six digits in the digital display, each couple separated by an austere colon. I know it will refuse me if I insert the desired time code. I know it will report it as an error and reset the time frame. I know that I will have to bypass the safe-mode default, in order to avoid it. I try to recollect all that Ryūji has taught me about such procedures. The good thing is that they are basically the same, no matter what the appliance. Hurray for standardization and all the virtues of this century-long globalization.

When I am done, I press the necessary keys and observe the result on the digital display.

99:99:99

Ninety-nine hours, ninety-nine minutes and ninety-nine seconds. Over four days of uninterrupted dancing.

It will be enough. I know it will be enough. I hope.

I take a deep breath.

I get into position, adjusting my body to the pre-set statuesque stance of the anthropomorphic machine, steel and cables to stand in for Ryūji’s warm limbs. As soon as my right hand sets on the stepbot’s cold grasp, it clutches around my fingers. I feel its other metallic claw against my shoulder blade and the first bars of Santa Maria del Buen Ayre begin filling the room. I feel it waver, his feet hardly moving, but giving me the cue nonetheless. Then, his right foot advances towards me and we are off.

It takes me but a couple of seconds to recognize all of Ryūji’s mannerisms in the flow of the stepbot’s pre-set choreography, and I immediately start to cry. I am pained with a moment of doubt, wanting to end it right then and there, although I know that it is already too late for second thoughts. The stepbot was purposefully designed for this. Unlike the human embrace, which requires a subtle connection of the body, sometimes hardly touching and thus relinquishing the imposition of strength, the stepbot is supposed to force you into the movement. It is a pedagogic tool and behaves accordingly. It forces you where you are supposed to go. A silly toy, when you think about it.

Once again, the advertising is faithfully accurate: “Its grip is relentless”. I can feel it now. There is nowhere to escape and I have but to surrender. I close my eyes and let myself be driven, an unwilling object in the stepbot’s claws. As soon as I get used to its cold metallic grasp, though, the memory of Ryūji takes over and I am dancing with him. At last.

I have tried to dispose of his memory for so long and so unsuccessfully, that having him there again – even if only in my mind’s eye – suddenly becomes unbearable happiness. “You are back”, my mind tricks me into thinking. His scent is there once more, the feel of his warm skin – how come you are always this warm? – and the soft sweetness of his voice when he hums the rhythm to me (a serenade of sorts).

I know it is but an illusion. One that I welcome dearly, nonetheless.

For close to six months, I had kept all his things around the house, exactly as they were at the time of his departure (I could not even acknowledge the concrete reality of the term death), not daring to change the location or dispose of a single item. There were two very precise reasons for this, though one more obvious than the other.

Yes, allowing any kind of change would be paramount to finally admitting that he was not coming back, and that was something that I was not prepared to deal with. Keeping the ballast of his presence intact somehow made his death unreal, a temporary condition soon to be rectified. On the other hand, we had never attributed individual possession to anything. There was no mine or his, but always ours. Disposing of his things meant disposing of things that I also considered mine. Was I to dispose of myself as well? I was his too, was I not?

Eventually, I did throw a lot of things away. The ones that more closely tortured me. For a while, I actually came very close to believing that I had managed to efface his sillage, as the French call it. But, now, it all flows back. As I am taken around the room, every single piece of Ryūji’s heritage comes rushing in. There are even moments when I can recognize his features in the metallic surface of what, in the machine, stands for a head. As if memory is powerful enough to superimpose a resurrected Ryūji on the stepbot’s impersonal countenance.

It is very near to the second hour now. I finally start to get tired and attain the full realization of my decision. All its implications and the physical, painful, reality that awaits me. I again clench my eyelids shut. I want this. I need this. I smile, daring Ryūji to do the same.

He did not smile that often but when he did he was able to light the very air. The fact that he did not usually smile did not mean that he was unhappy or incapable of such tender emotions, though. He was just more serious and I had learned to take it as a trait of character that, in no way, questioned his love. He merely had to walk into a room for me to feel his warmth from feet away.

“You are looking at me again” was the catchphrase that had so frequently coloured our days together. I could be facing away from him and still feel his loving gaze. He would then smile and I was at once enveloped by the sheer warmth of it.

It is a little before the tenth hour when my feet start to give in. I find myself missing steps, awkwardly trying to avoid the stepbot’s heavy hoofs. Eventually, my body will collapse and I will be a ragdoll in the stepbot’s arms, thrown around this way and that, time and time again, as my feet drag around the floor. It happens a mere three hours later, when I can longer hold myself upright. The stepbot compensates for my limpness by grabbing my hand tighter and supporting my torso closer to its breastplate. The heavier I get, the tighter its hold on me.

I hear one of my fingers snap, as its claw presses firmly around my hand. It is the unmistakable sound of crushed bones. I recognize it again, a few minutes later, when his foot treads on my toes. As I look down, there is a trail of continuous blood designing an obsessive pattern around the marble white floor.

For some reason, the bible comes into my mind. I had found it in an antique shop in the city’s outskirts. It had been by far my most dangerous acquisition, so much so that the dealer had almost refused to sell it to me. Faith and religion – any kind of belief in preternatural entities – had long been deemed a psychiatric condition. Anyone suspect of such beliefs was an immediate object to compulsory commitment. It had not been a question of belief (of any kind) which had drawn me to it, though. My interest was purely literary. Besides, it was a sort of cherry on top for any archaic lover worthy of its name.

It was written in ancient Greek, an attempt at reproducing the original form and structure of one of the best-known versions of the sacred text. During the course of the five years since I had bought it, I had made several attempts at translating certain portions of it. One in particular had become a love profession of sorts.

I would write it on a napkin and hand it over to Ryūji, at dinner. I would whisper it in his ear just before sleep. I went as far as to scratch it on the bark of a tree once, the same way people used to scratch arrow-trespassed hearts with both lovers’ initials inside it. It was the exact words that I used when we renewed our vows two years ago, much against Ryūji’s will, I might add. He was terrified that someone would recognize it for what it was and denounce us to the authorities. It was a useless fear, of course. The great thing about repression is that it efficiently generates ignorance, and it would have taken a fair amount of intelligence to recognize those words for what they stood for.

Once again I hear the words echoing in my mind:

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,

And though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and I have not love,

I am nothing.

Yes, it was corny and excessive, as love generally is. And it was true.

I gaze at the digital display on the stepbot’s breastplate, but there is a persistent fog over my eyes. I am very close to losing consciousness. I have also lost the track of time. I squint and am finally able to distinguish the digits.

67:56:31

For some silly reason, the thought of French toasts comes into my mind as well. For a long time, I could not eat them without bursting into tears. Because he had loved them so much (more than that, he had developed a true addiction to French toasts). As it turned out, I had to stop eating them altogether.

My hands are now a convoluted mesh of blood and ripped skin and exposed flesh and tendons.

I can no longer see the stepbot, but only his face.

Your face, Ryūji.

I can see you.

I can hear your voice, too.

As I used to, at the beginning of each dance, I ask you: “Tango me to death, dear”.

And I hear your voice, as you answer back, as you always did: “I will, baby. I will”.