It isn't that I want to follow her. As a matter of fact, what I want hasn't been relevant for some years. I remember what it was like to want, when I wanted to follow her and it actually brought me pleasure. Unlike the memories of the living, a dead man's memories become more intense with the passage of time.
I remember her as if she were gone. But she isn't, and I try to see her anyway. I remember the back of her head, the sweet gloss on which I would imagine her face, looking at me, a mouth moving and saying something to flatter me. My imagination created us both as dolls, her image and mine like vague sketches of people, some parts exaggerated and some deemphasized to suit the simple and static world I imagined. As often as I could I would fix my gaze on the back of her head, perfectly blank and chestnut smooth, and conjure a face there—its expression shifting as it talked to me, eyes glistening in a way I would naturally interpret as flirtatious—and those brief fantasies were almost worth the nauseating fear that one day she would actually turn around. I didn't want to know what she would say, if she would say anything, or if she would just look at me with an inscrutable expression that I would naturally interpret as contempt, mild enough not to bother her. But still it pleased me to follow her, her perfect indifference to me a blank screen on which I could project all the longings of my reticent, sex-deprived and nervous imagination. But now I feel no pleasure, and I don't even want her anymore, and my fear of her has long since turned into desperation—that living death that never lies down and dies, as others in my position have said.
I feel no pleasure. But the worst thing about it is that I am not dead enough to feel true despair. I loiter in the threshold between wishful thinking and hopelessness, wondering if maybe I can continue to get away with following her and never having to confront her, and knowing all the same that time will break this spell eventually, and at that point I will have control over neither her nor myself. We will talk, I know it. And it will be the most bowel-loosening moment of my existence.
I follow her against my will because I have been sentenced to do so until we talk. I am not in Hell—at least then I would have the reassuring certainty that my torment would last forever. No, I am not in Hell, because real eternity is maddeningly unpredictable, and Hell is an end reserved only as a nightmare for those who bore easily. Unfortunately, I do not bore easily, which is why I once delighted in following the same girl and imagining the same soft face, giving way to my spirit like sand and blowing away to let me come again and again. I could finger her to be anything, tracing my moods in her smooth hair like pictures on the beach, and I didn't need to go anywhere else to be at peace. I was once at peace. And when in my perverse idleness I died to the world, and after a time looked around to see where I was, I was like a panicked child who looks up from his game and sees he is completely alone. No one is waiting for him; his game is all he has had for quite some time. So he lingers to complete it, hoping that with the game at an end, his loneliness will disappear too.
Anyway, that was what it felt like when I received my sentence. I was completely alone, and at last I knew it: I was like a hedonist who gets bored with himself and realizes it is because he has been living in the same old body for far too long. And when I finally knew I was completely alone, I could hear my sentence calling me to penance. I do not know how long I was dead before I heard it. I must have been idling in the grave for some time, though, because when the sentence was read all of the angels had aged quite a bit since the last time I had seen them. It was only then that I realized how long I had been out of contact with them, neither in the world of dancing nor the world of watching, simply dead to all worlds. Somehow, I know not by what power, I was summoned from my entombed reverie to the world of watching and heard my sentence. And henceforth I am to follow her until she actually turns around.
She takes ballet. I am there, in the dance studio, with her. Near her, I mean. I am looking at the back of her head, feeling as though we are in the same room though our hearts are in fact in different worlds, different spiritual worlds. I didn't know that before, lying in the tomb of my fantasies, before I was sent to the world of watching. She is not in the world of watching; she moves without knowing herself, a feral creature untouchable by anything rude or rhetorically gifted. No one can insult her, no one can make her feel guilty. No one can call her any names—she does not need a name to be what she is. She knows what she is not because she ever thinks about herself, but because she lives instinctively on her feet, as I never have. She throws herself around the studio like a fearless child who could only be stopped if someone stopped her, and not without a deafening protest. She forces her way through space like a spectacular parade: this is why I know I don't stand a chance. Moving her feet on the ground without hesitation is completely natural to her, and I am nothing but a pair of eyes.
I watch and say all these things about her because it is part of my sentence to understand why we are worlds apart; she a dancer, I a watcher. It is part of my sentence to articulate the great gap between us, to know why I was dimly afraid of her before my sentence and intensify that tension in language. I have been sentenced to watch in order to increase my fear, to increase my resistance to the confrontation that is to take place between us. It is the only way I will be free from this: I have to get very uncomfortable in the crow's nest. That sentence is not some sadistic whim of the power that sent me here; I tilled the ground for it myself when I followed her with pleasure. I made her into an irresistible beast, something to be afraid of, something simultaneously to avoid and to gaze upon with awe from a vantage point, something untouchable. And now I must say it to myself. I must bridge the gap with my report. I must confess, confess, confess.
I take up my watching. She chatters with her friends in a language I understand but don't speak. I once met a French Canadian boy who could understand German because his grandparents spoke it to him, but could not put together a sentence. If they asked him a question he would respond in French. It is like that with her, not that she ever asks me questions. But I don't know if she would understand me if I spoke back to her in my language, or if she would just think I was a barbarian.
I can hear what she's saying, but I have nowhere to put it. It is meaningless to me, but not trash. I put it in my junk drawer. I'm sure I will need it later; I will need to offer it back to her. But I don't care about her words for their own sake, only as a bargaining tool. Only so I can understand her better and have something to offer her when she walks by. But I don't even remember what she says. I put it in my junk drawer.
My mind is wandering again. I imagine that I am falling into the junk drawer of all the words and quirks and gestures that make up the play of surfaces that is her identity. I am happy there, pleasantly surprised by every little quip, every anecdote, every color of shirt she wears. She sticks her hand in and rummages about for something she intuits she will need, and the movement makes me laugh, makes me speak as a character in her story, and I am so pleasantly surprised and engaged that I can't even thing as fast as I am moving. It is like I am stoned and every trivial phrase and movement and image suddenly becomes new and clever and loaded with meaning. She picks me up and looks me in the eye, and...
This is where I would wake up if I were dreaming, because there is no script for what happens next. I have always been jolted out of my imagination at this point, where she looks me in the eye and nothing happens, because we have to write it together. These are my sobering moments. I cannot sleep anymore. I am in the world again, following her, watching her move. I am not imagining what life would be like if I lived in the junk drawer of her personality. I am fretfully on edge, continually on the verge of tapping her on the shoulder and asking her to dance. And I don't even know any dance moves—I would have to ask her to teach me. The angels tell me that this is how to be born into the world of dancing, beyond death, beyond watching. But few people ever choose it, because one is never more vulnerable than when one is being born.