The Way Fayer

The breath of life.

People were everywhere. Music swimming through the air. Timeless. Shouting from the rafters, falling off the chandeliers, lulling down the stairwells, echoing from rooms unseen: the music and the people as one. A melody of the masses that made the moment more than mere mania. Mortality with a twist. There was no shortage of dancing. Waltz, tango, and line; tap, jazz, and jive—every move happening in the most effortless and intuitive of ways. As naturally occurring as water roaring from a bluff. Rhyming bodies coupled in a coalition of coordinated chaos. But then there were others, brooding in corners to the beats of their own barrels. Contrarians of discontent, carrying weight long forgotten by the dancers in their ecstasy, discarded and dismissed, bearing responsibility as if it were theirs alone to carry. Atlas’s of another world.

Virgil lowered his heels onto the floor. 

It was difficult to say how many people there were in total. Glistening diamonds and blinding pearls; silk shirts and tailored suits; sticky cotton, tattered pants, and scuffed shoes. Bodies white as snow, brown as mahogany, and tan as desert dunes. Languages riding on the hot and sweaty air: seamless, violent, and divine—practical, biting, and seductive. Thick with elegance and inelegance, beauty and terror, virtue and vice. Cures and their poisons. Angels and demons.

Escaping from the music, three women approached him in a mirage of dreamlike imago.

“Virgil!” said one.

“Welcome!” said another.

“We’ve been waiting for you!” the first woman continued. 

“Nine months, to be exact,” said the last.

At that moment, Virgil’s curiosity turned to insecurity and he quickly marched away. Steering himself away from the entrance, he wove his way into the adjacent dining room where the crowd was lighter. But only to a small degree. The dining room seemed to stretch itself farther and farther as he walked along the side of the dining room table, bumping against the chairs and knocking over glasses. Strange to say, however, many were dancing on the table’s surface without disturbing so much as a spoon. There were gasps as he clumsily passed by, until one jester-looking fellow took the initiative to jump on the table and began smashing the plates and glasses intentionally. After thirty seconds or so lagged on, Virgil reached the opposite end of the dining room. He could still faintly hear the women’s voices calling to him through the destruction as he rounded the corner. 

Then, pain shot through Virgil’s forehead as he ran headfirst into the blurred, cologne-infused image of another person rounding oppositely, sending him stepping backward with a hand on his face. 

“Agh!”

“Gee, man,” a voice returned. “What’s the hurry for?”

“Uhh …” Virgil peaked through his fingers. The man staring back was wearing a suit much like his own. English three-piece, black with small white stripes. A dimpled red tie. Lightning blue eyes flashing against a dark, midnight complexion. Sharp features and high cheekbones beneath graying salt-and-pepper hair. “I was uh … looking for the bathroom,” Virgil continued.

“Okay, okay … well,” said the man, offering his hand, “I’m Marvin.”

Virgil took it. “Virgil. That’s my name.”

Marvin chuckled. “I sure hope so. Bathroom’s through the breakfast room. Right there in the back. See it?”

Virgil nodded. It was about thirty yards away.

“Ten minute trip or so.”

“Ten minutes?” Virgil asked. “It’s just right there.”

Marvin flashed a charming smile of perfectly aligned, cigarette-and-whiskey-stained teeth. “I spend most of my time in the bar room. You need anything, you can find me there.”

And just like that, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, he was gone.

Virgil watched the man disappear into the dining room, wishing he had been more transparent about his situation. Resolved to find the man later, he started making his way through the breakfast room. Ten minutes? he wondered.

Nobody danced here apart from a young man stumbling in dreamy circles by the mantle. A blonde head of perfectly coiffed madness. Tie undone and draped around his neck. A monocle over his left eye. The young man didn’t receive much attention from the others, though his incoherent poetry was rather distracting as it spewed from wine-stained lips. Then, Virgil noticed the mahogany beside the young man move. The silhouette of a person, the figure of a woman, taking shape. The young man tilted his head, curious. She, naked to her glistening mahogany skin, quickly scampering away, ripping a tapestry off the wall to cover herself as she did. Behind her, the young man’s hand falling through the shimmering air, reaching after the wood’s exhalation. Like Galatea seeking independence, the woman rushed past Virgil. Dark eyes that matched her skin, burning into his own. Melting him. Bounding gracefully into a dark corridor and gone as he still stood. Watching. The young man collapsing at the mantle. Cursing.

“Oh dear,” a voice cooed to Virgil’s right. It belonged to an elderly woman covered in all kinds of clinking jewelry. She sat at a table full of women who looked just alike. “Pyg’s making a fool of himself again. Now, now. Behave yourself, young man.”

“Surely his name isn’t Pyg, now is it?” one of the others asked, chuckling. “Though doubtless we can all agree that he is one. A pig that is.”

A woman snickered from across the table. “Of course his name isn’t Pyg. What a ridiculous idea.”

The first woman scoffed, sipping from her mimosa. “That is his name. And shouldn’t I know? He’s my grandnephew! Now don’t you go on insulting his name further. It’s a family name that used to belong to my uncle. It stands for Pyg—”

An uproar of laughter from the table over. From the table: “Surely you understand I was complimenting your pearls. A lovely rack of pearls, I said—or meant, rather,” said a sheepish teenage voice.

“If you can’t control yourself we might just have to take you upstairs,” purred the voice of the woman in question.

Stately laughter followed.

At the next table, an old man croaking: “If these damn riots don’ stop in the pool room I ain’ never goin’ back. All kinds of fun we used to have back ‘n my day. Now it’s overrun with all these—”

“Dad! Stop it. It’s really not as bad as they say it is,” a middle-aged woman replied. “When was the last time you were there anyway? And I really hope you weren’t going to say what I think you were.”

A man who looked to be her husband sat up a little in his chair. “I have to say Marge, I agree with your father. It’s pretty ridiculous what’s going on over there. You have to wait an hour before you can get a cue, and a dinked up one at that.”

“Jack!” the woman protested, face flushed.

A little boy sat in the chair next to her, playing with some kind of device in his hands. The others hardly seemed to remember his presence, bowl-cut just barely surpassing the height of the table.

“What’r you starin’ at?” croaked the old voice as Virgil passed by.

It took Virgil a moment to realize that the question was directed at him. “Oh-uh. Sorry sir, I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“What else would ya call it then? Eavesdroppin’ n’ such. Shame.”

Virgil mustered a half-hearted, “Ha ha,” as he attempted to distance himself from the situation. Intensifying the speed of his march, he failed to look ahead of himself as he did. A second later and he was tumbling over the back of some large, coarse piece of furniture. A couch. When he steadied himself, dazed and confused, eyes darting from place to place, he saw that he was at the center of the breakfast room. Surrounded by unrecognizable faces. Surprise, surprise.