Roaming the neighborhood on a lonely, aimless Sunday, I stopped to buy a newspaper at the Loyola train station. Through the window I saw a small number of people standing transfixed, particularly a young woman who had covered her mouth with one hand and was pointing in wonder with the other. I turned and that’s when I saw him, the man everyone was looking at, the man who was dancing, dancing, dancing, all by himself, spinning along Sheridan Road in slow, exuberant circles, his narrow face gleaming with sweat, and I swear to God I’ve never seen a human being dance like him. Not for a moment did his body stop its splendrous trembling, his head rolling in wide, urgent circles as if to stop dancing was to drown. With no music, no stage but the sidewalk, no audience or partners except those of us who were watching him in disbelief, pleasure, amazement, or suspicion, he was dancing and cars slowed to a crawl as they passed through his shuddering sphere. If they could have, the trees would have bent down to gaze longingly at his feet. It seemed impossible that his frighteningly thin arms and legs could be filled with so much dancing, and his shabby clothes looked like he’d spent his entire life trying to dance out of them. He would turn his weathered face to the sun, letting his body rock in the heat and wind. A wide, delirious smile filled the deep furrows of his forehead, filled all the lines of his aging face with complicated pleasures, and even his lips and tongue and the delicate scar on his throat became part of the dance.
