A gorgeous chunk of calcium carbonate protruded from a layer of late-Anthropocene lakebed, preserved for eternity like a geologic bookmark somewhere above arrowheads and below discarded Juul pods. Once upon a time, this had been the preferred sunning rock of a certain Gambelia wislizenii, a long-nosed leopard lizard. Every year she bore unblinking witness to a bizarre caravan that passed by her home on Pyramid Lake. Thousands of vehicles careened past her rock on their way to the Burning Man festival; they limped back out a week later. On this, the evening that the festival gates opened, a flicker caught the lizard’s eye, and she swiveled her head to see a cigarette butt hit the pavement next to her and explode into miniature fireworks. She turned back to her business. She had to eat to stay alive.
By week’s end, all that remained of the actual burning Man was a smoldering spot in the exact center of the festival. This meant that it was Sunday morning, and to be honest, everyone still seemed pretty high. In line for the Porta-Potties, an Earth Guardian with a pierced septum swayed to the hum of a nearby generator. Waves of naked people sprang out of campsites when the water truck drove past, jogging through the spray like an open-air shower while it just tried to keep the dust down. Across a pile of clacky tent poles, a packing-up couple on the verge of an argument saw these naked, dripping bodies walking back to their camps and toyed with the idea of staying tonight for the Temple burn. Inside Center Camp, a volunteer with a ten pound bag of ice on her head took an order for an oat milk latte from a guy named Buzz wearing an open white robe and the chemical symbol for caffeine tattooed on his chest.
Across ruts and around sleeping bodies, Buzz pedaled his cruiser with the pink fur seat towards his campsite in the Deep Playa. He held his latte out in front of him like a talisman. His dust cloud caught up to him a second after he stopped in front of the three story inflatable duck he had called Home for the last week. He swung his leg off and leaned his cruiser against a speaker cabinet. When he crossed inside to the shaded lounge he remembered to dip his head low underneath a sign he had painted himself: “Duck!, get it?”
He didn’t yet know that he was being watched.
From the recesses of a dark couch inside the huge duck, Critter saw Buzz’s silhouette as it ducked through the doorway. He touched the bump on his own head.
By way of a greeting, Critter quacked.
The man stiffened in surprise and stared into the darkness, his eyes still adjusting. “Quack back atcha. Who goes there?”
“Can’t say I’m ‘going’ anywhere, but I’m Critter,” he smiled at how the stranger had quacked back. Only at Burning Man.
While his coffee cooled imperceptibly, Buzz studied the form on his couch. Vested, shirtless, longish hair, deeply tan. Possibly pants-less? No, there was some kind of mini-skirt or loin cloth. Necklaces and bracelets – gifts – clanged together when he sat up, and a little part of him, the part that went to an office and bought $500 glasses frames sometimes, winced at the thought of Critter’s uncovered asshole on the couch of his camp lounge.
Then he remembered they were going to burn it tonight. He took a sip of latte and introduced himself: “I’m Buzz.”
In a feline gesture that was somehow both dominant and submissive, Critter stretched in front of him, reaching up to the sky until it seemed his ribs would slide over his nipples. Then folding forward until his vertebrae stood out like watch gears and his lower back popped like knuckles.
With an exhale from the diaphragm, Critter stood up, eyes glazed over in drishti. A pendant stuck to his cheek like a punctuation mark. When he opened his eyes and smiled at Buzz, it fell off. He cleared his throat and asked the question that had just occurred to him.
“Where am I?”
Buzz swallowed a sip of latte and responded, “You’re in the Deep Playa, brother. Rubber Ducky Camp. Hope you have a bike.”
Critter pointed towards the door with a joint that had materialized in his hand. “Should be one out there. Would you care to smoke some of this organic marijuana with me before I scoot?”
Buzz thought about it, but felt compelled to first point out that there were no bikes out front.
“Uh-oh.”
They dipped outside together, blinking, and in the spot where hundreds of bikes had been parked the night before, only Buzz’s bike remained.
“Hate to break it to you, Critter: she’s gone.”
Critter struck a match against a pendant and cupped it to the end of his joint. Buzz noticed that instead of flicking it onto the playa, he put the matchstick in a little Altoid box he produced from somewhere within his loincloth.
“Well, these things move in cycles, you know…” Critter said in the squeezed voice of someone trying to hold in a hit. `
Buzz chuckled at the dad joke despite himself and as Critter’s head appeared from a cloud, accepted the smouldering cone before him. He took a modest but sincere toke, and was surprised to look over and see Critter holding his latte. How’d that happen? He raised his eyebrows when he saw Critter take a sip.
“That’s some real gourmet shit,” said Critter, and traded back with him.
They stood in silence for a moment. Blood roared in Buzz’s ears.
Buzz cleared his throat and asked, “So, you know where you’re going?”
“120 degrees and Mizzenmast. Near Pee Funnel Camp.”
Buzz nodded. “Pretty far.”
“Further.”
Buzz cut his eyes towards him to see if maybe that was a Grateful Dead reference. Disembodied bass notes from an art car drifted across the valley like open-source heartbeats. “If you get confused, listen to the music play.”
The quote struck him like a tuning fork.
Warmth unspooled inside of him; Purpose bloomed.
He knew if he said the next words, they would have to happen. So he said them. “I’m going to dance there.”
Buzz seemed surprised. “Where?”
“All the way there.”
Critter felt an ineffable tingle wash over him. He wondered if this was the kind of thing his ex was talking about when she used to describe how “electric bee stings” would strike her nipples when their newborn daughter cried. He shut his eyes against the image. He pulled back and saw himself from above. He kept pulling back higher and higher until the details of Rubber Ducky camp blurred and the whole Burning Man festival shrank and it looked like a hoofprint in the sand next to Pyramid Lake. From up here, Critter saw the route he needed to dance his way home: start in the middle of nowhere; dance a beeline to the Opulent Temple; pirouette; boogie along the Esplanade from the gardens of Xanadu past the Thunderdome, through the smaller camps; take a right on Mizzenmast and plop out in front of the Pee Funnel Camp for a celebratory shot and a hero’s welcome in his own camp. Estimated trip duration: one leap day.
The idea crystallized as soon as he tumbled it over. He was overcome by an acute disdain for anyone who didn’t dance from point A to point B. The walkers, the bikers, the riders atop mutant art cars: they were now part of an other. So was the version of him that existed before this exact moment. The roach in his hand had gone out, so he put it in the Altoid tin, and snapped the lid closed.
“‘Some dance to remember…’” Buzz left the first half of the Eagles quote hanging in the air like a blinking cursor. Buzz had half-planted the idea in his head in the first place, hadn’t he? Critter wondered how to thank somebody for something like this, this simple yet radical mission. He looked down and selected a pendant. During Friday’s sunrise set, a girl named Sriracha placed it on him and put her hand on it over his heart. It was a hand-blown glass piece, with the “Man” trapped inside swirling red flames. He lifted it away from the tangle of other pendants, up and over his hair and held it out to Buzz, lifted it over his buzz cut, rested it against his chest. Critter centered it over the man’s caffeine tattoo and placed his hand over it like Sriracha had done to him, but with one minor difference.
He patted it once and winked, “Tatanka.”
And just like that, Critter spun on his heel and began zig-zagging across the desert, careening and dancing like the last of a rare species. When he disappeared from sight, Buzz felt a surprising pang of emotion. He looked down and saw that around the rim of his latte there was the faintest tinge of glitter lipstick where Critter had taken a swig earlier.
“…and some dance to forget.” He ran the thick of his tongue across it and washed it down with latte.
Critter felt absolutely amazing by the time he arrived at the Opulent Temple, had in fact passed up two rides on art cars that he’d been offered on his way here. Each of the drivers had seemed impressed when he told them about his mission to dance all the way home. Watching the mutant vehicles thump into the distance, he felt a little bad for all those Burners partying atop them: dancing away like mad, but totally disconnected from the Earth.
“What’ll it be?”
Critter snapped his eyes open and realized he was in front of a bar. With the gifting economy at Burning Man, and the general vibe being more psychedelic than sloppy, he was always surprised at how prominent the bars were. Over the music he hadn’t heard the bartender, so he leaned in ear-first.
Instead of repeating, she held up a bottle of Jamison’s and tall boy of PBR.
Critter made shooter-fingers at both and raised his eyebrow.
She nodded approvingly and motioned for him to tilt his head back. She poured a hearty shot of Jamison’s in his mouth and when he came up wincing she cracked the beer in front of his nose like a smelling salt.
Cheers, he mouthed to her, and she pressed her palms together.
Recalculating for the added weight and numbing cold of the beer in his hand, Critter got back to dancing. He couldn’t place who was spinning, some kind of Goa-trance inspired House that was hitting him square in the amygdala. The more he danced to it the more waves of energy coursed through his arms and legs. A line from Hamlet floated by behind his closed eyes, “As if increase in appetite hath grown by what it fed on.” Oh, Billy, you sonofabitch, you nailed it! He danced harder.
There was no dividing line between the end of the music and the crowd’s return to their own bodies. Instead, cheering and clapping simmered up to the air from them like carbonation. Critter kept his eyes shut until he was sure it was good and over. When he opened them, he saw the DJ packing up, saw the sea of people smiling and swaying and slowing down and tilting towards the exit. The effect on Critter, who kept on dancing, was like getting off of a treadmill and feeling like you’re going backwards. He sashayed outside.
With pride he noticed how clear his head felt. He caught looks from the crowd acknowledging his continued dancing on the way out, and knew with absolute certainty that he was in the right place and time. This particular slice of the Sunday morning Burner crowd was devoid of sparkleponies, ravers, ragers and rookies – probably all crashing or chattering back in their campsites. He was thankful for these people, because who better to start the quest with him than the more veteran Burner crowd of psychonauts, artists and genuine freaks? His tribe.
In groups of twos and threes they flowed out of the dome and around the guy dancing by the exit. They were spell-bound and spun; they would talk about this week extensively in the coming years, but for now they were both brimming and depleted, mounting bikes like silent monks and disappearing into the solemn maze of sleeping campsites.
Bereft of a proper song, Critter tilted his head towards distant layers of clank and chatter. Like pulling on threads from a fuzzy sweater he coaxed a rhythm out of the white noise. He danced to it. Got down to it. He was getting good at noticing new frequencies, he thought, and felt a tap at his elbow.
He opened his eyes to see the bartender.
Five minutes later they were zig-zagging together on their way to Xanadu, one of Critter’s regifted necklaces swinging between her breasts.
A little motorized cupcake drove by the entrance to Camp Xanadu, and if the operator had taken off his cherry-shaped helmet right then, he would have heard two women chatting on a see-saw shaped like a hot dog. If that same journeyman had scrubbed the playa dust from his goggles, he would have seen a figure near them in a loincloth, dancing not ungracefully, with what appeared to be a ficus.
Bindi sent her friend to the ground when she pushed up on her side of the see-saw. The view was nice up here. A cupcake drove by with a man’s stoic face sticking out of it.
Pilar’s turn. She sprung off the ground and gestured towards the guy dancing with the houseplant. “So he’s with you?”
Her friend laughed from the high end of the hot dog. “Critter?” Bindi could tell he was harmless. “I saw him dancing at the Opulent Temple and just liked his vibe. Guy woke up at Rubber Ducky Camp this morning and had some frikken epiphany or something in the deep playa.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. He hit his head or had some special tea or… I don’t know, but he decided he wasn’t going to walk again at Burning Man – only dancing! So he’s, like, dancing all the way to…” she forgot where he said, “wherever the hell he camped.”
Pilar looked over at him. He was taking the ficus leaves in his hand and doing a kind of swing dance that gave people pause when they walked by. Most egged him on, though he didn’t seem to notice. A few tried to talk with him, but he’d just nod politely and hold up one finger like he was on a conference call, and then get back to the plant. Sure, this was her first Burn, but she was six days into it and found the spectacle wholly endearing. Also, she wanted a cool playa name like Critter or Bindi.
Bindi interrupted her playa name brain-storming. “You know, he guessed my birthday?”
“Who, Critter? You mean he guessed your sign?”
“Pffft… he knew my sign right off. Aries. But I said maybe ten words to him after the sunrise set and he knew I was born on a Tuesday. Then he guessed the date.”
“No fucking way.”
“The fucking date.”
They went up. They went down.
“So, uh. What do you think he’s on?” Pilar asked, her turn to be high, her feet dangling like a little girl’s from a bar stool.
“Umm, to be honest I think he’s Playa sober.”
Pilar looked confused.
“Alcohol and herb.”
“You sure?”
“Well, no. But he smells like dank. And I poured a shot down his throat earlier, so…” Bindi pushed up and sent her friend down.
“Impressive.” Pilar looked into her fanny pack. “Non-stop dancing, no face drugs…” She fished something out. “Hey, you want a bump?”
Suddenly, vertigo. Like tilting too far back in a chair. For a split second, Pilar feared the worst: she was fainting or definitely having a stroke. She hadn’t pushed off the ground but she was floating upward. What the? When she was about six feet off the ground, levitating, she realized someone was lifting up her side of the see-saw. She turned and saw Critter’s dancing head, eye-level with her own.
“‘Ello Gov’nah,” he piped up and flared his nostril at her like a racehorse.
As Critter shifted from foot to foot he realized he needed to turn down the dancing to a minimum, and really focus. This shit was like mid-air refueling: attached to his swaying hand, a tiny mogul of cocaine sent mini avalanches raining onto the ground while a hungry nose chased it around space. It was a miracle they ever connected. When they did, the snort hit like a lightning bolt and the pile was gone. Gag. Did it vanish, did it even happen? They were standing behind a humming generator, huddled over Pilar’s bag, two-thirds of them still as statues.
“Ah, there we go,” the drip was numbing the back of his throat.
“Ooh, that’ll do,” said Bindi, rubbing her nose.
Pilar took a blast in each nostril and folded it back up with a wink at Bindi. “Bad girl shit.”
Critter felt the rush coming on and made a mental note – more of a mental Post-it, really – to practice deep breathing so he didn’t jabber like some cracked-out cockatoo.
“Check out the plants, I love the plants in here.” He pulled them along gently by the hand towards the entrance of Xanadu. “They had to bring in two extra water trucks just to keep the turf alive for the week.”
They ducked inside. Until their eyes adjusted to the dark, the deep bass of the soundsystem and the tinkling of a water fountain were the only signs of life. Then, like a Polaroid, shapes materialized from the blackness. This was Pilar’s first time here, and she bent down to rub her hands on the turf.
Bindi pointed out the writhing shapes of lovers also enjoying the feel of the real grass.
Pilar stared until a hoarse shout rent the jungle darkness.
“Oh my God! Critter?”
The voice came from on top of a huge speaker. As her eyes adjusted, Bindi saw Critter approach it and give the man on top a side-hug. The man was getting a blowjob from a guy with a mohawk standing in front of the bass cabinet.
The man gestured toward himself. “It’s Jester! I don’t… I can’t believe you’re really real!”
“Well, I try,” demurred Critter.
The man turned to Bindi. “This guy. I met this guy four, maybe five? burns ago. On top of my RV,” he looked at Critter, but played with the bobbing mohawk as he talked. “He was biking by in this afro wig-”
“Marge Simpson wig.”
“Whatever. We invite him up to our camp, ‘Cuddle Princess Island,’ and he, it was like he had friggin’ magical powers, this guy!”
Bindi nodded. “Like what?”
“Like…” he tilted his head back. “Like he knew I was a cancer survivor.” Bindi and Pilar exchanged a look. “Like he guessed the name of our teddy bear mascot. Like he convinced an art car to stop and DJ for us, and I don’t know what kind of moves he’s working on right now, but on that morning I’m telling you this snack could fucking dance!”
“That was a special morning,” Critter was far away from the music he was dancing to.
“You know, we talked about you after that. A few people thought they hallucinated you.”
“I hallucinate myself sometimes.”
“So, uh, what’s going on with this?” Jester gestured at the perpetual motion experiment dancing before him.
Bindi answered for Critter and then kept on going: explained about his quest to dance himself home, and added that she was a Women’s Studies Major in college and did he know that there was in fact a ‘Cannabis Nation Barbie’ made in a limited run in the seventies whose motto – on the box, mind you – said, “Can’t stop dancing!”
He tuned out, tuned back in, looked at her. “I’ll be damned.”
“Hey, what was the mascot’s name?” asked Pilar from the ground, still stroking the grass.
“Prolapse,” he replied, which forced a garbled laugh from the mohawk man at his lap.
Under a neon sign that squirted pink and purple drops into perpetuity, an exchange of sorts was transpiring. An exhausted-looking cyborg with green nail polish handed two pee funnels across the bar. A dusty man shifting from one foot to the other pressed something discreetly into her hands, and mumbled something about how nothing could prepare one for the disappointment of Burning Man.
“The fuck is this?” asked the cyborg.
Critter winked.
Then he followed her eyes to the tiny, wrinkled corner of an empty bag coated in white residue, sitting in her palm like a dead butterfly. “Whoops!”
Critter had run out of pendants somewhere between here and Xanadu.
There had been a dust storm. They had ducked into a crowded tent serving tea and sweets. He remembered bumping into something, and something breaking. He remembered dancing himself outside in the white-out, riding out the storm like the throes of vision quest.
Now he and… was it Bindi?… and her friend were at Pee Funnel Camp, giggling at the pee funnels they now twirled. Basically, a Dixie cup with a tube. Wasn’t that what they were giggling about?
He leaned in to them and said, “It’s so you can pee standing up.”
At this, the cyborg became animated. She cupped her hands to her mouth and pretended to make a big announcement: “We got Weekend at Bernie’s over here mansplaining a pee funnel!”
The girls giggled.
Some dance to forget.
He turned away from Pee Funnel Camp and saw the edge of his campsite. He was getting tired. He couldn’t bear to look at the line of traffic in the distance slinking towards the Exodus, a sober counterpoint to us Devil’s Advocates staying behind for the Temple burn. It was early afternoon. His feet hurt. His flops were rubbing raw between his toes, but he was sure it was nothing a little Neosporin couldn’t fix. He could picture exactly where it was: inside tent, inside backpack, inside toiletry kit. Yellow tube.
While the girls pretended to call each other on pee funnel phones, Critter noticed that he had been increasingly defaulting to spinning. His dancing was now almost entirely spinning, spinning that felt too good to ever stop. He felt a protected cocoon form around him, and occurred to him that those – what were they called?- whirling dervishes were maybe onto something.
He felt a tap on his shoulder and his heart sank to see Bindi waving goodbye to him with her pee funnel. Pilar stood behind her. Dread opened inside him like the mouth of a bass, about to swallow everything.
“Come back with me!” he heard his own voice begging, weird in his ear. The horizon tilted, and he feared he had stopped spinning too fast.
“Love to, man. But it’s time.”
Pilar came up to give him a hug but he put his hands up and stopped her, tried to walk backwards and get her to do a little two-step with him. Instead, something in the smile she gave him threw him off, almost made him stop dancing. “Come on, kiddo! One little bounce on our trampoline?”
Desperation was a stinky cologne, and he was laying it on.
“You’ve got a trampoline?”
“It’s sweet!” He realized as long as he kept talking about it, they would follow him – courtesy worked like that sometimes. So he kept walking backwards, dancing, talking, spinning a filament of conversation like a hostage negotiator. “One year, we got here really early in the morning and just dumped it on the playa,” he was getting miffed at their pace – his camp was right around the corner, for fuckssake! “By the time we woke up, our neighbors had put the whole tram-damn-poline together and we had a bouncing breakfast! With Bloody’s and everything.” Almost there. “Ah, he we are.”
“Thank God,” Pilar mumbled.
“Home sweet…” Critter pulled them around a corner.
Bindi laughed.
In front of them sat a pile of springs, metal tubes and canvas, all covered in a thick layer of dust.
“Where’s your camp?” asked Pilar.
At that moment, Critter saw a sheet of notebook paper, pinned to the ground with one of the tent stakes he never used. On it was a familiar scrawl in Sharpie:
WE WAITED AND WAITED FOR YOU BUT RIDE LEFT. WE HAVE YOUR STUFF. SEE YOU BACK IN THE CITY!
“Looks like they… bounced?” answered Bindi. Pilar hi-fived the bad joke.
Critter stopped dancing. His feet turned to concrete, and the setting stone spread up his legs. Whispers swirled and dragged him down into the dust beside the trampoline carcass. Just gonna rest here for a second.
He heard voices above him and, turning his face up towards the light, begged God for some Neosporin.
Dave Gentry 