We Stand on the Verge of Getting It On
By Barth Anderson

"I could only worship a god who danced." – Nietzsche

"All that is good is nasty!" – George Clinton

One

"Please! Please! Please!"

The Animal was calling to her again while the galaxy ticked on its bright hub. In the great beyond, where the Diva's gardens of blooming and dying stars gave way to yawning emptiness, two atoms happened to touch. The galaxy ticked again, and the Diva neared her glorious finish. Yet again.

"Please! Please! Please!" cried the Animal.

Though she dwelt in timelessness, the Diva had an acute sense of time. Every tick of the galaxy was a strike across her heart, reminding the Diva of the excruciating, ubiquitous nearness of her lover (were his dark atoms passing through her light ones right now?) but also the immense distance of time between them.

It wasn't boredom that pained her, since she was so many things at once. While the Diva stirred thin matter in that lonely gulf and longed for the end, she was also a quasar blazing at the heart of a distant galaxy and an upwelling of phosphorescent life in the organic atmosphere of a gaseous planet. She was a creek full of lusty frogs, a nebula gasping ionized gas, a fissure in the flank of a volcano. She was nearing the end of her exploration into all possible matters, wearying of the same atoms dancing with themselves and yearning for something different. Like a young girl with a pretend partner, the Diva would whirl as a binary star clutching its identical companion, herself to herself, and yearn for the day when she would again have her lover, the Eleatic One, to seduce, seize, and to bite.

Now the Diva sat at a table with a drink; there were ice cubes in the glass and she was listening to the Animal scream in shrieks of pain, anger, need.

"Please . . . please . . . please!" cried the Animal.

What was It screaming for, she always wondered, listening to It now with her rum and coke in hand. Was the Animal shouting to Its mate, Its child? To a torturer, maybe? She rocked her head in time to the universe's howls. "Please, oh please!" The club's superb sound system had planted the Animal from the singer's soul next to the Animal in the Diva's body, beside her titanic hunger. "Honey, please! Oh! Oh!" Guitars and drums walked in a quiet blues progression beneath the screams, and the Famous Flames backed up the song like sympathetic lawyers advocating on the singer's behalf.

"You dig James Brown," a man said.

The Diva opened her eyes. In this old bus terminal turned night club, four separate bars irrigated the churning crowd, and in the back where the lockers and luggage bays used to be, billiard balls clacked. From its wide-open dance floor to its fifty foot high ceilings, First Avenue's interior was painted black, and black stairways connected the black upper floor to the black dance floor. She always came here in the end.

Though waiting for her One, before her stood a fine young thing, black soul patch shaved into his chin. Precious smile. Bedroom eyes blinking. She warned him, "You have no idea who you're talking to."

"I was hoping to find that out." From Soul Patch's point of view: A woman in yellow leather short-shorts and white go-go boots glowing against her dark, muscular legs. Corn rows and beads in her hair. Blue suede halter. One calf was crossed over the other, bobbing to James Brown 1956, and her right hand drummed ringed fingers on the table. She was sitting next to the railing and watched the dance floor, which was already crowded and rocking in anticipation of the concert. As his eyes gulped the sight of her heart-shaped hips, Soul Patch said, "Some say all funk music is traceable back to James, you know? The way he inverted chorus and melodic lead in Please, Please, Please. What do you think?"

The universe seizes the Animal in a musician by the throat, squeezing until It sings, and humans discuss the cry as though talking about weather. "All I know," said the Diva, "is that you interrupted Mr. James Brown." She couldn't blame the young man. He'd wandered into her aura of pheromones like a teen-ager finding himself in a dressing room full of leggy strippers. The Diva could read his chemical reactions like a stock ticker and she couldn't demur: It turned her on that she turned him on. Perhaps she could slake her thirst with this young lovely if her lover didn't get here (her) soon. Just as coy as she could, she said, "You a player?"

He laughed a low sexy laugh and took a brave step forward. "Player of the year."

She could smell her stardust in this man's flesh, so a romp with him wouldn't satisfy, she knew. The Diva didn't want another make-believe dance. Like a salmon she swam home from distant futures and remote pasts to this one – the one - special time thread, to find her estranged lover. She wanted the taste of his unfamiliar stars. "You better run along," she warned Soul Patch, "find yourself another playmate."

"I . . . I . . . I . . . !" shouted James.

Soul Patch dropped a hand to her bare knee and looked up at her, furrowing his brow like a trumpet-player. "Won't your mama let you play with me?"

He was a fun flirt. The Animal in her body ached, rubbed its teeth against the bars of her own resistance. She laughed and with all her might summoned the will to say, "Forget it. You can't play my game."

"I bet I could pick it up," said Soul Patch. "What's your game, sugar?"

The Diva looked him up and down. "Ekpyriosis."

That ticker of chemical reactions went silent.

"Um. What - is that?" Soul Patch lifted his hand from her knee. "Like, an STD?"

"No." The Diva tilted back her head, shaking her drink's ice down to her lips. The conversation was over. Soon Clinton and Parliament would take the stage, as they always did, here at the end of time, and the Diva would be ready to dance. "It's Greek," she said, "for conflagration. The destruction of the cosmos."

"Good gawd almighty! Oh! Lord! Please! Oh, no!"

Soul Patch was already gone, wiping his hand on his jacket. As he walked off, he said over his shoulder, "OK. Right. Good luck with that."

At the backside of First Avenue's dance-floor bar, where shadows and black walls formed an invisible corner, Gary appeared like an origami man emerging from flat paper.

Head held still, his eyes darted back and forth as he took in the scene. Girls in flowing caftans, men in bountiful fros, halos of patchouli, platform shoes, sequined bellbottoms. Flocks of girls looked like cast members of Hair, and muscle boys wore glittery make up. To the untrained traveler, this would look tres 1971, but Gary was a professional swansonger, traveling the many threads of American popular culture throughout the last half of the twentieth century. This was later than '71 - a giddy retro scene pimping the sincere original. In his Sergeant Pepper-style pea coat, multicolored scarf, and lambchops, Gary had intended to unfold in Manhattan 1967, but now he didn't know when in the hell he was.

Gary inched up to the skinny blond bartender at the dance-floor bar. "Hi."

The bartender put her hands in her jeans pockets. "What's up?"

"Um." Gary couldn't keep his eyes from darting, looking for time clues. "Not much."

The bartender waited for him to make up his mind. When he didn't take a hint from her pause, she gave her patented seal laugh and said broadly, "Would you care to order an alcoholic beverage?"

He nodded to a bottle on the bar, whatever it was.

"Summit? You got it."

Next to him at the bar, a Rasta man was perched on a bar stool, beaming a wide grin of straight teeth at Gary.

Ignoring him, Gary turned his ear to the music playing for a clue: James Brown. Mid-fifties. James cranked out albums well into the next century, so that was no help.

Out of the corner of his eye, Gary could see that absurd grin still shining at him. Rasta's dreadlocks were gathered in a black knit tam and his threadbare t-shirt read Sesame Street Live! He was so huge it didn't seem possible that the bar stool could be comfortable for him, like a pear propped atop a thimble. He kept time, tapping fingers on the bar - on the one, Gary noticed.

Damn. A wayfarer.

The bartender brought Gary's beer and he paid with 1967 dollars, hoping he wasn't too far post-2000, when they reformatted the paper currency. After a tense wait, she brought him change and knocked on the bar when he tipped her.

The Rasta man leaned toward Gary. "Do you know when you are?"

Gary took another look at the crowd. "Name brands are an advanced fad here, but none of the kids have photo-dentistry." He took a sip. "1995? 2005? Maybe 2010."

"You're in Minneapolis. Parliament starts in a few minutes." Rasta man raised his eyebrows at Gary as if watching for his reaction.

Gary said with fright, "P-Funk?"

"Parliament. Funkadelic. P-Funk. Whatever you want to call em, tonight's their night. Yes." Rasta man said, deep and strong, not just an affirmative but an affirmation.

"Parliament? Here? What is this, like, 1977?" he asked hopefully.

"It's 1996," Rasta man took a smug drink.

Gary's face fell with dread. "Which Minneapolis 1996? The Minneapolis 1996? No. No. I'm always precise." He looked back at the dark nook where he'd unfolded. "I have to get out!"

"You can't. Not now."

Gary tried to unfold, but there he remained, beer foaming in front of him at the end of time. "I was so careful to avoid this moment! How could this happen?"

Rasta laughed a low, almost noiseless laugh, but Gary felt it in his solar plexus like a sub-bass woofer. "That's so funny. You tee-tees know to avoid Parliament in Minneapolis 1996, but not why."

Gary gave him a blank stare.

"OK, let me tell ya 'bout the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees. You know about the Big Clap?"

"Sure. Who doesn't? Well, they would call it the Big Bang." Gary lifted his beer toward the dance floor full of now-timers.

"Show me, if you know."

Gary held up his hands, palms flat against each other, representing the two planes of reality, positive and negative, starting out close, building up energy, and flooding their respective universes with heat. He separated his hands, representing the light and dark planes' slow separation from one another, expanding the fifth dimension between them – more heat, more energy pumping. Then he clapped, planes rushing back together. He clapped again, showing the bass line cycle of the universe. And again.

And when he clapped each time, Rasta man clapped with him, nodding, smiling. "The Diva and the Eleatic One finally meet," said Rasta, "tonight."

Lowering his hands, Gary said, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"The Eleatic One – the all being – and the Diva? Mother fucking nature? No? Well, I guess no one knows the Incompatible Lovers no more. But here's a word you do know," sighed the Rasta man, clapping again. "Ekpyriosis."

Gary looked at Rasta's hands. "No. No way."

"Yup. All timelines in this universe are threading into Minneapolis 1996 – tonight – and then," Rasta raised his glass, mouthing the word, "boom."

Gary had just left hyperIstanbul, his apartment, his maps. There had to be a way to get back, an escape hatch. "Have the hypercities collapsed yet?"

"Just did. That's why we got so many hypsters in the house. Everyone's coming for one last dance." Rasta man waved to a trio of time travelers in funky Dr. Seuss hats who were trying hard to blend. Rasta man made a mudra with his right hand. "Yes."

Gary had planned on crashing and taping a little known jam session between Ginger Baker, Steven Stills, Bob Dylan, and John Entwhistle at a Soho bar, the night they all overdosed in that timeline. "I don't get it. You're a wayfarer, right? You could unfold in another quantum universe that isn't collapsing," said Gary.

"Oui. I am literally out of time," smiled Rasta. "But of all the quantum universes, quantum Couples, quantum ekpyrioses, quantum quanta - this is the place for me."

Gary, in an anguished whisper, said, "Why?"

"For I am one," said Rasta, mudra raised. "But the real question is why are you resisting the universal mating dance? You like a little kid watching animals mate who goes, 'Mommy, are they fighting?'" Rasta found this metaphor hilarious, dropping his head and suppressing his laugh with a sss, sss, sss! "You gotta get hip. This universe and all its timelines stand on the verge of getting it on, tee-tee! This is about love, not death, the refunkifying of all that is funkless, the cosmic funk theory. The funk and nothing but the funk." Heavy eyes appraised Gary's wardrobe. "And you about as defunked as they come."

"Funk you," Gary muttered. "You're evil."

"We're beyond good and evil, now." Rasta pointed an accusing stare at Gary. "But this could be karma, tee-tee."

"Look, man, I never interfere or remove anything from a time-point. Ever," Gary said, raising his voice. "I'm so clean I squeak when I time travel."

"Yeah? You so clean, why you here?"

Gary squirmed, looking for angry words. All he could say was, "It was a mistake."

Rasta man shook his head. "Maybe the universe wants to hear your dying song for a change."

Gary sat watching as the dance floor suffused with characters from the fifth dimension – hyperBombay hypsters, cyberfunks in platform shoes, sinonauts and afronauts, tight-denimed houris, cubist incubi and, in sequined leather fringe, a synthetic yet alluring suck-u-buy – all flushing into this quantum sink. They seemed exactly like this wayfarer, a flock of happy moths batting themselves at a deadly disco strobe.

"Look, you been living the dead life, tee-tee. It's time to turn the Animal loose in you, get refunked," said Rasta, clapping measures of four in time to James Brown. "We all on the One tonight. The Diva. The Eleatic One. You. Me. Every heart beat in rhythm in the cosmos. Boom." He clapped. "And once destroyed, all matter comes back. Back to this moment. Boom." Clap. "Every little thing. Atoms, electrons, protons. Croutons." Rasta laughed, drank, laughed again. "Crew cuts and cold cuts and pastrami, Ferris wheels and wheel barrows and wagon wheels. Clean shirts and short skirts and card sharks and snow leopards. Snow drifts. All upon the One. " He clapped his hands one last time and held them together. "Boom."

The house lights dimmed. A shiver went through the crowd.

"This is your last call, swansonger." Rasta grinned at Gary and shrugged, lifting his considerable rump from the barstool. "You can't take the music home this time."

He didn't choose the men's room, but that's where he unfolded after leaving the fifth dimension, and the Eleatic One came to consciousness gazing at a perfect replica of himself.

Or was that himself? Had he inadvertently gone extracorp, hovering outside his own meat like a ghost?

Oh, it's a mirror, he realized. I'm looking at my own damn reflection.

The Eleatic One looked down at his forearms and splayed fingers. It worked. I'm in a skin! And over his dark skin were threads, very hip threads. He hadn't come to Parliament-Minneapolis-1996 since his last dance with the Diva which was eons ago (literally), so he was pleased to see he could still capture a look. He was wearing a three-piece black suit, pinstriped, cut with flared lapels and bell bottoms, like a costume for a 1970 gangster movie. He felt the cuff. Supple wool. Superb. The Diva insisted on natural fibers.

Music hollowed in the restroom (First Avenue's DJ was playing James Brown before the show during this pass through the cosmic cycle), and behind him, a guy was shaking down kids for pot in one of the stalls.

The Eleatic One leaned over the sink and tried to imagine the equation that might describe the amount of energy he was expending in order to cross over and wear this coat of pores and nerves. Let E equal the total combined energy of my home plane and the fifth dimension's hypercities . . . A scary number, whatever it might be, and it nearly exhausted The Eleatic One to contemplate bundling such a quotient in this meager skin. Like an ontological bedroom farce, his dark atoms spun between the atoms of the Diva's, forever just missing, his dark stars exploding eternally between her light ones. So close it was sexy. So close it was agony. So close it was time to end it once and for all. He was here, at last, nearer his one great forbidden love than he'd been for millennia, and there was no going back. I want here. I want this. I want now, he thought. I want her, I want her, I want her, and I'll destroy my universe for just one dance.

A young white man strode into the restroom wearing a wood-bead necklace and an oily mop of bobbing, golden curls. He looked over his sunglasses at The Eleatic One. "Whoa, that suit is fly, homes!"

The Eleatic One opened his mouth but shut it when no words came - his meat's language centers were still gelling. He wanted to ask how much time he had before Parliament would take the stage.

"You OK?" said the young man, stepping forward and put his hand on the man's shoulder.

The touch was strong and welcome, but all The Eleatic One could say in response was, "Diva."

The young man had to get him to repeat the word a few times. "Diva? Oh, I see. Got a date?"

What a word to use. He laughed, and the bodily convulsion was both delightful and spooky. "Yeah. Date," smiled the Eleatic One.

"Let me give you a hand," said the young man, jerking his head, but his curly bangs just flopped back into his eyes. "Ya shouldn't get so ripped before meeting a lady." He stood in front of the Eleatic One and straightened his blue silk tie, took off the fedora and corrected its snap brim. Then he placed it back on his head just so.

From outside the restroom, a great wall of applause went up, along with a swell of cheering. "Rhythm and rhyme," a deep voice boomed through the club's sound system. "Rhythm and rhyme!"

"Hey, they're starting!" said the kid, turning away, tugging at his zipper. "I gotta go! You OK now?"

The Eleatic One nodded. He felt better, just having a pair of hands tending to him, but it only served to whet his colossal appetite for the Diva.

The first measure of a bass line thrummed as the Eleatic One strolled out of the bathroom. He was upstairs and from here, the club was a seething lake of dancing, sweating bodies - skin, cloned, and synth – with George Clinton, witch doctor of rhythm and rhyme, taking the stage under a pinpoint spotlight. Somewhere in the teeming, throbbing mass, the Diva danced like a gardener among her flowers – waiting for him.

Just like always.

The house lights fell.

The crowd roared for the band.

My girlfriend and I rubbed through the crowd to get as close as we could to Parliament.

The white screen covering the stage came up, and the fat mystic in full funk regalia, George Clinton, walked slowly across First Avenue's stage while Bootsy Collins in star-shades laid down an intricate bass line that trailed Clinton's steps. In his cape of many colors and headdress, Clinton was on heavy mood-decontrol, the taskmaster of beat.

"Rhythm and rhyme, rhythm and rhyme," he bellowed at the audience. "Rhythm and mother fucking rhyme!"

Tracy the Bartender told me that our local deity Prince was off stage. Would he join Clinton, Collins, Maceo Parker and the rest tonight? In anticipation of a DC/Marvel match-up of our funk superheroes, the crowd did everything Clinton asked.

"Rhythm and rhyme," Lisa and I shouted. "Rhythm and rhyme!"

I was jammed tight against the people around me, but the groove got in my bones, shook out my skeleton. Whenever I looked over at Lisa, she was working it hard and looking up at me with her hippie girl hair and those eyes.

A Rastafarian with a backpack was talking to a white guy in front of me. White guy looked like he was dressed for the Sergeant Peppers album cover. "Shakers and Shivas and Shinto temple mamas!" shouted the Jamaican. "Sufis and Sundancers. We all on the one tonight!"

White dude clearly wanted the Jamaican to shut up. "Whatever, man."

"Do what you want all day, but come back to the one, P-funk!" the Jamaican shouted at the stage.

"People here are looking at you," said Sergeant Pepper. "Be cool!"

The band rolled into "Flashlight" and that got everyone bobbing. It was a hit that anyone who dropped eighteen rocks to see Parliament would know by heart - except uptight Sergeant Pepper here. He had all the groove of a post man.

"Give it to me on the one!" The Jamaican looked back at Sergeant Pepper whose arms were now folded, and shouted, "Clinton got it from Bootsy. Bootsy got it from James. James got it from Source, I have faith, for we all come and go from the One." He shouted the number in time to the music.

I was so geeked to see my favorite band I was ready to pee my pants. Couldn't believe Sergeant Pepper wasn't dancing, rolling with the Jamaican and his great energy. I leaned in between them on the heaviest bass line beat and shouted, "One," just as the Jamaican shouted it. Then I went back to dancing.

After a moment, I felt Lisa tap my arm. "Barth!"

I looked at her, and she was pointing to the Jamaican, whose eyes were narrow and crinkling at me in delight. The rhythm rolled around, bass line beat returning to us, and Lisa, the Jamaican, and I shouted "One!"

The Jamaican laughed and raised his hands over his head in triumph. "Yes!" he shouted, and it was like an incantation, a spell of good. The three of us danced together and he started playing with the Principle of Funk. "Badda-da badda-da badda-da – ONE."

I picked up the game. As James once told Bootsy Collins, the lanky bass player raging before us, it didn't matter what rhythm you shoved between beats. I went, "Zapata toota taata toota taata toota – ONE."

The Jamaican said, "Yeah, though I walk through the valley o' ONE."

Lisa said, "We, the people, in order to form a more perfect ONE!"

We went back to dancing and I watched the Jamaican groove. Long ago, I learned to dance watching dancers like him. Can I be honest? Politically incorrect? Tall, fat, black men like him. A skinny guy like me just looks like a bag of sticks rattling on the floor. Not the Jamaican. I envied how much space he took up with an economy of movement. His posture was straight and his hands worked an invisible pair of maracas in front of his chest, hips and head working in time. Wow. I looked at Lisa, and she was impressed too.

The Jamaican caught us watching him and we all smiled like village idiots at each other. "Like this," he said, elbows hitting an independent set of rhythms from feet and knees. "Do this dance!"

Lisa could pick up any move under the sun. "What's this?" she shouted, hair back in a pony tail now, gettin serious.

"It's called, oh, I dunno," said the Jamaican. "The Big Clap?"

Sergeant Pepper watched Lisa and I try to imitate the dance, then smiled wanly at the Jamaican. "Now look who's interfering."

"Ignore him," said the Jamaican, dancing, "he'll die a funkless man. Listen to that high hat on the drums. For real, it got its own boogie, baby!"

My vision grays, but my body feels surprised. The Big Clap is a little like that test where you have to draw a star while looking in a mirror. It requires listening to different threads of the music and working a different part of your body to them. Feet stepping to the guitars. Shoulders rolling with the horn section. Butt shaking with the bass. The Big Clap takes all my concentration, but eventually I have it and the three of us are in startling syncopation, my butt moving in rhythm with the Jamaican's, my upper body swaying in time with Lisa's, all our arms raised as if we're floating in the sea.

Once this happens, it's like the dance has pried the lid off the music for me. Parliament gets three funk-lines rolling, all of them intersecting at the beginning of each musical phrase – the One! – then each musician wanders off to explore, then back to the beginning and over again. I hear rhythm guitar trotting down a staircase of fifths. I hear the lead guitar chattering sixteenth notes at the lead singer's melody, and congas circle the drum kit's rhythm in syncopated quarter steps. I'm in a funk of math. I am in the math of funk.

"Do you funk, do we funk, do they funk," cries George Clinton on stage, "in the United Funk of Funkadelica?"

"You rhyming the rhythm?" The Jamaican shouts to Lisa, still dancing.

"I am rhymed." Lisa closes her eyes and spreads her hands palms down, like she's calling someone safe at home.

He turns to me. "Unframing your mind?"

With feet working the guitars and butt on the bass, I lift my face to the Jamaican and smile.

"Ah, you got the harmony." He looks at Lisa and sees the same thing. "Yes." Then he turns and points through the maze of dancers at a couple across the floor. "Now look at them."

We see a woman and a man dancing the Big Clap, just like us, but they're so synchronized it seems like one of them must be controlling the other's movements. They're lovers, that much is obvious. She: A length of legs and the bearing of an empress. He: Dressed like Harry Belafonte in "Uptown Saturday Night." Her high-heels are set wide apart, thigh muscles flexing as she rocks, and he's about five feet from her, rolling his massive shoulders, closing in. Calves flexing on the drums. Breasts bobbing on the bass.

"That suit is so damn you," she shouts at her lover as if she hasn't seen him in a while.

"It's all for you, girl," he shouts back.

She lifts her hands and makes little come-hithers with her fingers.

He laughs, turns his back on her, then looks at her over one shoulder.

I stop dancing, unable to believe what I'm seeing. They don't touch but they move like they're on top of each other.

"The Big Clap is their dance," the Jamaican shouts at me. "We're all here for them!"

I keep dancing, and keep watching the couple, astonished. The woman hits the One with a tilt of her head. The man hits it with a flicked wrist. Even subtler movements: An earring sways on the One. Lips purse, and a sleeve flaps. A shrug. A blink.

All on the One.

Maybe the exertion has me dizzy, but I feel like I'm being let in on a big secret that I almost understand, and it has something to do with that couple and how in tune, in love they are. Grins from strangers float across First Avenue's floor to Lisa and me, some people watch the couple with open amazement, but no one ain't dancing the Big Clap.

"Who are they?" I ask.

The Jamaican leans toward me, and he smells like sweat and beer, but when he speaks, all I smell is ripe apples. "The truth?"

"Yes!" I shout.

"Are two you going to talk through the whole fucking show?" Lisa scolds, still dancing. "Shake it or get off my dance floor!"

Jamaica raises his invisible maracas and starts to bob, his dreds flaring in a peacock fan of hair as he moves in to high gear. "Yes! "

I'll catch him later at the bar, I figure, so I plant my feet for marathon gyration. Even Sergeant Pepper in pea coat and wild side burns laughs and starts dancing. I see he sees what I see: This rhythm has been going forever. The song changes. The musicians and the dancers come and go. But the rhythm never wears out. We jam whatever words, notes, or beats we like into the jam, explore all possibilities forever and ever, so that ultimately we are not a crowd of dancers, but different expressions of the same dancer only, over and over and over. And over. And if all these moments get explored to their logical and varied conclusions, then eventually we must repeat and recycle time. Back to the One. Back to this night, this bus station turned night club. This bartender seal-laughing at her clientele. This spread of elm-shaped smoke in the air and this man, and that woman.

Boom.

The End

Story copyright Barth Anderson, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com