Jim: legally blind hard-faced goateed blue-eyed buzzcut eyebrow pierced pusher. Anorexic blond girlfriend named Hurricane Sally. Who wears a constant pout of surprise and a purple fuzzy hat. Jim doesn't know whether her name is really Sally or not, although they're engaged now. He calls her Puff. "Like the dragon," he says. She proposed two months after they met at a rave, a week after the end of a month-long heroin detox they went through together. He said yes, obviously. In doing so he surprised even himself. Even her. She doesn't even know his last name.

Jim sells drugs for a living. Wanted in three states in the Northeast, and on at least one Indian reservation. He got kicked out of the same community college three times. "For drugs?" I ask. "For everything," he says, and grins. He grins in that unsettling blind way, like that girl from the O. Henry story. Yes, if Nausicca were constantly nauseous. If she had the pale brittle skin of a meth user, a junkie's faintly luminescent desiccation. Every time he smiles, his face looks like it'll split open. But it's a smile that asks for no justification, no validation. A smile not aimed at a mirror. When I smile it is just another face that I wear. I put it on and I take it off. When Jim smiles, it is a window. Cracked and dirty. But through it you can see something waiting to be born.

The police chief in the town he's in now has taken an interest in him. He thinks Jim's basically a good kid, one who just needs some help. "You're damn lucky we can't pin anything on you right now, son," he told Jim last week. "Otherwise, it'd be at least twenty-five years for you." And heaved a paternal sigh. "And that's twenty-five to life we're talking about. Now, are you going to stop doing this shit or what? You're not a bad kid. And you got that sweet girlie of yours to think of now."

But Jim and his sweet girlie are in a different town in a different state tonight, and they are dancing. The way they dance isn't the way I dance or you dance. For them dancing is a fight to the death against gravity. And for gravity, read grave. "We all fall down in the end." says Jim. "But before that--shit man, you can fly for a while. Just a little." says Hurricane Sally. So they shake and strut, squat and swoop, shimmy and swing. They jump as hard as they can. Again. Again. Like it's the hardest thing they've ever done in their lives. Like it's the easiest. Movements animal and urgent. Ferocious and precise. Denying death. On the verge of it, always. Oh but denying, denying always. It's the gesture that matters. Even though the present is trembling already past. The future too trembling already here. Here already there. There: already gone.