Beneath The Floor

The ceiling above me shudders. Swollen with the heat of moving bodies, shadows flicker across the cracks in the old wood, restless in the candlelight. I hold my breath—laughter, thin and tired, drifts from between the floorboards. Off to my right, somebody drops a coin that clatters to the floor and rolls towards me. A shoe scrapes as somebody moves to retrieve it. The air smells of dust and perfume.

I came down here first, many years ago. Maybe decades. It is difficult to say when the applause stopped for me; there were no clocks, no seasons, just the rhythms of life leaking through the floorboards. Above my cot is a small hole, no bigger than a nail, and when the light slants just right, it becomes a searching spotlight in the tiny space. Through it, I can see the world in merciful pieces.

I hear them call it a cabaret upstairs, on the other side of the hole. Once, when I was a younger fool, my fingers bled upon the piano keys there while the girls spun in their feathers, their faces made up with war paint and insincere smiles. I would play for them, and they would focus on the crowd. On anybody else.

Now I look up at them.

I can see her tonight, through the hole—the redhead with the scarlet gloves. She moves slower than the others; deliberately, like she is wading through a river only she can feel. She leans forward, and the men lean forward. She leans back, and the men lean forward still, as if pulled by a string. I can hear the strain of their breathing and the clinking desperation in their pockets. My heart beats out in sympathetic rhythm.

She begins with a tilt of her chin, lifting her hands as her gloves catch the light like dripping wounds. The band strikes the first lazy chords, and a sultry, swaying rhythm drapes over the room in velour. Her movements are heavy with suggestion: a turn of the wrist, a slow curl of the fingers... I would have thought the motion effortless, if I had not seen rehearsals.

Her voice is smoke and honey, drizzling through the floorboards, coating my ears in the dark. She sings of trains that never come, full of men who never show up at the bottom of empty glasses.

Trumpets rise—garish, golden fanfare—and she turns, her gown catching the soft yellow light like spilled wine. The dancers join her, all sequins and artifice, and for just a moment the cabaret becomes a feverish dream of color and adoration. She bends low, hair spilling forward, and the men reach out with their eyes to touch her.

She freezes, one red hand pressed to her heart and the other hanging open in silent offering. The silence that follows is unbearable.

From stillness, she sings. Wild and free, her voice lifts in ecstatic release from a body stuck in a single moment of time. The way she plays with the perception of time always gives me goosebumps.

I can see something they cannot, from my perspective here beneath the floor: the way she trembles when the music stops, her hollow smile fading with the applause. I no longer look for pleasure. I look to see. And seeing breaks the spell.

As she sings, she steps over the hole and I close my eyes. I feel the moment breathe, breathing with it and into it under the lustful eyes of the audience. The boards above me split wide open and the light pours in, scouring me clean. Dust drifts around me like ashes.

For a heartbeat, I am seen.

The show moves on. The shadows gather again.

I exhale slowly and watch from beneath the floor.