Ghost Dogs by Andre Dubus III

Author:Andre Dubus III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

RISK

Horror walked into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, then a café in Copenhagen, then the Bardo Museum and a resort beach in Tunisia. There came the Russian airline flight over Egypt, then the madness of a Parisian night, and in just a few months, as quickly as the young and lost can pledge allegiance to a new state, over five hundred men, women, and children were gone, and my wife of many years, a performer and the owner of a dance studio, tells me she is taking twenty-one teenage girls to Barcelona to dance. Do I want to chaperone?

I asked her if she really needed to take them to Europe. She said yes, we can’t let them stop us.

I told her I would go.

In the months leading up to our trip, there came the suicide attacks at the Brussels airport, then the carnage in Istanbul. In July, one week before we were to fly to Europe, a young man in Nice used a speeding truck to kill eighty-four more human beings, and yet we were going. And yet we went.

As I boarded the plane with our lovely, passport-clutching young dancers, I felt I was an accomplice to exposing them to something terrible. In Zurich, then Barcelona, I kept scanning terminals and open squares and hotel lobbies for any man or woman with death in their eyes. But what would I do anyway? Hurl myself at them and shout at our young dancers to run?

But they did not run, they danced. Under the sun, in front of hundreds of happily attentive people.

Then it was over, and we were back at the airport in Zurich. We had a long layover, and we were in a quiet and empty part of the terminal, our twenty-one dancers sprawled in small groups. But a few of them kept looking over at the wide expanse of floor, its surface hard and shining, and one of them said, “You guys, let’s do our show.” My wife stood and opened her laptop and began to play the music these kids knew so well. It was hard for the rest of us to hear, but it didn’t matter. Our young women were dancing at the airport, their long hair flying, their shoulders and arms whipping out from their torsos, and now weary-looking passengers were leaving a plane, many of them middle-aged men and women from all over the world, and their faces began to soften with smiles, with looks of wonder and gratitude as they walked right into it all, this explosion of resolve, and hope, and joy.

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