Nightmare on the Conga Line
- Mar 26
- 9 min read
Scott John Murray
The first thing I remember about the line: I was already in it. Before I had time to take stock of the situation, someone was grabbing my shoulders and pushing me ahead from behind. We were in the velvet-lined halls of a mansion, it seemed, and though I could see fragments of what was beside me and glimpses of what lay ahead, the corridors were poorly lit, and everything was obscured by a hovering darkness. Two people I recognized were in the line up ahead, but they were much too far for me to ask what was going on. Instead I leaned in and posed a question to the stranger in front of me, who responded with a rebuke that was drowned out by the sound. It seemed clear that my question had violated something, so I gave up on questioning and instead danced more rigorously, belting out the lyrics and kicking my feet to each side with aplomb.
For a time I proceeded thus—lamenting my breach of etiquette, executing a militant conga. I attempted to lose myself in the mystery of the music and align my kicks more perfectly with the stranger ahead of me, watching as his fleshy undersides shifted to the left and right. I thought that by mirroring his motions and proving myself a good partner, I would not only erase my previous error, but perhaps even achieve some kind of harmony. I went as far as to close my eyes and wiggle my hips, in a kind of improvisational and personalized flourish, which I thought might set my dancing apart from the others.
But after a few minutes of striding forth in this fashion—eyes sealed and thrusting—I had the sudden impression that I was becoming ridiculous. My dedication had not changed anything. I was still feeling the same, uncertain emotions and thinking the same, inane thoughts. I thus had no choice but to abandon my wiggling and come to terms with the humiliating reality of what I had just done. As the line hooked right into a new hall, I found that my physical gestures transformed, almost instinctively, in the wake of my spurned pride. I started to conga minimally and keep myself stiff, raising my feet only a few inches off the ground. I was determined, at any cost, to establish my indifference. I wanted to convince my peers that my earlier antics had been tongue-in-cheek, that I was in fact totally aware of the absurdity of the conga. At one point I even tried to reverse my kicks and sabotage the timing of the dance, but as the chorus of growls around me increased, I found my resolve breaking down. To spite the conga so openly—to attract the ire of my neighbors and allow myself not even the basic sense of community afforded by the line—in these matters my endurance was finite. I lacked the strength to extend my subversion, but I was determined to question my neighbors again, no matter how off-putting or infuriating they seemed to find it.
This time I craned my head to observe the person behind me. I was expecting an aloof and haughty individual, someone reminiscent of my quick-tempered predecessor, but instead I found myself staring into one of the most startled visages I had ever encountered. My neighbor’s hair was sweat-drenched and pinned to his forehead. His lips were quivering, and his eyes, full of water, darted. I felt an instinctual resentment for him, like a body-builder passing some shuddering rodent on the sidewalk, and though I did look into his eyes for a moment (and even parted my lips to pose a question), it was obvious that he knew far less than me about the party. I abandoned my question just as he shouted something, and the feeling of his moisture hitting my face made whatever he said impossible to process.
In lieu of answering him I scowled and swirled forward, resolving to forever ignore the imbecile behind me. Fortunately all of this swirling had not been in vain. My attempts at peripheral movement had revealed that my neighbor was clinging to me fiercely and that his forward march was implacable. If I were to leave the line, I reasoned, he would be sure to rush forward and cut me out of it entirely. Thereafter I would be left to grovel and plead with that horrible man, or perhaps simply loiter at the edges of the party. I thus dismissed the idea of leaving and craned my head once more, this time looking ahead, over the high shoulders of my predecessors, in an attempt to glimpse the facial expressions of those fortunate individuals at the front of the line. My timing in this maneuver was perfect. We were emerging from the narrow corridor into a vast ballroom, across which I could see the profiles of many people as they veered to the left and right. From their collective facial expressions, I hoped to discern something—attitudes, levels of patience, the implied value judgments lingering beneath it all. But instead, I found their expressions as mystifying as the dance. Among even this small population, which stretched across the ballroom but may have constituted only a tiny portion of the overall line, there were such varied expressions as to be impossible to reconcile. On one side of the spectrum were those who were ecstatic—their eyes wide, their bodily movements jerky and abrupt, their mouths frozen in irrepressible, almost psychotic smiles. And then, at the same time, there was another demographic—one more in keeping with myself at present, and thus crystallizing certain suppositions that until this point I had only vaguely defined in my mind. These poor creatures’ clothes hung loosely over their bodies, like they had gradually gone slack and never been washed, and some had shoes that were torn at the soles, revealing pruned feet that had soaked in the swill of the party.
All in all, it seemed unlikely that this was the virgin conga of the people in front of me. I got the impression instead that they had congaed thousands of times, over millions of years, far beyond the point where a conventional conga ceases to be enjoyable. The dance had transformed, for them, from whatever festival it might once have been to a farce characterized by pure, abject misery. And this realization raised further questions, which I now posed to myself, such as whether we all believed, against the evidence, that a change in the music was imminent, or if we were instead simply too pigheaded to consider leaving the line.
I was nearing a complete mental break from the people and circumstances around me when a miracle occurred. We were passing the midpoint of the ballroom when a young woman in a black dress materialized before me. In place of a rude stranger’s bloated manhandles, I found my hands gripping her waist as the movements of our respective bodies fell into total alignment. When I looked down and saw her expression, it confirmed my greatest hope: though she had not said anything, I intuited that she had joined the conga in order to be close to me, and I felt an overwhelming warmth in my arms, legs and heart. Together we continued forward, dancing not the conga of our imbecilic neighbors, but one that was perfect and sublime. I no longer thought about what the conga had represented in its original incarnation, of those confused early minutes (or were they years?) wherein I had congaed for no reason at all.
But then: a tragedy. The woman in front of me, suddenly and without explanation, elects to abandon the line. The song is not stopping, nobody has called her away, but for some unintelligible reason (or, more likely, for no reason) she has been torn forever from the line. My grip closes around the undersides of a new stranger in front of me, and though I consider rushing after the woman, it seems imperative, given the lack of certainty surrounding the situation, to instead preserve my memory of her and defend our spot in the line. Everything that is of value to me has been, in this transition, permanently lost, but before I can grieve this loss, I notice that my mother, who is far ahead, has been looking back at me, smiling.
For her benefit I suppress the anguish born of my tragic fate. As I march forward, singing and kicking my left leg out in feigned delight, I comprehend anew the unabating horror of the conga line.
***
So the music plays on, and the dancing continues, and though my legs and arms become tired—more tired, in truth, than I ever would have imagined (If I had known how tired I would someday become, when I launched my virgin kick, I would never have been able to continue. The knowledge of my future suffering would have crushed me like an anvil falling a thousand leagues unto a butterfly.)—alas, though I am, to be sure, so unspeakably tired, I continue my march. With only a fleeting idea of the woman who danced with me, I return to my ideological speculations, trying to redeem her existence by instantiating some miraculous and eternal projection of the party, the mansion, the music, the line. I try every kind of solution. I imagine, for example, that the answer to the conga must be contained in its wordless phenomena: the ra-ta-tapping of the drums, the swells of the melody, the ingratiating maracas. The music itself is a question, I decide, which the accustomed dance attempts to answer.
But this is so unsatisfying, so inane, so positively nonsensical, that if I am going to derive any value from the dance, I reason further, it will have to arise from something other than sound and movement, to exist instead on some secondary, reflective plane, transfiguring my destitute physical mechanisms into the context of a higher project. And it is only through such a transfiguration that I might be able, within the confines of this implacable rhythm, to parse my true symbolic self from the particulars of the thrusting, and thereby instantiate a pure, disembodied image of myself, one that expands, happy and eternal, far beyond the confines of the hallway.
But just as I arrive at this hypothesis—just when my mind has drifted wonderfully far from the dance itself—I find that my mental conceptions have retreated, and my mind is a blank, and I can no longer make any sense of these concepts, or the world, or the half-formed theories that I had, only one moment earlier, exalted. I try desperately to reclaim the ideas, turning my mind inward, blocking the sound. But the chaos of the scene is too much, and though I maintain a vague emotional impression of what I have been thinking, the linguistic articulation of this impression abandons me entirely. So I console myself, and I resolve to start again, from the beginning—to gather the basic inputs of my surroundings and set forth, trusting that sound logic will deliver me, all at once, to the faraway light that once broke through the clouds.
And I do find my way to the epiphany again—the projection, the disembodied image, the symbolic self that is perfect and constant. But when I try to maintain this idea, to implement it—then I feel again that something is withdrawing. It seems that the borders between the physical and mental are breaking down, and I am thrown, again and again, out of my reflections and back into the dance. It is a return to the familiar sterility, an ejection and homecoming to the essence of the intellectual dark. Finally, I understand that the mechanisms of my cognition have begun to align—at first imperceptibly, and now with sinister clarity—to the mechanisms of the conga itself. In the ruins of my hypotheses, I recognize a pattern, a reliable and cyclical loop, one consisting of initial states, errors, epiphanies, and withdrawals, which has recurred, all through the dance, in exact parallel to the physical motifs around me. I become aware, then, of this new duality, which consists, first, of the cranes of the neck, the fleeting periods of grace, the emergence and disappearance of physical partners, and then, second, of this internal dance, the kicks of my cognition, the man who drums inside.
The people before and behind me vanish. The music is the only constant. In the wake of my latest failure, I resign myself unconsciously. Like a discarded corpse, I swirl back into the unthinking tide. But then—just when I have put everything to rest—then, just then, the person in front of me is falling away, and I am not seeing the familiar silhouette—the hourglass or blocky or pear-shaped figure—of some sprawling new body in front of me. This time, instead, it is the leader of the line who has fallen, and I see that now it is me, first and foremost, that I am the leader of the line. So, I step forward and see it clearly: the looming darkness, the winding halls, the glow of the long spotlight. And I turn my head and see terrified fragments of the faces behind. The song is starting again—the same kick, the same snare, the same flamboyant, insatiable maracas—and I kick one leg out to my left, and I step forward, and I am gone.
Scott John Murray is an author based in New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and descant. He was also shortlisted for New Letters’ Robert Day Award for Fiction. You can find his work on his website, scottjohnmurray.com.