I’m staying with my father, and I love him but all he does noon to night is dance. Not an ecstatic dancing or an energetic dancing. A long, slow dancing. Shifting, shifting.  The wood floor creaks all over his little apartment from his shifting.  

I’ve learned I can put on music for him, and this soothes his movement, though it never ceases. My father’s second wife has died. I flew back to Los Angeles and when I met him straight from the airport at her funeral, he was dancing. He laid her in the ground, refused the car and swayed all the way home. His home, an apartment in K-Town. Packed three aunts deep, air conditioner weeping, he danced. So, I’m staying until his vigil is over. 

To get out of the apartment I try to find the Los Angeles of my youth. I was only six when Mom and I left. The building I remember is a two-story apartment, light pink plaster, small, barred windows. Vintage already when we got there. 

On my seventh walk, forced out by the swish of my father’s sleeves, I was listening to synth too loud, wishing I was as clean, dry, hard and beautiful as a woman in an action film. A wet blonde, black leather, clear glass, clear vodka, hard ice. Perfect goosebump throat swallowing. 

On the sidewalk a fruit tree had dumped its rotten fruit, trampled and dried now so the seeds cracked under my feet, the concrete a spume covered sea. 

I looked up from the rot and there it was. 519 W Orchard St. The pink now off-beige. The plaster split at the corners. I took a picture and sent it to my dad. Was this our old place?  The front doors were locked, a sticky metal code box on the wall.  

Dad never texted me back. When I got home, he was dancing. When I went to sleep, he was dancing. 

I went back the next day. I noticed the cars.  

All their tires were flat. Mired in gutter gunk. Bodies layered in palm sap and bird shit, pocked by long ago rain. The ghosts of parking tickets gummed up their windshield wipers.  I go back every day, watch for hours. No one ever enters, no one leaves. I try to conjure up the inside. Popcorn ceilings, soft light, linoleum. Dad crouched, sweet sun-bleached denim knees. I had a gerbil, a sticker book. We wheeled around the living room with zebra stripped balloons.  

He is wearing thin. Today his arms hang low by his sides. His sway is small. I feed him beef glass noodles for dinner, and he chews as slow as he sways.  

He tells me a story as he moves. I listen from the next room, saying “oh” often so he knows I’m listening.  

He tells me about living on Maui in Haiku with my mom in the nineties, before I was born.  A one-room place behind a house. Tiny lizards dotting the walls. Four Buddhist women lived in the main house and kept the radio on in the afternoons. They’d turn up a song that was popular that summer, a song about resurrection, and they’d all sing along. The Indigo Girls, he thinks.  Galileo. 

I tell him about our old building, which burns in my head now in perfect 3D. I see the trees and shrubs edging the walls, so stunted by grime they can’t even move in the breeze, limbs tired and heavy. 

My father doesn’t share my courtesy, he is quiet, and I can’t tell if he’s listening.  He’s fallen asleep on his feet dream-swaying. I tip him ungenerously into bed.  I call the leasing office even though it is listed as NO VACANCY. It rings and rings. 

The next night I ask him to come with me. He hasn’t spoken today. Now he shakes his head. I pull him, notice his feet have worn the floorboards three shades lighter. I pull harder. I want my father to come home with me. I want him to come alive, crouch, denim knees, rest with me on the floor. I want a father who is still. 

His lily hands slip my grip, wave through the air in his slow, slow dance. 

I put on a song for him. Galileo by the Indigo Girls.  

How long 'til my soul gets it right / Can any human being ever reach that kind of light. 

The windows are dark. Even the streetlights seem dimmer here, as if they can’t find the energy to light this place up. 

The only light is a glowering red at the foot of the stairwell. 

I hold my piece of paper, where I have written my numbers. I called an old janitor. Oh god, I forgot the front door code, I said. I need to get home. Please. 

It doesn’t feel like lying. This building belongs to me. I have forgotten.  

Every door to every apartment stands open.  

I peer into their darkness. Empty. Empty. Empty. 

I enter the one in the middle.  

The floors are wood, and the walls are light pink. The first room is large, the curtains on the window heavy and dark. 

That feeling washes over me again. Of wanting to be hard, cold, svelt. Svelt and svedka.  But I am not. I am hot, pocketed with grime (fingernails, dirt, armpits, eye grit).  I’ve been hoping for stillness. 

But now I’m straining to hear my father dancing. 

Outside there’s a wind and all the shrubs lining the walls are moving, tossing. Grime be damned. I’ve left the song on repeat all night. 

How long, how long, how long. 

There’s my father, dancing on. His eyes are closed but he opens them to me, he smiles. I take his hand, gently this time, and lead him out the door. We are dancing down to Orchard Street. Two midnight trees come loose on the sidewalk.  

In the apartment in the middle, we dance. We will dance until the demolition vehicles come.