The Dancer

 

The agar quivered lightly in the rows of transparent petri dishes as Tom Spencer removed the tray from the low-lit storage room that was used for the development of cultures.  The room was kept an even 65˚, natural room temperature to an extent that no unregulated room could match.  A constant habitability hung around the closet-like room, giving most of the researchers the uncanny feeling that under the next tray of bacterial samples they would find their old Risk board, or a coat that the weather never really was cold enough to merit.

Balancing the tray on his fingertips, Tom tapped open the door with a lightweight yet durable cross-trainer.  He set the tray down on the intentionally streaked and spotted faux-marble of the cast plastic countertop.  Staring into the bacterial fireworks exploding in the fertile seaweed-protein fields on their ex-sterile plates, he ran his fingers through his cropped hair, just short enough to make the distinction between coiffed and unkempt ambiguous.

The agar trembled, and somewhere in the back of Tom Spencer’s eye, a forest of rods and cones quivered in the wind of reflected waves and particles.  An army of potassium ions charged across a membrane near the synapses of the optic nerve like a legion of William Wallaces, all battle cries and blue paint.  A million switches flipped and a series of tiny jolts jumped across the slowly swaying gaps of the myelin sheath of the nerve, until they reached a tiny, solitary neuron, like a thousand howler monkies jumping from branch to branch in the jungles of the Congo, evoking images of poor Irish immigrants flocking into Ellis Island, like so many moths to a candle.

This neuron sat among billions of other neurons; it was not statistically important.  Its function was not essential to Tom’s survival.  It sat adjacent to hundreds of more interesting neurons – one controlled for precisely the way people stand when they look at your bookshelf or CD collection (Techno-Children of the Future: MP3 Cyberdeck?  One can only imagine.); another was a key player in producing the rising panic that, when a lost object is not immediately forthcoming, forces you to search in ever tightening circles until you are stuck bouncing between your desk and coffee table, like a character in a very boring video game, perhaps even one modeling that exact situation; still another, when stimulated, provoked the exact resigned melancholy that overtakes any person trying to enjoy hot chocolate that isn’t fully mixed.

Our neuron, however, was the one that fired.  It fired and the howler monkeys swung off and the William Wallaces charged and the moths circled further inward and the Irish immigrants, cursing the Emerald Isle that couldn’t support them any longer, and cursing the America (or at least the Know-Nothing Party [1854-1856]) that wouldn’t accept them spread out into the other areas of Tom’s brain.

Tom looked up.

“I don’t want to be a research scientist,” he said.  “I want to be...”

 

The press conference crashed over Tom like a tidal wave of inquisition.

“Two months ago you were nobody.  How does it feel to be swept out of obscurity into such fame?  Especially as an amateur?” shot out an earnest young newscaster in rolled up shirtsleeves and a tie.

“Well...”

“Why do you think you’ve acquired such fame in such a short time?  Do you think you always had the talent in you?  Did you have some sort of epiphany?” asked a serious looking young woman in a skirt and suit jacket.

“Um...”

“Had you auditioned to any other ballet companies before the New York City Ballet?” The  voice came from somewhere to his left, but he couldn’t tell who had asked it.  So began a barrage of questions from all sides, from increasingly faceless reporters.

“How do you think the response will be to your European tour?”

“Who are your major influences?”

“What do you think the next big direction in ballet is?”

“When you get down to brass tacks, how important is ballet, really?”

“Do you take any message or meaning from this sudden transformation of your life?”

Tom turned to the man who he thought had asked the last question.

“Well...I guess I take from this...that you should follow any big dreams or ideas you have?  And that it’ll probably make you happy, I guess.  I guess people should just understand that you can control what happens in your life.  I guess that people should understand that doing what they love should make them happy?”

 

“...a dancer!”

 

Tom stretched his tired limbs like a sailor pulling his jib into place.  His left quadracep, in this scenario, had a tension most comparable to the tension on the sails when traveling at a close haul -- almost straight into the wind.  His right thigh was more of a beam reach.  Maybe it had been a downwind sail into this situation, but no matter how much natural talent he had, the ballet was hard on his body.  Still, he stretched his tendons with the kind of satisfaction a rock takes in not moving.

The first knock came at his door.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah.  I’m...uh....I’m here to join?”

“Join?”

“Yep.  You said that joining the ballet made you happy?”

“...”

“On T.V.?”

“...”

“Well, I’m here.”

“...”

“I’m wearing a tutu.”

“Men don’t generally wear tutus in this line.  Or, really, in most lines, I suppose.  You do realize there’s a lengthy audition process?”

“Yeah, well it turns out they don’t quite have the manpower to deal with everybody out there, so I thought I’d just...”

“Out there?”

Out in the hall, the throng flapped like a fish (collectively) on a pier (a big linoleum one).

In the White House, a meeting was just starting.  The President was in the late stages of his second term.  The Vice President had only served for the last two years, and felt uncomfortable with the effects any crises would have on his upcoming presidential bid.  The old Vice President was back at his old consulting job, and, although the impeachment had been rough on his pride, he was generally happy.  The old old  Vice President had finally worked up the courage, and he and the First Lady were very happy, although she hadn’t told him about the baby yet.  She was just beginning to show.  The baby was reasonably lucky to not be autistic, although the inevitably impending deaths of his parents relative to his projected chronology didn’t exactly spell out an untroubled future for him.

The President began to speak.

“Gentlemen, we have a crisis on our hands.”

He tried again.

“Gentlemen, we face dire times.”

The Secretary of State let out a whoop as he scored another goal.  The President rued the day he had built the table around an air hockey set.

“GENTLEMEN!  Something has to be done!”

“About what?” asked the Secretary of the Interior, whose spinning swivel chair lent a subtle tremolo to his voice.

“Well.  It seems that one quarter of the country’s productivity has been lost.”

“Lost!?” exclaimed the Speaker for the House, spitting out a mouthful of his Shirley Temple.  “What to?”

“It seems that people just stopped showing up for their, uh...”

“Just, uh...stopped?”

“Well.  It seems as if...it looks like at least one quarter of the country has run away to join the ballet.”

“Okay.”

“And the numbers are growing.”

“Okay.”

“And it’s a serious problem to our and the world’s economy.”

“I mean...isn’t the sort of thing that the Shadow Government usually takes care of?”

“Well...yes.  Why do you think I called you all here today?”

 

One hundred miles away, the Shadow Emperor was in mid leap.  He had never felt so free in his life.

 

First came the allegorical slap in the face to Israel that was the Palestenian Liberation Ouvre’s performance of the classically styled Les Juifs et les Personnes Juives.  Israel’s Chasid Company responded with the modernist Chosen People, Chosen Land.  The piece had a budget that was nearly ten times that of Les Juifs, not to mention underwriting from a panel of five well to do Western countries, and although it was clearly a better organized and executed performance, some argued that it lacked the underdog charm of the PLO’s.  The PLO’s subsequent coordinated regional tour of the low budget satirical piece The Chosen People Chose My Land recieved moderate acclaim but was criticized for its sometimes bombastic tone.

All over the world, ballet companies rushed to arms (legs?) in a limber frenzy of graceful nationalism.  Governments began recruiting larger and larger segments of society to realize their balletic offenses.  But with every dancer conscripted, a new problem became more and more clear; the world had reached its carrying capacity for national dance troupes – there was no one left to watch the ballet.  Soon, the only audiences left were the children and elderly.  Needless to say, neither had the patience for the governmental histrionics they were being subjected to.  So, nearly as quickly as they came, the Great Ballet Wars extinguished themselves.

 

“Do we have to listen to this CD again?”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor, but it’s policy for everybody now.  We’ve already lost most of Congress, and we just can’t afford to lose anybody else.  So we just have to eliminate any desire you might have to move in a rhythmic sense.”

“But I don’t even like Pink Floyd.  And besides, there’s not even anything for me to do anymore.”

“Well, Your Honor, we’ve heard rumors about some of the more avant garde troupes going for unprecedented levels of realism and symbolism.  Dangerous levels.  You know, in performances about gang violence and stuff.  Just wait, things are changing; we’ll all need you sooner or later.  There’s nothing more dangerous than an overdone metaphor.”

 

And so the Realist movement took the ballet world, and thus the whole world, by storm.  The Employed Thirty-Somethings was the first performance to take place in both an undefined location and time, instead existing as an ongoing installation in major cities around the world.  Los Ancianos in Barcelona was the first ballet performance to include no dance and, in fact, no movement whatsoever.  The Life and Death of Lawrence Johnson was lauded as the most ambitious undertaking of the century, although most people ended up losing interest during Act V: His Career As a Chartered Accountant.

 

Balancing the tray on his fingertips, Tom tapped open the door with a lightweight yet durable toe shoe, one of billions of dancers, a member of a ballet that was at the same time the largest and most personal of all.