The Silent Dancers

I see the Silent Dancers.

Every night they emerge, past the midnight hour, when the roar from the highway is reduced to a somber hum and the street lamps awaken like bedazzled jewels. When the imagination grasps the mind with its many hands and pulls it an inch closer towards insanity.

They float out gradually, not collectively, like newly-hatched tadpoles at the bottom of the river. Static shadows into twitching shapes into dark, humanoid figures, leaping around the light, melting into the black.

Have you ever spotted a peculiar shadow in your peripheral? Or felt an otherworldly presence festering within the depths of some repressed alleyway? Those are the Silent Dancers. They are just so right out-of-place that most individuals miss them or attempt to justify their existence with logical explanations.

But no logic can reason with a wandering mind. The later the night lives, the more they dance, the more defined they become.

“Only the wicked see the beasts” says the television every night as I lay in bed with my glass of milk, spectacles sliding off the rim of my nose. Every night its noises spew out at me, clogging my ear with disingenuous rhetoric and conflicting narratives. But the wretched thing does not know what I see. A machine of false pretenses programmed by senseless code will never know the fear that I have felt in my life, the horror I have witnessed in these past two months.

Forgive me, for I have manipulated the truth. It would be utterly reductive to describe my feelings as purely fearful. I am likewise subjected to a sick curiosity. The dancers, they fascinate me. They always have, since I first began to notice them. I recall my initial observation of them. I will never forget it. A night of terrible insomnia and I had given up on the prospect of sleep. The city street became my medicine, my canvas for delirium. It was one of these nights—a night with no moon and a deep, subliminal, hypnotic darkness that imprisoned my mind into a state of paralyzed fear—when I discovered the forsaken ritual. It began with a single, disfigured hand, lacking any definition, rippling and sifting through the cool air as if to search for the remnants of some misplaced possession. Yes, I still see it, behind the light pole, beckoning me, beckoning the others. It revealed itself to me, its entropic body and meticulous movements, and one became two, two became four, and four became dozens. And soon the whole street was a perverted ballroom, alternating between total synchronization and liquefied chaos.

Am I wicked? Is the television correct? Is this why their shapes imprint themselves into my eyes and lull me night and day? Those alluring, warping shapes. Like needle and thread they weave through each other and around the light and straight into my mind. It is a deep connection. More than machine connection. More than human connection. It surpasses all.

Only the wicked see the beasts, and the man in the second story apartment window, the man with the oversized glasses pressed against the crack between the blinds, a cigarette squeezed between his two pale fingers. I have seen him across the street many times now, equally in awe as I am at the grotesque performance in the street below. How do they move? Where do they come from? Are they born? Do they die? What are they? I reject your question, the television responds. Of course you reject, I say. Machines can not contemplate such abstractions. Machines follow orders and logic.

I look out the window and see silver-tone flames reflected in the man’s eyes. He, like me, watches throughout the night. He does not reject questions. Both of us swim in the darkness of our own thoughts as we watch the Silent Dancers perform. And I believe both of us have reached the conclusion that the only way to learn is by doing. Each ritual, every movement. Repeated. Memorized. We both swing our arms in our rooms, leap into the air, spin around our beds, observe, mimic, bend, and crumple our bodies in an attempt to mirror the madness below. And every morning before the first ray of sunshine peaks over the horizon, before the television begins its ranting and raving, the Silent Dancers bow with faces split open into smiles void of light. A heap of faceless figures, facing us in our high windows, and together we look back with a quiet, shameful fulfillment.

Wickedness is an invention. The language of morality perpetually invents me and all of us, invents and reshapes our institutions, our politics, and our values. If I see the beasts, then I am wicked, so be it.

The Dancers are not machines, they are grotesquely organic. Imperfect. Raw and real. Darkness is all-encompassing. It welcomes the average passerby with open arms. Light discriminates. Light exposes the disfigured, burning terrible truths into the eyes of others with unwavering intensity.

The television is light, a blue light that penetrates the eyes with unrelenting ferocity and reckless misinformation. Half of my generation is blind from a life of excessive screen consumption. I am lucky to have my eyes. Yes, myself and my neighbor are lucky to watch the beauty of Shadows. We understand the connection, the significance of their nightly lessons.

The day has become foreign to me. I no longer remember the life of Light. I only exist in the Dark, when I am alone in my room away from others. When I surrender my body to the Silent Dance. They have resurrected me. They have liberated me from the wrath of Light, from the apathy of machines and the humans controlled by the machines.

Tonight I will go. Tonight I will use my fists to destroy the television, rupture its screen until the light and the sound is no more and only darkness fills my room. I will not use a weapon or any tool. The tenacity of my bones will speak for me. Tonight I will burn my clothes and my material possessions. Like a virus I will dismantle the tangible, and like diseased pigs the machines will die. No more will artificiality plague me. No more will scripted language consume my primal self. No more will Time march unforgivingly forward. Tonight I will leave my apartment and enter the Valley of Wickedness and show them what I have learned. Tonight I escape the confines of the Construct and let go of myself, let go of my inhibitions, my desires, my love for you, my anger for you, my fear of you, my pathetic attempts at sculpting truth out of the raw materials we ourselves invented.
Tonight I become Nothing.
I hope to see you there, my friend.

You see the silent dancers,
their bodies twisting and writhing into inconceivable shapes.
Shadows, cast like a swinging lamp,
sporadic, haunting.
Their screams, silent.
Veins bulging, muscles spasming,
falling and leaping and swinging and spinning and contorting
and morphing into each other, arms locked, heads together.
A homogenous river,
a self-fueled, hysterical cesspool of disorientating despair.

And at the end of Darkness, they bow with faces split open into smiles void of light.
But now, perhaps, you see one more standing with them,
a vestige of Humanity, faceless and empty.

Daniel Young is 20 years old and a junior at the University of Southern California pursuing both a B.A in Music and a B.A in Narrative Studies. Daniel’s earliest memories consist of creating and telling stories. From the first time he learned to use a pencil and hold a violin, he has used both writing and music as an expressive tool for understanding the world around him. At USC, Daniel has studied composition with Brian Head, Camae Ayewa, and Veronika Krausas. As a strong believer in arts education, Daniel has participated as a fellow in the first cohort of the Elemental Strings Teaching Fellowship, where he received first-hand experience teaching young string players and studying under veteran music educators and performers. He has also developed his love of teaching as a summer intern at Kismet Kids Musical Theatre and an administrative assistant and violin coach at the Kadima Conservatory of Music. Daniel currently works as a research assistant at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, where he assists in acquiring evidence of industries that lack diversity. In his free time, he enjoys reading sci-fi fantasy/horror novels, writing fiction, playing soccer, and listening to his friends’ music recommendations.