“He also gave a final dance concert, before an invited audience, at a near-by hotel, the Suvretta House. As Romola describes the performance, Nijinsky began by taking a chair, sitting down in front of the audience, and staring at them for what seemed like half an hour. Eventually he unrolled two lengths of velvet, one white, one black, to form a cross on the floor. Standing at the head of the cross, he addressed the audience: ‘Now I will dance you the war… the war which you will not prevent.’”
*
Father, Son & Holy Ferret, I want rest, I want rest, I want rest. From up the zero rectum of this great green void, at last I’ve come out as sane as my mother before she made me. Was it the voice of the Authority still on me like sleek afterbirth that I heard, shaking my head a bit to knock loose the amniotic fluid still trapped within my ears? “Are you willing to be a nobody? Yes?” Yes. “Then you are free. I condemn you.”
*
So, condemned as such, besmirched like a louse fresh from the crush of a thumb, I was spat out like human realism, cast out. The churches would not have me. The halfway houses would not have me. The myriad jackbag jobs would not have me. And yet, was I not a spy as I was–a devout Christian, homeless, diseased with criminal drugs? To the nearest low wage I took myself and from the incredible hours passing through me made something measly. Under the awning above the grocery loading dock, I stood half in sunlight and submitted myself to a coworker’s lessons on smoking. Hold the cigarette like so. Suck. Hold the smoke, then let it flow out, or blow. Out both nostrils if you are a true animal. And if you are so skilled, out of one only. Best to be elegant with your cancer.
*
The somebodies, what of them? The somebodies, they say, are deeply weak for their identities, which, of course, we give them. We kill them to be one thing and one thing only. Here one comes walking along, snipping people’s ears off with scissors. In their presence everyone learns to listen. The end of God is a mouth. Blah blah. The end of the mouth is God. Now that sounds more like it. A sweet day for the nobodies, who have had to stand by for so long, moving through the vanishing circuits like so much Zen money. For today, like us, they drag God from his inborn lair, face-down through the streets of his literature.
*
Because he was one of the first, wasn’t he? For I am full of increase now, moving through the bowels of Authority’s communal ego—I can, and will say it! Celebrities are feces of the disenchanted, the anonymous, blandly downtrodden, lives too dumb to rise. Here is Monica Belluci, here is Beyonce, here is Jack Nicholson and Andy Warhol and, yes, barely last and mostly least, yours only—Nijinksy! Then we are, here we go, on our mobile thrones, carried across wasteland relevance atop a velvet pillow. As our pallbearers crumble, their children step to take up pillow. The burden, as they hate themselves praising us so, is more than they could ever know!
*
To dance the war, then! A pornography of realism. I lay no preexisting claims on what will happen next. Ballet is life lunging out of death. It says much—that no one now would dare believe it. As I have established, I am of these beings, vibrating among them along the nimble continual string of consciousness. Each time I seize one and become them, I tell them: every day I meet my maker, because I am him. They only believe in their condition, as if it were selected for them, like a body. A body is there to leap out of time, to shame space and gravity, and just as vigilantly, sculpt it! These weaklings, these inborn wraiths, who have never allowed themselves to be brushed so by the unreal greatness of their bodies!
*
A good hard living look. A good look at them. And there they go, one by one: staring back. What do they think I think they are? They should know, I am full gone obliterated back through the insane navel of my animal. Whilst they sit and stare, reduced, like just that: an audience. Cast out at breakneck speed into helplessness. Though to them it feels like waiting for no one else.
*
As I am! No one! One with a body, a Nobody! A Nobody flooding space like a ghost! Hold me close, Holy Ghost! Drowning in the now, new as a death-throe, as full tight with birth as roe.
*
Look up, and there you are. A leap suspends us—you, me, every one of me as you—above and below, unknown!
*
The meaning of life is power. The meaning of life is self-interest in flower. Those who can’t climb it, hallucinate it. Ranting, doctors would later say, is the sympathetic magic of madness. Imagine how dangerous I would be if I were useful! High on the view from up here, where I leapt with a lonely body, and then, from that simple height, one by one, dropped them.
*
Nijinsky’s Head was born on Apr. 8th 1950 in London, England. It has been rolling towards you ever since, and will continue to do so long after you’re gone.
Kyle Coma-Thompson is the author of short story collections The Lucky Body (Dock Street Press, 2014) and Night in the Sun (Dock Street Press, 2016). The title story for this book was included by Ben Marcus in the anthology New American Stories (Vintage, 2015)
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