Short Story: While the Nights and Days Away

Leesi danced on the livestream for two days straight, stumbling and tottering across her dorm room on swollen red toes. By some miracle she’d tripped on the carpet and couldn’t get back up again. We came to pick her up from the hospital, and I remember the nurses arguing as we passed their break room. Teenagers do stupid things all the time, one was saying as he smoked a cigarette, hell, my boy skateboarded off a mountain when he was fourteen. You can make them do anything. What special breed of idiot would call this an epidemic?

That made sense, I suppose. It’s not like Leesi was the smartest tool in the box. She liked dancing, and she liked challenges, and you could draw the line between those things to explain how she'd watch a stupid video and try something like this for a couple of hours. But for a couple of days? .

That wasn’t even close to the record, by the way. A lot of the others didn’t stop dancing at all, even as they were wrestled into churches and temples or hospitals and asylums. Even as blood pooled into their feet and their arms spasmed and their bodies stank with dried and drying sweat. Some screamed for help amidst the madness. Others stared expressionless at the blinking red lights of their cameras.

I do see where the talk of an epidemic came from. Some acted like they’d caught that same insanity once they saw the videos, standing up and dancing themselves.. But most of the viewers just acted like people, leaning back in their seats and watched the victims dance their lives away. An enterprising few made bets. An empathetic fewer called for donations to send them food or medical supplies. Many more proclaimed it a curse from worlds beyond, marking ashy crosses on their shoes. Soon enough, those crosses started popping up in the videos, the dancers making each careful mark before beginning to twitch and shake, bodies moving on puppet strings attached from their own devising.

I don’t know much about the topic, I’ll grant you. Even as a kid I was all knobbly knees and bumping into walls while Leesi practiced her pirouettes. But to me each movement was random and somehow nauseating, even if you ignored the state of the dancers. Painful to watch and impossible to look away from.

Almost everyone in my neighborhood locked up their kids’ phones when they heard about the epidemic, though a few parents managed to catch themselves up in the craze in the process.

I guess a quarantine would be logical, so long as you think of this thing like a disease. But if you’re going down that route, you should do it right. And that means not plastering those people’s face all over the news channels. Hell, some of them played the dancing videos, too, straight to the family television sets. But you’d have to do that, wouldn’t you? How could you get anyone to pay attention if the funny words don’t have any pictures?

Maybe it makes me a bad person, but part of me was smug as hell after hearing that the epidemic had kept spreading. Everybody likes being proven right, even if it’s through bad news.

A little vindication never hurt anyone, especially after a week mostly spent rubbing salve on purple, swollen feet and feeding them soup. Leesi had been getting a little better at least, even skimming through magazines and flicking my nose when I brought her trays like the spoiled brat she was. With school shut up for the last week and nothing my parents let me watch, I didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

when he visited us for dinner. Uncle Anish didn’t go up to Leesi’s room to see her, even when we said she’d be all right with it. He just stared at the empty chair on the table, and said the whole thing was about kids begging for attention.I can’t forget the way he said it, like it was another passing fad that’ll go away in a month or two.

But no one had a better explanation.

The Internet’s the fastest and easiest way to get people’s attention, for sure. Not to mention the most controllable. You’ve got filters and edits and nice lighting and a thousand different tools to warp the barrier between you and the rest of the world. But what happens when you rip that barrier away?

We found out after a week after Leesi was brought back home, when the doctors had just begun to make approving noises. When the bloody sores on her feet had begun to close..

The music woke me up, a frenzied cacophony of rap and classical and tubas and any other sounds the neighborhood could drudge up from its gifted children and Bluetooth speakers. It could be a school parade, I remember musing. Yet I’d had to endure those for years and never heard anything close to being this bad.

I shrugged on my clothes and came down to an empty kitchen. During the last week, my Dad would’ve poured a jug of water down my neck at the mere suggestion of being late to bring up Leesi’s breakfast. But the room was cold and empty now. No pots on the stove, no dishes on the counter. The music outside grew louder with every second. I caught a glimpse of a mass of people outside, but not much else.

A brief twinge of worry came through my foggy state of mind, and I found myself bounding up the stairs, nearly tripping over myself to get to Leesi’s room. Her magazines were still strewn everywhere, her bass guitar laid beside her bed and surrounded by dirty cups. Everything was placed in its own orderly little mess. Except her. .

I, rubbed my arms, shivering. It has to be a hospital visit, I told myself. The old folks not deigning to inform me about it was irritating, but notunheardof. The music outside kept beating at my eardrums, with the neighbor’s old trumpet joining the din. I had to muster all my courage just to step towards the window and look.

It did feel close to a procession at first glance, with crowds on the sidewalk giving a wide berth for the people on the road. Most of the bystanders had armed themselves with music players and instruments. Some of their shouting rose over the noise, blind appeals to end this insanity alongside screams of encouragement. Many held up every symbol they could think of, everything from healing crystals to silver crosses that glinted from the sun.

Yet that boiling energy never spilled over onto the tarmac. The dancers were given all the space they wanted, fenced off from the rest of the world.

With more dancers crowded into one space, They skewed more towards women than men, and more towards the young than the old, but plenty of exceptions had joined the fray. I didn’t recognize any of them except Leesi, still in her pajamas. There were bandages still wrapped around her feet, already grimy and ragged from the dirt. My sister’s eyes were scrunched up closed, swaying to a tempo that fit none of the music being played. Her head snapped back as a flailing arm hit her. Then her head nodded forward, and everyone moved on without missing a beat.

That broke me out of the trance. I stumbled back down the stairs, grabbing some of the ointment off the table, then wrenched open the front door to see my parents standing just outside. Their hands were clasped together, and they stared out into the street. My father had placed a cooler at his feet, filled with water bottles and sandwiches wrapped in foil.

My mother turned to look at me, her expression a mixture of worry and excitement and terrifying normalcy. She yelled at me something I couldn’t make out over the music. I threw my hands up in the air in frustration, and she smiled like the two of us were sharing a joke. She tossed me a phone I barely managed to catch. I had to fumble for the on button thrice, my hands were shaking so much, before the screen lit up.

They’’ll have to dance it out, the doctors had advised. The epidemic was evidence of a psychological disorder, for which the only cure was a strong dose of exposure therapy. Which doctors in question seemed to change from article from article as I clicked through the links. Even the ones who’d fallen out of exhaustion just hadn’t gotten it purged from their systems properly, they’d observed. How else could they get infected for a second time?

The articles linked themselves to talk shows, and the talk shows fed themselves to the other side of the Internet. Only through the endurance of suffering could one be cleansed of sin, I read, a great trial proclaimed by every personal lord and savior. One skimming of a comment section brought up aliens and the Divine Zo-Kalar. A few jokers claiming they should join the dance just to dance away all their sins. Or had they been serious about it? My head was throbbing from the music, and the act of reading felt painful, let alone actually trying to think.

I heard the clatter of someone falling over in the street, a middle aged lady in a moth-eaten dress who’d powdered her entire body in white makeup. A boy with a gap in his teeth stepped over her, and dancers continued their twitching. She looked so small curled up like that, a small pale lump so easy to ignore in the chaos.

It’s like those fairy tales about the piper, the one who led all the children away with his music. But here there was no piper, there was no leading, and if these people were dancing to music it wasn’t to any kind that the bystanders were playing. When I caught a glimpse of their glassy stares, I wasn’t sure they were hearing anything at all.

Police cruisers and broadcasting vans had parked themselves just out of reach of the dancers. A reporter clutched her microphone and shouted over the music. “It’s a beautiful day out here, Jim! At least eight hours of daylight left, and as you can see, plenty of people have taken their sick days off for this once-in-a-lifetime - “ Then she was drowned out by the screech of a violin. The news cameras kept recording through it all, their red lights blinking inexorably. They were hard to pick out in broad daylight, those lights, but after finding one they started popping up everywhere, in tablets and button phones and old dusty camcorders being held up above the crowd. In Dad’’s video camera pointed right at my sister, as if he was taking a photograph for the family scrapbook.

Mom leaned in and spoke in my ear, and for the first time this morning I heard her voice, real worry and real excitement twisted together in her tone. “I think once the reporters leave, we can sneak Leesi a few sandwiches, don’t you think? Oh, and the poor dear surely needs some water, too...”

The sun was approaching its zenith. Its glare turned every detail brighter, sharpened every edge within the scene. My skin felt like it would burn to the touch. Bone and muscle and sinew screamed for freedom, rejecting what my sight and hearing told me. Trying to expel whatever soul my body had to give, I bent over, wheezing, and felt my arms twitch. I spread out my fingers, and winced when they twitched a second time.

“Hun?” Mom asked me. “You okay? You want some water?”

I tried to imagine an answer, but thinking hurt too much now. It was easier to move, in spite of how I had no idea of where I was going. Or maybe because of it.. I twitched and twisted across the sidewalk, and joined my sister out on the street.