CORRECTION
The choreography needs melody. And the theremin section wove together more than twenty voices. The drum machine accelerated to the rhythm of the piano chords and the double bass announced a silence that was followed by the recorded sound of a busy signal in the background. The lights flashed with the first words of the silhouette, the figure, the sweaty face that emerged from the fog. He opened his arms and dropped to his knees to sing the song of a woman who traveled the world with her terrorist cell, freeing animals from zoos, until she was caught and sentenced to life in a prison. That song had topped commercial sales charts for eighty weeks straight, before even one photo of The Band appeared on screens or in magazines. A roar erupted from the crowd of five thousand imperial kids, falling down drunk after three days of celebrating an immigrant woman being elected president. The girl who played the drum machine saw all of this from her corner of the stage; the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end. She saw how the vocalist’s hard eyes fixed on a girl in the audience as she climbed onto the stage, how something changed in him when that same girl tore off her T-shirt and, like an offering, threw it at her idol, before letting herself fall back into the arms of the bouncers, swallowed by the crowd, fainting away. Likewise, she saw the shirt in his hands, how he let the microphone drop, and without turning back, walked to the dressing room, though the other tried to push him back onstage. The girl’s T-shirt was blue and printed with a cross and his name, in place of the baroque Inri.
The choreography needs a rhythm, a rhythm that isn’t moving.
I am he.
Before tossing out ten possible false names, before proposing titles, I dilate my pupil to transplant someone else’s words into the beginning of this volume of autobiographical fiction:
“It’s the libretto of a musical piece and some unspoken dialogues, a beyond-the-text that’s nonetheless of utmost importance when it comes to reading it and that’s not why it doesn’t occupy the fundamental place on the page.
“Don’t substitute voices.
“Don’t anticipate them; don’t try to express them or metamorphose them into writing.
“It’s not the story of a journey, not a spiritual treatise.
“The choreography simply supplies a set of procedures and practices related to experiences that aren’t described or explained, that don’t entirely enter the text, and whose representation doesn’t aspire to in any way, for it posits them as its own exteriors, assuming the form of an oral dialogue between the one who writes and the one who reads, or a silent history of the relationship between what goes unuttered and its two guardians.”
Meanwhile, these eyelids grow heavy.