Eat the pill

Saturday sends discrete messages to the feet of swing dancers manque; my partner and I feel the fast beating of jive-love in our soles and souls even before we reach the door to Century Ballroom. We flounce through the entrance early only to discover that tonight is movie night at the swing club, the film is fittingly, Swing Kids. Zach and I never had a problem with disrupting proper behaviour with our swinging flare, and so we take mats off the ballroom wall with the intention of later kicking them aside to dance as "extras" in the movie. The ballroom, which now resembles a middle school gym, is becoming crowded with shapeless, gray, and sullen young people, they sit on their own mats as the room darkens for the film. Splayed out under and around the mats, our group grows quite tired and everyone falls asleep. The movie police do not appreciate this and wake us up with flashlights and angry grunts. Our rebellion began in the form of another treacherous nap. Because we had fallen asleep twice, Zach and I were kicked out. We performed a coquettish charleston until reaching the doorway to the hall where we subsequently burst out laughing with our lungs and with our feet. The movie police heard us and we ran into a hidden corner of the hallway by an abandoned room.

As we were hiding, a lithe, tanned boy came out from the main hallway. Startled and amused, we watched as he did a strange little dance. He threw a bottle to me and asked, "Will you rub this on me?" I thought this rather forward but I did it anyways. The lotion was unremarkable and produced white lather as any other skin product would, it even had the ubiquitous "microbeads" that acne treatments advertise - but the boy's back reformed itself under the foam into what could only be described as a full eight pack.

I woke up in an abandoned factory to see many children clustered around an old yearbook. The boy is among the crowd and shows me his photos - he looks considerably different - now neatly proportioned, Japanese, and pale, he bears no resemblance to the previous boy except for his smiling manner, which I note is a rarity amidst all the children. Akira is his name and he is the brightest and most genetically modified of all the children.

Children are produced here in the name of science, they do not have feelings but instead learn to imitate them with the help of the assistant director of education, an earnest but haunted looking man. He allows me to watch the children's imitation session. He puts a hand on Akira's shoulder and smiles. He draws the name of a feeling out of a hat. I suddenly understand that the assistant director of education is ethically opposed to the operations of the factory and has in the past offered Akira the chance to kill himself. Akira could not comprehend the magnitude of this act, ate the pill offered and threw it up in a retching cough.

Despair is the feeling, and the children do their best to communicate it. Much of it is overwrought. To a person used to the quiet melancholia of existential angst, it appears too disruptive for honest despairing, but the act is remarkable if not believable. Akira stands alone on top of a yellow ball holding a yellow glazed sun. He does not make any noise for despair; the assistant director talks to him, hands him a yellow pill, and walks away as the boy eats it. I wake up for the last time as he falls off his yellow orb.