Perverted yet Tender
by Erin Fairlight
What follows is Chapter 24 of Camps Caspian, a novel exploring disinformation, vertical versus horizontal charity, and finding the incredible in the horrific. Cornell, a conscripted medical facility worker, is attempting to keep Kings alive during an embargo where food and water shipments have ceased. They tell shared memories in hopes that if they remember the people who have died on their watch, someone else will do the same for them when they are gone. This shared memory is the first time they meet the owner of Café Aaliyah, a powerful entrepreneur in the refugee camps, who has created a common area to gather for song and dance now that her brothel has been closed. The narrator of the novel is an advanced artificial intelligence who recommends music throughout. The music to be played for this portion is Doina Romanian Dances as played by Yitchak Perlman. This tune originated in Romanian folk song and was adopted by the Jewish Klezmers who traveled around playing at weddings and other festivities.
I added this additional scene during a group writing meditation Jan led on our Story Hunters tour in India, that began with the same words that the chapter begins with. Two extra additions came as jots during bus rides while chatting with our crew about how they felt their body change when they heard the beat of drums that greeted us upon arrival in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.
We can go in with a spell. I’ll take you there. Just hang on to me Kings. We’re making it through this night.
What would the summon be? How do we transport without falling to sleep and never waking? A password? A flame to focus gaze? A gate to limp through?
You need to hold on tighter to me to get there. I can pull you through.
Who am I kidding? You’re too heavy. How can a starving man be this enormous?
Or, maybe the smell of that night? The smell of humanshit burning down slowly. A gong of a bowl, with wide rim for evaporation, balanced on top of the feces fuel. The powdered bean-milk concentrated to a rich creme-de-desperate-delight. Yeah, it makes my stomach growl too. It’s a good sign. Digestive contractions have to mean we are still fit for, for remembering.
Have you been reborn to the then and there and cast off the here and now?
Maybe if I just drop her name you will be open to the possibility. Or is that too brusk, to call her from the grave? What if I speak her words? Her exact words. Do I need to do a disclaimer for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples to shield their ears if it is her words said in my voice? I won’t include a picture of the dead. But be warned. She said it exactly, and you will see her face in your mind’s eye,
“Speaker music, make them do speaker music. Now. I will dance. Speaker music, prefer.”
She must have said it thirty times. We pretended to not understand. We changed the conversation to watered-down beer and the children stealing gulps. We fidgeted with the pillows and ran to catch the serviettes that went flying in the wind. Like we knew what to do with something to wipe our face on. Isn’t that what a sleeve is designed for?
The musicians played till their calluses split, squinting in the laser beams just shipped in. They knew the music’s every beat so they didn’t even need to do that flirtation of eyes to make sure they were on the same phrase of song. They didn’t know of her demands to wash away their practice with some recorded set blaring on broken stereo cubes.
She walked out like a bride, veil trailing behind her in the wind, hands accentuating her hips. Who needs a bouquet when you have this pelvis? And the band members sat taller. Somehow the lasers didn’t harm their corneas enough to avoid a saturating gaze right in her direction. Ultraviolet light flooded their retinas, scorching the exposed tissue. Short-term damage can include burn — known as solar keratitis. This is the cost for gazing at the sun.
It wasn’t a strut. A strut demands attention. But this was less a demand, and more an acceptance. Something she has come to live as reality. When she walks on the dance floor all shall watch.
The crowd, covered in sweat, had not bided their time. As the music began there was no waiting for a unique entrance to the dance floor, not for the crowd. Their bodies couldn’t deny the electroshock of the first moments of the beat dropping. The musicians were strumming and syncopating, but they might as well have been using a taser, injecting electricity into the audience in the form of aimed shocks causing twitches of the shoulders and head, mostly on beat. A few had taken the power injected into their twitches, and transformed it into becoming animal. Humanness faded. They were part of the collective mammalian species with nails spread out as talons and hips leaned forward angling to go down on all fours.
Those first minutes of accelerated heart beat caught up to them. Breathing heavy wasn’t enough, sweat down their noses and tugged clothing to create some wind to detach cloth from wet pits. And the self-aware homo sapien unfortunately returned.
But they too looked at her. And we are all grateful. To be human. To be right there at this moment. To be lone and wandering adults on the same continent, in the same refugee camp, on the same night as when she came to the dance floor.
She does not obey the beat of the drums. And so the musicians alter. Time signature be damned. She’s waltzing on what had been a march. She’s the barely erected spinning windmill installed beside the ruins of an ancient village. While we are all sitting in the crumbling ruins of cenotaphs, she traces the edges of her lips colored with her own blood. A little bite can’t hurt and the red can yell. It can remind us all that we still throb.
Her dance is managed chaos. Just when you think you can mimic her move, it all changes. Right at the moment that you consent to openly stare because she’s facing away, she turns to catch your glint. It’s primitive and neanderthal. No it’s newly discovered, before its time. It’s never before whimsied, and somehow intuitively familiar.
We were all conceived from the heat that we feel in the pit of our stomachs. And since our births we’ve been trying to feel it for ourselves. We scrappily survive, craving a chance to feel it for the first time, or maybe once again.
The lasers, frenetic and spurting out light, overheat. They join our club of the singed, us slightly burned swayers. Their gimbal heads keep twisting and rotating, but they refuse to light up and attempt a comparative glow.
If she were a bus driver, she would take the risk to drive over the collapsing road, stepping on the gas to dash over the chasm — choosing to live recklessly with stark memories. If she were a restauranteur, she would furtively pour the tap water into the stemware of the tourists and then provide the cure in the morning for those with belly aches and press an orange bindi in between their brows — any excuse to add in a little human touch and a direct glance in the eye. If she were a security guard at the airport she would create faux names, addresses, and passport numbers just for the relief of their loved ones when the plane crashed — her own relatives being lost so easily, weren’t everyone else’s slippery? A little bureaucratic error could save so much heartache with no death notice.
Managed chaos. Perverted, yet tender.
Tell me I didn’t conjure her.
I conjured you too, right to her gaze.
Now stay in mine.
© Erin Fairlight 2023.
Erin Fairlight is recently escaped from the patriarchy, attempting to feed a family of 13 children, four dogs, two bears, and a parakeet by sending in manuscripts like these. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland when not wandering the globe to temporarily shelter in the homelands of her imaginary friends (novel characters).
Erin took part in Story Hunters India, a 16 day creative odyssey organised by Blue Swan Events with Writers Journey.
Jan Cornall is a writer who leads international writers journeys, retreats and workshops. See pics here.
Insta: @_writersjourney
