The ladies dancing – The rotten woman

*

3 ladies move synchronously in the studio while their light clothing, consisting of blue exercise bikinis, moves silently with them, hardly a beat behind. And as they dance they are very mildly disturbed by the sense of shadows on the periphery: men watching. They ever so slightly wish the men would go away.

And the men watching the 3 ladies think the world is perfect, beautiful, couldn't be better. They watch and watch, they take a breath and then watch.

The thing about our maker is that he is so quiet, so reticent. There are long swatches of our lives in which he doesn't impose his presence, doesn't impose. It is easy to play with the fantasy that his attention has been drawn away, for a moment or two -- that he is at least provisionally absent. As though things were explicable all by themselves.

The men imagine the ladies dancing forever. All will be well, no one will die, nothing intends to change, beauty moves like the workings in a clock. The ladies while they dance try to think of nothing at all.

*

In the shower the men wash themselves slowly and think of themselves as very ugly, which they are not. But this is the way they seem to themselves.

*

In the foyer, a woman with blue eyes discreetly adjusts her wrinkles and her jewels. She exudes the smell of money: a metallic mixture of flowers. How it intimidates by not being anything you can quite describe! I would like to join your little gym today, she says. I plan to become oh so very buff and, I don't know, drop 20 years from my age. Just like this.

Wrinkles like fled insects. Cut through the air. Standing in front of the stupefied clerk, Duessa does just that: drops 20 years in an instant. It is as shocking as if she'd disrobed. Look how terrified he is. His soul dangles a foot away. She thinks of tossing it into her mouth like a snack, devouring him. He sags into his chair. Not sure why. Not sure why.

Why doesn't she feel any pleasure? She has all this power to demolish people or, better still, make them small and leave them half alive, so that their death can be played with and savored. But it doesn't feel good anymore. It isn't fun. It doesn't give her any satisfaction to be bad.

It is as though evil were nothing more than a low fashion that had had its very short day. And when the day is past the fashion addict needs to go onto something new but suddenly there is nothing new. Because evil has eaten up the world and left no residue, nothing at least that an evil person can recognize. So there is nowhere to go and nothing to develop. The cultural entity is bankrupt.

She stands paralyzed. Her daughter, who doesn't even see her, walks past her and leaves the workplace heading for home, walking as though to a goal, walking as though having a goal, and so having something that her mother no longer has.

Damn you forever, you rotten little wretch, her mother says, watching her daughter transcend her.

*