This is the Dancing Man. Of course there had been hundreds like him, but this is the one that was promoted as the archetype. The one that everyone remembers. They were going to put that image on a warning poster but they didn't, because the attacks stopped just after the photo was taken. And people didn't really take any notice of official warnings, anyway.
Looking at it now, I can't conjure up any sadness, any deep emotion beyond a distant memory of wartime, nostalgia faded to a pale sepia-brown: shortages, air-raids, rationing, drab clothing. It was a long time ago, the war; everyone had other things to worry about. The detritus from the enemy barrage that you can see in the photo being the least of them.
I was too young to remember when it started. For me, it was a regular occurrence, a seasonal thing like rain on weekends, bushfires at Christmas or dead leaves in Autumn. Three years into the war, according to the history books, the Enemy began sending planes over, too high for the anti-aircraft guns to shoot down. Instead of dropping bombs, these planes dropped notes. Millions of scraps of paper, each about the size of a Chinese fortune cookie message. At first, people would read them without fear. Very few of them made sense, as if the Enemy understood our language but hadn't quite managed to get a handle on context. They weren't what people expected to see as Enemy propaganda:
Gargling clock oil makes people go "tick!"
Some idiot has forced two chickens into the goat slot
Sometimes you people act like I need a reason
Would you like to put those sticks down?
At first, they were just a nuisance, something else to clean up along with the rubbish and shattered buildings from occasional rocket attacks. A few people began collecting them, looking for repeats, and found that there weren't any. Each message was unique, like a snowflake. They must have had some gigantic machine making them up out of words, scraps of our language that they'd learned by interrogating prisoners.
If I don't do it I won't have to deal with it but I HAVE TO DO IT
Of course, we know I lost it in a swinging door
Naturally, I said to myself, but why?
Can't fight the seether!
After a while, people grew bored with trying to find sense in the messages. A few still read them; of these few, some read thousands of notes. Occasionally, they'd write newspaper articles claiming to find some pattern, or sense, or subtext in the messages. It was around this time that the syndrome appeared.
A street sweeper was cleaning up after one of the message bombings. The scene would have looked very much like the one in the photo of the Dancing Man. He picked up a note, read it, closed his eyes. His fellow street-sweepers playfully nudged him and then, like a clockwork toy set into motion, he threw his broom down and began dancing, waving his arms wildly, kicking his heels up, spinning slowly like a sleepy dervish. When his friends tried to stop him, he fought back with the strength of a madman, clawing and screaming incoherently. They let him go and he resumed dancing with an enigmatic smile on his face. He kept dancing for two days, between infrequent attempts to restrain him, then he dropped dead from exhaustion. They pulled the note from his clenched fist:
'This rice is my family,' 'But I hate rice!' Ha ha
It would have been dismissed as a random occurrence, but after the next attack three more people started dancing after reading notes. One of them escaped and danced until he died; the other two were restrained and sedated. This didn't help; as soon as they woke, they tried to get loose. They both died within a week of the syndrome's onset.
After the next attack, nineteen people started Dancing (by this point, the word merited a capital D). A law was passed forbidding citizens to read the notes. Special street-sweeping trucks were brought into service, spraying a solvent which dissolved the ink, making the notes illegible. However, they couldn't obscure them all, and of course some people still picked them up and read them. Human nature.
A military taskforce was set up to investigate the phenomenon. As the weeks went by, more attacks followed, the same clouds of notes dropped in the main city streets like a ticker-tape parade for no-one in particular. The number of people who started Dancing decreased, but that was mainly due to the street-sweepers and the laws. Someone in the taskforce theorised publically that the Enemy was drawing a bead on the nation's mentality, that the notes were crafted to drive us insane and that they were getting better at it. This was the only pronouncement from that taskforce that made any sense; the others were littered with phrases like 'Post-literate Cognitive Dissonance' and 'Memetic Infection'. Which was ironic; they were trying to hide behind words, knowing that now, words could kill.
How deep would the ocean be without sponges?
I'll be under the floor-boards with my face in the sun
We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.
Insanity LIES truth
At its worst, the syndrome claimed almost forty people in one attack. I remember wondering why the Enemy would risk bombers to drop small pieces of paper that claimed on average a dozen lives, when convential explosives would have done more damage. Perhaps they were trying to demoralise us. It emphasised the differences between us and them; the propaganda we bombarded them with at least made some kind of sense. I remember being terribly torn between wanting to pick up a note and read it, but being too scared to do so. Watching the ones who Danced. Wondering why they Danced, what they saw in the notes that no-one else saw.
The attacks stopped after the one shown in the photo; the Dancing Man was one of the last casualties of the syndrome. There were rumors of the taskforce conducting tests on prisoners of war, making them read the notes until they started Dancing, but they were just rumors. To most people, the Dancing Man was the last one. Some nameless newspaper reporter had taken the photo just after the man had started Dancing, had managed to capture the unrestrained wildness of the Dance, the odd smile on the Dancing Man's face - a joy in knowing some terrible secret, something only he could know. And the reactions of the other people on the street - fear, nervous bemusement. The photo appeared in all of the newspapers. It was occasionally recycled whenever someone wrote an article about the syndrome, or about how the government was wasting our money by keeping the collected notes in a special bunker.
Because the Dancing Man was my father, they gave me the original of the photo. I still have it, in a cheap but sturdy wooden frame. Every now and then, I unbend the clips that hold the glass front onto the frame, pull the photo out and look at the slip of paper that is hidden behind the photo; the dog-eared and faded slip of paper they took from my father's hand after he died.
All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated.