The swirling piano built further in decibels and complexity, a cascade without regard for gravity. A swarm, or a battalion. As it passed a certain volume, it ceased to be identifiable as piano music; low hums emerged from below that might have been digital drones or low-throated singing; upper registers dropped in from above, pulsing: insect communication patterns or the last frantic rise of an EDM song as the higher frequencies, filtered out until close to the end, are let through.

As the music turned dance, the tent turned club, the sunlight turned away as artificial blue and yellow and red patterns illuminated the white canvas walls, bouncing their low saturated light off the rippled plastic windows. The people turned dance club, too, vendors climbing over and around their tables and into the center of the space, a continuous stream of new bodies now entering through the door and joining together on the floor. Pablo and Marina watched as the population doubled, then tripled, as the bodies shook and spun and found and lost each other across the unheeded painted boundaries (basketball, dodgeball); they watched shoulders and backs and asses and hands engage and disengage, each body unique but all of them together; and none of it was strange or unfamiliar to the translator and the mediator still seated behind their shared table, they had each had their moments, many and frequent, on floors like this, but all of it was a surprise in this moment, all of it faster and more unmoored, and so much louder, both aurally and visually, than anything either one could specifically remember. They watched as a body was passed around the room atop hands atop other bodies that continued to dance beneath the weight; they watched as a body in a wheelchair spun at the center of a group, countless hands contributing in unison to the spin; they watched as a group on one side of the tent took its moves to the floor and a group on the other side took its to the air; they watched until they began to sense, first one of them and then the other, that this was not a show that would end, that this was no interlude and there was no mass exhaustion in sight, and when they sensed this they also sensed the appetite to join, and they crawled over their plastic table and separated into the crowd.

FIGURE NINETEEN

This one looks like a parasite. Which is to say that it takes the shape of what a person believes—right or wrong—to be unfortunate but necessary, and attaches like a puzzle piece to the person’s most vulnerable, porous part. Unable to feed itself, it takes its fuel from the intensity of this kind of individual belief, rerouting the train of energy and commitment to its chosen destination.

For example: