They all crack a riotous human whip in the streets. They brandish riding crops and woolly flails of human hair, thongs of pale curious leather—they charge through the streets shrieking like banshees lashing out at each other and everyone they see with their crops thongs and flails. The lifers recoil and dodge away laughing as they are struck. I see a streaked stark-eyed face whiz by flapping its arms, a soft blow flutters down my face and breast and power crackles down my body, I catch my breath and my legs and arms shiver with a mindless desire to leap and flail.

I’m in a group of lifers following the students now, panting and shivering. The students are clashing in the crossroads; some have picked up heavy steel garbage cans and bang them one-handed on the ground in a swift driving rhythm while others whirl with locked arms and stamp their feet. Rushing together in pairs, they take each other by the waist, and butt heads with a sound like wood mallets striking wood. They bash their skulls against each other, and their top hats seem riveted in place never budging, seize each other and hurl each other up ten feet in the air—now they have pulled searing-white knives from their coats and slash each other across the face, knife arms swinging regularly backhand and forehand. I can hear the thud of the knives as they hit, but there is no blood, their faces are unmarred, even when the knives hack at their eyes.

They stop and dance, then run again through the streets, belaboring crowds that shout with glee and alarm, wildly trampling the flowers that are strewn down for them from the windows. Now they have come to a dilapidated square on the river, the faces of the buildings here are tall and blank, with blasted windows and rent masonry. Beside a listing stone fountain a few students are waiting for the others, with a rough wooden wagon piled high with human heads. The sight stops me in my tracks and that moment I am set to one side by a pair of decisive hands under my armpits. Some invisible companion, perhaps every follower of the students has one, has put me out of the stream, but that current of blazing excitement is crazing me again and I fling myself back in, rush along with the others and take my place among them by the maimed, outflung arm of a collapsed bridge.

The boulevards belch students into the square. They form a jostling rampart around the fountain and heads are distributed rapidly from the cart. Two men stand atop the pile and fling heads down to upraised arms. A bad smell trickles in my nose and screws itself in behind my face—then it softens, dissolves in other odors like a buttery perfume, and cold autumn wood smoke. Some heads are mounted on wooden poles draped with black shrouds and strapped to the student’s backs. The other two corners are attached to rods with human hands at the ends, making the dancers into crude carnival giants with real human heads and hands flapping as they gambol around the square. Even through the shouts and howls, the pounding of impossibly coordinated stamping feet, the clapping hands and ecstatic shouts, I can hear that chuckle scattered everywhere, and perhaps even from the heads.