Where will "Bloch" lead me after being on his pseudonymous street (it is
narrow and all I need to make my ambush) he needed to cross, through the
midnight black, the baptismal straits between garbage cans and façades, a huge
effort of passage for a lone body, the one-hundred-fortieth to present itself
and, I'm not sure how to put it exactly, secure itself to its fate. Two hundred
metres from there, on a perpendicular street, he penetrated, and (some prudent
minutes afterwards) I followed suit, an establishment without a sign, mark, or
identifying designation. The storefront windows opaque, the door massive: a
midnight blue cliff guarded by two impassible bouncers.
Inside was like getting on an old ship, the repeated hammering of an unseen
engine room shaking and jolting painfully from the depths of the hold. The walls
resonated to the frequency of the bass, the floor underfoot vibrating and
shaking. This muffled rumble, by degrees the further you descended into the
hold, became clearer. Rhythmic percussion, its scansion delves deeper within us,
batters against your limbs, courses through your veins, drums against your
heart, assails you from the walls and stairs, you a poor pennant, a captive
puppet that it forces, kneads you, hollows you out, into phase.
There are bodies, bodies everywhere: stagnant along the whole length of the
stairs, driven against the mirror-covered walls which reflect them, dismembering
them, dividing them, dispersing them.
Each gaze spies upon another through the surface of the mirrors.
Above the central area, surrounded by enormous speakers, under the turning
lights which intermittently illuminate, the bodies stomped in time with the
bass, the metallic percussion of drinks with the rhythmic pounding, a spasmodic
mass. Sometimes, a rhythmic syncope, a black hole, an ellipsis, a menace
suspends its pitch, makes its heart go flaccid. A riff cracks, a sequenced cell
of an old melody, cloned, chopped up, and reiterated, propagates from speaker to
speaker, striking up anew and reflowing the convulsive magma of bodies which are
taken here, the bodies captive in the mirrors, trapped between gazes.
I searched for "Bloch" among the bodies, unsure of recognizing him in the
spectral penumbra of the blacklight. My eyes were meeting other eyes: passing
lively like a fencing disengagement, feigning to evade the sharp, burning tip of
a sword.
All around the bodies glide and brush against me, coming to bear against me.
I have become aware of a gaze wandering, passing over me, eyes fixed briefly on
mine, then pulling away. For a brief moment, the dancers lunge under the beam of
a spotlight; in this illuminated empty interval I spotted the sovereign statue
of Bloch leaning at the bar, his pelvis jutting forward, entirely immobile...
except for the inquietude of his pupils, their sweep jerked by the swell before
him, as though he was searchingly reading a sentence or word upon its surface
whose syllables were human bodies and whose syntax their pulsing convulsion.
A man is coming to lean on the bar near him, eyes driven to the right under
a dancer, naked down to the belt of his jeans. Bloch has turned his head in the
direction of his neighbour, following the invisible ray of his gaze.
Break: harsh drumbeats. Stroboscopy: the half-nude dancer breaks down in a
flash into something else, limbs multiplying, quartered -- dispersed in
proportion all at once...
Syncope. Black night. Heart disrupted, weakened.
The bass gets carried away and your heart is drawn along in its wake.
The light returns, trained in a wash of red glow devouring the mirrors,
sullying the naked skin.
I search for Bloch's gaze eclipsed by the stroboscopic blindness.
It is fixed on me.
I barely recover when he's dragged away, crossing past me to lose himself
beyond the mirror I am leaning against.
The man beside him has disappeared.
Bloch slowly detaches from the bar, allowing himself to be seized by the
magma of perspiring bodies. A whirlwind which is made around the half-naked man
drawn into his orbit and the rush of his counterstrike. A reflux tears itself
away from him, carries itself off. Then he looks away, splitting the crowd
toward the other side.
Fit into the threshold of the exit incised in the mirrored wall to my left,
I catch of a glance over my shoulder which glides over me, swept along following
the dancer in his whirlwind. An instant more he hesitates.
