Cosmic Dancer

The young man staggers across the dance floor, arms flailing, his footing loose and awkward.

The patron thinks that this idiot has had too many, and signals the bouncers to remove him.

The young man put up a token fight, but is immediately pacified by a solid punch to the jaw.

They throw him into an idle taxi waiting by the curbside. He wilts listlessly at the back seat.

Where do you want me to send her highness the princess?, the driver asks the tough men.

The men turn him over and search his pockets. They find some business cards in his wallet.

Oh! A Petronas guy! Send him to Housing, a bouncer says. The driver nods and he takes off.



Will there be someone picking you up?, the man asked the boy as his son got into the car.

Yes. My father. He will come to pick me up, the boy replied. He was the last student there.

Okay, just stay here and wait for him, alright?, the man said and rolled up the car window.

The man drove away slowly and then exited the school compound. The boy looked around.

Father is not coming. He has probably forgotten to pick me up. Or maybe he has a meeting.

The boy looked up and saw that the sky is getting darker. The house could not be that far.

The boy walked by himself two kilometers down the road to where his house was located.

A sedan car approached him from the rear, stopped, and honked. The boy was startled.

He opened the back seat door and climbed onboard. He slammed the door shut forcefully.

Did you wait for me long? I'm sorry I'm late - I had an urgent meeting. Were you the last?

The boy looked out the window and did not answer back. His chest was madly thumping.



The taxi driver turns around and pokes the young man awake, telling him to get off his taxi.

The young man slowly raise but then immediately vomits onto himself, angering the driver.

He pulls him out of the car and onto the roadside, and takes all the money from his wallet.

The money is for cleaning up your puke, you bastard asshole! - and kicks him in the head.



The boy was an insolent brat. After school, he left without telling, and he returned home late.

When asked to explain by the father at the dinner table, the boy replied, What do you care?

Father slapped him in the head so hard that the potato chunks in the boy's mouth came out.

Mother gasped and grabbed his head into her bossoms - but the boy calmly wriggled away.

Quietly and gently, he excused himself from the dinner table and he went to wash his head.

The boy dried his hair and tucked himself into bed, while Mother and Father finished dinner.

There were hushed voices in anger from the kitchen, but they were drowned by his sobbing.



The young man moans, his head throbbing in pain. The pungent odor of puke greets him.

The night sky is pitch dark, with dotted stars that whirl and flicker inside his heavy head.

The young man finds himself in a place he cannot recognize. There are no known signs.

The street lights are all foreign. The houses lining up the street are all oddly out of shape.

There are hushed voices from the houses. Shadows move behind the living room curtains.

He struggles to get up, but his legs fail him. He slumps. The young man falls unconscious.



The boy arrived home and parked his bicycle by the car. He heard a familiar voice sobbing.

Father's eyes were red and glistening. He was slouching on the lawn chair, looking away.

In the living room, Mother was sobbing. Upon seeing the boy, she quietly wiped her tears.

The boy walked straight past her to the freezer for a tall glass of juice. It was a hot day.

Walking to his room, he saw Father hugging Mother's feet and asking for her forgiveness.

The boy threw his school bag onto the bed and changed his clothes. I'm goin' out, he said.



He wakes up and finds himself surrounded by a small crowd of onlookers. They are noisy.

Bright lights come pouring in from all over the place, garage lights, car lights, torch lights.

The klaxon from the patrol car honks loudly. The crowd moves away as the police arrives.

The young man becomes disoriented. All his senses are overwhelmed by the commotion.

He closes his eyes and struggles to get away, but he feels weak. Pain is blanketing him.

He sees a small boy in the crowd hiding behind his mother, staring in bewildered disgust.

Aghast, the young man turns away and hides his face in the grass. He looks just like me.



The entire neighborhood was there. They looked on as the policemen dragged Father away.

Mother was being held back and calmed down by the elderly women. She was hysterical.

Father put up a token fight, lashing out drunken wild fists, but he was immediately pacified.

The patrol car began to move away with Father strapped in the back seat, wilting listlessly.

Mother threw herself onto the car bonnet, stopping it. The women struggled to peel her off.

The policemen got off and wanted to take Mother away, too, but the women shielded her.

A mild scuffle broke out between the two. Finally, the policemen relented and drove away.



The strobe light flickered brightly that night, in sharp streaks of hues in blue, red and white.

Neighborhood kids, who had never seen such vivid festivity of lights, danced on the streets.



The young man received his baby son, and gently cradled him on his chest, arms folded.

The baby wriggled uncomfortably. The young man shushed, booed and beeped; all failed.

He held the baby up and propped him to stand on his two little feet, forcing him to dance.

The baby laughed uncontrollably as his father swayed him from side to side, hips jiggling.

The young man twirled and swung the baby high, and then the baby vomited on his shirt.

The pungent odor of puke greeted him, but he was not repulsed. He put the baby down.

Y'know, one day you're all grown up, and you're not gonna wanna dance with me no more.

The young man then realized something, and he snickered. Just like me and my father.

As he wiped down his shirt, his baby son looked on, his face anticipating more dancing.






Author's notes - This was written in late 2009 in Bintulu after a blackout. The housing area was totally dark. Everybody in the neighborhood came out of their house (panas) and sat outside.

Coincidentally, one of the LNG Modules was starting up from a bad trip, and the flare shone brightly over the entire Tanjung Kidurong area. We all sat around, waiting for SESCo to bring back electricity, basking under the flickering red and yellow sky.

After an hour, an hour and half or so, the lights came back on, and everybody simultaneously cheered. One neighborhood kid, probably still in pre-school, screamed in joy, and started dancing on the street.

The title comes from a Morrissey song "Cosmic Dancer", which is a cover of a song by 70's English glam rock band called T. Rex. The song starts with Morrissey crooning, "I was dancing when I was twelve.."

The idea of repeating one's history pervade the story. It is almost like some kind of cosmic coincidence, that we will end up becoming like our dads, repeating their mistakes, passing it on to our children.

If there is anything about adulthood that scares me the most, that is it. That fear of cosmic dancing.

The story is partially inspired by a song by the Canadian band Arcade Fire, "Neighborhood No. 2 (Laika)" - specifically the last verse below:

When daddy comes home you always start a fight
So the neighbors can dance in the police disco lights-
The police disco lights! Now the neighbors can dance!

And also by another Morrissey song "Used to Be a Sweet Boy" which was used as the lead soundtrack in a short film project that I did with my college friend Fazrul Adri Roslan in Minnesota in 2003, the verse:

Used to be a sweet boy
Holding so tightly
To Daddy's hand
But that was all
In some distant land.

Used to be a sweet boy
And I'm not to blame
But something went wrong
Something went wrong.

The picture is titled 'Bucket Boy'. I forgot who the content owner was, but I plundered it from Reddit. The selection of this photo is deliberate, 'coz I thought it reminded me of the TV show 'Growing Pains'.

The scene with the baby vomiting, that happened to my brother and his baby daughter Siti Hajar.

The scene where the boy walked home because his father picked him up late - the emotion and pacing for that were partially inspired by select scenes from the films 'Children of Heaven' (Iran, 1997, Majid Majidi) and 'I Was Born, But' (Japan, 1932, Yasujiro Ozu), and partially my own childhood experience.

I have written the story in the terse minimalist style of Hemingway -- a style that I love to emulate.

That means the sentences are short, linear, active, and straight to the point, with no need for flowery adjectives. To quote Ezra Pound, the poet, the use of no word that does not help the general design.

This style fits me well, because I often could not find the time or the energy to write things proper.

Another literary element that is not so obvious is the approach to storytelling ala Raymond Carver - that 'less is more' - that you do not need to describe every single process or detail to the reader. You use the pre-existing images or prejudices in the reader (e.g. a bar scene), and build the story from there.

This helps me save time and brain cells from having to construct the first few extra paragraphs to "paint the scene" before the real story could take off.

The result is a pared-down, clipped story, that feels halted and lacking, but does not sacrifice the plot. It has a strong prose-like quality, almost metered, that seems at first like a long poem -- but it is not.

If you noticed, the timeline contracts and expands and jumps forward and back following the plot. While the sentences are linear, the plot is not. At one point, you are disgusted by the drunken young man. The next, you follow his experience as a child. Future, past, and present do not follow a straight line.

This is done on purpose, primarily for stylization, but also because it provides me with better ending.

This style, I have used it before in 'A Better Man' and 'Love in the Time of H1N1' in Facebook Notes.

To reinforce the theme of repeating one's history, I used quite a lot of parallelism. Elements in the past that occur when the young man was a boy (e.g. police strobe lights, dance) are repeated in the future.

I did not learn any of this technical stuff in college. I just read a lot, and all the good things stick.

I am influenced by everything that I have experienced - film, music, fiction, photographs - and all these come through to my writing, even the peculiar details that you would not have thought mean anything.

Sentences are roughly the same length because I have a slight touch of the obsessive-compulsive.