Episode 02
The casting
The school with the mirrors was on the ninth floor of a building on West 38th, and the elevator had opinions about how many dancers it would carry at once.
Ricky took the stairs. His feet hurt in a way they hadn't hurt since he was nine, a deep, new, structural hurt, as if they'd been taken apart in the night and put back together by someone working from memory. He'd found a pair of old trainers in the back of the closet. They were not the good shoes. There were no good shoes any more. There was a bin bag on Canal Street with two halves of a pair of leather Oxfords in it, and there was Ricky, on the sixth landing, with three hours of sleep and a smell of smoke in his hair that no amount of shower had shifted, thinking: casting.
"You look like something that happened to someone," said a voice above him.
Dash was sitting on the eighth-floor landing with his legs across the stairs and a coffee in each hand, which was how Dash did most things. He was big and loud and dressed like a colour had exploded, and he'd been the first person to talk to Ricky at the school three years ago, and the last to stop.
"Long night."
"Long night, he says. It's the callback for the Halcyon tour, Ricardo. It's the biggest thing that's come through this building since Noor's mother, and he's had a long night." Dash held out a coffee. "Drink that. Noor's already warming up. She's been warming up since Tuesday."
Ricky took the coffee. It was too sweet, the way Dash liked it, the way Ricky pretended not to.
"How does she look?"
"Like she's already on the tour and we're the guys who came to see her off."
The school was called Varga, after the woman who ran it, and it was the kind of place people said they'd trained at in interviews years later, quietly, so that you'd ask. Two studios, the big one and the small one. The big one had a wall of windows onto 38th and a wall of mirrors facing it, so that on a bright morning you danced inside the city twice. There were photographs in the corridor. Ricky had walked past them every day for three years and knew them like a rosary: the ones who'd made it. Halfway along, newer than the rest, a girl with her eyes shut and her mouth open on a note nobody could hear.
Somebody had written ARI!!! on a sticky note and put it on the frame. Somebody else had taken it off. The little square of clean glass was still there.
He hadn't known she'd trained here. He'd known it the way you know things you've never quite looked at. Two years above him, gone before he'd arrived, a name people said in the changing room the way they said the names of weather. And now a poster on Houston, and a song coming out of a cleaner's earbuds at one in the morning, and that word under her face that had started, that week, to mean something.
He felt the floor as he went in. Habit. Old wood under new varnish, the ordinary old of a building that had been a garment factory before it was anything. And, faint, from somewhere at the far end of the studio, behind the trestle table where the jury sat, a beat that was slightly behind the music.
He looked. He couldn't help it. Vovô would have had his hand on the back of his neck.
Three at the table. Two he didn't know: a man from the tour, all teeth and tablet, and a woman with a lanyard who kept checking her phone. And at the end, small, in a coat despite the heat, with a face like a walnut and a coffee she wasn't drinking, Ilse Varga herself, who had run this school for longer than anyone could remember and who never, ever sat on castings.
She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the floor under his feet, and her eyes were not, entirely, a person's eyes.
Noor went fourth. Noor was extraordinary.
Ricky had known that for three years and it still did something to him to watch it, a tightening under the ribs that wasn't jealousy yet but knew the way. She was small and exact and completely without fear, and when she moved there was no gap between the thought and the thing, no visible decision, as if her body had been told about the choreography in a previous life and was only now remembering. The man from the tour stopped looking at his tablet. The woman with the lanyard put her phone face down. Ilse Varga sipped her coffee for the first time.
When Noor finished she didn't smile. She walked to the side and stood next to Dash and let him squeeze her shoulder and looked straight ahead at the mirrors, at herself, checking, as if the mirror might have caught something the room hadn't.
"She's through," Dash said, very quietly, not to anyone. "She's so through."
Dash went ninth and was Dash: bigger than the space, funnier than the music, a joy to watch and half a beat late on everything, and he knew it, and he bowed anyway, and the man from the tour laughed, which was something.
Ricky went eleventh.
He'd danced tired before. He'd danced sick, and heartbroken, and once with a broken toe, and it had always been the same floor under him and the same trick: feel it first, then let it carry you. But the floor today was wrong in a way he had no word for. It was soft. It had been soft since two-twenty this morning and it wasn't getting better, as if somewhere under the varnish and the wood and the garment factory and the bedrock of Manhattan, one board in the whole world had been quietly taken out, and his feet, which had been rebuilt overnight by someone working from memory, kept reaching for it.
He was late on the first turn. He knew it the way you know you've said the wrong name. He recovered, because he always recovered, with the whole body at once, a thing that would have looked like a choice from the back row, but there was no back row, there were three people at a trestle table and a wall of mirrors, and he could see himself doing it, and Noor could see it, and something happened in his chest, the struck-bell thing, the thing from last night, and for one terrible second in the middle of the combination he felt his trainers get tight.
He stopped.
Just stopped. Stood there in the middle of the studio inside the city twice with his hands open and the music going on without him, and breathed, and made himself small, and the trainers went back to being trainers.
"Thank you," said the man from the tour, already looking at his tablet.
They read the list at four. Noor was on it, callback Thursday, and she still didn't smile, and Dash picked her up off the ground anyway. Dash wasn't on it and said he'd known that since he was born. Ricky wasn't on it and said nothing at all.
"You stopped," Noor said, in the corridor, not cruelly. She was never cruel. She was just exact. "In the middle. You never stop."
"I know."
"What happened?"
He looked at the photograph on the wall, the girl with her eyes shut, the little clean square where the sticky note had been.
"Long night," he said.
"Ricardo."
They turned. Ilse Varga was standing in the door of the small studio with her coat on and her cold coffee in her hand, and the beat under the corridor was slightly behind the music.
"A word."
The small studio had no windows. It had one mirror, and a piano nobody played, and a radiator that ticked. She didn't sit. She stood by the piano and looked at him with those eyes and he thought, absurdly, of the golem's face, the smear of writing that moved, and how the elves had laughed.
"You stopped," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He had a lie ready. He'd had it ready since the sixth landing. It was a good lie, about his ankle. He opened his mouth and what came out was: "Because if I hadn't, I'd have got bigger."
The radiator ticked.
"Yes," said Ilse Varga. "I thought so." She put the coffee down on the piano, which nobody was allowed to do. "Your grandfather telephoned me at five o'clock this morning. He does not telephone. He said, Ilse, the boy woke up, and the floor is wrong, and I am too old to be right about both at once. I told him I would look. I have looked." A pause. "You were terrible today."
"I know."
"You were terrible, and you were the only one in that room who felt what I felt when I walked in, and you stopped rather than burn the building down, which is, in my experience, rarer than talent." She picked the coffee up again. "The tour does not want you. Good. The tour is a circus for people who have never stood on a floor that moved. I have something else."
"What else?"
"One of ours. A little further along than you. Not big. Not yet. Very lucky. A great deal of potential and no patience whatsoever." Something that on another face would have been a smile. "She has just put out a record. Wishingwell. Eleven dates, small rooms, the kind of rooms where a person can still see the whole crowd from the stage, which is the point. She needs four dancers who can hold a floor. I have three."
He heard himself say it before he understood it. "Ari."
"Ariana," said Ilse Varga, "to people who have not met her. Rose, to the ones who have. Two weeks. You will train here, mornings, with me, in this room, and you will do your grandfather's night shifts, and you will sleep when you can, and at the end of it, if you can get through a combination without changing shape, you will go and stand on her stage. If you can't, you'll go back to mopping. Are you interested?"
The floor was soft. The radiator ticked. Somewhere nine floors down a cleaner was probably humming.
"Yes," Ricky said.
"Good. Tomorrow, seven. Bring shoes that will survive you." She went to the door and stopped, the way Vovô had stopped at the window, and said, in a voice that had nothing to do with dancing: "And Ricardo. What you felt in that station last night, before the golem. The floor. You'll be tempted to tell people. Don't. Not your friends, not the girl. Nobody knows what it is yet, and people who don't know what a thing is, are frightened of it, and frightened people are the only thing in this world I have ever been afraid of."
She went out. He stood in the small studio with the mirror and the piano and felt, for the first time, the shape of the door he'd walked through, and how it had shut.
Dash was waiting on the landing with a third coffee, because of course he was. Noor was on the stairs below, on the phone to her mother, saying Thursday in a voice that was trying very hard to be nobody's.
"Well?" said Dash.
Ricky took the coffee. It was too sweet.
"I got something," he said. "It's small. It's not the tour."
"What is it?"
He looked down the stairwell at the top of Noor's head, and at the little clean square in his mind where a sticky note had been.
"Two weeks," Ricky said. "Then I'll tell you."