Emotional Performance by Dan Bieger
 (5 ratings)
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SUMMARY: Entry in June 08 flash fiction contest.He could feel it.
He could feel his love escape him across the stage, out across the audience in the orchestra, floating up to those in the parterre, the grand tier, the dress circle, the balcony, and, finally, seeping into the few folk seated in the family circle. Unconditional, total, all he had to give, his feeling engulfed the mass of people gathered to experience him, the in crowd, the curious, the fashion minded, the out-of-towners drawn by rumor.
And, then, as he now knew was inevitable, the feeling returned in torrential gusts, sweeping over him, threatening to wash him under save that his own feeling joined and mitigated the terrible force of the people's love.
He let that feeling surge, a tidal energy back and forth between him and these people. Later, these people might think that this was how the world should be all the day, every day: people loving people, accepting people, enjoying people. But that would be later. Now, it was all he could do to maintain consciousness against the torrent of emotion pounding the shore of his consciousness. Without guard, the emotion would slowly consume first the man and then everyone in the theater, everyone passing by the theater, everyone in the city, everyone in the world, a vector of love emanating from this one building to end the world: raw emotion unchecked, mutually reinforcing to become mutually destructive.
Slowly, he found another emotion within his memory drawn from every less than perfect human being he had ever encountered, the discomfort, the unease, the distrust, and finally the revulsion he felt for those human beings on the fringes, the street people, the refugees, the starving masses in the dark places of the world. He brought that feeling into the love, a slender thread inserted into the surging mass, a thread that thickened to a rope insinuating itself throughout the theater, a rope that continued to thicken, elbowing the love out and away. Soon, the revulsion pulsed back and forth between the man and his audience, the love departed, a faint memory all would later think back on wistfully, nostalgically. Now, all involved found themselves bound together in a horror show, each finding the others - all the others - pariahs. Neighbors unable to physically withdraw from the crowd shrank into themselves in maniac attempt to avoid contact, parents hiding from children, lovers turning away from lovers, strangers grasping their individual alienage as if it were a life preserver created for just such a situation.
Again, the man's strength of will persisted only so long before he knew must move to the grand finale. From that deep place in his memory he took the loss, the grief, the loneliness, the abandonment, the anger, the helplessness, the mystery, the questions that accompany the loss of the one dearest to you. He might have used his parents or the wife gone in a traffic accident or the son lost in war or all of them together. He was never certain but he knew with absolute certainty that this was the feeling he now projected into his audience.
The audience responded. Hand grasped hand frantically, heads buried into shoulders, tears fell in physical analog to the emotion storming within the confines of theater walls. Culture inserted itself in small ways, ululations common to some parts of the world, shrieks common to others. Heads bowed. Heads threw back to scream agony to the ceiling. Heads stood unmoving as if in rigor mortis. Arms shoved hands into the air, open and in fists, in supplication or in anger, always close to despair.
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