The Last Dance

What if the secret to dimensional travel were so simple, anybody could do it?

¹
“You know, there were rumors that Skinner raised his own kid in an operant conditioning chamber.” Leslie was always full of trivia like this. In fairness, the topic is legitimately interesting. But of all the narrow interests to have, 1960s behaviorism makes for some truly weird conversations.

“Not true of course. He built what amounted to a fancy crib that would automate certain childcare tasks. But his work was controversial, and his detractors weren’t above slander.” I thought it was going to be a date. That’s egg on my face. Unless Leslie’s idea of a date is touring the dusty abandoned behaviorism lab of her university.

I wouldn’t put it past her. She really lives for her work. Although postgrads are more like indentured servants than conventional paid employees. “The experiments he was best known for involved the operant conditioning of pigeons. If you were ever shown any short films about B.F. Skinner in school, that’s probably what you saw. Row after row of little transparent plastic cages like these with pigeons in them, hopping, twirling, and eating food pellets out of a little dispenser.”

In fact I did vaguely recall something like that. It failed to capture my attention at the time but I now found myself scouring my memory for any details that I did retain, for the purpose of impressing Leslie. “Oh uh, yeah!” I blurted out. “Training the birds to perform specific tricks by giving them food every time they do it over and over. To create an association for them.”

She beamed at me and I experienced one of those rare epiphenal moments when I realize my education actually benefits me from time to time. Other than the basic math involved in calculating change for people buying coffee. Look at that degree pay for itself, huh? She took the moment of silence as an invitation to continue.

“The really interesting part was when he set the dispenser to give them food pellets at random intervals. If the pigeon happened to be doing some action when food came out like bobbing its head, it would mistakenly infer a causal association, and begin to repeatedly perform that action hoping for more food pellets.

Of course another eventually came, reinforcing the association. But if by chance it was doing something else, like spinning, it would add that to its ever-growing routine. Better safe than sorry! And because pellets always came eventually, it continued to develop a more and more complex ritual that it believed was causing the pellets to be released.”

“Like a rain dance.” I muttered, staring contemplatively at the empty wall of cages. “Exactly!” she replied, “or like prayer.” I furrowed my brow. “Hey now, that’s going a bit far.” She giggled and brushed it off. It was one of her few qualities I didn’t like. Unless you really got in her face about it, she usually couldn’t tell if she’d offended you and would carry on like it was no big deal. Like you were silly to feel anything.

Since I’m a sucker for a pretty face and a high IQ, I let her get away with it. I’m no doormat, but my “lower brain” does have significant veto power over the upper one. The hall of cages creeped me out, and I said so. She shrugged, having shown me what she wanted to, and we headed for the parking lot.

“How does dim sum sound?” Unfamiliar, I thought. But probably tasty, so soon we were barreling down the freeway towards whatever sort of restaurant serves it. Leslie drives like a maniac. She shuts down any complaints about it by pointing out that she’s never been in an accident. “Statistically, that means you’re due”. She wasn’t amused.

I remembered what dim sum is shortly after we were inside. In fact I’d had it before and at the time thought it was less of a meal and more of an extended snacking session. Over the various edible odds and ends, we discussed probability. She’d taken exception to my little barb in the car and, as is her tendency, overthinking it to absurd extremes.

“You know I was just teasing” I interjected. A flash of recognition. But she pretended that she knew. “Of course, I just think that’s a good jumping off point for some stimulating discussion. Now, do the odds of a collision really increase over time?

If you consider my history of driving as one long event, certainly. But aren’t the odds the same each time I drive to campus in the morning? Then there’s the question of whether or not I’m simply living in the continuity without any crashes.”

I vaguely recalled some TV show from the 90s about a bunch of college students jumping through wormholes to parallel Earths. I judiciously decided to keep it to myself as she’d never reacted well to pop culture references in the past.

Still, the way her eyes sparkled as she animatedly described the ‘many worlds interpretation’ to me was releasing all kinds of endorphins in my brain. I saw no reason to interrupt, even though she had a sizable chunk of fried shrimp stuck to her chin.

“So it may well be that every time I make some uncharacteristic decision while driving, it causes my continuity to diverge from the rest. Just because quantum uncertainty in my brain made me do something none of the other Leslies did.”

I mulled that one over. Everything I knew about the subject came from stoned viewings of Michio Kaku’s TV show. It took some work to formulate a question that wouldn’t betray my ignorance of the subject, while also challenging her somewhat.

“Is there anything you could do that would cause your continuity to re-converge?” She stared. It turned out to be one of those questions that was smarter than I realized. Not sure whether to be proud of that, to be honest.

But I was on a roll, so I pressed my luck. “For that matter, if you were to deliberately create conditions in a limited area identical to what’s happening there in a different continuity, would that cause the two continuities to converge only at that point?”

I wanted to impress her. Not render her mute. She spent the rest of the date doing napkin math. I’d sold her on our first date by singing Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” from the lawn outside her sorority house as she looked on from the second story window.

Corny to the point of fructose toxicity, but it did the trick. She goes in for that stuff even more than I do. It’s really hit and miss though. I never know what I’ll do or say that will delight her. It’s like Narnia, you can’t find it by trying to, you gotta stumble across it.

“You know, this is why I go out with you. You always ask the most interesting questions. I guess I don’t have an answer for you. I’m not even sure how anybody could properly devise an experiment to test that idea. I might steal it from you and write up a grant proposal.” I was all for it until she clarified that she was joking. Just about the grant proposal, I think.

I didn’t get into her pants but nonetheless considered it a successful evening. My feelings were definitely growing stronger but at the same time more confusing. It wasn’t yet clear to me how we fit together. What kind of dynamic we could build.

I’m no caveman, I’m perfectly comfortable with a girlfriend substantially smarter than me. But sometimes it left me wondering if she couldn’t do better, and if in some ways I wasn’t wasting her time.

I brought up Youtube when I got home and started binge watching stuff related to 1960s behaviorism. If I could see in it what Leslie saw I figured we might mesh better. When I next looked at the time, it was 3:49AM. Leslie would make some cute remark about the passage of time being relative to the observer. I filed that one away to use next time we got dinner.

If I hadn’t glanced back at the screen as I reached with the cursor to click the little X that closes the browser, I would’ve missed it. I nearly did anyway because it didn’t really register until I was halfway to my bed.

Subconscious confusion boiled over into the conscious. Wait a fucking second. Did I really see that? No, I’m just tired. Right? I deliberated whether it was worth the time and effort to watch the last few seconds of the video.

Curiosity won that battle. I plunked my boxer clad buns down on the cold metal folding chair I’d been using ever since a hefty friend managed to collapse my nice leather office chair to bits on a recent visit.

The remains still sat out by the dumpster, awaiting somebody who could find a use for such a thing. It was a hassle to find the exact video until I remembered the browser kept track of my recently visited URLs.

The footage played back more or less as I remembered. I expected to discover I’d imagined the anomaly. But no, there it was again. I blinked, rewound the video by a few seconds and watched again. The pigeon in the last cage in the row hopped, twirled, bobbed its head, hopped, scratched the ground, hopped, twirled….then vanished.

There was no hiccup in the video to suggest a cut. Skinner kept talking in the foreground without any discernible jump or interruption. The pigeon just disappeared. Over and over I rewound the video to watch the last few seconds. Then I scoured the comments for any mention of it. I was evidently the only person to notice.

Unsurprising given how few views the video had. Groundbreaking experiments lose to headbanging black metal kittens and narrated video game playthroughs in the market of passing interest. I watched every other video I’d been through looking for the same thing. It only occurred in the one video. Why? What set that pigeon apart from the rest?

On a whim I wrote down the actions it performed prior to vanishing. Then watched the other pigeons frame by frame looking for any who did the exact same dance. When 8am arrived, eyes bloodshot, hands shaking, I was finally satisfied it was unique. That was the only unique thing about it that was apparent in the video anyway.

I wracked my brain trying to determine what if anything it could mean as I stumbled to bed. I double checked my phone and thanked God that I didn’t have work today before collapsing in a heap and losing consciousness.

My dreams were varied and bizarre. Endless rows of cages stretching to infinity, warping around in a sort of kaleidoscopic flux. A pigeon was contained in each, performing a different dance. Some were breakdancing. Others doing the waltz. I woke up at 5 that evening, feeling rested and inspired.

I downloaded a plugin for capturing Youtube videos and saved the video to a folder I resolved I’d use for everything related to this investigation. That was priority one, as if it were taken offline or something I’d have nothing to show anyone I wanted to convince of any of this. Or myself. Without that video I wondered if, after a long enough time, I wouldn’t just convince myself I’d imagined it and get on with my life.

I should’ve. But it’s like the hanging thread which unravels the sweater. The one you cannot help but tug on despite knowing damn well you shouldn’t. I briefly considered showing this to Leslie. After all it was something concerning her pet interest that she didn’t yet know about. I doubted there was any gift she’d appreciate more.

At the same time I feared she might think I was being foolish. That she'd dismiss the anomaly as something to do with how the video was recorded, a post-processing prank or some other mundane explanation. Maybe that really was it? Something in me nonetheless drove me to tug that thread.

The first stab at it was a Wikipedia binge on quantum teleportation. I couldn’t understand any of it and before long I was on a page about how sailboats are made without fully understanding how that happened. So I searched for information on rituals involving dance. Rain dances, fertility dances, dances to raise the dead. Nothing jumped out at me.

Until I clicked onto a ridiculously dated website about Samhain. It was an archived copy of what had once been a Geocities site so a lot of the links didn’t work and it was littered with animated gifs which had at best a tenuous relation to the topic of the page. Straining my eyes to read the purple text on the black repeating starfield background, I began to recognize that this was what I’d been looking for.

Samhain is believed by Celts to be a special, liminal time when our world is closest to the world of spirits such that they can more easily pass through. I corroborated this on other websites to make sure it wasn’t just the 1994 ravings of some isolated lunatic and found it was accurate, at least with respect to Celtic beliefs. However the site mentioned something I found nowhere else. A ritual for piercing the membrane between our world and the next….which included a dance.

A medieval illustration depicted some crudely drawn robed fellow performing something like a pirouette atop an elaborate geometric glyph on the ground, which the caption said was drawn with charcoal. At the points where the inset triangle, square, pentagon and hexagon touched the outer edge of the circle which contained them all, there were small red candles.

It looked like what Hollywood led me to believe was how you go about summoning demons and other otherworldly creatures from the realms they inhabit. Possibly the same ritual, inverted? For bringing them here, instead of sending yourself there. I smiled as I imagined some nightmarish eldritch abomination summoned at a bad time, appearing atop the symbol in a bathtub, clutching a soapy loofa.

Aha! There it is. “Ritual instructions”. Only upon clicking it I got a white screen with black text reading “Page removed from archive due to copyright claim.” I raised an eyebrow. How does one copyright a ritual? I felt I had enough to show someone now without being dismissed outright. But could I really go to Leslie with it? She didn’t go in for this sort of stuff.

As there was nobody else I felt comfortable discussing it with, I texted her and arranged to meet for lunch. This time my choice, which is almost always huge burritos.

She never eats more than half but I’m only too happy to finish the rest. Seating inside was all taken, as it often is since my preferred burrito joint is a little hole in the wall. It was a nice day though, the fresh air somehow intensified my appetite.

“Alright, this is gonna seem pretty out there. And really it’s just a what-if.” She furrowed her brow, immediately setting about trying to predict where I was going with this. I pulled out my phone and showed her the pigeon video, skipping to the last ten seconds and directing her to watch the one in the far cage. I studied her face as she cradled the phone in her hands.

Her eyes widened. “See?!” I exclaimed. “Fucking weird, right?” She rewound a few seconds and watched again, and again. As I did before her. She asked if anyone else noticed it right before she thought to check the comments.

She continued to even after I told her nobody else had. I knew better than to interpret it as distrust or rudeness, she just confirms everything for herself as a matter of principle.

I’d found something that intrigued her. It was difficult not to feel pleased with myself. She looked so beautiful like this, wavy auburn hair tumbling down her shoulders, freckled face scrunched up in deep contemplation.

I actually preferred her in glasses but she’d recently taken to wearing contacts and was talking seriously about getting laser surgery. I dreaded it. A face like hers is perfectly framed by a sharp set of glasses.

“Well, I don’t see any hiccup in the video. Off the bat, I’m not really sure what the deal is. Occam’s Razor applies, though. There’s any number of things more likely than a teleporting pigeon.” I deflated somewhat.

But really, the discovery served its purpose. I thought that would be the end of it until she told me she wanted to take me to speak with someone who might be able to make sense of it. There was still ample daylight left and it was an excuse to stretch out the date, so I obliged.

It was a shorter drive than I expected. When she turned into campus I initially thought she wanted to pick up something she’d forgotten. But then she pulled into one of three parking spaces in front of what proved to be a fragile antique of a house shrouded on all sides by maple trees.

“What, really? This is the place?” She nodded, then paused as if troubled by something. “Promise you won’t get mad”. I mulled that over, but stipulated that I’d like to know what it is first.

She looked sheepish. “We’re here to talk to one of my ex-boyfriends. I just want you to be cool about it.” Who, me? Of course I’d be cool about it, I said. The picture of cool. The coolest. Absolute zero.

I talk a big game but it really is primally unnerving to share a room with someone who’s gotten naked and sweaty with your girlfriend. The ego kept shouting “Start a fight with this guy” while the superego kept it barely restrained and admonished me not to show any signs of jealousy. Cool as a fucking cucumber and in no way tempted to strangle.

“This is the new guy?” I was as surprised as he was. Leslie really dated this dude? He was maybe 5’11 with blonde dreadlocks, severe stonerface and a “Sacred Geometry” T-shirt. Sandles completed the hippie ensemble although to his credit he wasn’t wearing socks with them.

He smiled warmly and reached out to shake my hand. I could see in his face he sensed how tense I was, but I forced myself to return the gesture. “I’m Zach. You’re a lucky dude, Leslie is pretty fuckin’ special. But no doubt you know that already. She was my negator for a while, one of the best I ever worked with. Last I checked she’s still in mint condition.” He grinned at her and I convulsed slightly when she grinned back.

“Zach, let’s not open that can of worms right now. You showed me some pretty impressive tricks but all of it’s conventionally explicable. Do you still use that shit to pick up girls?” The two laughed, joked and reminisced as I quietly stood there, rigid as a board. Eventually Leslie noticed and she got to the point of it all.

Zach didn’t seem nearly as phased by the video as either of us. He rewatched it once, scratched his chin, then led us to a library in the basement. We passed all manner of weird old machines on the way that he ignored my questions about. Suits me, I guess. Didn’t really want to be there longer than necessary.

The book he picked out was bound in dusty, tattered leather with a tangled insignia of some sort on the front. Taking care to blow the dust away from the two of us, he cracked it open and began searching for a particular page. Before I could ask what he was looking for, he jammed his index finger down on an illustration and grinned at me.

“I knew it. Of all the phenomena it might’ve been! The moment I saw the video, I knew. It was a long shot but now I’m as certain of it as I’ve ever been of anything.”

I cast a sidelong glance at Leslie. She explained that it was in his nature to be theatrical like this and that he’d eventually give us the bottom line if we indulged him. And he did.

The illustration very closely matched the one I’d seen on the website. When I mentioned it to him he said something baffling about how the Institute tracks down such information and has it removed under the pretense of intellectual property rights. Leslie wasn’t kidding about this guy. This book had something the website lacked, though. A step by step illustration of the dance steps.

To my disappointment it looked nothing like what I’d seen the pigeon do. Then and there I strongly considered the possibility that all of this had been a fool’s errand. But watching the video again, something occurred to me. “Leslie, do you have something to write with and some paper?”

She has this tiny little purse that somehow fits the whole universe inside of it. I’ve seen her pull stuff out of there I still can’t believe. Fuckin’ lady mysteries. But indeed, she had a notepad and bic pen.

I broke down the pigeon’s movements into categories: hops, twirls, head bobs, and scratching the ground. Then I assigned each a number from one to four, and used that to sequence the movements seen in the video.

1231412. I did the same with the movements shown in the dance instructions. A perfect match! Zach stepped in, beckoned for the notepad, and added to it. Instead of one through four, he used A through D. I didn’t understand why until he wrote out those letters in an order corresponding to the dance. ABCADAB. I slapped my forehead.

“Abra Cadabra? Alright, surely someone’s having some fun with us” I said. But he looked dead serious. “Not quite. As you’ve pointed out it’s missing some letters and therefore some dance steps. Some part of the ritual had been lost to the passage of time, even when this book was written. But it would seem that what remains is still enough to effect passage, I’d just anticipate irregularities.”

Irregularities? Passage? And here I’d been worried that Leslie would laugh at me if she thought I took any of it seriously. She’d really dated this guy? “Look, I don’t know what your game is, but I know bullshit when I smell it.”

Leslie elbowed me in the ribs. “Zach” only shrugged. “You’re the one that came to me. Ask a question, get an answer. What you do with the information is your business.”

I didn’t want him to think he’d won. Even so, I took a photo of the dance instructions with my phone before we left. My grumblings about how full of shit he was turned out to be preaching to the choir.

Yet I could tell it still irritated her on some level, so I gave it a rest. The idea of it nagged at me the whole ride home. Some aspects resonated with all that quantum probability stuff I remembered discussing with Leslie over dim sum.

Supposing you did something completely unlike almost every other instance of yourself. Something with no practical purpose, such that very few others were ever likely to do it. Something highly specific and elaborate to narrow things down, as it were. Like how adding words to a search string increases the accuracy of the results.

Until there were only two, or a few of you doing that exact thing at that exact time. Pulling those points in space and time together in perfect, synchronous unity for the duration of the ritual. The more I tried to flush it out of my brain, the more the puzzle pieces fell into place. But then, Richard Feynman once said “Take care not to fool yourself. You are the easiest one for you to fool.”

Letting go of that fear was really when the first domino fell. I might’ve still thrown it all out the window and gone on with my affairs as if none of it ever happened, if not for that.

More than the video, more than the website, more than the book, it was the simple act of committing to an experiment that really fucked me. That’s when I threw my hat over the wall, and the subsequent chain of events became inevitable.

Normally I would’ve scolded myself for buying the charcoal. How silly. A grown ass man buying ingredients for a magical ritual. And the little red candles! But I powered through my shopping list one item at a time with clarity of purpose, not yet believing but certainly determined to call Zach’s bluff at the very least.

The canvas was my white livingroom rug turned over. I figured I could mark that side of it without concern as nobody was ever likely to see it afterwards.

I held the phone in one hand, carefully studying the details of the symbol and candle placement as I went about my task. But then, I’d done everything. The cushion of time between myself and the moment of truth had finally shrunk to nothing.

I collected myself, scanned the sequence of steps on my phone, then set it down. Performing the movements in rapid succession was nerve wracking. Like when you’re ten years old and recite Bloody Mary three times before the mirror in your darkened bathroom. I doubted anything would happen but there was still this visceral feeling that something big was getting near.

Nothing happened. No transport to the spirit world. No demon appearing in my livingroom. Not a single God damned thing. I stood there mildly dumbfounded, then had a good long laugh at myself.

Why had I done all this? Over a Youtube video of pigeons, no less. The silver lining was that I could now definitively say Leslie’s ex was full of shit. This, too, might’ve been the end of it.

Months rolled by, Halloween approached and I had to move the rug in preparation to decorate the living room. I had this wicked coffee table type thing in the shape of a coffin, with a rack for booze inside when you open the top.

But when I peeled back the carpet, the markings were still there. It all came flooding back. The dancing pigeons. The book. The ritual. And now, finally, I remembered. Samhain! The most crucial part, performing the dance when the worlds are closest.

I’d long since determined it was all a wild goose chase I’d sent myself on, yet this realization restored that relentless nagging voice in the back of my mind.

The one insisting that I hadn’t really disproven it. That I had to get every detail right or there would always be lingering doubts. That agonizing splinter in my mind that absolutely wouldn’t shut up until I obeyed.

So, out came the charcoal and the candles for round two. I’d returned to my senses somewhat by this time, so unlike the prior attempt, I felt quite embarrassed by all of it. I just wanted the ordeal to be over so as to permanently silence that damned voice.

That photo turned out to still be there, buried under loads of pics I’d taken on a recent skiing trip. I went over the faded lines to darken them, ensured everything was absolutely right, then took several deep breaths. I was ready for nothing to happen. To again have a good, cleansing laugh at myself and put all of this shit away.

Instead I abruptly found myself in an altogether different apartment. I stood there quietly looking at my surroundings. I blinked. Then rubbed my eyes. Then shut them, opened them, and so forth.

Trying to wake up from it, I guess. Beneath me was a white overturned rug with the familiar symbol drawn in charcoal and the little red candles. But everything else was different.

I opened my mouth as if to scream but nothing would come out. Felt like my brain was coming apart. What happened? How did I get here? The human brain really isn’t durable enough for an immediate reversal of expectations this severe.

Thought is neurochemical. It takes time to process. I’d already invested completely in the belief that the ritual was bunk. Those neural pathways were well worn by now, to the point that I almost couldn’t comprehend my situation.

Could it be a prank? I didn’t see how that was possible. It was instantaneous. How could a person be moved into a different room, or the layout and contents of a room change too quickly for them to notice how it was done?

But the alternative was unacceptable. I kept coming back to the notion that it was an incredibly well done prank, only to continually reject it because of incompatible facts.

Finally, after overcoming the prolonged bitter opposition to it in my psyche, I resigned myself to believing what appeared most likely given what was in front of me. That I had actually somehow transported myself by doing a silly little dance atop a charcoal drawing surrounded by candles from Bed, Bath and Beyond. It truly hurt to think about.