­The changes came quickly; she was whisked out of the dust and into the carousel, brushing the dirt from her clothes, swearing she knew the dances and the demands, promising she'd catch on quick. They gave her an old dress of Grille de Egout's and told her, all right.

Her first skirt was red and, compared to the frilled and vibrant ones worn by the rest of the dancers, ragged. She thought it was beautiful. And she danced, small and dark, awkward in the first full skirts she had worn in years. The dancehall was a seething mass of the bright and riotous colors she eventually came to clothe herself in and it very nearly blinded her. During her first days there she was dazed and dizzy, drunk on the excitement and hardly believing her good fortune. The other dancers—or the Diamond Dogs, as they were known—indulged her wide-eyed awe for a short while, but it was soon made quite clear that unless Nini tugged her head out of the clouds she was sure to find herself on the streets within a week.

At that, she quickly pulled herself back down to earth, where she fervently swore her feet, which were growing increasingly more nimble, would remain. And, for a time, they did. When she grew overly fond of absinthe, they stayed sprawled on the tough wood floor of her room along with the rest of her. When she could stand it no longer and ran back to the opium dens, they faithfully carried her there and back before the busiest part of the evening. When she encountered charges who proved troublesome, she often opened her eyes to the sight of her own feet, bare and bruised, bent before her on the cold stones of an alleyway. But Nini had long since grown accustomed to brutality—it was the opulence of the dancehall that was truly new to her.

The intricacies of her new life differed remarkably from the lethargic laissez-faire environment of the opium dens. She soon discovered the dividing line between the common prostitute and the can-can dancer—the dancer had more than one means of making a living, and could therefore afford more standards and scruples than her lower-class counterpart. She came to this conclusion when one of the girls asked her disdainfully one day if she had known that no one from the hall would ever stoop so low as to even glance down the street Nini had chosen to explore last night. Nini had defensively tried to explain that she had been acquainted with the street for years and knew it well enough to be certain it yielded more profits than one might think, but the girl had turned on her heel and disappeared in a swirl of skirts. "Don't do it again," she had called over her shoulder, "else people're going to get the wrong idea about you."

Afterward, Nini had been more careful and turned to different methods of maximizing her income, still struggling to adapt. In the opium dens, no one had cared in the least how others perceived him. The entire area had been one gigantic blur, nothing quite coherent. The hall was different. Perceptions, it seemed, were everything, and the better one was perceived, the more likely one's chances were of gaining prestige. Nini had never before needed to concern herself with prestige, but she soon realized that an excellent way to acquire it was to produce talents and abilities that no one else possessed.

This discovery was made almost accidentally. Recalling how beneficial walking on her hands had been in the dens, she tried it again, hoping fervently no one would see it as degrading. Instead, they seemed shocked that Nini, new as she was to the business, had any sort of talent at all, and she caught quite a few of them eyeing her with envy. From then on, her place among the Diamond Dogs was secure. Zidler took a liking to her immediately, providing her with a nickname, large parts to play in any given evening's revelry, and seeing to it that she received a great deal of recognition. She was good for business, he told her, and laughingly claimed the acrobats should watch out for her.

When the Argentinean had come, Nini had learned what he had been willing to

teach, adding a new dance to the list of skills that were exclusively hers. She drank in the glamour of her new position, spinning and shivering in the excitement it offered, feeding on cheers and music. She had a small room nearby and paid the rent herself. She finally felt she belonged somewhere and the dancehall, with its offers of salvation and the path to a better way of living through dance, was it.

For a time, she loved it. Her unknown benefactor rested godlike on a pedestal in her mind. He had been, she thought, the kindest person she had ever known, and she longed to see him again to proudly prove she had followed his advice. But after years of dancing for her life in the hall, she developed a rather cynical turn of mind. The artificiality of her occupation nauseated her, from the laughter she forced out of her throat to the skirt she numbly tossed over her knees; it made her feel like the beribboned girl she had once been, pretending for all she was worth. She had managed to live within the mass of backstabbing and deceit and she had learned the importance of portraying herself properly, but she had begun to wonder just how much longer she would be able to last.

Her daydreams, which had previously consisted of herself parading her new life before her benefactor, gradually changed. They retained the hope that he would come back, only now, instead of gratefully flaunting her happiness, Nini saw herself dancing before him. She saw him reaching out an arm and holding up one finger, and she could almost hear him murmur, "Stop, you've had enough of this. Come, I know a place for you, a better place than this. You can't be a can-can dancer forever, you know, and besides, keeping up appearances is far more strenuous than it's worth and it never amounts to anything and once you can't dance anymore where will you go and what will you do? I know you don't know, so come with me."

And his face, which was growing more and more indistinct with each memory, would shift until it became Edouard's.

"Don't be an idiot, Lini," his reedy voice chided inside her head. "Pretty soon it's not gonna work anymore; you'll reach a certain age and it'll be over—you'll just get too old to make anything off it. What're you gonna do once you get too old? You're almost too old already."

She wondered then if she would have been better off wasting away in one of the dens instead of dancing frenetically with personal scruples and the perceptions of others balanced on her back. And she began to truly resent the man who had told her, "Come, I know a place for you," for making her what she had become. She found herself frequently thinking about the future and hated herself for it; she had never thought that way in the dens, never even assumed she would live long enough to need any long-term plans.

But somehow she had survived, left with hazy memories, a blank desert of a future and, at twenty-four, a stubborn line alongside her mouth and a bitter squint to her eyes. She had virtually no idea what she wanted out of life, only that the idea of spending the rest of it in the hall made her stomach turn. She had seen what happened to dancers who chose that path; several of the costumers at the hall had once danced for a living. And there they remained, wrinkling within their high-necked dresses while they sat in the dry air away from the dance floor, stoically sewing with arthritic fingers and starving away on the small salaries they received for doing something Nini was certain none of them found particularly enjoyable.

It was the way of dance, she thought bluntly, beautiful but brief, and after it was over there was precious little left to turn to. The thought steadily infiltrated her mind, creeping across the desert of her uncertainty until the dancehall sickened her more than the opium ever had.

What're you gonna do once you get too old?

And when she ceased to see any meaning in the mechanically dystopian nights and she fell one evening trying to walk on her hands, she began to wish more than ever that he would come again and take her away.

So she went back to the opium dens in the absurd hope that she would encounter him again. Take me back, she would tell him. I don't like this anymore and I want to go home. She never admitted to herself that she had no more home to go back to than she had future to look forward to, and instead she found herself returning to the dens more and more often, waiting for him to come again and offer another solution, a way out of the desert that still stretched before her. Every now and then she missed nights at the dancehall, but there was a new main attraction and, although she was scolded upon her return, Nini knew her own absence hardly mattered. And sometimes she would turn into fifteen-year-old Lini again, taking whatever came her way in order to pay for opium and possibly food, caring nothing for scruples or impressions. But nothing was quite the same.

Please, I don't like this anymore and I want to go…

Just take me somewhere else. There has to be another place for me, but I'll never find it myself. Take me somewhere else.