Two days after the second ballerina was murdered, Michael Chow, senior editor of New
York Now and my boss, called me into his office. I already knew what he wanted, and I already knew I didn't want to do it. He knew that, too. We both knew it wo uldn't make any difference.
"You're the logical reporter, Susan," Michael said. He sat behind his desk, always a bad sign. When he thought I'd want an assignment, he leaned
casually against the front of the desk. Its top was cluttered with print-outs; with disposable research car tridges, some with their screens alight; with pictures of Michael's six children.
Six. They all looked like Michael: straight black hair and a smooth face like a peeled egg. At the apex of the mess sat a hardcopy of the Times 3:00 p.m. on-li ne lead: AUTOPSY
DISCOVERS BIOENHANCERS IN CITY BALLET DANCER. "You have an in. Even Anton Privitera will talk to you." "Not about this. He already gave his
press conference. Such as it was." "So? You can get to him as a parent and leverage from there." My daughter Deborah was a student in the School of American Ballet, the juvenile province of Anton Privitera's kingdom. For thirty years he had ruled the New York City
Ballet like an anointed tyrant. Sometimes it seemed he could even levy taxes and rai se armies, so exalted was reputation in the dance world, and so good was his business manager John Cole at raising
funds and enlisting corporate patrons. Dancers had flocked to the City Ballet from Europe, from Asia, from South America, from serious ballet schools in the patrolled zones of America's dying cities.
Until bioenhancers, the New York City Ballet had been the undisputed grail of the international dance world. Now, of course, that was
changing. Privitera was dynamic with the press as long as we content with what he wished us to know. He wasn't going to want to discuss the
murder of two dancers, one of them his own. A month ago Nicole Heyer, a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater, had been found
strangled in Central Park. Three days ago the body of Jennifer Lang had been found in her modest apartment. Heyer had been a bioenhanced dancer who had come t o the ABT from the Stuttgart Ballet.
Lang, a minor soloist with the City Ballet, had of course been natural. Or so everybody thought until the autopsy. The entire company had been bioscanned only three weeks ago, Artistic Director
Privitera had told the p ress, but apparently the particular viro-enhancers were so new and so different that they hadn't even shown up on the scan. I wondered how to make Michael understand the depth of my dislike for all of this. "Don't cover the usual police
stuff," Michael said, "nor the scientific stuff on bioenhancement. Concentrate on the human angle you do so well. What's the effect of these murders on the other dancers? Has it affected their
dancing? Does Privitera seeme d more confirmed in his company policy now, or has this shaken him enough to consider a change? What's he doing to protect his dancers? How do the parents feel about
the youngsters in the ballet school? Are they withdrawing them until the killer is caught ?" I said, "You don't have an sensitivity at all, do
you, Michael?" He said quietly, "Your girl's seventeen, Susan. If you couldn't get her to leave dancing before, you're not going to get he to
leave now. Will you do the story?" I looked again at the scattered pictures of Michael's children. His oldest was at Harvard Law. His second
son was a happily married househusband, raising three kids. His third child, a daughter, was doing six-to-ten in Rock Mountain Maximum Security Pr ison for armed robbery. There was no figuring it
out. I said, "I'll do the story." "Good," he said, not looking at me. "Just hold down the metaphors, Susan. You're still too given to
metaphors." "New York Now could use a few metaphors. A feature magazine isn't supposed to be a TV holo bite" "A feature magazine isn't art, either," Michael retorted. "Let's all keep that in mind." "You're in luck," I said.
"As it happens, I'm not a great lover of art." I couldn't decide whether to tell Deborah I had agreed to write about ballet. She would hate my
writing about her world under threat. Which was a reason both for and against. September
heat and long, cool shadows fought it out over the wide plaza of Lincoln Center. The fountain splashed, surrounded by tourist and students and strollers and derelicts. I thought Lincoln Center was
ugly, shoe-box architecture stuck around a ch armless expanse of stone unredeemed by a little splashing water. Michael said I only felt that way because I hated New York. If Lincoln Center had been
built in Kentucky, he said, I would have admired it. I had remembered to get the electronic password from Deborah. Since the first murder, the
New York State Theater changed it weekly. Late afternoon was heavy rehearsal time; the company was using the stage as well as the studios. I heard the Spanish bol ero from the second act of
Coppelia. Deborah had been trying to learn it for weeks. The role of Swanilda, the girl who pretends to be a doll, had first made the brilliant Caroline Olson a superstar. Privitera's office was a jumble of dance programs, costume swatches, and computers. He made me wait for him twenty minutes. I sat and thought about what I
knew about bioenhanced dancers, besides the fact that there weren't supposed to have been any at City Ballet. There were several kinds of
bioenhancement. All of them were experimental, all of them were illegal in the United States, all of them were constantly in flux as new discoveries were made and rushed onto the European, South
American, and Japanese market s. It was a new science, chaotic and contradictory, like physics at the start of the last century, or cancer cures at the start of this one. No bioenhancements had been
developed specifically for ballet dancers, who were an insignificant portion of the po pulation. But European dancers submitted to experimental version, as did American dancers who could travel to
Berlin or Copenhagen or Rio for the very expensive privilege of injecting their bodies with tiny, unproven biological "machines." Some
nanomachines carried programming that searched out deviations in the body and repaired them to match surrounding tissue. This speeded the healing of some injuries some of the time, or only
erratically, or not a t all, depending on whom you believe d. Jennifer Lang had been receiving these treatments, trying desperately to lessen the injury rate that went hand-in-hand with ballet. The
nanomachines were highly experimental, and nobody was sure what long-term effect they might have, reproducing themse lves in the human body, interacting with human DNA. Bone builders were both simpler and more dangerous. They were altered viruses, reprogrammed to change the shape or density of bone. Most of the experimental work had been
done on old women with advanced osteoporosis. Some grew denser bones after treatm ent. The rest didn't. In ballet, the legs are required to rotate 180 degrees in the hip sockets - the famous
"turnout" that had destroyed so many dancers' hips and knees. If bones could be altered to swivel 180 degrees naturally in their sockets, turnout would cause far less strain and
disintegration. Extension could also be higher, making easier the spectacular arabesques and grand battement kicks. If the bones
of the foot were reshaped, foot injuries could be lessened in the unnatural act of dancing on toe. Bioenhanced leg muscles could be stronger,
for higher jumps, greater speed, more stamina. Anything that helped metabolic efficiency or lung capacity could help a dancer sustain movement.
They could also help keep down her weight without anorexia, the secret vice of the ballet world. Dancers in Europe began to experiment with
bioenhancement. First cautiously, clandestinely. Then scandalously. Now openly, as a mark of pride. A dancer with the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi or the Nederlands Theater who didn't have his or
her body enhan ced was considered undevoted to movement. A dancer at the New York City Ballet who did have his or her body enhanced was considered undevoted to art. Privitera swept into his office without apology for being late. "Ah, there you are. What can I do for you?" His accent was very light, but still the musical tones of his
native Tuscany were there. It gave his words a deceptive intimacy. "I've come about my daughter, Deborah Anders. She's in the D level at SAB.
She's the one who --" "Yes, yes, yes, I know who she is. I know all my dancers, even the very young ones. Of course. But shouldn't you be
talking to Madame Alois? She is the director of our School." "But you make all the important decisions," I say, trying to smile winningly.
Privitera sat on a wing chair. He must have been in his seventies, yet he moved like a young man: straight strong back, light movements. The
famous bright blue eyes met mine shrewdly. His vitality and physical presence on stage had made him a legendary dancer; new he was simply a legend. Whatever he decided the New York City Ballet
should be, it became. I didn't like him. That absolute power bothered me - even though it was merely power over an art form seen by on a fraction of the people who watched s occer or football.
"I have three questions about Deborah, Mr. Privitera. First - and I'm sure you hear this all the time - can you give me some idea of her chances as
a professional dancer? She'll have to apply to college this fall, if she's going to go, although what she really wants is to dance professionally, and if that's not going to happen then we need to
think about other -" "Yes, yes," Privitera said, swatting away this question like the irrelevancy he considered it to be. "But dance is never a
second choice, Ms. Anders." "Matthews," I said. "Susan Matthews. Anders is Deborah's name." "If Deborah has it in her to be a dancer, that's what she will be. If not --" He shrugged. People who are not dancers ceased to exist for Anton Privitera. "That's what I want to know. Does she have it in her to be a professional dancer? Her teachers say she has good musicality and rhythm, but . . ."
My hands gripped together so tightly the skin was gray. "Perhaps. Perhaps. You must leave
it to me to judge when the time comes." "But that's what I'm saying," I said, as agreeably as I could. "The time has come. College
-" "You cannot hurry art. If Deborah is meant to be a dancer, she will become one. Leave it to me, dear." Dear. It was what he called all his dancers. I saw that it had just slipped out. Leave it to me, dear. I know best. How often did he say that in class,
in rehearsal, during choreography session, before a performance? The muted strains of Coppelia drifted through the walls. I said, "Then
let me ask my second question. As a parent, I'm naturally concerned about Deborah's safety since these awful murders. What steps has City Ballet taken to ensure the safety of the students and
dancers?" The intense eyes contracted to blue shards. But I could see the moment he decided the question was within a parent's right to ask.
"The police do not think there is a danger to the students. This . . . madman, this bestia, apparently only attack s full-fledged dancers, soloists and principles who tried to reach art
through medicine and not through dancing. No dancer in my company or my school is bioenhanced. My dancers believe as I do: You can achieve art only through talent and work, through ope ning yourself
to the dance, not through mechanical aids. What they do at the ABT -- that is not art! Besides, "he added, with an abrupt descent to the practical, "students cannot afford bioenhancing
operations." Idealism enforced by realism - I saw the combination that kept the City Ballet a success, despite the technically superior
performances of the bioenhanced dancers. I could almost hear the dancers and patrons alike: "The only real ballet." "Dance that preserves the necessary illusion that the performer's
bodies and the audience's are fundamentally the same." "My dear, he's simply the most wonderful man, saving the precious traditions that that made dance great in the first place. We've pledge
$20,000 -" I decided to push. "But Jennifer Lang apparently found a way to afford illegal bioenhancements that -" "That has nothing to do with your Deborah," Privitera said, standing in one fluid movement. His blue eyes were arctic. "Now if you will excuse me, many
things call me." "But you haven't said what you are doing for the students' safety," I said, not rising from my chair, trying to sounds as if my
only interest were parental. "Please, I need to know. Deborah . . ." He barely repressed a sigh. "We have increased security, Ms. Anders.
Electronic surveillance both at SAB and Lincoln Center has been added to, with specifics I cannot discuss. We have hired additional escorts for those students performing small profess ional roles who
must leave Lincoln Center after ten at night. We have created new emphasis on teaching our young dancers the importance, the complete necessity, of training their bodies for dance, not relying
on drugs and operations that can only o ffer tawdry imitations of the genuine experience of art." I doubted City Ballet had actually done all
that: it had only been three days since Jennifer Lang's murder. But Privitera's rhetoric helped me ask my last questions. "Have any other
parents withdrawn their sons and daughters from SAB? For that matter, have any of you dancers altered their performance schedules? How has the company as a whole been affected?" Privitera looked at me with utter scorn. "If a dancer - even a student dancer - leaves me because some bestia is killing performers who do what I
have insisted my dancers not do - such a so-called dancer should leave. There is no place fo r such a dancer in my school or my company. Don't you understand, Ms. Anders - this is the New
York City Ballet." He left. Through the open door the music was clear: still the Spanish dance from Coppelia. The girl who turned
herself into a beautiful doll. Michael was right. I was definitely too given to metaphors. As I walked down the hall, it occurred to me that Privitera hadn't mentioned increased bioscanning. Surely that would make the most sense - discover which dancers were
attaining their high jumps and strong developpes through bioenhancement, and then eliminate those dancers from the purity of the company? Before some bestia did it first. Deborah, I knew, was taking an extra class in Studio 3. I shouldn't go. If I went, we would only fight again. I pushed open the door to Studio 3.
I sat on a small chair with the ballet mothers waiting for the class to end. I knew better than to talk to any of them. They all wanted their
daughters to succeed in ballet. Barre warm-ups were over. The warm air smelled of rosin on wood. Dancers worked in the center of the floor,
sweat dripping off their twirling and leaping bodies. Bourrees, pirouettes, entrechats. "Non, non!" the teacher called, a retired French dancer whom I had never seen smile. "When you jump,
your arms must help. They must pull you through from left to right. Like this." Deborah did the step wrong. "Non, non!" the teacher called.
"Like this!" Deborah still did it wrong. She grimaced. I felt my stomach tighten. Deborah tried again. It was still wrong. The teacher gestured toward the back of the room. Deborah walked to the barre and practiced the step alone while the rest of the
class went on leaping. Plie, relee, then . . . I didn't know the names of t he rest of these steps. Whatever they were, she was still doing them wrong. Deborah tried over and over again, her
face clenched. I couldn't watch. When Deborah was fourteen, she ran away from home in St. Louis to her father's hovel in New York, the same
father she had not seen since she was three. She wanted to dance for Anton Privitera, she said. I demanded that Pers, whom I had divorced for des ertion, send her back. He refused. Deborah moved
into his rat trap on West 110th, way outside Manhattan's patrolled zone. The lack of police protection didn't deter her, the nine-year-old who was shot dealing sunshine on the stoop next
door did n't deter her. When I flew to New York, she cried but refused to go home. She wanted to dance for Anton Privitera. You can't
physically wrestle a fourteen-year-old onto a plane. You can argue, and scream, and threaten, and plead, and cry, but you cannot physically move her. Not without a court order. I filed for a breach
of custody. Pers did the most effective thing you can do in the New York judicial system: nothing. Since Pers was an indigent, periodically on
public assistance, the court appointed a public defender for him. The public defender had 154 cases. He asked for three c ontinuances in a row. The judge had a docket full six months ahead. In
less than a year and a half Deborah would be sixteen, legally entitled to leave home. She auditioned for Privitera, and the School of American Ballet accepted her. Another kid was shot, this one on the subway just before Pers's stop. She was twelve. A boy was knifed, a young mother was raped, houses were torched. Pers's lawyer
resigned. Another was appointed, who immediately filed for a continuance. I quit my job with St. Louis On-Line and moved to New York.
I left behind a new promotion, a house I loved, and a man I had just started to care about. I found work on Michael's magazine, for half the prestige and two-thirds the salary, in a cit y twice as
expensive and three times as dangerous. I took a two-room apartment on West Seventy-fifth, shabby but decent, just inside the patrolled zone. From my living room window I could see the shimmer of
the electronic fence marking the zone. The shimm er bent to exclude all of the Central Park south of Seventieth. I bought a gun. After a few
tense weeks, Deborah moved in with me. We lived with piles of toe shoes and surgical tape, with leotards and tights drying on a line strung across the living room, with Dance magazine in tattered
third-hand copies that would go on to be som ebody else's fourth-hand copies., with bunions and inflamed tendons and pulled ligaments. We lived with Deborah's guilt and my anger. At night I lay
awake on the pull-out sofa, staring a the ceiling, remembering the day Deborah had started kindergarten an d I had opened a college fund for her. She refused now to consider college. She wanted to
dance for Anton Privitera. Privitera had not yet invited her to join the company. She had just turned seventeen. This was her last year with
the School. If she weren't invited into the corps de ballet this year, she could forget about dancing for the New York City Ballet. I sat with
the ballet mothers and watched. Deborah's extension was not as high as some of the other girls', her strength not always enough to sustain a slow, difficult move. So glamorous! the ballet mothers screeched. So beautiful! So wonderful for a girl to know so young what she wants to do with her life! The ballet mothers apparently
never saw the constant injuries, the fatigue, the competition that made every friend a deadly rival, the narrowing down of a young world until there is only one definition of success: Do I get to
dance for Privitera? Everything else is failure. Life and death, determined at seventeen. "I don't know what I'll do if Jeannie isn't asked to joi n the company," Jeannie's mother told me. "It
would be like we both died. Maybe we would." "You're so unfair, Mom!" Deborah shouted at me periodically in the tiny, jammed apartment. "You
never see the good side of dancing! You're so against me!" Is it so unfair to hope that your child will be forced out of a life that can only
break her body and her heart? A life whose future will belong only to those willing to become human test tubes for inhuman biological experiments? Nicole Heyer, the dead ABT dancer, had apparently come to the United States from Germany because she could not compete with the dazzlingly bioenhanced dancers in her own
country. Jennifer Lang, an ordinary girl from an ordinary Houston family, had lack ed the money for major experimentation. To finance her bioenhancements in European labs, she had rented herself out
as a glamorous and expensive call girl. Fuck a ballerina! That was how her killer had gotten into her apartment. In her corner of Sutdio 3,
Deborah finally got the sequence of steps straight, although I could see she was wobbly. She rejoined the class. The room had become as steamy as a Turkish bath. Students ran and leapt the whole
length of the hall, corner to corner, in groups of six. "grand jete in third arabesque," Madame called. "Non, non, more extension, Lisa. Victoria, more quick - vite! vite!.
One, two . . . next group." Deborah ran, jumped, and crashed to the ground. I stood.
Jeannie's mother put a hand on my arm. "You can't go to her," she said matter-of-factly. "You'll interfere with her discipline." Madame ran
gnarled hands over Deborah's ankle. "Lisa, help her to the side. Ninette, go tell the office to send the doctor. Alors, next group, grande jete in third grand jete in third arabesque . .
. I shook off Jeannie's mother's hand and walked slowly to where Deborah sat, her face twisted in pain. "It's nothing, Mom." "Don't move it until the doctor gets here." "I said it's nothing!" It was a sprain. The doctor taped it and said Deborah shouldn't dance for a week.
At home she limped to her room. An hour later I found her at the barre. "Deborah! You
heard what the doctor said!" Her eyes were luminous with tears: Odette as the dying swan, Giselle in the mad scene. "I have to, Mom! You don't
understand! They're casting Nutcracker in two weeks! I have to be there, dancing!" "Deborah -" "I can dance through the injury! Leave me alone!" Deborah had never yet been cast in Privitera's Nutcracker.
I watched her transfer her weight gingerly to the injured ankle, wince, and plie. She wouldn't meet my eyes in the mirror. Slowly I
closed the door. That night we had tickets to see Coppelia. Caroline Olson skimmed across the stage, barely seeming to touch ground. Her
grands jetes brought gasps from the sophisticated New York ballet audience. In the final act, when Swanilda danced a tender pas de duex with her lover Franz, I could see heads
motionless all over the theater, lips slightly parted, barely breathing. Franz turned her slowly into a liquid arabesque, her leg impossibly high, followed by pirouettes. Swanilda mel
ted from one pose to another, her long silken legs forming a perfect line with her body, flesh made light and strong and elegant as the music itself. Beside me, I felt Deborah's despair.
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