THERE ARE THE POWERS, AND THEN THERE ARE THE POWERS

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You could tell by her eyes. She was in a trance, and all she could do was dance.

Nobody knew where she came from. The municipal records had no entry for her. The Ministry of Unexplained Phenomena denied she existed. The local priest suggested she was an unfortunate consequence of foreign music.

It was four below zero at a Russian bus stop where twelve citizens had been waiting forty-seven minutes for a bus that had apparently been nationalized by the invisible.

Then she appeared.

Golden eyes. Red shoes. A flower the size of a satellite dish balanced above her head.

She began dancing.

Not ballet. Not the official People’s Folkloric Dance of Agricultural Productivity. Something considerably older. Something that had escaped the supervision of civilization.

Her left foot tapped out a rhythm that made the Kremlin’s clocks run backward. Her right foot negotiated directly with the equator.

Then she reached across the horizon and pulled.

The tropics came loose.

Tahiti arrived without a passport.

One moment the citizens were standing in freezing rain, contemplating the philosophical implications of pneumonia. The next, they were experiencing a tropical monsoon of such magnificent proportions that the old woman in the red shawl began speaking fluent Polynesian.

The bus shelter turned into a ceremonial pavilion.

A palm tree erupted through the pavement.

The boy holding a wooden sailboat watched it become seaworthy.

A retired machinist discovered that his arthritis had been replaced by an overwhelming desire to learn the hula.

Nobody had consulted the Ministry of Transportation.

This was serious.

The authorities immediately declared the tropical weather an unauthorized atmospheric demonstration.

But the woman kept dancing.

She wasn’t interested in overthrowing the government. Governments were a minor superstition compared with the machinery she was operating.

She had discovered that geography was negotiable.

Longitude was a bureaucratic inconvenience.

Latitude was an opinion.

And weather was simply the universe remembering an older rhythm.

An official arrived carrying a clipboard.

“Who authorized this monsoon?”

The dancer smiled without opening her eyes.

The official disappeared into a hibiscus blossom.

Three minutes later he emerged wearing a grass skirt and carrying a coconut containing his resignation.

The crowd applauded.

Nobody mentioned the bus.

Across the lagoon, enormous ancestral faces appeared in the clouds, watching the proceedings with the detached amusement of beings who had survived several thousand political systems.

The dancer raised her golden flower.

The rain became warm.

The citizens began removing their winter coats.

Somewhere in Moscow, a committee convened to determine whether paradise constituted a threat to national security.

The old woman in the red shawl laughed.

“Those people have power,” she said, pointing toward the invisible committee.

Then she pointed toward the dancer.

“But that girl has the powers.”

And there, beneath the golden flower, with the Pacific Ocean lapping against the Russian pavement, everybody finally understood.

There are the powers.

And then there are the powers.

The bus never came.

Nobody cared.