Flinch
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Sornig
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Society is concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. – Roland Barthes
I am writing blindly. – Dmitry Kolesnikov in a note to his wife from the sunken Russian submarine Kursk August 2000
Two hundred and forty frames. Ten seconds long. Twenty-four frames per second. In the popular version of the mpeg – that is, the version lifted by the news editors from the website, the version that was then edited and rebroadcast on television, and therefore the one that actually matters – on that version we get about 240 frames of video. These frames are all the life the man has to me. They are his landscape, his memory, his past and his future. The persistence of my vision of him. Here, before the flinch.
I am lying on a bed, crisp hard sheets folded over me, drowsy, uncertain of many things, not the least of which is how I got here. An air-con unit in the wall gurgles to life and hisses into a rhythm. The TV news says it is Tuesday today. Then they play the video. I have seen this version of the mpeg maybe ten or twenty times already, and I haven't even shifted from the bed. It is on every one of the cable news channels. The local stations, with their dancing girls and cash prizes, seem to take extra delight in repeating it in freak show loops.
Here it is again.
A low-res room at the end of the world. The man in the chair. The weeks of facial hair. The tired, spent, dead eyes. The orange jumpsuit. This is hardly a man anymore. He is no man. The man who is about to die leaves no message, except his name and those of his parents. I can't make them out. Martin maybe? And Cristina? Or is it Terri and Peter? Then cut to another scene. Another day? Another hour? Who can say? The man in the orange jumpsuit kneeling, it seems, a news ticker crawling across the floor of his death chamber. Over him looms a brace of men in masks. Shouts of glory. A banner. The A-man waves his finger in judgement as he shouts from a sheet of A4 – words of power, a ritual. He declares year zero, or some such, in a language I don't understand, and now here he comes again in his almost skilled, but not quite certain, way. He hasn't done this before; he is always doing it for the first time. He topples over the still-living man, the one who has given his name, then draws out a blade. Now here is the flinch and freeze frame, the blade at the almost-dead man's throat.
Two hundred and forty frames. Fragments in a bleak corner as the man in orange begins his long forgetting. Here, where I am, the whole proscenium of death is whittled down to just this moment of terrible anticipation in the few seconds between the rigid blade being drawn behind the man's turned back and what I guess is his first sense that he is about to die. I know he is to die before he does. Of course, his death has already happened. This is not a live syndicated telecast with six-second delay. Still, the terror remains. The terror is in the flinch of the frames, it is their sudden disruption that shouts loudest amongst the voices in the chamber. In that flinch I can feel it – even the camera operator is shocked by what he sees. I know some of his epiphany, that sudden ecstatic revelation of his power to murder this man a billion times over – or are there more television sets than that in the world? I can imagine the math.
I try to imagine that face hidden in the eye of the camera, the eye that is watching, composing, framing what I see. I try to weigh it up, to feel its shape, but it conceals itself better than any man in a mask. Perhaps the camera operator senses his place in the line of succession from Zapruder to the news camera bomber who went off in the face of Masood to the Naudet brothers wandering through the World Trade Center as it burned over their heads. The camera as instrument of murder – a multiplier of terror. Unknowable faces.
Now here comes the bit that gets me. What follows, says the grave news narrator, is too gruesome to show. They all say it. What follows then is the words that take its place. It is the words that make the scene so terrible. The orthodoxy says that writing, narrating, is freedom – that storytelling is at heart the most noble act of humanity, of civilisation. But this story, these words, do not illuminate the darkness; they are left to stew in the imagination as abstract ghosts brewing the elixir of death.
I SIT UP, FORGETTING TO WATCH THE TELEVISION for the first time since waking (did I really sleep?). My whistle-smooth neck in the mirror comes as a surprise. I arrived late, ill. This is not the version of me I expected to see. No, I am too neat altogether.
Out of bed now, I shake off the wet sackcloth of sleep. It is then, as I put weight on my feet and become aware of my body for the first time, my knees shinboning, that I sense my nakedness. I straighten my body and catch sight of my face in the mirror again. I step back to get a full look at myself. My body is clean, white like a lamp. My chin sags a little, my breasts hang across to my armpits; my gut is tense, but threatens to collapse over my pelvis. I scan for some clothes. There are none I can see.
The phone rings. I stare at it for a moment, its red bead of light wriggling on and off in concert with the pulse. Something for the benefit of the deaf. I'm not sure I want to answer it. Finally I pick up and listen for its voice to speak to me.
It is a woman. She is speaking a language I don't quite recognise. Italian maybe, with a delicious nasal, almost throaty accent and a slight lisp that recalls the Spanish dominance of the peninsula. I translate her words as I hear them. Then silence again. Mine. I am about to speak when I realise that I don't quite know what I want to say.
"Hello?" she says again, but in English this time.
I cannot speak. My words won't come. I put down the receiver and sit on the bed again. Perhaps I should call back to ask where I am. No. Is that a question a sane man asks a hotel receptionist? But then is this a hotel? It could be a hospital. A private suite where the dead come to sink into their pillows for the last time. Hotel. Hospitality. Hospital. Hospice. The dead or the mad. I am ill. Terribly ill. Terrified.
I need clothes. A pair of trousers must be around here somewhere. I tear the covers off the bed, feel under it, scrabble through the cupboards and drawers but there is nothing. Not a scrap. Not even a bag. I rip back the curtain. Still no clothes, but something else, something that suddenly interests me a whole lot more than the clothes – the world outside.
Of course, what I see is nothing more than the skyline of a city: a vast expanse of dawn-streaked sky, punctuated by the irregular beat of its buildings – some square and squat, others great shadowy oblongs. I open the window and step out on to the balcony. Even though I must be twenty flights up, the wind breathes warm over my naked skin. At my feet, a great crossroads squirms, a squish of small citizens who argue the space blindly with an endless column of cars and buses. On the horizon, at one end of the great boulevard, the sun is a fat gold disc, reflecting a web of roads that spans out across the flats; in the other direction, the road trails off into the half of the city still bathing in the shades of night. I am midway between light and dark, where the world is largest.
The city is a kind of London. Palaces of sorts. Parks. Squares. With a quiet kind of order that imposes itself on a great patchwork of advertising images – women's barely covered breasts, silver cars, flat-screen televisions, words colourful to the eye, but dull to the heart, electric, painted, carved; a great illumination, carefully rendered by some strange monk in his cold scriptorium, warmed by the electric vision of human possibility. Perhaps, like the scriptures made light, it is a copy – a city I know, with modifications and original additions. But really, as far as I know, this world, this metropolis outside my window, might be so new that it was only built this morning, just before I opened the curtain.
Truly, I do not know where I am. I forget my own soul. Perhaps I am the Italian the woman had expected to speak to, but have just forgotten. Maybe she looked up my name on the register – of patients? of guests? – and read a row of double-Ts, its Is and As and simply guessed. This sickness of self has emptied me. Perhaps I am the Italian. Perhaps not.
Then, for no good reason, I shudder – the recall of an utter loss of sensuality. It is the same glad jolt of recognition I feel under the shower, when suddenly a dream player strides across the stage, speaks a word then a moment later falls away. Death made small. I let it go; soft my eyes shut; the warm summer air over my skin, the hummed shouts and drones of the city. A word, the name of this sickness. I can half mouth it. I'm close; a picture comes to mind. A touch. Grass. Water. Sunshine. Real things.
"Room service."
It is gone.