Flinch - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Sornig
I WAKE TO AN ORANGE FLICKER, and for a moment am afraid that the room has caught fire. But no, the television is still beaming in the corner of the room. There he is again, that man with so little life in him, the trivia of presidents and prices at his knees. He troubles me. I want to know whether he struggled, or if he went passively to his death. This is what lies beyond the flinch of the frames. This is what the newsreaders do not describe. Did the man have enough dignity left to resist? In that last moment, when he knew that the blade was on his throat, did he at least kick away? I want to kick with him, to feel in my body what he felt as his body was held down.
At the computer again, I type a phrase into the search engine: the name of the man in orange, and another word. Uncut.
I am surprised by how quickly I find it. A page with a new link to the video of the man's decapitation, his blinding. I click on it. The media player pops open and I catch a breath; the thrill of the ugly truth rises in the buffer and then the play. And here it is. There are titles in a script I cannot read; abstractions of sound and image that belong to another alphabetical empire. Then the man in orange appears, giving his name. It runs for longer than is played out on the news. Without the watermarks and market movements the video looks cleaner, less cluttered, closer to something authentic. But the frames still have that low-res digital flicker. Here again is the sentence being read over the man. Here is the blade, the man is pushed, the camera jumps a little. I come to the moment that I've seen on the news, to what I have calculated as the 240th frame. I click on pause. I have to make a choice. Do I watch what is coming or not? I remember the first pornographic picture I ever saw when I was seven. My friend had found it in his father's hidden laundry stash. A naked man and woman, standing, kissing, the man's erection standing between them, like an alien body. It didn't strike me as strange or titillating. It was only what it was. Something that before then had been hidden, secret, made plain. After I see these images now of a man losing his head, will I always watch images of men being murdered with the same indifference with which I make my way through pornography? What will I feel in my body?
There is another knock at the door. I click off the program and wait a moment, to let the knock come again and then for her to enter the room with her key. The smart girl in the uniform. She addresses me by name now, formally, with the Italian Signor. She makes a small gesture with her hand. I notice the ring is missing.
"Your bag has arrived," she hums, pointing to a case on the bell-hop trolley. It is green, soft. On the handle is an airline tag. So I have a life after all. I am not empty. Here lies the proof. Beside the bag is a black video camera case.
"Is this mine as well?" I ask her.
"I guess so," she says. "They just came in a taxi from the airport."
"Do you know which flight they were on?"
"No, I don't. The tags say Rome. They must have come from Rome, Signor."
Her formality tells me that she has either realised my true status – whatever that might be – or that she has already half forgotten me, or at least my shame and our candour. In any case, it is only right that she should forget me. Her place is not to remember me. I must bear the weight of remembering myself. It is how I will come back to myself, with the notes played in the songs of others who must make sense of me. People pointing out the obvious – that my bags came from Rome. That it is my video case. My title is Signor. The girl holds out another slip of paper. I sign it this time with my name as it is. Strong, fat letters.
She lifts the green bag from the trolley and hands it to me. I measure its weight: something inside is heavier than clothes, or books. Its weight shifts, rolls maybe, into one end of the bag. I carry it over to the bed. The girl stays at the door. She's waiting to hand me the camera case.
"You wanted to know," she says, "about how you came in here last night. I asked. They say you were like a madman. Not screaming or half-conscious. But your madness was in your silence. As if you had seen death."
I take the case, and then she is gone again. The same exit. A performance. The Pivot.
I RETURN TO THE COMPUTER AND TRY TO FIND the link, but it is gone. I find another one. They fade and rise again, warlike. I open it. But this time the video looks different. I can't say how. I see something I missed before. The man in the video looks compliant somehow. I struggle through the disgust, the anticipation of what I am about to see in order to overcome the ghosts brewing that elixir of death, those words. I come to the frames. They unfold and as the knife is plunged in I swallow and flinch. But when I stare at the man, the blade moving deeper and deeper, and rewind across the cut, back and forward looking for his own flinch, I realise with utter certainty that there is nothing to see. The man falls. The video ends. It is simple to see. The man was not alive. There was no struggle. He was already dead, or he was no man at all. A fake.
I open the video camera case and plug the machine into the television. There is a tape already in the camera. I rewind it and press play. Images flicker past. A family in a kitchen with a birthday cake for a child, a giraffe and elephant at the zoo. No message for me. Nothing I remember. Then it comes. I see it as I have remembered it, from the same point of view. I am the third person. I see the slim bodies of a man and woman. The man watches the woman against a window illuminated by the slow California sunset that moves from white to gold and somewhere, as the moment moves on outdoors, the warmth of a fine spray of golden water across both their bodies as they embrace in cool laughter with deep green grass curling and springing like a mattress under their toes and heels.
This is the name of my terror. It is the terror of the images I have seen. It is my soul-illness. I am the man behind the video camera. Just another man, forgetful of his own place in the world, remembering himself, imagining love, wishing for blindness. ♦