Alligator - Lisa Moore [1]
For a while I watched one of the beheadings every night, the man with the hood, two men behind him with rifles, a glint when the sun strikes the bayonet. After the second glint on the bayonet the hooded man stops walking and the hood turns toward the camera. He’s small-boned, this man, and his hands are tied behind his back. Just briefly, his head turns toward the camera, though he probably doesn’t know what he’s turning toward. One of the soldiers behind him, they look like soldiers, gives him a nudge. I watch because how lonely to die so far from home with nobody in attendance.
I’m attending.
I stop watching before they commit the act, not because I’m afraid to, but out of respect. This is in a bedroom painted pink and a pink canopy over the bed in a house in the suburbs of St. John’s, up behind the Village Mall. I have a high-speed connection to help with homework. I go into the kitchen for supper and there’s Mom.
Mom says, Why the face? You’ve always got a face on you.
I often sleep over at Aunt Madeleine’s and watch her old footage. She’s saved all the takes from pretty much everything she’s ever shot. It’s a nuclear power plant and there’s a scientist talking. I’m watching the footage and I’m reading Cosmo. Reading is not the word, flipping, leafing. I like the crinkle of the pages and the weird dresses and the raunchiness you come across. Big jewels and bulimia, perfume bottles and lots of glossy mouths ready to whisper something dirty.
A nuclear power plant on the mainland, the guy is talking.
He says, A distinction must be made between the safe operation of the nuclear power plant and protection against sabotage. He cocks an eyebrow, like, is he ever smart.
Cut.
The best part of the footage is always Madeleine, off-camera, yelling cut.
Sometimes I see Madeleine in the footage. The camera swerves and she’s pacing with her arms folded, looking at the floor. She’s younger, much younger, and she’s crouched with her back against a wall next to a stainless-steel cylinder, which is the kind of ashtray they had in public places back then.
She’s always smoking, eyes squinted, patting her back pockets for a notebook, silver hoops tangled in her black hair. A pencil tucked behind her ear.
The scientist is trying to talk about sabotage and this is pretty much before sabotage.
This is before the twin towers and web sites that show a mounted rifle aimed at a corral of exotic animals and for a fee you shoot from your armchair. You press Enter and an emu goes down.
Emus and orangutans lope through the crosshairs of a mounted rifle somewhere in Montana and you watch on your screen and kapow, they send it to you in the mail. An emu on ice chips, via PayPal.
Or the bum-fight videos you can find on the Net. A Jeep pulls up and five guys jump out and they attack a pile of cardboard and filthy blankets in a back alley and two bums crawl out from beneath the frost-coated debris they’re sleeping under. The bums are bearded and lost and the five men from the Jeep beat them on the head with billy clubs, these poor half-retarded alcoholics with their arms thrown up to protect their ears; they beat them until the bums agree to fight each other so they can make a video that they’ll post. Like something on the Animal Planet channel, only winos.
I saw a bum fight on a plasma screen at a party in Mount Pearl but eventually the police were called because the parents were in Florida, because of the noise. Everybody cleared out, but I saw through the front window as I was heading down the street, the four cops standing in front of the plasma screen, their brawny shoulders slumped, like they couldn’t believe what they were watching.
The scientist is talking nuclear accidents