First Draft of Section I: Gesticular Motion

I. Gesticular Motion

1.

The screen phosphoresces quickly, blue sheet lightning moving across its internal surfaces before receding to the vanishing point of a dwindling white square, dying heart of a pixel universe. A hand enters the frame, runs knuckles across the darkening screen. Static discharges. Dust sifts into the air. The hand moves two fingers lightly across the control panel in the dark. It finds the power button.
The whine competes with the hum of the filtration system vent somewhere overhead as the screen brightens again. A single, staticky frame rocks back and forth, the narrative of the closed-circuit record frozen at the midpoint. The image is from an outdoor security camera.
Two human figures are distantly visible in the grainy ghostlight of the security system’s black and white night-vision filter. One is crouched over the other, half holding, half lifting him into a reclined sitting position in the middle of the street. The crouching figure seems to be cradling the other’s head. Something glints between blurry hands and granulated chin.
The features of the crouching figure are distorted, but it seems to look directly into the camera. Its posture is protective. The scene is not unlike a street corner pieta, if the white holes where the crouching figures eyes would be did not look so much like open mouths made of light.
In the corner of the screen, in the foreground is a Red Oak leaf. It has been caught by the freeze frame as if balancing with one point on the sidewalk. It is pirouetting; part of its rotation visible as the frame rocks back and forth to the metronome click of the VCR heads fine manipulation. The detail and visibility of the leaf render the scene in the street beyond almost abstract. The disinterest of the leaf’s motion makes the blood covering both figures in sourceless shadows a natural feature of the night.


2.

I’m a storyteller by nature. Let me set the scene:
Once, there were two brothers. The two brothers did not know that they were demons. That is not important to the story, but it was important to the brothers.
One of the brothers was named Aka, the other Ao. They were very close. They lived together in the house that their father had built for them on the saddle where two mountains joined each other.
The brothers spent most of their time playing chess and passing time, for no one ever came to visit them. Neither of them ever won more than two games in a row.
Gradually, Aka noticed something was wrong. While watching the sun set through the bamboo screen of the western windows, Ao would sometimes cry. This puzzled Aka. He tried everything he could to comfort his brother. He followed him everywhere, brought him his slippers in the morning—he even tried insisting on pouring the tea. Nothing seemed to work.
Day by day, Ao grew more desolate. He stopped moving or playing chess. He stopped talking altogether. His tears came more frequently and fell in larger spatters on his robes. Soon, they had carved runnels down his face and ran in rivulets through the house, out the door, and between the small, sharp bushes that grew along the slopes of the mountain side. It seemed that Ao grew smaller with every tear that fell from him, as if the scope of his thoughts were enough to change him completely from flesh to water running ceaselessly away. Aka watched and grew more and more worried for his brother.
One day, Aka decided that he had to do something. He said to his brother, “Brother of my bones and my brother in spirit, what is it that fills your heart with sorrow until the tears leak from your eyes? Your tears move even the cold stone of these mountains beneath us, and a spring wells up from the ground to mingle with your tears. Already, the birds have named it the Spring of the Sorrowful, and they avoid bathing in it or drinking from it. I have heard their songs, and they fear your sadness is catching. It has been years since I last saw you smile. Tell me how I can ease your suffering.”
Ao lifted his head and said, “Brother of my blood and brother in truth, I fear there is nothing that you can do. I have watched the sun and stars, moving across the face of the world. It seems to me that this has killed me, for from watching the skies I have caught a fatal loneliness. It seems to me that even you, who are as close to me as my breath, are as separate and distant from me as the sun is to the moon, or as each of the several stars are the one from the others.”
To this Aka replied, “My brother, surely the sun and the moon are together when we cannot see them. Surely, the stars do not feel the sting of their solitude, cradled as they are in the profuse darkness that is their origin and their home. Or if they do surely we can never do likewise, made as we were from the selfsame fire and water that grew up in the place where our mother fell, made as we were in the images of each other.”
Ao shook his head, saying, “It is true. We are alike as two facets of the jewel in our father’s crown, but, Brother, your face, its likeness to my own, is a reminder of how we can never be anything but alone. It is a constant proof that I can never know your thoughts, nor ever can you truly know mine. In the mirror of your face, I can never see the swift movement of my thoughts. It is gazing upon you that feeds my loneliness and makes it grow deep roots.”
Aka cried out, “Then I will go! If my face causes you pain, my brother, I will hide me from you!”
Ao shook his head once more: “No, Brother. I would never force you to leave the home you know so well. I shall be the one to go. It is clear that my sadness is difficult for you to look upon. Perhaps, in the wide world, I will find something to ease my loneliness. Perhaps the wide world will teach me to value your presence all the more. Yes, it is better that I go.”
Ao left that day. Aka walked with him as far as the spring. He watched his brother bound swiftly down the slope, dwindling with each step. Ao turned to wave at the edge of sight. Aka watched without moving for many days. Ao did not come back.

3.

The coroner tilts the head back again, looking at the puncture. He pictures the dimensions of the implement. Something slim. He pushes the tip of one gloved finger inside the wound. It is clear that the knife slipped up through the mylo-hyoideus tissue between the hyoid bone and the mandible and continued up, through the tongue and the upper palate, through the maxilla, and, preliminary examinations have shown, superficially, into the brain. He palpitates the neck with his free hand. The surfaces tell his fingers of bruising to the surrounding tissues. Death was not immediate.
He removes his finger and uses it to follow the curves of the swollen and bruised length of the throat. No, the blades’ scant penetration of the brain did not kill the boy on the table. The coroner brings his fist up in quick, tight jerk, his white lab coat whispering into the near quiet of refrigerators and fluorescent lights. He stops the arc of his fist before latex meets flesh. It was the hilt.
The crushing of the trachea from the hilt’s encounter with the neck, the trachea’s subsequent swelling, and the ancillary swelling of the sterno- and omo-hyoideus muscles that were also damaged by the force of the blow would have ensured that the young man be strangled even if he had not drowned in his own blood. The damage patterns suggest an angle of insertion that would favor the use of the right hand. It would require considerable strength and, he supposes, accuracy to wound someone in such a manner, even should the victim be incapacitated before hand. Tox screens are negative. Trace amounts of a beta-blocker suggest the dead child took medication for migraines.
The rest of the damage is self-inflicted. All secondary lacerations are probably the result of the youth writhing and jerking on the point of the knife. Comparatively older damage to various facial tissues suggests two altercations. The fatal one following the first by approximately three hours.
The coroner looses his hold on the chin. The head does not respond to the call of gravity. In most other respects, the boy looks to be sleeping. He pulls the sheet up over the body before he removes his gloves and turns out the light. His hand roots in his pocket for change, rubbing away talc and sweat in a vain search for quarters.