Read Online The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nicholas Rombes
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what is going to happen to him. It’s not clear whether the shot of the axes was meant to signify Sollors’s point of view, or simply the impersonal camera’s.
“Somewhere in Europe Schneid practices with his flare gun on one of the students Sollors has named in his poems. The bartender makes an alien symbol with his hands and one of the men from the back comes over and sits beside him. Thereis sand blowing in through the open door and collecting in the corners of the cafe. The parallel reality surveillance footage still plays on the television. Two men walk across the screen in the bright sun beside a blue pool. One of them wears a white track suit. A voice off screen—a woman’s voice—says, ‘Love among consenting holograms?’ What will become of the North African Unit, without the words, the poems of Sollors?
“And then the other two men from the back approach him, one of them holding an axe. They take him to the beach and in what happens next, there is no poetry to convey the tenderness by which they hold him as they use their weapons, laying their hands upon him, Sollors, the animal they have been given to destroy.”
The cone on the table seems to have grown larger. It takes up more space. Laing doesn’t want to quit. A wall of clouds menaces on the far horizon. I switch out the batteries in the micro recorder. For the first time Laing produces a pack of cigarettes. They appear unsteadily on the table, next to the cone, a soft pack still wrapped in cellophane, Camels I think or some other brand that looks like Camels (“Fritz’s camel” my great uncle used to say) so that the animal appears to have been overtaken by a sandstorm, or as if the camel itself was made out of sand. Laing opens the pack and lays out two cigarettes, one for me, and one for him. I remember thinking that this was a test. In the wind, my cigarette rolls across the table to the left, and then, a few moments later, when the wind changes, back to where it had been. Laing doesn’t touch his, doesn’t even look at it.
Between the cone and the cigarettes some sort of force field emerges. As crazy as that sounds that’s the only way I can put it. Like a dome of outward pressure rising in the space between the cigarettes and the red cone. I think of the fate of poor Sollors, hacked to death on the beach in Africa. And then I think of those missing children, the ones the waitress at the tavern described, and what she said about not being able to turn offthe part of your brain that imagines what might have happened to them, the sharp crease or fold in time sharp like a knife blade that they had the misfortune of falling beneath, and the fact that “missing” always turns out to be the gentler, more abstract term for something much, much worse. And then Laing reaches his hand through the force field and takes one of the cigarettes, lighting it with his chin low against the slight wind. He shakes the match out as if casting a spell and the black clouds just hang there in the sky, and he does so in a way that recalls the snapping wrist action used to open a flick knife, the sort of knife that could be used to carve atrocities on the body of a child.
“Not all of them were films in the proper sense, you know. A few of them came to me on VHS. The only one worth mentioning from that era isn’t really even a film,” Laing says, in the strange time-bending present tense. “It’s footage for a documentary that was to feature one of my old professors—Ephraim—a documentary about the last generation of ’60s campus radicals. He sent me a VHS of the segment that featured him, or maybe it was just footage of him talking that wouldn’t have made it into the documentary anyway. It begins with Ephraim saying It wasn’t always like this .
“ It wasn’t always like what? an off-camera voice asks.
“There’s a very long pause. Ephraim’s gaze drifts into the surrounding forest. He looks like a person who’s been napalmed. His neck is
“Somewhere in Europe Schneid practices with his flare gun on one of the students Sollors has named in his poems. The bartender makes an alien symbol with his hands and one of the men from the back comes over and sits beside him. Thereis sand blowing in through the open door and collecting in the corners of the cafe. The parallel reality surveillance footage still plays on the television. Two men walk across the screen in the bright sun beside a blue pool. One of them wears a white track suit. A voice off screen—a woman’s voice—says, ‘Love among consenting holograms?’ What will become of the North African Unit, without the words, the poems of Sollors?
“And then the other two men from the back approach him, one of them holding an axe. They take him to the beach and in what happens next, there is no poetry to convey the tenderness by which they hold him as they use their weapons, laying their hands upon him, Sollors, the animal they have been given to destroy.”
The cone on the table seems to have grown larger. It takes up more space. Laing doesn’t want to quit. A wall of clouds menaces on the far horizon. I switch out the batteries in the micro recorder. For the first time Laing produces a pack of cigarettes. They appear unsteadily on the table, next to the cone, a soft pack still wrapped in cellophane, Camels I think or some other brand that looks like Camels (“Fritz’s camel” my great uncle used to say) so that the animal appears to have been overtaken by a sandstorm, or as if the camel itself was made out of sand. Laing opens the pack and lays out two cigarettes, one for me, and one for him. I remember thinking that this was a test. In the wind, my cigarette rolls across the table to the left, and then, a few moments later, when the wind changes, back to where it had been. Laing doesn’t touch his, doesn’t even look at it.
Between the cone and the cigarettes some sort of force field emerges. As crazy as that sounds that’s the only way I can put it. Like a dome of outward pressure rising in the space between the cigarettes and the red cone. I think of the fate of poor Sollors, hacked to death on the beach in Africa. And then I think of those missing children, the ones the waitress at the tavern described, and what she said about not being able to turn offthe part of your brain that imagines what might have happened to them, the sharp crease or fold in time sharp like a knife blade that they had the misfortune of falling beneath, and the fact that “missing” always turns out to be the gentler, more abstract term for something much, much worse. And then Laing reaches his hand through the force field and takes one of the cigarettes, lighting it with his chin low against the slight wind. He shakes the match out as if casting a spell and the black clouds just hang there in the sky, and he does so in a way that recalls the snapping wrist action used to open a flick knife, the sort of knife that could be used to carve atrocities on the body of a child.
“Not all of them were films in the proper sense, you know. A few of them came to me on VHS. The only one worth mentioning from that era isn’t really even a film,” Laing says, in the strange time-bending present tense. “It’s footage for a documentary that was to feature one of my old professors—Ephraim—a documentary about the last generation of ’60s campus radicals. He sent me a VHS of the segment that featured him, or maybe it was just footage of him talking that wouldn’t have made it into the documentary anyway. It begins with Ephraim saying It wasn’t always like this .
“ It wasn’t always like what? an off-camera voice asks.
“There’s a very long pause. Ephraim’s gaze drifts into the surrounding forest. He looks like a person who’s been napalmed. His neck is
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