Free The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes Page A

Ephraim portion. The gap in the forest has opened up, like I said, beyond the confines of the television set and into Marlene’s apartment. There’s a small dot of blood collecting around her pierced eyebrow and when I go to dab it she flinches, the first time she’s ever flinched around me, and I think she flinched because of something to do with that VHS, and the exposed blankness of the screen that took over when Ephraim left the frame. It’s the last time we were together, really. After that the distance between us grew greater, at first just a little bit but then more and more, until we regressed from lovers to friends, and then acquaintances, and then colleagues and then, by the time I left for Pennsylvania, strangers.”
    The soft light spills out from Laing’s room and illuminates our table. But other than that we’re surrounded by darkness. The storm clouds on the horizon from earlier haven’t advanced, and the night air is pure, as if there is not now or ever has beena contaminate in the world. I think about what Laing said about Marlene, and the blood above her eye, and about the time, before the disease, that Emily had helped me patch the bottom of our aluminum boat with tar that we had warmed up so that we could spread it over places the metal had rubbed thin from dragging the boat loaded with firewood across the shallow river behind our house, wood gathered from the uninhabited island, wood that we scavenged in the summer so we could burn it during the winter. And I remember the smell of that tar, and how difficult it was to remove the stains from Emily’s hands who, at age seven or eight, pretended they were something like tattoos for a while, or something even more primitive, markings, black markings, streaks and splotches that stayed sticky for days, collecting dust and lint and leaving smudges on her pillowcase and sheets.
    A large brown moth lands on the table and begins walking in circles. Laing puts his hand on the table, palm up, and the moth keeps circling lazily and unsteadily and then manages to crawl into his palm. It’s wounded in some way, but who can say how? It’s just a moth, and yet to destroy it… to destroy it would be an unforgiveable act, and it’s as if Laing knows this too and so he gently raises his hand and watches the moth, its antennae twitching as if trying to detect the danger level and then it flies off, first toward the open motel room door and then back out into the black night. It was a small act of mercy, but intended for whom? I only say this because, thinking back on it now, Laing’s gesture—releasing the moth—seems inauthentic. There was something—how to put it?—rehearsed. That’s not the right word. Forced. There was something forced in Laing’s handling of the moth, almost theatrically forced, as if to suggest to me, Look, if you weren’t here to see this I’d smear the moth across the table .
    “The film is only one frame long,” Laing says.
    I understand he wants to move on.
    “Then it’s not a film,” I say.
    “It’s the only part of the film that survives.”
    “Title?”
    “ The Murderous King Addresses the Horizon . 1910. A fragment.”
    Laing is sitting at the table now and he tells me about the film frame, which he produces from a yellow envelope from beneath the blue velvet chair. It’s actually not a film frame, but a paper print from the Library of Congress, Laing says, referring to the early method for securing copyright of films from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Rather than strike extra prints of films, paper versions were made, an opaque from the film negative printed onto various sorts of paper, which were coiled tightly and preserved. The frame that Laing produced was actually stolen, Edison told me later, from the vaults of the Renovare Company, which had been commissioned to convert the paper prints to 16 mm acetate safety film stock. An image from a forgotten film, by a forgotten director although, as Laing reminds