Lisa Moore - Alligator

ALLIGATOR

ALSO BY LISA MOORE
Degrees of Nakedness
Open
February

ALLIGATOR

LISA MOORE

A NOVEL

Copyright 2005 Lisa Moore

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This edition published in 2009 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Ave., Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964
Alligator : a novel / Lisa Moore.

eISBN 978-0-88784-844-5

I. Title.

PS8576.O61444A64 2005 C813'.54 C2005-903742-3

Jacket design: Bill Douglas @ The Bang
Cover photograph: Getty Images/Geoff Du Feu

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund .

For Nan Love

COLLEEN

I T STARTS OFF theres an alligator with its jaws open on a dirt road. The mans back is bare and gleaming with sweat, and those trees they have, hanging with moss. The whole thing is overexposed. The sun is relentless. A crowd has gathered around the man and the alligator. There are kids in the front, a little girl with blond hair and a silver helium balloon tied to her wrist.

The balloon looks hot. For some reason the camera lingers on the balloon. Perhaps the cameraman has forgotten what hes supposed to be doing. The balloon looks like a hole burned through the sky. Theres no wind, but the balloon jerks when the little girl shifts her weight. It jerks to the side and bobs and then settles, becomes still. There isnt a cloud. The little girls blond hair is spread over her shoulders and bits of sunlight come through it and some of her hair is full of static and it stands up and the sun makes it buzz with light. The alligator footage was part of a training video about safety in nuclear power plants.

Some plant in Ontario.

My Aunt Madeleine made a lot of industrial training videos in the 1970s and 1980s. For a while safety videos were her bread and butter. She had a niche. I was watching Aunt Madeleines archival footage and came across a man who puts his head in an alligators mouth.

Theres something low-budget about the event. The man is strutting around, trying to rouse the crowd. He has a sheen and there are beads of sweat all over his back and he is trying to create anticipation. But he looks exhausted by the heat.

The alligator doesnt move. It looks like a tree trunk in the middle of the road.

But it also looks untrustworthy. The way it stays still makes it look sly, though it may just be asleep. Its probably asleep is whats going on.

A shimmering curtain of heat rises from the dirt road and the man walks through it. This shimmer makes everything behind it look saturated with colour and blurred. The child with the balloon has a red dress that seems to lift and float over the person beside her, an elderly woman in a straw hat sitting in a lawn chair. Two walking canes rest against the womans knees. The aluminum frame of the chair looks like it would burn your skin.

Several people in the crowd are fanning themselves with pieces of paper that must be some sort of program.

The veil of heat is a warning, like what you might see in a crystal ball, of something bad.

Then theres a cut.

Ive also been downloading the beheadings off the Net. They are available. The wet concrete wall behind and a man in a black hood kneeling on a concrete floor next to what appears to be a drain, and a few people amble past the camera behind him, then out comes the machete. Its slow and gritty and takes a while to download, or it downloads instantly. I never watch further than out comes the machete but I watch as a kind of duty because I dont want that man to be alone. It looks like the courtyard of a compound. You can see the leaves of palm trees over the top of the cinderblock wall. It looks hot there too.

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. Hes small-boned, this man, and his hands are tied behind his back. Just briefly, his head turns toward the camera, though he probably doesnt know what hes 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.

Im attending.

I stop watching before they commit the act, not because Im 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. Johns, up behind the Village Mall. I have a high-speed connection to help with homework. I go into the kitchen for supper and theres Mom.

Mom says, Why the face? Youve always got a face on you.

I often sleep over at Aunt Madeleines and watch her old footage. Shes saved all the takes from pretty much everything shes ever shot. Its a nuclear power plant and theres a scientist talking. Im watching the footage and Im 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 shes pacing with her arms folded, looking at the floor. Shes younger, much younger, and shes 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.

Shes 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 theyre 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 theyll post. Like something on the Animal Planet channel, only winos.