Gesture
by T.Y. LEGRAS
None other.
Before he exited the train, this is what he heard -
"The last time...we almost ran out of benadryl."
"Your mother..."
"Calisthenic. Procedural. Ragged. Very ragged."
"We were ambering and then we weren't. Surreal."
"Your dad doesn't like me. He thinks I drive too fast."
The word time came up the most often. It was stated more frequently than it elapsed. To hear them speak of their concerns constituted an overwhelming possession. It felt effective.
God, could. God could speak of this in a way, knowing they would be drawn to Him.
Behind his desk that day, he collected papers with a minimum of aplomb. The word that troubled him, he realized with a start in front of a sausage stand: ambering. Finding what it meant was impossible. He spoke aloud, with difficulty, stretching it out until every syllable grew familiar.
In the park two crows followed him along the esplanade. Before he got up from a bench, he heard, "There's more than one. I swear I saw them."
"I heard him say."
"Yes."
"I heard him utter the words. And I laughed, when he did."
The next thing the large woman said was a cliché.
He approached a group of young black men, and fought the urge to pull out a business card. They showed him their CD. He bought one, and spoke roughly, although he did not mean it. "Do you know...what ambering is?" They thought about it, grinding their fingers against the underside of a picnic table. Finally the tallest came to a sudden decision. "You know. In Jurassic Park, when they found the mitochrondrial DNA of the dinosaurs in the golden fugue?"
"Stegosaurus. Triceratops," his friend said.
photo by Daido Moriyama
It had to do with preserving something. Across 6th Avenue a small group of children had wrapped themselves in Christmas lights; they alternately spun into the arms of their parents or tottered down. At the traffic light, one woman said to another, "If it's a given, what is given?" Her friend asked her if she wanted to get out of the sun.
In the ensuing days he found he could not whisper to himself. His voice could not delineate the correct volume. He completely lost the taste of liquids.
She found him on the last step of the building, arching and flattening the soles of his shoes. He said, "Say you came home, and found a bar of gold there. Waiting for you, shuffling back and forth, magnetized with perfect symmetry."
T.Y. Legras is a writer living in Brooklyn.
Photographs by Daido Moriyama.
photo by Daido Moriyama