Richard House - The Kills

Yee Jan picked up the flyers scattered across the piazza and added them to his own. And as the Duomo’s bells began to ring a charge ran through the air. From the side streets, via Tribunali, along via Duomo more people arrived, many dressed in black, many with posters and all with unlit candles, the groups gathered without sound, all facing via Capasso and the film crew, so the noise of the gathering became a hustle of bodies and feet. Yee Jan stood in the centre and handed out the sheets. For Pascal. For Johannes. For Emilio. For Michele. For Mizuki. The vigil formed about as the small open square in front of the Duomo stopped with people — when the bells struck midnight the candles were lit and all conversation stopped without any instruction to do so. And there, brightening the darkness, a sea of light.

TUESDAY

The men wear baseball hats, one grey the other blue with a black visor. Both men wear lightweight summer jackets, windbreakers, similar to the film crew. Both men wear sunglasses in what seems at first to be an affectation, because approaching midnight on the piazza the only light comes from candles and the floodlights brightening the front of the church and the blank ends of the buildings either side — so in analysis there’s little to distinguish them apart, regardless of how many cameras, how many phones catch them as they push through a crowd too dense to make room. The image loses focus with the candles, the fuzz and blow of light, as an undulating plain speckled soft and obscure, a sudden brightness dazing the image as the two men lug the boy through. The blackness — night sky, gaps between figures, hair — appears liquid.

Monica watches the image on her own, sits at the side of her bed, the remote in her hand to change to another channel. The image switches, a kind of flicker, as if something has been edited, and loses colour completely, shows the men as they push through, bodies angling sideways, shoulder first. In every example it’s almost the same, or a version of the same sets of information: two men, on either side of what you’d take to be a petite girl, Asian, who appears to be drunk or stunned or stoned. The two men look like boxers in the way they duck forward, although the association makes no sense to Monica, perhaps because of how lean they seem, and their clothes, the caps, the coats, an attitude to them of stern and focused business. And the girl — who she knows to be a boy because this has already been reported and discussed, and because the screen carries his name — Yee Jan Lee — although this could be the name of a girl as far as she can tell, because this is the face of a girl, deadpan white, and eyes so small, would it be wrong to call him pretty? And something wrong with him, seriously wrong because he isn’t walking properly, he’s being held up by these two men who bully him through, propped on either side, and move as one brusque unit, no gentility about the shove and shunt and push, and there, in the register of the boy’s mouth a turn, a down-turn, that might be pain. He’s being swept through. Monica thinks of him as a girl because this is how the boy is presented, a painted face, luminous white, delicate eyes drawn in, a painted face with a slender feminine mouth, so much about this boy is soft. The boy’s face sweeps by the camera, nothing more than a blur, his eyes are certainly looking into the camera, and there, a hand gripped on his upper arm. If he or she passed by you so close you could free him, hold him, keep him from harm. The videos insist that this is a present action, something happening continuously: the ongoing abduction of a boy in a crowded piazza. A counter beside the name marks the days he has been missing. 4.

She watches again.

A different view taken from the Duomo steps so that the field of people is specked with a pulsing light, the candles too many to account for, star points, a map of light, and she can see the disturbance, how the light appears to grow dense, block together as the three bodies push through, a small hole behind them which soon, water-like, refills itself. The buildings opposite glow with ominous long, hollow windows.

Again. Another view. Closer.

The crowd barely move, the threesome press directly toward the camera, shoulders first. No one steps aside to allow them through so they have to shove and lumber past the person taking the shot. The camera jolts, is held up to show a brighter set of lights, the film set beside the Duomo and the scaffold holding floodlights which turn night into day. Something about the crowd reminds her of an execution, a public trial. She’s old enough to remember Tiananmen Square.

Monica watches because she has promised to do this, and tries to concentrate on the men, the boxers, the brothers, as they bump deliberately, shoulders set to knock people out the way, some small cries of protest. But every time she can’t help but focus on the boy, it is impossible not to watch him, and she can’t imagine how this could happen — an abduction during a silent protest, one body selected and removed.

She has to understand how this could happen. How someone could be picked out when surely all attention would be on him, everyone would notice him. She cannot help but watch the boy. The boy appears drunk, ill, out of it. The men have purpose, threat in their speed, which dares to be challenged — and this, the greatest shock of all, almost unaccountable, is their pure nerve to show themselves, join the very crowd protesting their actions two years earlier. Everybody is here because of these two brothers.

The news today is worse, if this is even possible. There is footage from the police, not from the demonstration but images taken a week before of a man waiting in a small street. This image is almost black and white, and at one point, showed slowly, the man appears to leave a message, make a series of gestures, his hand up, a signal she cannot read. The same baseball cap, the same jacket. A one point a group of people come out from under the camera, and there, among them, the boy from the piazza. Yee Jan Lee.

Monica sits and watches, unsure of the limits of her body. She can’t feel her fingers, or sense anything other than her breath and chest, aware that it hurts to watch, but now, exhausted, she feels like she is starting to disappear. There is nothing about the brothers that she recognizes. Although they must have been there, two years ago, on the platform, in the station. They had to have been close, she must have walked right by them, there is no possible way she could not have passed them. She has taken the very same walk many times in the intervening years and looked at every detail and wondered, in a space so small, how could she not have seen them?

* * *

On his first visit the man made it from the door to the rack of magazines. On the second he managed a further two metres to the desk before changing his mind. On his third visit, which comes minutes after the second (they have all occurred in the space of one morning), Elisa, who always keeps an eye out for the weird ones, announces as the man steps in from the street that this is a travel agency for the purpose of booking flights and holidays. OK?

‘You come here when you want to go somewhere.’ She slides a brochure across her desk. ‘If you want anything that isn’t travel-related then you’re in the wrong place.’

Monica, being less confrontational, asks the man if she can help, and the man asks if there are any brochures for America or England. Monica points to the rack at the brochures facing out with pictures of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, searching herself, and then and along a lower shelf, aha, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, and there it is, London. ‘Where are you thinking in England,’ she asks, and realizes she can’t think of anywhere other than London. London, England, even though she has relatives who live in Manchester. She can’t remember booking anyone a trip to anywhere other than America, North and South, in a long time. She tries to chat but it isn’t easy this morning: to be honest everyone figures out their own arrangements these days (she’s talking nonsense because she just can’t focus). Everyone has a computer. She makes a grimace and the man smiles. After the smile he steps forward as if they are a little more intimate.