A/N. I don't own the Law and Order characters, or the song (hell, I can't even find the song for downloading; the only place I've ever heard it is on YouTube). I did cut some of the lyrics for length purposes, particularly as won't let me single space them (er, yeah, that's it, blame it on the site and not that I don't know how to do it).
On to the story!
"Oh, there is a house
A wonderful lover
A satisfied hole
Hope isn't a word
A sudden sad brother
And what do you care.
And I'll take the pictures if you stay in bed
I'll run down the park if you'll put up your head.
Don't put up your borderline.
Four or five years ago
I wouldn't believe it
I wouldn't receive it
And I'll take the stiches you put in my head
I'll run down the ark if you put up your head
Don't put up your borderline
Don't put up your borderline
It feels like I'm going to lose my mind.
It feels like I'm going to lose my mind."
~Borderline by Sufjan Stevens
BORDERLINE
Blood oozing out has a distinctive sound. Full-bodied and round. Slippery. A rocketing affect, changing the atmosphere. If you listen closely you can hear the plasma rubbing together with a faint pickled squeak. Rivulets plinking down onto the painted wood of the boat, tapping and flowing into an nebulous circle that will soon be dry; a stain on the floor; a stain on the body; a stain on the murderer; a stain, really, on the world.
Death has a sound too. It's a field, full with tall grasses moving, moving, always moving. It's a tunnel, great rushing movie-effect gusts of wind cutting through the air, displacing the atoms. Listen closely. You hear the thousands of crows flapping through the air? You hear, far off in the distance, the renting of the air from the screams of the souls you're about to join? And the turning, this vortex the wind is creating, a whirlpool inescapable, tides pulling and clouds flying and mountains shooting up; ice melting; erosion and dust landing—
This is what death sounds like.
All these sounds, and no ears to hear.
***
Boat security sucks, Goren has surmised. He is standing at the front of a gaggle of his classmates, with all the other eighth-graders, staring at the body. Two guys and a girl flap ineffectually around, trying to prevent the school kids from seeing death. Not that they're doing a very good job of it. These three staff members, dressed in khaki pants and royal blue shirts—royal blue, the most horrible blue of them all—they cannot overcome the macabre fascination of a real dead body.
"I said everyone down below," the woman bellows. She glares at the teachers too paralyzed to help with the herding. "This is a crime scene, and so help me if any of you compromise it I will lock you in the shackles myself."
Goren has to smile (even at 13 he is most definitely Goren, not Robert or Rob. Bobby occasionally, but only with his mother.). If anything's going to get done here, it's going to get done by this woman. She's tall. Silky hair, a purplish-black, swinging around her face in thin sections. She has a vaguely windswept atmosphere. One of strength. Force. She is staring now at the body with a slightly glazed look in her eyes, focusing not so much on the blood, or the wrecked disjointedness of the broken body, but on the victim's open staring eyes.
"This is like that book," Susan whispers behind him, the giggle for once gone from her voice. Still, she cannot mask a faint note of awe, of being in the presence of a crime. "You know. Where they're stuck on that island, dying off one by one. Killed."
" 'Lord of the Flies?' " Malton guesses.
"No, by the lady. With the judge or whatever."
" 'Ten Little Monkeys,' " Tucker says decisively. "April Christy."
"Agatha Christie," Frank says with a snort. "And it's not 'Ten Little Monkeys,' it's 'And Then There Were None.' Based on the poem 'Ten Little Indians.' Idiot."
Oh, the joys of multiple grade field trips. And this one was originally bound to be a colossal bore, too. Seriously. A trip across the Hudson on a boat? So they could see what? The beauty of nature? Yeah, faintly greenish-black water. Kegs and oil drums and just general rot, more like. The occasional fish with like eight eyes, courtesy of pollution in action.
Goren had pointed all this out to his teacher, but oddly Mrs. Robinson had failed to appreciate this. "It's for our environmental module," she severely pointed out. "We're going to take samples of the water and then analyze it to see what makes up the chemical composition."
"Rot," he muttered again. "That's its make up. Rot."
"And," she continued on, ignoring him, "The Key Club needs to go out sometime anyway, so we figured it may as well all get done at once. You should know this, as it's your brother who came up with the idea of using encapsulated chloride tablets clean the River up. He needs some of the water for analysis."
"Yeah," he muttered. It was all his mother had talked about for weeks. Frank, the scientist. "Clean it up from all the rot. If it works. Which, well..."
And then there was the inevitable "Why can't you be more like your brother?" and he walked away.
But they're going to have to drag him away from this. He's never seen a body before. It's...compelling. He wants to go up to it and poke it. Sniff it. He wants to examine it from all angles. Search eagle-eyed for clues. Pluck hairs out of the grained lines of the wood with tweezers. He wants to stand right up against the border and lean out, sunglassed and windswept, staring into the horizon. Waiting for that perfect spark of an idea. Fighting for the rights of the dead.
The air feels like it's clicking, suddenly, tens of thousands of clothespins opening and shutting all around him.
He smiles. Is punched in the kidneys. "What. The hell. Was that?" he says slowly, turning around to Frank and glaring at him. Lording up those extra inches he has over his older brother.
"I could solve that," Frank says loftily. "It'd be easy. DNA, baby. That's where it's all at. Give me some fiber and a microscope, and I'd tell you not only who killed the bastard, but what the killer had for lunch."
"You do that," Goren says softly. "Let me know how that works out."
"Maybe I'll be a forensic scientist. Solve crimes by the hour."
"Be a bit difficult if you're still going to be an astronaut," Goren points out. "Not much time for DNA testing technology up in space, I imagine. Constant moonwalking and all."
"I'll make time. I'll have my own personal workstation all set up, somewhere in the back where I won't be bothered, and it'll have all the latest technology--carbon dating equipment and the best microscopes and DNA analysis and…" Frank continues on with his monologue, dreaming wildly of a future that Goren knows will never happen for him. Particularly if the crack pipe he found under Frank's bed isn't just for a "science experiment," as he claimed.
He drifts off into a daydream of his own, oblivious to the security and teachers trying to corral them off into a less corpse-filled area of the boat. This is where he wants to be, and nothing is going to stop him.
A/N. Don't trust me on the science of Frank's idea, by any means. The only reason I used chloride is that I think it sounds faintly bleachish. I was one of those catastrophic kids in Chemistry class who fudged data, lit things on fire, exploded test tubes, shattered glass, etc.
I don't entirely know where this story is going but I actually like it, so it will probably be finished much more quickly than, say, A Week of Sleep (dragging on for a month now). Or Cy Pres.