The Invention of Sound Read online

  Out of the black, silent void she built the world of a nighttime paradise. Mice rustled through fallen leaves. Tree branches creaked and scraped in the breeze, and an owl hooted twice and took wing through the air above them.

  Just as her father had done, Mitzi introduced a quiet family of deer that nipped at rose bushes and snapped off the tender buds. She replaced the flawed, troubled world with tall grass that whispered its blades together.

  In this, this soundproof, lightless void, she conjured a paradise. And soon the stranger within her seemed to fall asleep. And as the tinkle of water and wind chimes ran on their endless loop, Mitzi, on her nest of moldering blankets, even she fell asleep.

  Foster moved aside the basketball. Gently, he picked up each Teddy bear and carried it a safe distance. As he lifted a stuffed giraffe, it began to play a music box lullaby, a tinkling melody that sounded big in the cold night. The bright notes shrill and unnerving as they echoed back from the surrounding tombstones. To silence the giraffe, he lay it across the grave and beat it with the curved blade of his shovel.

  He gathered and set aside the holiday cards, the birthday cards and glass-encased candles labeled with pictures of saints. Pictures of Christ cradling a lamb in his arms. Their wicks burnt down to black stubs, the candles sloshed with water collected from the lawn sprinklers. The plush toys were furred with grass clippings thrown up by the lawn mowers.

  Fully uncovered, the headstone glowed in the moonless dark. Trevor Laurence, beloved son of Robb and Mai Laurence. The birth and death dates only months apart.

  Foster knelt in front of the grave marker and whispered, “If I’m wrong, I’m very sorry.” He stood and stomped the blade of the shovel into the soft grass. Using the spade, he cut the sod and set it aside in neat squares. Atop these he spread a tarp to collect the loose dirt. With every few shovelfuls he froze and listened. The crickets and frogs had stopped, but now they sang anew. Their din almost drowned out his heavy breathing as he heaved a spade of dirt out of the growing pit. He dug the soil out from beneath his feet until only his head rose above the lip of the hole. Then the shovel struck concrete, the concrete vault to protect the casket. With his bare hands, his fingers caked in wet earth, Foster brushed the edges of the vault lid clean.

  He’d seen pictures. Members of the support group had passed photographs from hand to hand. Robb had shown them a tiny casket of polished rosewood that glowed almost red. Hardly the size of a suitcase. Pictures of Mai and her family tossing flowers into the open grave. No pictures of the body, but there wouldn’t be, not after Trevor’s daylong suffering in a hot car.

  The same way Blush had used the sharp end of the lug wrench to pry away plywood, Foster stabbed it under the vault lid and muscled the concrete. He told himself this was only a movie. He was only a character in a cheap drive-in-theater horror movie. The lid tipped up and slid aside, revealing the casket that seemed smaller than it had looked in the photographs. Movie or not, the casket lid wouldn’t open. It needed a key. A socket deal. Otherwise the lid was locked down to make it watertight.

  Careful not to step on the casket itself, he planted his feet on the concrete edges of the vault. Movie or not, he reared back with the shovel and swung it down like an axe. The blade sinking into the varnished wood, wood even now so red he half expected it to bleed. A second blow split the casket lid. A third tore the lid down the center, and Foster dropped to his knees and clawed at the splintered wood. Tearing aside the satin and padding. Ready to see, hoping to find the sad horror, the tragic withered body. He ripped away the padded and pleated lining.

  Under the weak beam of his flashlight his hands tossed back the quilted satin blanket and pillow. Buried here and honored with toys, wept over in photographs, inside this beautiful shattered casket Foster found nothing. The little mattress was unstained.

  Even here, sunk a man’s height into the damp soil of a graveyard, his phone got a signal. He dialed.

  A voice answered, the voice from the tape he’d erased in the studio said, “Hello?”

  “Friend,” said Foster.

  After a blip, a breath, a shudder, after a beat of nothing, Robb Laurence said, “Gates.” He asked, “Where are you calling from?”

  Foster asked, “Is the support group still meeting on Thursdays?”

  Over the phone Robb said, “Are you okay?”

  “Are you going to group this week?” asked Foster.

  Robb answered too loud. As if getting someone’s attention, he said, “Am I going to the support group, you mean?” As if there might be someone there to triangulate the call and locate Foster.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Foster said, and broke the connection.

  Mitzi opened a third bottle of wine before she could listen to the voicemail.

  She’d seen some of the video shot inside the Dolby Theatre that night. Bits had played on television, the cleaner bits. The worst were on the web, but she’d not gone to look there. Alone in her condo, she set her phone on the desk in front of her and pressed Play.

  The recording replaced the world around her.

  “Mitz,” a voice croaked. “My baby girl.”

  A voice from the grave, it gave her gooseflesh all up her arms.

  It continued, “Mitz, it’s good you don’t pick up.” Like a man shouting at the hands-free phone in his car, it said, “God forbid you should pick up and hear this.” Screams, human screams and a noise like thunder muffled his words. “…so much dust a person can’t breathe,” Schlo shouted. “Can you hear it?”

  Mitzi pictured the footage from inside the Imperial Theater. Cracks running through every surface, cracks branching into more cracks. The walls and ceiling shifting. Crumbling. Thick dust sifting and settling over everything below.

  “Choking I am. Mitzi, my baby girl, I want you should know how proud I am for you. A good life I’ve lived.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Words can’t go there, but the balconies, they’re pancaking together. Oh, the horror of so many…just gone.”

  The screams diminished, but now the thunder of steel bending and glass breaking grew louder.

  Mitzi could picture this from the video she’d seen on the news. The concrete slabs of the walls had fractured into chunks, shattered into pieces, busted into rocks of cement already blasting into sand. “So much dust,” Schlo said. He coughed into the phone. “I should suffocate before I get smashed. Blinded I am, half blind from such dust!”

  Mitzi shook tears from her eyes.

  “Baby girl,” Schlo’s voice continued, hoarse, “I love that you tried to rescue me. I swear by all the blood of all the martyrs that I didn’t know.” He asked, “How was I to know?”

  Schlo, like all the people she’d loved, now reduced to a recording.

  It was too much.

  In the last moment of his life, Mitzi lost her nerve. To keep from hearing her friend die she switched off the phone.

  The voice belched and gasped. His breathing bubbled and gargled. In nasal tones the man on the tape panted, fast, panted-panted as if his lungs had shrunken to dime sized. Over Foster’s headphones he gurgled and coughed as if his chest were filling with water.

  He moaned, “My sweet girl.” He spat, and a stream of something liquid splashed against something flat and hard. Clearer now, he said, “Everything I’ve done I’ve done…” He swallowed. “To coax you to this moment.”

  Foster tried to plug the man’s voice into a movie. Some drama about a sinus infection sufferer. An Academy Award winner about a severe head cold.

  Within the headphones the man took a long, ragged breath. “You’re not to blame,” he said, his voice hardly rising above a whisper. “I’ve groomed you to do this since the day you were born.” He said, “I know the terrible power you feel at this moment.”

  In the darkness of Foster’s mind, the man gagged. He vomited an invisible stream, of what Foster couldn’t imagine. Gobbets and clots spattered in some long-ago sickroom. Every sound rang with a bright echo that suggested concrete
or tile. Nothing soft. In the background he could hear a child, a young person, sobbing.

  His airway cleared, the man spoke louder. He said, “One day, when you’re my age an apprentice will appear.”

  Foster risked a sideways look at Mitzi Ives. He wanted to wave, to ask her if she knew these characters. What melodramatic soap opera was this from?

  Oblivious in her headphones, Mitzi was mouthing silent words. As if saying her prayers or learning a foreign language. She sat with her knees tucked under the mixing console, as close as her belly allowed. With one hand she petted herself, running her fingers in long strokes over the swelling shape of her unborn child.

  The man in Foster’s head panted for air, panting out the words “Do not be afraid.” He said, “Your apprentice, one day he will do this exact same thing to you.”

  Foster touched a knob to sharpen the tone. Turned a dial to up the volume.

  His voice fading, the man said, “On the day when you are chained in my place, you must remember how proud I am of you.” He gasped, “May you die feeling so much pride.” Here the voice rasped and went quiet.

  Replacing the man’s words was only room tone and a steady drip-drip-drip that slowed to one final drop.

  At that, Gates Foster rewound the tape and hit Erase.

  The tape ended, but Mitzi pretended to still hear something. Her pulse she could hear. She pretended she could hear a second heartbeat, the baby’s.

  The Foster person sat cocooned in his headphones. He might cast a glance in her direction, but he couldn’t hear as she whispered to her child. To the child she would never meet. She whispered, “Do not be afraid. You will be raised by a woman who loves you, but that woman will not be me.”

  She stroked and petted the shifting mound at her waist, telling it, “You will be part of a family, but not my family. My family will die with me. Our work must die with me.”

  Mitzi touched the tiny hand that pressed to touch hers. Without bitterness, she told the child, “You will step into a destiny that will not be the destiny I was tricked into fulfilling.”

  Before the next length of tape would deliver the next scream, the next gasping, choking bellow of fear and pain, Mitzi continued to whisper to the infant that held still and even now seemed to listen and understand.

  As Foster listened, this Foley person explained how people find the source of a sound. With low-frequency sounds, the human brain analyzes the time delay between when the sound reaches each of the two ears. But with high-frequency sounds the brain analyzes the loss in volume between when the sound reaches each ear.

  In this way Mitzi Ives was training him. Her voice, calm, a master schooling her apprentice. Tutoring him. She passed along what seemed a lifetime of knowledge, several lifetimes. A legacy.

  “You never hear a dry voice, not anymore,” she said. By that she meant that every song and soundtrack has been sweetened or made more warm and rich. Or the voice has been tweaked to sound more tubby, the reverberation has been lengthened or shortened. She talked about the decay time of a sound. She taught him how to manipulate the fatness of a sound.

  According to her father, to stories he’d told her, any wire fence could hold a recording. She described how a person could walk along a fence and use a microphone attached to a needle that would encode her voice along the wire. As a child, she said, she’d spliced a set of headphones to a needle and walked along random wire fences trying to read any secret messages. Barbed wire fences. Chain link.

  Likewise, she explained how any speaker could be reverse wired to work as a microphone. This created such a wonderful distortion that musicians recorded their work through speakers intentionally.

  She described how crooning had replaced more traditional singing in the 1920s. At the time, carbon would build up in microphones and broadcasters needed to shut off each mic, occasionally, and strike it with a small hammer to clear that buildup. The softer, more prolonged notes sung by crooners created less carbon buildup. Cornets replaced trumpets for the same reason. In short, people could only listen to what microphones could pick up. Technology dictated fashions in music.

  Mitzi Ives introduced him to ribbon mics and moving coil mics, carbon mics and electrostatic mics. She taught him about parabolic, omnidirectional, and bidirectional mics. The racks of analog mixing equipment. She showed him vacuum tubes that would cost five thousand dollars to replace, and microphones worth twenty thousand. She toured him through concrete bunkers lined with file cabinets filled with recordings.

  She told him about the Wilhelm scream.

  Through this warren of rooms ran a pair of wires, just two wires routed along the floor. Their tour followed these wires, but she never called his attention to them. In the farthest reaches of the basement the wires disappeared into a closed locker. Foster opened the door. Inside hung something shapeless and white. Shoved into the locker and hung on a hook, it was a dress. Satin and ruffles as fancy as a wedding cake.

  Like a fuse, the wires looped up to clips attached to the skirts. Two metal clips clamped to the fabric and to each other. Beneath the dress, a stack of rusted film reels stank of vinegar.

  Mitzi Ives waited, but he didn’t ask. He closed the locker, and she continued his education.

  It didn’t sound like much on the web. The cell phone videos from inside the Dolby Theatre on Oscar night, they sounded thin. Screechy. Nothing like Mitzi knew the Jimmy scream would sound on the master tape. These were crude copies. In one clip banked rows of glittering celebrities sat, their heads thrown back, their mouths gaping in a mutual choir of shrieks. Dogs howling. A few among them stood, their necks corded with effort, teeth bared, screaming as debris bombarded them, culminating in the concrete wall behind them crashing over everything like a tidal wave.

  Mitzi clicked to another clip. Another choir of wailing faces. She paused the video and expanded it to fill the screen. She studied the faces, each distorted. Each chin dropped to each chest, each mouth stretched so taut the lips looked thin and white. Nobody dodged or ducked as shattered lighting and bricks hammered down upon them. How many clips she’d watched she had no idea. She would watch every post before she’d ever give up hope.

  In one clip a white-dressed figure dashed through the shot, screaming, “Schlo, you don’t have to die!” No one in the surrounding seats gave the figure a glance. A woman, her white dress billowed around her, the wide skirts filled the aisle. She shouted, “Schlo, take my hand!”

  In a different clip the deranged woman forced her way past seated guests and yanked at the wrist of a man. Unseen by her, two uniformed security guards came down the aisle from behind. One leveled something, not a gun, but something like a gun, and pulled the trigger. A wire jetted through the air and lanced the back of the lunatic’s neck.

  In a third clip the woman shrieked. Clearly tasered, she thrashed and screamed as the guards carried her twitching body away. The video clip followed along until they disappeared through a fire exit. That, that’s how Mitzi had found herself dressed in ragged white satin, sitting in a Hollywood alley the morning after the disaster.

  Watching now, her neck ached. The Taser explained the mark she’d found. Here was everything that she couldn’t remember.

  She hunched with her nose almost touching the screen. Besides the network cameras, cell phones had recorded the final moments from every angle. Never had so many people documented their own demise.

  To know the pecking order helped. In effect, to know where the VIPs among the VIPs were seated. Scanning through the center of the main floor, Mitzi paused. She backtracked a moment, and there he sat. The gardenia fresh in his lapel. His hand held his phone to his face as he spoke, as he left the voicemail. There were the malachite cuff links. There was the Timex watch. Here the walls and ceiling weren’t crashing down. Instead, the floor buckled. A sinkhole opened, swallowing seated movie stars near Schlo. The fissure yawned and more A-listers tumbled in, screaming. They poured down into whatever basements or parking garages lay below the auditoriu
m. Schlo continued to talk on his phone. Even as his own seat tipped sideways and tumbled toward the void, he was still talking, trying to leave something of himself for her benefit in the physical world.

  Here she touched her phone to start the voicemail. Schlo’s voice shouted, “Glad I am that you’re safe, that my family is safe.” He was shouting because of the roar around him or because he’d plugged his ears. Or shouting maybe just because Schlo always shouted on the phone, but he told her, “Now’s the time we should talk turkey, Mitz. And by that I’m telling you—destroy your damn tape!”

  The end looked fast. Fast and painless. Painless and complete.

  The tiny figure on the video shouted into his phone, “If our deaths are to mean anything, you should destroy what you’ve brought into this world!”

  That was Schlo. That was Schlo all over, still yelling into his phone even while his entire world tilted sideways and he was tossed into oblivion.

  Foster tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. Through the basement windows he could see inside. Dust coated the floor of the room where they usually met, a thin layer of dust unmarked by footprints. Gone was the usual circle of folding chairs. Gone was the sign in the window that welcomed the parents of missing or deceased children. To stand at the bottom of the concrete steps leading down from the sidewalk, this felt too much like standing in a grave, so Foster walked up to street level. There his beater Dodge sat at the curb, the only car on the block. Traffic passed a couple streets away on the avenue. Footsteps grew from that direction.

  A figure moved along the brick walls, becoming a man, becoming Robb. Robb calling, “It’s too late, you know.” At such a distance he had to yell, “You can’t stop anything.”

  Foster guessed his name wasn’t actually Robb. Nobody he’d met at this support group had been anybody. This place wasn’t a place, and it never had been. He took his best shot. “It was just me, wasn’t it?” He called out, “Why me?”