The Invention of Sound Page 16

  Robb, no longer the leader of a group that had never existed, he stopped out of reach. “You showed up is all.” Patronizing, his smile smug and guilty at the same time, he said, “We set a trap, and one day you stepped into it.”

  They’d all been actors or mercenaries. There to stage the kind of a scam called a Big Store. A long con. They’d each faked a dead child, rehearsing their stories together. On the first evening when Foster had come down the stairs from the sidewalk and read the sign and opened that door, they’d all looked up as someone among them had been recounting a death that had never taken place. Someone had waved him inside. Whoever had been telling their story began to fake weeping, and Foster had been completely suckered. He asked, “There had to be other grieving parents, so why me?”

  Robb, not-Robb, the voice on the tape complaining about too much blood and too many knives to clean, he shrugged. “You’re a man. We needed someone of your size.”

  Foster felt the gun in his jacket pocket.

  “And we needed someone who was angry,” said not-Robb. “We could channel your anger.”

  The funeral is what he referred to. The mob scene, it had all been arranged to drive Foster into action. Something besides Lucinda had been steering his course, these people, but for their own purpose.

  “Don’t take any of this personally,” not-Robb said. His smugness fell away. He ducked his head and scratched at the back of his scalp. “Our assignment was to rope in someone ruthless, with a bottomless rage that would feed his work for years to come.” He looked around, his eyes fixing on something. “The best agent is an agent who doesn’t know he’s one.”

  When Foster looked, the something was just a window. Only curtains moving in a window.

  Not-Robb stepped against the side of the building as if trying to blend into the brick wall. “I’m only here to deliver a message.” He shot another look at the curtains. “Tell your boss…”

  Foster asked, “What boss?”

  “Tell Mitzi Ives,” not-Robb clarified, “that she has until Tuesday to turn over the asset in question.”

  A new figure was approaching. Another man, a shaggy-haired stranger, slowing as he drew near. Some hemp-headed caveman throwback.

  Not-Robb followed Foster’s gaze to this new stranger, a burner type, but lanky. “Tuesday at four o’clock,” not-Robb said. “That’s when my employer will arrive to seize the asset by force.”

  Foster asked, “What asset?”

  Already backing away, retreating, not-Robb said, “Your boss will know. Tell her to deliver the asset before it’s too late.” And at that he’d turned his back and was jogging into the distance. Even as the new stranger strode up, not-Robb broke into a sprint and disappeared.

  For an instant the new man seemed to be walking past. A love-beaded granola type, he scowled. His shoulders bunched, his hands were balled into fists. The man’s arm lashed out, landing a fast, hard crack against the side of Foster’s skull. A strobe flashed behind Foster’s eyes, and his knees gave way. He caught the sidewalk hard, landing on his ass. With the impact of the man’s fist the gun tumbled from Foster’s pocket. Tumbled and clattered across the sidewalk. Clattered and skidded over the curb. Skidded and dropped into a storm drain.

  The gun, gone. The man, the man kept walking away. Not a stranger, not entirely. Not anymore.

  The stink of patchouli and the words “Harsh, dude” sprang briefly to mind.

  Mitzi arrived at the diner wearing the pearls. The booth near the back. The usual arrangement. An actress, a friend, sat waiting. Mitzi slipped into the booth and asked, “You called about a job?”

  Blush Gentry didn’t answer, not right away. From behind oversized sunglasses she stared at Mitzi’s swollen belly. “You’re lucky,” she said. “I wish I could have a kid.”

  It was clear to Mitzi that Blush had arranged her own kidnapping as an excuse not to attend the Oscar ceremony. She said, “You could have a child with your kidnapper.”

  “Not him.” Gentry shook her head. “Too old. He’s shooting nothing but hot water and birth defects, you know?”

  A server approached the table. A young woman, part of the new influx of pretty hopefuls migrating to California to revitalize the movie business. Mitzi regarded this one as eager but hopeless. When the advent of sound had killed off a generation of silent stars, their replacements had been recruited from live theater in New York. The theater would once more provide the new stars.

  Blush removed her sunglasses. The server’s eyes came to rest on the actress and couldn’t look away. Starstruck, she asked, “What can I start you with?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” said Gentry. “Maybe coffee.”

  Mitzi asked for a glass of wine. White wine. It was lunch. Just wine, a big pour.

  The server stared at the pregnant belly, obviously trapped between asking if someone was pregnant or implying Mitzi was fat. She didn’t risk it. “We have a Syrah.”

  “Make that two,” Blush said. When the server had left, the actress plucked a napkin from a dispenser on the table and began folding and worrying the paper. Without meeting Mitzi’s gaze, she said, “Certain persons have impressed upon me that you’re in illegal possession of an asset.” Blush’s delivery was wooden and halting. “These…persons have asked me to intervene at this juncture.” An actress reading a script as if English were not her first language. “If you’ve not relinquished said asset by Tuesday at four o’clock, said persons will arrive at your place of business to forcibly take custody.”

  As rough as the delivery sounded, Mitzi understood. Someone was going to raid the studio. Special forces would ransack Ives Foley Arts on Tuesday afternoon.

  As the server brought their wine, Mitzi reached both hands to the back of her own neck. She undid the clasp and gathered the double strand of pearls cupped in one palm. “Until you have a baby of your own,” she said, and handed the necklace across the table.

  Speechless, Blush lifted the two ends and fastened them together around her own neck.

  They’d set Foster up, total strangers. They’d bullied him into staging that fake funeral, the carnival freak show, and they’d driven him to explode. Amber had been there, a witness seated in the back. Some crew of people had ambushed him with cell phones in a staged nightmare that had in fact been a plot right up to the email link to the babysitter movie. It sounded crazy, but he was part of something, targeted by something. Strangers had hijacked his anger and grief. Telling it now to Amber, Foster knew that he sounded crazy, too.

  Mission accomplished.

  Amber kissed his forehead, gently forcing his head down onto a pillow. To find her meant calling her father. And just by chance she’d picked up the phone, and after a moment’s embarrassment Amber had explained that she was hiding out from publicity, hiding from the media at her father’s house, at Paul’s house in the suburbs. And after another moment of embarrassed silence she’d asked him to stop by. And here he was, guided by his ex-wife into a back bedroom and told to sit on the bed and calm down.

  “Rest,” she whispered into his hair. Her fingers lifted off his glasses, folded them and set them on a windowsill.

  Amber’s dog jumped up on the bed beside him. A small dog. A pug. Maybe it was Paul’s dog, Foster didn’t know.

  “They stage-managed everything,” he tried to explain. Minus his glasses, the room swam out of focus.

  Amber listened like she did. She let him run out of steam. Reaching toward the foot of the bed, she spread a blanket to cover him. To bind him down, she tucked the edges in around his arms and shoulders. This done, she went to the room’s window and looked outside before drawing the curtains. The pug dog snuggled in tight against his leg.

  Peering outside around one edge of the curtains, she said, “You need to rest. Just for an hour.”

  What a stroke of good fortune. Maybe his luck was turning around. To connect with Amber when he needed her most. And to find her at the first place he called, and to be invited over and given a place to
sleep. The dirt from Trevor’s grave clung to his pants in dark scabs. It lined his fingernails. But baby Trevor had never existed. Robb was a character, and most of the world had turned into a movie where events were prompted to move him toward some goal. He felt his bones settling into the mattress. Amber leaned down to kiss him again, and her hair fell forward to brush his face.

  “Sleep,” she said. She padded quietly to the doorway and quit the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

  Whatever had trapped him, Foster had escaped. Here he was safe. Tuesday at four o’clock something, some long con would descend on Mitzi Ives, but he didn’t have to be there.

  He could sleep through Tuesday, he felt that tired. The dog wedged against him felt almost like Lucy had as a baby. To have the smell of Amber, of her hair, clinging to him, he could imagine when they were first married. He placed himself back in a time when they were happy, and the future glowed. The baby snuggled close into his hip, and if he didn’t open his eyes he was a new father, a young man.

  If he didn’t open his eyes, the world seemed perfect.

  Soft and low, the little dog began to howl. Then long and loud, the howl heralded a siren. A siren joined the dog’s howl, and from beyond the bedroom window a chorus of neighborhood dogs joined the siren. A police car approached, drawing so close it drowned out the animals.

  Foster opened his eyes and retrieved his glasses.

  The pug watched, head cocked, as Foster pulled open the curtains and the window and slipped quietly into the backyard. Slipped over the sill and jumped to the grass. Jumped and vaulted the back fence. Vaulted and raced away down an alley.

  Mitzi put Foster aboard a ship. The scenario had always been one of her favorites. She shut off the studio lights and began to build the world by creating the ocean. The mid-Atlantic in March, a storm-tossed, wind-churned ocean. She broke waves against the wooden hull and whistled the wind through the rigging. She made the canvas sails billow and snap. Rain strafed the decks, and water sloshed in the bilges.

  He’d staggered in, this Gates Foster, exhausted and mumbling. His clothes caked with dirt. A purple goose egg swelling one side of his face. Mumbling about a conspiracy. Mumbling about being betrayed by his former wife.

  She’d dragged out the cot and blankets and urged him to lie down. She deleted this world and began to build a new one around him. Lightning cracked. Thunder roared. And gradually the distance between the thunder and lightning lengthened. The winds weakened. Of the heavy rain only a light mist fell on the ship. Then even the mist stopped. The sails fell slack as the seas calmed, and by that point this Gates Foster had fallen fast asleep.

  The day dragged on. Each scream might be the pain and terror of someone, but it wasn’t the scream Foster was looking for. It wasn’t the scream of anyone he loved. And as his reserve of empathy ran dry, he found himself irked by the noise of people’s suffering. This bedlam crop of people’s misery, he began to hate the strangers whose torture hurt his ears.

  Foster reviewed each scream. Dismissed and deleted it. Moved on to the next.

  Mitzi had cast looks at him, almost frightened looks. Almost as if she knew who he was and what he intended to do.

  He texted the escort agency and got no reply.

  He erased the agony of another reel filled with an army of dying strangers.

  Yelling to be heard, he pushed back from the console and asked, “When are you due?”

  When Mitzi didn’t respond, isolated by her own set of headphones, he tried again.

  She turned, pulling the headphones down to her neck.

  “When’s the baby due?” he asked.

  Mitzi shrugged. “Tuesday afternoon,” she said. “Just after four o’clock.” She placed the headphones back over her ears and returned to the task at hand.

  In Foster’s headset the tape hiss changed. The tone shifted to suggest a new recording. A different room tone brought a man’s voice. This stranger said, “Mitzi, honey, you were wrong to tie up Daddy while he was asleep…”

  Foster snuck a glance at the woman working next to him.

  A child’s whisper answered him. It was lost in the tape hiss until Foster could make out the words, “…what did you do to my friend?”

  The man stammered, “Mitzi, you can’t.”

  The child’s voice shrieked. Raging, “Into the microphone, please!”

  His voice reedy and shrill, the man insisted, “You can’t. Mitzi, you love me!”

  As silence fell, Foster listened harder. He recognized the voices as something, as being related to something he’d heard before. A pickup from a different microphone? Another fragment of the past.

  Whatever the case it wasn’t his past.

  He checked the label on the reel, the list of names for each recording. In the loopy handwriting of a teenager, this one was titled Serial Killer Flayed to Death by Child. He rewound the segment. He erased it. He waited for the next.

  Mitzi knew the primitives were right. The tribes who believed a photograph would steal a person’s soul. It would, and it did. So did an audio recording, as did video. Our greatest creation is our selves. The way we cultivate our appearance and behavior. And nowhere is our artwork more apparent than in our minds. The way we each have an idea of self. The one perfect self we’ve chosen by rejecting all other options.

  The opportunity costs of identity.

  We’ve rejected the slack self, the fat self, the gray-haired or skinny self, those constant other selves we see modeled by people around us.

  We are each our own best effort. And we’re satisfied until we see a photograph or hear a recording of our voice. All the worse is the torture of video, to witness the squawking, gawky monster we’ve created. The you that you’ve chosen from all possible yous to create. The one life you’ve been given, and you’ve dedicated it to perfecting this staggering yammering artificial Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the traits of other people. Anything original, anything innately you, it’s long ago been discarded.

  Knowing all of that, Mitzi still pressed Play.

  How the session had gone, Mitzi had no idea. As always she’d blinked awake to find the actress gone. No blood. No body. Only the faint perpetual whiff of bleach. A length of tape had spooled from one reel to the other, but she’d not had the heart to review the result.

  Now the reel turned, and a girl’s voice said, “He named his horse Yahoo.”

  Through her headphones Mitzi recognized the snap of a latex glove. She heard wine poured into a glass. Her recorded voice sounded slurred. In slow-motion words, she said, “The name of your character is Lucinda…”

  The meters registered something. A jump or the creak of the ropes.

  Shushing her, telling her to relax, Mitzi said, “Your line…the line I want you to say is ‘Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!’”

  Almost inaudible on the tape, the girl asked, “What’s my cue?”

  At the console, Mitzi lowered the volume just as a scream rang out. The shrieks built in stages and broke with a ragged gasp followed by a hoarse coughing fit. After that came the silence of death.

  Rising in the background were sobs. Sobbing, a woman crying softly, the bright ding of a knife dropped on the concrete floor. A self Mitzi didn’t remember.

  Another woman, the girl’s voice asked, “Can you untie me, please?”

  The sobs ebbed to sniffing, shuddering sighs. Halting exhales.

  “I’m going now,” the young woman said. “Here,” she added, “take these. They’re real pearls.” A click followed, too faint for anything but the most sensitive mic to catch. Then footsteps hurried away. A door opened, closed.

  Listening to the tape now, those echoed voices seemed more real than the man working next to her. More real than the stranger curled up inside of her. Mitzi sat motionless, the headphones cupped over her ears, and listened to her real self weeping before the artificial her reached forward to hit Erase.

  From Oscarpocalypse Now by Blush Gentry (p. 205)


  Why did I go with Gates? He rescued me from the real kidnappers. Millions of people don’t know what goes into ranch dressing, billions of people, but they still love eating it. I don’t recall any detail of my kidnapping, but I know that Gates Foster rescued me and I married him and now he’s among the industry’s leading Foley artists. They headhunted him, the government did, as part of their effort to rebuild the domestic film industry. And I know I love him—even though half the time he smells like bleach—and I love our son, Lawton. Almost as much as I love chromium diopside. I mean, you just put on any of my high-fashion rings or necklaces and it’s like you’re in a classic Hollywood movie. You know?

  You could say I’m married to chromium diopside. I was born to be married to chromium diopside.

  Foster wiped another tape. How many screams he couldn’t say. He’d quit counting.

  Lucinda had never seemed more lost to him. He’d tracked her this far, to this concrete pit in the basement of a soundproof, world-proof bunker, and now he was forced to search for her among the screams of so many. The hell was inside his head where he met the ghosts and sorted between them. As if he were groping through the underworld seeking just one soul from amongst the billions of dead.

  He mounted another reel on the spindle and threaded the tape. The headphones hissed. His fingers lowered the volume by twisting a knob the moment before a scream ripped through his head. A long one, someone with huge lungs, the scream ran for longer than most. It ran for too long. Until it was no longer a scream.

  He turned to meet the Mitzi person’s round, shocked eyes. She’d lowered her headset, and as he did the same the scream continued. It filled the studio.

  “My alarm,” she shouted against the noise that burst from speakers in every corner. Tuesday had arrived.