The Invention of Sound Read online

  From Oscarpocalypse Now by Blush Gentry (p.1)

  Don’t call me a movie star. I’m not, not anymore. I’m a certified gemologist these days. If I’m offered roles, it’s not for my acting acumen. The last parts I want to play are the sort of freak show cameos that Patty Hearst got duped into.

  No, what really excites me is chromium diopside. My company has controlling interest over the largest deposit of chromium diopside in Siberia. More Emerald than Emeralds, that’s our slogan. What we mean is chromium diopside is a deeper green than most emeralds. My entire line is showcased on the Blush Gentry Hollywood Crown Jewels Hour on GemStoneTV.

  My son, his name is Lawton, he’s eleven. My husband, he’s still in the industry but not in front of the camera. He works in postproduction, post-postproduction, like deep postproduction. And he’s a little bit of a workaholic. He tells me, “Blush, my work is my church.”

  And, no. We didn’t know anything about any grisly killings, at least not at the time they were being committed.

  Whatever magic Robb worked, it got Foster sprung. From the airport he drove Foster to a diner. They took a booth near a woman wearing oversized sunglasses who pushed a package across her table toward a man who pushed it back. Anonymous behind her dark lenses, the woman fiddled with her phone. She clicked a pen and jotted something into a notebook.

  The waitress hadn’t brought out their eggs before Robb covered his face with both hands and burst into tears. “It’s Mai,” he sobbed, his words muffled behind his fingers. “It’s everything.” Customers turned to stare.

  His wife, Mai, had left him after their baby’s awful death. Foster had heard the story often enough at the support group.

  Robb opened his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster, a gun snugged flat against his ribs. He wiped his face with a paper napkin. His other hand fumbled a buckle and snaps until the holster came loose, and he placed it and the gun on the table between them. “I can’t have it right now. I can’t say what will happen if I walk out of here with this…” He pushed it toward Foster.

  Foster slid the gun back. Heavy steel against laminated plastic, the sliding sounded big. Like static. Like something grinding in a room where everyone present had gone silent.

  They were two men sitting in a diner. One man crying, a gun resting between them, people stared. The woman wearing sunglasses stared.

  “Please,” Robb begged. “Just for now, you take it.”

  After the airport, Foster owed the man a favor. So Foster took the gun.

  Mitzi arrived at the diner. The booth near the back. The usual arrangement. A producer, Schlo, sat waiting. With two projects backlogged, it wasn’t as if she needed the work. But Schlo was like family. Besides, this being Hollywood, who didn’t want to play the hero? Mitzi slipped into the booth and asked, “You already tried Industrial Light and Magic?”

  The guy didn’t answer, not right away. That was Schlo all over. The speech pattern of someone who lived on his mobile phone. A man who left a wide margin around each statement to allow for the satellite delay. He said, “Industrial Light and Magic’s not you.”

  Even in person, sitting across the table, Schlo was loud. Like he spent his life yelling at the hands-free phone in his car.

  Big Schlo lifted a hand to stroke the stubble on his cheek, clearly watching his reflection in her sunglasses. They gave her away, sunglasses, indoors. “Hang one on, last night?” he asked. “Xanax bars.” He leveled a thick finger at her. His wrist sparkled with a ruby cuff link. “I’m maybe going to send you over some.”

  That, that she wouldn’t dignify with a response.

  “If it’s magnesium you’re not getting, Brazil nuts are your answer.” He cupped a hand next to his mouth and whispered, “You know, back in my day we used to call them ‘African American Toes’?” He hissed wetly, snickering at his own joke.

  Mitzi lifted her glasses to glower at him, but the fluorescent lights stabbed her eyes.

  He reached a hairy, meaty hand across the table. “You take after your mother. Such a person of goodness she was.” His fingertips stroked her cheek. “You’re not your father, you aren’t. A bigger prick I never met than your father.”

  She slapped the hand away. The headache drove down her neck, across her shoulders and onward down her spine.

  She’d only suggested Industrial Light & Magic to make a point. She was baiting the guy. Only Mitzi was Mitzi. She dodged eye contact. Signaled a waitress. Said, “Call Jenkins, she’s good.”

  After the pause, Schlo said, “Jenkins won’t touch this one.” Again, too loud.

  Mitzi set her phone on the table. She uncoiled a pair of earbuds and plugged them into the phone, saying, “I want you should hear a new scream.”

  Big Schlo waved off the pitch. To him a scream was a scream.

  People, Mitzi asked herself, what do they know? They think they know the sound of a bone breaking, when all they know is celery. Frozen celery wrapped in chamois and snapped in half. How they think a skull sounds when someone jumps off a skyscraper and slams headfirst on the sidewalk, that’s just a double layer of soda crackers glued to a watermelon and smacked with a baseball bat.

  Your average moviegoer thought all knives made the same noise going in. The poor innocents wouldn’t know the true sound of arterial spray until it was their own head-on car accident.

  Schlo lifted a thick express-mail packet from the seat next to him. Handed it across the table. A sticky shadow of glue showed where an address label had been peeled off.

  Mitzi lifted the flap. Her thumb riffed the stack of bills on top. All hundreds. Stacks and stacks. The scene in question must really stink.

  Something popped. Gum popped. A gum-chewing server had stepped to their table. An orange-stained Los Angelina she wasn’t. Not yet another bimbo beat hard with the blonde stick.

  The waitress looked at Schlo too long. Then looked away too fast. She’d pegged him. Her spine straightened. She pushed out her chest and raised her chin. Turned her head in both directions for no reason except perhaps to display each profile. She asked, “What can I get you guys?” No longer a waitress, now she was an actor playing a waitress. With a tiny gulp she swallowed her chewing gum.

  She started into reciting the specials. Delivered each word like here was an audition.

  Mitzi cut her off. “Just coffee.” She added, “Please.”

  When the server was gone, Schlo tried a new strategy. Said, “I love your work.” He said, “That picture in release last month, the one where the kid gets tripped at the top of the stairs and busts his noggin open on the stone floor…that was yours, right?”

  A kid, some actor played a teenager stalked by a haunted doll. The doll was a computer model. The actor was almost middle-aged. What tumbled down the flight of stairs was a lifelike dummy with an articulated skeleton inside. What made all this make-believe garbage real was the sound. The smack of somebody’s skull splitting open on a stone floor and the perfect squash of the brains inside. That sound was the money shot that sold the scene.

  Mitzi said, “A head of lettuce, frozen, and dropped to land next to the mic.”

  Schlo shook his oversized noggin. “This town knows a head of lettuce when they hear one.” Insiders knew plywood strips soaked in water to dissolve the glue, then dried in the sun and snapped in half to dub a shattered femur.

  Mitzi shrugged. On her phone she cued up the audio file she was shopping around. Her latest scream, it was the future of motion pictures. Acting beyond acting.

  It was a shitty double standard. Visually, pictures were better every year. With computer graphics. With digitally animated everything. But sound-wise, it was still two coconut shells for every shot showing a horse. It was somebody mashing a bag of cornmeal for every step an actor took in the snow. The delivery was better, with Dolby and Surround and layered tracks, but the raw craft was still the fucking Middle Ages.

  Thunder was a sheet of metal. Bat wings were an umbrella opened and closed at the appropriate speed. />
  “What’s your scene?” Mitzi asked. She’d find out soon enough from the clip, but there were basic questions she needed answered up front.

  Schlo looked away. Looked out the big windows at a Porsche parked in the lot. He said, “Nothing special. A young lady gets herself stabbed.”

  Mitzi plucked a little spiral notebook from her handbag. She clicked a ballpoint. “The make of the knife?”

  Schlo frowned. “You need that?”

  Mitzi started to slide the envelope of money across the table to where it came from.

  Schlo slid it back. He held up a finger for patience while he fished out his phone and scrolled through something on the screen. Reading, he said, “A German Lauffer Carvingware. Stainless steel with an ebony handle. A seventeen-inch slicing knife, manufactured in 1954.” He looked up. “You need a serial number?”

  The waitress reentered the scene. She’d pinned her hair back, off her face. Her lipstick looked fresh and glossy. Her lashes sagged, long and fat with added mascara. Smiling as if this were a second callback, she held a couple cups in one hand. A pot of coffee in the other. In a single take she placed the cups on the table and poured them full. She exited.

  Mitzi jotted notes. “The knife stay in, or is this a multiple?”

  Schlo looked up from his phone. “What’s it matter?”

  Mitzi shoved the fat packet of money back across the table. She clicked her pen and feigned putting away her notebook.

  She didn’t say as much, but with a multiple there would be the sound of the knife coming out. A suction noise. A sucking followed by the rush of blood or air from inside the wound. It was complicated.

  As Schlo pushed the money back, he said, “Three stabs. One, two, three, and the knife gets left inside.”

  Without looking up from her note-taking, Mitzi asked, “Where’s she stabbed?”

  The producer eyed the pen, the notebook. He picked up his cup and slurped. “In a big brass bed.”

  Exasperated, Mitzi sighed heavily. “Where on…her…body?”

  Schlo looked around. His color rose, and his eyes narrowed as he leaned across the table. He whispered something to her from behind his raised hand.

  Mitzi shut her eyes and shook her head. She opened them.

  His eyes narrowed to slits, the producer glowered. “Don’t get all high-and-mighty with me.” He smirked. A sneer showed bottom teeth capped and bleached but no less ugly. “You did that scene where the demon dogs ripped the skin off that faggot priest.” He was sputtering, juiced with equal parts shame and outrage. The few other diners looked up and glanced their way.

  She didn’t invent any of these scenarios, but Mitzi didn’t say as much. She was just a woman, an independent contractor, making some writer’s twisted dream come true.

  Across the way a man seated at a table began to weep. Cupped both hands over his face, he did, and let loose loud, stagy sobs. A second man seated across from the first glanced around, his face going brick red with shame. This second man, just some dad-shaped nobody, he was, but his face Mitzi knew.

  Back at his office, small girls continued to haunt Foster. Third graders ran photocopies. Middle schoolers pushed the mail cart, but he kept his monitor angled so they couldn’t see. Their whispers and giggles drifted to him from the hallway and the offices beyond, but he stayed on task. In his leather swivel chair, he pretended to sip a cup of coffee. Sales reports lay open across his desk. One hand he kept always ready, one fingertip always resting on the key that would toggle him to a screen filled with part numbers and delivery dates.

  The workaday world eddied around him as he snaked his way through secret online portals. Typing passwords. Directed to links embedded in emails sent to him in exchange for a credit card number or crypto currency. Using a list of usernames, he hit sites that redirected him to sites that redirected him to JPEG bins where no one’s IP address could be traced. There, Foster clicked through images people refuse to believe exist.

  A coworker from the Contracts department stuck her head in the doorway. “Gates, you have a second?” she asked. “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Gena.” A younger version of the woman, a girl standing elbow-high to her, stepped into view.

  His red-rimmed eyes looked her way, he smiled. The very picture of a harried district rep, he said, “Hello, Gena.”

  The girl carried a manila folder. Pages and slips of paper dangled and fluttered from the edges of the folder. She looked at him with solemn eyes, her gaze taking in his office. “Where’s your little girl?”

  Her mother petted the child’s hair. “Sorry, she thinks everyone should have a daughter she can play with.”

  A few degrees beyond the woman’s field of vision, atrocities were worming across Foster’s monitor. Playing in lurid color, the sound muted, here were crimes against children just the witnessing of which would send him to prison until he was an old, old man. With just one more step, she’d see things that would trouble her sleep for the rest of her life. Men wearing masks and waiting in line. Sex where the child was clearly dead.

  Foster tapped a key, and the horrors were replaced by columns of serial numbers. He said, “Gena?”

  The girl looked back, her eyes confused.

  He continued, “You have a good ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day,’ okay?”

  Gena stepped closer. Her head tilting to a slight angle as she asked, “Why are you crying?”

  He touched the side of his face and found a tear he wiped with his knuckles. “Allergies,” he told her.

  Her mother mouthed the words, “It’s Tuesday.” Stretching them out. She put a hand on her child’s shoulder and steered her away.

  Right. Taco Tuesday. Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs. It was lunchtime, and the floor was going quiet. Foster toggled back to hell.

  To find these sites had been spooky-easy. One anonymous phishing email had led him down the rabbit hole. Each cache yielded links to others.

  So what if someone caught him? Who really cared if somebody from IT found anything he’d failed to scrub from his browser history? Foster risked nothing. He’d become a man who’d already suffered the worst. This searching gave him a reason to live.

  Robb had told him, once, in the group, that the laboratories that did medical experiments and product testing on animals sought out dogs and cats that had once been household pets. Wild animals or strays living on the street knew how dangerous the world actually was. Such animals had a survival instinct, and they fought back. But animals raised with love would tolerate torture and regular abuse and never strike out in self-defense. On the contrary, animals raised in loving homes would suffer the laboratory abuse and always strive to please their tormenter. The more torture an animal could endure, the longer it was useful. And the longer it would live.

  The same went for kids. Girls like his daughter, Lucinda, they could stay alive by not resisting. No child had been raised with more love than Lucinda, if she was still alive.

  If nothing else, he might see how his daughter had died. Hovering over the images, reflected dimly on the screen was his dull, sick face. His eyelids sagging, half closed. His lips hanging half open.

  Foster’s eyes tried to avoid the kids the way anyone decent looked away from a dead cat in the street. To not look was to respect its dignity, somehow. These kids, they’d been looked at to death. Drooled over to death. And whatever took place in these images amounted to a slow-motion murder.

  No, the kids Foster tuned out. The kids he found online with men. The men, though, he studied their faces. The pixilated ones, he studied their hands, or he scoured their bodies for tattoos, for finger rings or scars. An occasional glimpse of Lucinda’s long hair might catch his attention—hair like that of the girl at the airport—but it was never her. So he focused on the men.

  These kids, he’d never see them on the street. Foster knew as much. His only hope was to see one of the men. So he toggled to make screen captures, and
he enlarged them as much as their resolution would allow. In that way he built his inventory of male faces, of tattoos and birthmarks. In such numbers it was just a matter of time. If he could catch just one man, he might be able to torture his way to the next.

  Gates Foster saw himself as a bomb primed to explode. A machine gun in constant search of its next target. This, this office, no it wasn’t his dream job. His fantasy career would be to torture these men who tortured children.

  Crazy risks Mitzi didn’t take.

  A gun on the table across the restaurant from her. Two strange men, two goons trading a gun with one man crying and the other looking around for eyewitnesses. She let her gaze drift out the large windows to where a Porsche sat. Guarded, she lowered her voice. “I want you should give this a listen…” She offered Schlo the earbuds attached to her phone. When she dared to look again, the two men were gone.

  The producer continued, wary. “The girl we hired, she’s okay at taking off her clothes, but she couldn’t scream her way out of a paper bag.”

  Cued up on her phone was Mitzi’s new masterpiece. A game changer that would have sound replacing visuals as the most important part of any picture.

  Schlo eyed the earbuds. “What’s this?” He reached to accept them. He pressed one, then the other, into his hairy ears.

  Mitzi winked. She said, “Judge for yourself.” Touched the screen of her phone.

  She didn’t say as much, but the only way a person had to process an experience so troubling was by sharing it. And not just pirated on a telephone screen. A troubled person wanted everyone else to see and hear it on the big screen. Multiple times. Ticket after ticket. Until the experience stopped leaving them so shaken.

  Over the phone, her masterpiece worked its magic. Schlo’s face had gone pale as a powdered doughnut. A tear tipped out of each eye and slid down. His lower lip trembled, and he planted both hands over his mouth and looked away.

  She spoke wistfully. “I call it Gypsy Joker, Long Blonde Hair, Twenty-Seven Years Old, Tortured to Death, Heat Gun.” She lifted her sunglasses, but only for a wink. “Catchy title, don’t you think?”