The Invention of Sound Page 6

  In the lobby of the studio’s theater no one ventured near them. As if an invisible shield held them back, nobody approached her or addressed them. It might’ve been the bruises on her neck or the halfhearted way she’d applied concealer to her fractured nose and swollen eyes, but she knew she was a pariah for bigger reasons.

  Here, every hello was a request for a job, either a job-job or a blow job. Mitzi could accept the fact that she was everyone’s dirty little secret. Like a child star they’d all fucked the second before she was legal.

  Jimmy was stupid not to see what she was. She hated him for his blindness, but she still wanted to be seen as something not corrupt. Even if right now he was ogling a nearby actress. The blonde wore a strapless gown so wired and boned that it made her breasts look like something being served on a tray. Her lashes were so loaded with mascara that her eyes looked like two Venus flytraps.

  Jimmy, just dirty and unkempt enough to pass as a millionaire celebrity, leered at the woman. “Is that Blush Gentry?” He sloshed his drink in the direction of the younger middle-aged blonde, a woman who fit somewhere between trophy wife and soccer mom. Her curls brought to mind drive-in movies. A generation of movies where a monster or mental patient had stalked and eventually killed her. The blonde curls still looked good. The waist was almost the same waist. As if she sensed Jimmy’s leer, her blue eyes found him.

  Mitzi knew the dance. In a moment Blush Gentry would break away from her conversation with an assistant nobody, and she’d make a beeline to see if Jimmy offered a better prospect for a new role. Yesterday’s drug connection was today’s executive producer. The marijuana industry was bankrolling independent projects, big projects, just as a means to launder the profits no bank would accept. Jimmy, with his neck tattoos and pockmarks, looked just the type to have a project to cast.

  Straightaway, the actress locked her gaze on him and approached them. “Hi,” she said, extending a beautiful hand, a hand that had once been lopped off with a meat cleaver. “I’m Blush.”

  Starstruck, Jimmy’s pitted face flushed. His tattooed hand met her not-severed hand. “I’m Jimmy.”

  Although Blush didn’t acknowledge her, Mitzi offered her hand. “Mitzi Ives.” Adding, “Ives Foley Arts.”

  The actress touched hands with Mitzi, not making eye contact, and said, “Thanks, but I do all my own screaming.”

  Give it a minute and the actress’s business card would appear, complete with links to her online highlights reel. And Jimmy would reciprocate with a screenshot of his GED. A big-shot mogul he was not. At that, his new best friend would get busy working the crowd for a better job prospect.

  People saw Mitzi and looked straight through her until an industry tub made passing eye contact, all belly and whiskers. She told Jimmy, “I’ve got to do business.” And headed for the foyer and the toilets.

  In the women’s room she stood at the sink and watched the door behind her in the mirror. The her in the mirror looked back with busted, bloodshot eyes. The industry tub walked in without hesitation. Looking around to make certain the place was otherwise empty, he said, “Word is you have something special you’re auctioning.”

  The trend was that people consumed their media alone. Minus the ready laughter of others or the screams of an audience, the magic just didn’t happen. Studios knew this. As did distributors and theater chains. That’s why they held so-called contests and gave out free tickets to press screenings. Young people who felt they’d won something would be euphoric. Who better to pack the house with when a handful of local critics would be watching?

  The shared limbic high of so many people, it almost guaranteed a spate of good reviews. The human limbic system needed community to reach its peak highs and lows.

  But now home theaters and downloads meant more people, particularly cultural arbiters and people with disposable income, the early adopters, were cocooning alone. Watching alone, and wondering why films weren’t as funny or as scary or sad as they used to be.

  Alone with Mitzi in the ladies’ toilet, the industry tub asked, “Can I give it a listen?”

  As she cued the file, Mitzi said, “I call it Gypsy Joker, Long Blonde Hair, Twenty-Seven Years Old, Tortured to Death, Heat Gun.” She watched as the industry tub fitted the buds into his hairy ears.

  Everyone felt self-conscious expressing emotion alone. They needed a scream that gave them permission to scream. They needed to feel part of a larger limbic system. The way all dogs howled, that was limbic resonance.

  Producers were locked into a battle for the best scream.

  Mitzi pressed Play.

  The industry tub jerked fully upright as if jolted with electricity. His body shook, and his eyes went so wide the whites showed in a bulging, bloodshot margin around each yellow iris.

  She left him leaning forward, his hands braced against the edge of the sink, squeezing out anguished tears. She said, “Bidding stands at a million two.”

  At the bar the inevitable had taken place. Jimmy stood alone.

  “What?” he asked. “Do I stink or something?” It was clear he was hurt. Blush Gentry had escaped, and no one else would go near him. Jimmy just didn’t know how to live on the outside. Shunned by polite society: a feeling Mitzi had adjusted to years before.

  It was hard not to love a man who so steadfastly ignored the awful truth about her. But it was even more difficult to respect him.

  Mitzi led him into the small auditorium, where the center seats were clearly occupied. These, the best seats, were filled with small parties of people, or couples, with only a few single seats left empty among them. Mitzi left Jimmy on the aisle and edged her way down a center row. She excused her way past people until she arrived at a single seat smack-dab in the middle of everyone.

  Jimmy had suggested they stay in and fuck. Thanks to the Ambien, every time felt like her first with him. If he wore a rubber, she had no idea. Probably not. He’d made nothing of his life, so the best he could imagine was to conceive another of himself. A do-over: Jimmy 2.0. As if to give himself a second shot, and doing so would shift the burden to this new him and give the current Jimmy permission to squander what was left of his years.

  No doing, Mitzi had told him. No way was she getting knocked up.

  As she sat in that centermost seat, the party of four sitting to one side of her rose and silently moved to distant seats. At that, a couple to her other side rose and relocated to less desirable seats. Within a few minutes of her arrival the area around Mitzi was vacant. Several rows ahead and behind her as well as wide margins of seats on either side were empty. She looked over at Jimmy and waved for him to join her.

  “Lucky us,” she called loudly. “I found two seats together!” The question of the rubber wouldn’t leave her mind. To make matters worse was her dress, now the waist seemed tight. And the bodice. At that, Mitzi settled into her seat, heavy with the dread that she was no longer alone in her body.

  The internet wasn’t any help. She’d gotten remarried. Changed her name. Foster called her old work, and they told him as much. No one there had ever known her, not back then. Staff turnover. The last person he wanted to call was her dad.

  Online he pulled up an obituary for her mother. It listed the survivors, and among them was Amber. Amber Jarvis, these days. Lucinda’s mother. Directory assistance had a Jarvis but unlisted.

  Finally, Foster caved in and called her father. Lucinda’s grandfather.

  “Hello?” Amber’s dad sounded so chipper that Foster almost hung up. Why spoil such a good mood?

  Foster pushed on. “Paul?”

  Still sounding upbeat, the voice asked, “Is that you, Gates?”

  He didn’t ask about Amber, not right off the bat. First he tried to explain the ceremony the group had set up.

  The latest trend was to buy an all-white casket, steel or lacquered hardwood. High gloss. All mourners would get a customized Sharpie with which to autograph the sides and lid of the coffin and to write a loving message. Foster tried to ex
plain about the fake funeral. How it would provide closure, according to the parents group.

  He tried to make it sound not crazy. More like a real thing done by enlightened people.

  Amber’s dad, Paul, stayed quiet. He wasn’t buying it.

  Foster said, “I’m sorry about Linda.” He meant Amber’s mother, dead of cancer as of three years ago according to the obituary. “I would’ve come,” he offered.

  Paul’s tone wasn’t angry, but he said, “Amber said not to tell you. She didn’t want you there.”

  Foster said he understood. He didn’t understand. He asked if Paul would come to the casket ceremony.

  The older man waited a swallow and said, “Gates, I don’t think so.”

  Foster wanted to explain about catharsis. What the group had drilled into him. About how the music and the flowers would provide a public setting for grief. He could externalize his loss instead of shouldering the burden alone. He wanted to explain about closure.

  Instead he waited and held his tongue. More words would just be a way to keep Paul from eventually saying “No.”

  Perhaps out of pity, the man on the phone told him, “I’ll tell her.”

  Foster said, “Thank you.”

  His former father-in-law added, “But, understand, she won’t be there, either.”

  Mitzi could anticipate how a stranger would scream. She’d done this work so long and so often. In airports, she’d spy someone. In the supermarket. She knew who would scream for his mother, and who would only scream. Experience, at least hers, showed that no one screamed for God. Fat or thin. Black or white or Asian. Men or women, young or old, she knew how their final moments on Earth would sound.

  On sight, she knew whether a stranger at the library would let loose with a full-throated giving up compared to a teeth-gritting, stubborn, grunting death. Or the worst, the mewling of a leaky balloon, something almost laughable, like a dog’s squeak toy. Actual people actually died that way, a few.

  And if she hadn’t worked directly with such a person, she had her studio collection to fill in the blanks. The collection she’d inherited. Rows and rows of file cabinets, filling room after room, they held samples going back to the earliest forms of sound recording. Among them, tin foil wrapped around metal cylinders and banded with the hill-and-dale imprints of a stylus. A yellowed-paper tag tied to one cylinder read: Recent Irish Immigrant Man, Chest Crushed, Basalt Millstone. Tucked away were the machines that could still play such relics. Mitzi had picked through drawers filled with hollow cylinders of hardened wax. Iroquois Squaw Strangled, Slow Middle Distance, Leather Cord. She’d spend weeks exploring rooms filled with hard rubber and celluloid disks. Shellac disks and finally vinyl.

  Such a trove of screams, it made her wonder whether films were invented simply as a medium to display them. Here was a sort-of immortality, agony preserved, archived and curated. She wondered if Native Americans were right. If a photograph could steal a person’s soul, perhaps these recordings were the souls of the dead. They were dead but not in heaven or hell. They were inventory. They were making money. Some were—most were warehoused. Property cached away, here in these sliding metal drawers in these chilly concrete rooms.

  This commodification of pain.

  She’d pour a glass of Riesling. Sip enough to swallow an Ambien. Keep the bottle beside her for refills.

  Each recording was a drug. Each made her heart beat faster. Her breathing slowed until she’d be forced to gasp for air. Each scream spiked her blood with adrenaline and endorphins. Slumped over the mixing console, her head clamped in earphones, she’d sit. Scream surfing.

  Only at the end of her strength would she cue up her favorite. The master recording of her favorite: Little Sister, Dies in Terror, Calls for Father. She poured herself another glass of wine. She pressed Play.

  His hand throbbed. The bite had become infected, the bite on his thumb from the airport. If he didn’t keep his elbow bent, if he allowed his hand to hang low, it swelled up like a mitt and dripped something.

  The doctor from his support group, Dr. Adamah, asked those present to bow their heads. Adamah was supposed to read the twenty-third psalm from the book of Psalms. But by glaring mistake he read from the book of Joshua, the account of Jericho’s destruction. Not that anyone seemed to notice, the onlookers smiled raptly and nodded their approval.

  Dr. Adamah wrapped up his reading, “…the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed…and destroyed…every living thing in it—men and women, young and old…” He closed his Bible, and the doctor motioned for Foster to take his place.

  Standing at the podium, Gates Foster began to deliver the eulogy. His swollen hand raised as if he were testifying. With the exception of the few faces he recognized from the group, the entire assembly of mourners were strangers to him. Each stared until he flinched and looked away. In every direction he found the unblinking eyes of strangers who whispered to each other behind lifted hands. Someone giggled.

  That’s when Foster saw her. Amber. Amber Jarvis, now. Seated in a folding chair at the end of the chapel’s back row was Lucinda’s mother. It had been a long shot, but she was at the funeral. Alone, it seemed, she’d come. Wearing a tan coat that was easy to spot in that sea of funeral black.

  “When Lucinda was six,” he began, “she asked her mother how to cook.” He risked a look at the woman in the back row. She nodded for him to continue. “They were going to cook a roast for dinner…” A smile flitted across Amber’s face as she saw where the story was going.

  Foster paused and smiled back at her for a beat. “They took the roast out of its wrapping paper, and her mother asked Lucinda to get the pan out of the bottom cabinet.” Each action and detail moved him to the next memory. “Her mother placed the roast on the cutting board and slid a knife from the knife block and explained that the first step was to slice about two inches off the smaller end of the roast.” Saying this, Foster found his hands placing an invisible chunk of raw meat on the podium in front of him. His swollen hand straightened as if to make a karate chop, becoming the knife.

  As he cut the invisible pot roast, he recounted how Lucinda had asked why they needed to shorten the roast. Her mother answered automatically that the smaller end cooked too quickly and would serve up dry and inedible, so it had to be set aside and cooked separately.

  Foster laughed. “Lucinda didn’t buy it.” She’d asked why and kept asking why the entire roast wouldn’t cook at the same rate. “That’s how smart a kid she was,” he said, even though it hurt to talk about his child in the past tense.

  Behind him, now, the casket lay open, heaped with worn toys. Robb and the group had sent a whopping big casket spray of white carnations. Like something you’d throw over the back of a winning racehorse. A second-grade photo of Lucinda, smiling, enlarged to poster size, sat on an easel beside the casket.

  Foster glanced up to meet the eyes of his ex-wife. A woman with her daughter’s heavy, dark hair combed down her back, but threaded with gray along the sides of her face. She nodded, and he continued.

  “Lucy never bought the reason for trimming the pot roast,” he recounted. Her mother had offered other reasonable explanations. The smaller end tended to be too fatty, for example. The bit they trimmed away always served up too bitter or too tough. Whatever the case, her mother had reasoned, this was how she’d been taught by her mother, Lucinda’s grandmother, so this was how she meant to teach her own daughter.

  “And still”—Foster shrugged and offered up both hands helplessly—“Lucinda insisted they call her grandmother and keep asking.”

  So they’d called Lucinda’s grandmother. A woman dead of cancer for three years now. And they’d asked why it was so important to trim the smaller end off the pot roast.

  Here he wound up to deliver the story’s payoff.

  “It wasn’t because the meat cooked unevenly or dried out,” he said. “It was because the only roasting pan they’d had—so long ago—had only been so-big.”

  A le
sson in perpetuating a mistake across generations. A dozen valid reasons, all wrong.

  Lucinda, their smart, beautiful daughter had been the skeptic who’d brought their family to the final truth.

  He looked up to see Lucinda’s mother listening intently.

  Among the seated mourners more telephones rose to record his words as Foster pressed forward. A small voice in the crowd said, “Harsh, dude,” but faintly. Another small voice, the shout of a tiny man said, “He’s not your daddy.”

  A laugh rippled through the chapel. The bereaved hunched forward, touching buttons, texting.

  A louder voice, a man’s voice, shouted, “That man is a child pornographer!” It was Foster himself. It was his voice, shouting from a different phone, “You don’t have to be his sex slave. Not anymore.”

  They were watching the airport video. Someone was. It had gone viral and made him a freak show celebrity, and they’d found him.

  So many phones were recording, watching to catch his reaction. And Foster craned his neck and struggled to see past the forest of raised arms. To see Lucinda’s mother, but where she’d sat was an empty chair. Amber had fled.

  Truncated bits of his voice shouted, “Pot roast!” Shouted, “Pot roast!” Somebody laughed and others shushed him because they were still recording. People wanted an encore.

  Lucinda was dead, but no one cared. Lucinda had lived, but no one cared. Building inside him was the rage he felt when he dreamed of beating down child molesters. The machine-gun him.

  Bumping inside his jacket, like a heavy weight bouncing against the thud of his heart, was the gun.

  Mitzi went to the window in her nightgown. Her new headache proved she wasn’t dead. As did Jimmy snoring behind her. In the office building across the way only one window glowed. A single night owl like herself, the dad-shaped nobody studied something on his computer screen. A celebration it had to be. He was slugging back a whiskey-looking something from a bottle of something brown. Slugging it straight from the bottle.