The Invention of Sound Page 7

  Unseen, she toasted him with her own sticky glass of wine.

  Jimmy simply wasn’t working out. Not that he hadn’t tried. He’d literally stood on her neck without breaking it. Stood balanced on one foot, even. And all she had to show for it was a sore neck, not so much as a slipped disk. She’d have to plumb deeper depths, maybe drive as far as Bakersfield or Stockton to find a replacement. Go trawling weight rooms for a steroid case. Her busted nose notwithstanding, Jimmy hadn’t the killer instinct.

  Behind her a snort sounded. The snoring from her bed stopped.

  Jimmy, leathery, long-legged Jimmy with all of his Riverside bad-boy swagger and hustle, he said, “You okay, baby?”

  Mitzi didn’t turn to face him, but she asked, “Would you like to be in a movie?” It wasn’t her imagination, her breasts had grown. Her nipples had started to ache.

  He told her, “Don’t shit me.” But his voice had a smile in it. There was so much silence around him she knew he must be frozen in disbelief.

  She studied the man in the office. He tapped his keyboard and squinted into the glow of the monitor. She asked, “Do you know what the Goofy holler is?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy lied.

  “It’s a yodel recorded by an Austrian ski racer named Hannes Schroll,” she explained, “first used in a 1941 cartoon called The Art of Skiing.” The yodel had since been used in hundreds of films and thousands of television productions and video games. It’s quite possibly the most famous recording of a human voice. Schroll never earned a cent from it.

  Jimmy shifted on the bed. Springs squeaked. “Never heard of the man,” he said.

  Mitzi sighed. “My point, exactly.”

  “Well,” he huffed, “if I’m going to work, I’m going to get paid for it.” He fumbled something and it slipped off the bedside table. Glass broke. An ashtray or stemware. Mitzi heard the snap of a cigarette lighter and smelled smoke drifting her way. The Fontaine was a smoke-free co-op, but he already knew that.

  Mitzi gauged how much wine was left in her glass.

  And then, there, afloat in the lonely well-lit office across the street, the man heaved forward in his chair. His glasses slid from his nose, and he vomited onto his desk.

  Tonight he’d hide in his office. Tomorrow Foster would be arrested for the funeral. He’d surrender himself to the police. On every news website he was tonight’s top story. On video after video, each shot from a different distance and angle, each video shot from some phone at the funeral, he withdrew the gun from his jacket. On his computer screen the tiny video version of him wheeled on the crowd, his arms straight out in front of him, the gun clutched in both hands. Folding chairs clattered and fell backward, spilling each row of people into the laps of the row behind. Mourners climbed each other, clawing away at a kicking pile of legs and thrashing arms. Through the computer’s tinny speakers came their wails and the rip of yanked fabric pulled to shreds. Fingers grabbed collars and belts like rungs on a ladder. Shoes stomped over the layer of fallen, flattened bodies. On a different video the casket teetered on its stand, teetered and tipped, tipped and crashed to the floor spilling Teddy bears and sympathy cards.

  On a third video the tiny Foster backed away from the screaming crowd and ducked out a fire exit.

  Tonight he’d drink Jack Daniel’s and surf the dark web one final time in search of his child.

  At times he’d hated her for running away, even in a game of tag. If she hadn’t dashed into an elevator, regardless of her intentions, she’d still be here. So perhaps the funeral had accomplished its purpose. It had forced him to express his sorrow and his anger, and now both were gone. He’d overcome his addiction to her.

  This indifference, it wasn’t numbness because numbness implied the opposite: that some feeling would return. This had no opposite.

  An email chimed in his inbox. A link from an address he didn’t recognize. From a secret pervert or not, this was an ordinary link to a movie pirated on YouTube.

  Foster was old enough to realize that no problem was entirely his own. What kept him awake at night also kept a million others up. The video was an excellent example. A fake high school cheerleader stumbled through a fake forest in implied darkness, barefoot and wearing only a lace negligee. The fake blood smeared on her hands and face was laughable. Generations had watched so much fake death. Beautifully lighted, badly acted, underscored with music. Now nobody could believe in the reality of death.

  After people had been fed so many lies they’ll never swallow anything as the truth.

  Millions had watched the scantily clad actor push her way through briars and branches as a shadowy figure carrying a butcher knife stalked her. Foster wasn’t the only person not buying it. He lifted the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and put it to his lips. Drinking, yes, but not drunk.

  No, this new indifference wasn’t from whiskey. This was a complete inability to believe in anything.

  The cheerleader struggled with her negligee snagged on something. Snagged on a thorn.

  Her stalker lifted the knife so that the long blade caught the moonlight. Shining clean.

  The cheerleader raised her hands to ward off the attack. She gasped.

  The knife slashed down clean, but rose again smeared with blood. Stabbed downward bloody, but arose dripping.

  In profile, the cheerleader’s face tilted back, outlined against the full moon. Her glossy mouth moved. Her lips not matching the scream. The overdubbing was so bad, but the scream made up for it. The shrill voice of a terrified girl shrieked, “Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!”

  The words seemed to hang in the air like so much smoke. If the cheerleader escaped, Foster didn’t notice. If she died, he couldn’t say.

  It wasn’t Lucinda’s voice until it was.

  He tucked his chin and vomited across his keyboard.

  Part Two:

  Tape Bleed

  When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed.

  Book of Joshua 5:20

  Jimmy’s skin smelled like paint. So much so that when she’d wrap her hand around his dick and jerk it up and down—like shaking a can of spray paint—she’d half expect to hear something rattle inside. Ketoacidosis, the smell probably was, his body was that kind of lean. But Mitzi suspected years of vandalism had seeped into his pores, giving him body odor like so much late-night graffiti.

  Who could guess what soup of chemicals the Rohypnol was interacting with in his bloodstream? Mitzi pulled open a file drawer and dug up some aerosol NARCAN given to her by Dr. Adamah for such emergencies. One whiff and Jimmy jolted eyes-wide, gasping awake.

  He stammered, “Did I overdose?” His yellow eyes marveled at her. “You saved my life!”

  Mitzi leaned in to adjust an RCA Type 77-DX ribbon mic, saying, “Don’t thank me just yet.”

  The grave yawned, open and empty, at Foster’s feet. Barely visible in the dark, tombstones stood like innumerable witnesses radiating outward from this spot. Each stone, granite or marble, a chunk hacked from the whole, impossibly big planet and hammered down to a uniform size and shape and made to carry a conventional message.

  A framework was still in place atop the hole. Whether to cover the grave or to eventually lower Lucinda’s casket, Foster couldn’t tell.

  The nighttime smell of cut grass took him back to childhood, while the left-behind bouquets, fresh and plastic alike, were without scent. In-ground sprinklers jetted ghosts of gray water into the still air.

  A crunching reached him. Footsteps along a gravel path. Then a figure, a black outline, moved against the background of the blue night. A voice hissed, “Foster?” A male voice. And Robb came forward clutching an edge of each stone he passed like a blind man negotiating a strange room.

  Instead of calling a lawyer, Foster had once more called his group leader. Hadn’t Robb talked him out of that beef at the airport? Not that even Robb could disappear a weapons charge so easily. On the web, aft
er the cheerleader movie had ended, a pop-up teaser had announced, “Bereaved father threatens mass shooting at daughter’s funeral.”

  According to the web, Foster was dodging an arrest warrant. His cell phone pinged his every step, so he’d taken out the battery. The last thing he needed was jail time. Not after he’d heard Lucinda. Her voice, not his imagination. Not a dream. Her shout had shocked him sober, and he needed help. He needed some help.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  Robb said, “I should’ve called the police.”

  Foster lowered his voice. “Some amazing magic is at work here, my friend.”

  Robb looked at his wristwatch. “It’s late.”

  Standing there at the grave intended for his daughter, Foster pressed his case. He insisted that none of this had happened by accident. Just the other day he’d been back to the airport to collect the suitcase that had flown to Denver without him. The little girl at the airport had been a sign. An omen. Sending his suitcase away so he could retrieve it, now, when he really needed it. It all seemed so predestined. Inevitable.

  It was a divine something guiding him to reunite with Lucinda. Or it was his child’s soul demanding resolution and revenge. But something, something had been directing his path.

  He could see Robb wasn’t buying it.

  Foster proposed writing a check. A check for every dollar he had in the bank. Making it out to Robb. Robb only needed to cash it and deliver the cash to him. With cash Foster could buy a junker car off the web. Live in it. Sleep in it. Not transfer the title and drive it to pieces as he searched out Lucinda’s scream in the movie.

  Before he could ask, Robb said, “Nothing doing.” He didn’t need an aiding and abetting charge on his record. Not with his own past.

  Foster pulled the gun from his pocket. “Walk with me?”

  Jimmy had yet to realize that he was naked. His beef jerky body, corded with muscle, was tied spread eagle to a waist-high wooden platform. The usual audience of microphones crowded around him. Others hung by cords, close above his face.

  Mitzi had tied a long strand of piano wire to a hook in the studio ceiling. This led down to where a small noose lay against his sunken belly. She looped the noose around the top of his scrotum and cinched it snug. That he did notice. Her touch immediately produced an erection.

  At the mixing console she poured herself a glass of pinot gris and tossed back an Ambien. She asked, “Did you know even dogs have laugh tracks?”

  As she stretched her hands into a pair of latex gloves, Mitzi described how animal studies had identified the way dogs pant while at play. Analysis with a sonograph shows the panting includes bursts of various frequencies. These are similar to the high-frequency “chirping” rats produce during rough play and sex.

  Mitzi bundled her hair under a surgical cap, saying, “Both the chirping and the panting seem to function as laughter.” When researchers recorded the specialized panting and played it back to anxious dogs confined at animal shelters, this canine laugh track prompted tail wagging. The recorded laughter triggered face licking. Dogs abandoned stress-related behavior such as pacing, and those same dogs began to play.

  She flicked a fingertip against a can mic and watched the needle on the corresponding meter. “Yawning and laughter,” she went on to explain, “are contagious because they were the protohuman’s method for regulating the mood of their group or tribe.”

  Jimmy’s eyes drifted closed. He appeared to be slipping back into dreams.

  “A major trait of psychopaths,” she explained, “is that they don’t yawn when people around them yawn. Psychopaths don’t feel empathy. They lack the mirror neurons.”

  She placed a gloved hand on a cold metal handle and cranked it a half rotation. The handle drove squeaky gears. The mechanism was archaic and rusty and hadn’t been used. At least not in her time. She muscled it, and the platform lowered until the wire to the ceiling drew taut.

  As she fitted earplugs into her ears, Mitzi thought vaguely about Odysseus plugging the ears of his crew with wax, then lashing himself to a ship’s mast so he alone could listen to the Sirens. It was typical, how a mere sound could lure people to their doom.

  Jimmy blinked awake and looked at her with confused eyes.

  She turned the crank another half rotation. The table edged lower. He’d soon get the picture.

  As she tried to explain it, the platform would lower while Jimmy’s wrists and ankles would stay bound at the original height. If he could keep his entire body rigid, the noose wouldn’t pull tighter and do any damage. As long as he could hold all of his muscles tensed and keep his body hanging stiffly in space, he’d keep his testicles.

  She poured another glass of wine and chewed a couple Ambien for faster effect. The meters bumped, their needles jumping in response to the slightest noise. Lastly, she fitted a pair of goggles over her eyes. In the event of blood spray. She donned noise-canceling headphones over her earplugs to complete her sphere of silence.

  She wanted to tell Jimmy about the Grateful Dead. How they’d invented the phenomenon known as “tape bleed.” An early master tape of theirs had been wound too tightly, and magnetic coding from one section seemed to imprint on adjacent sections of the tape. This produced a ghostly reoccurring echo. An unintended overdubbing, this faint layer of sound in the wrong places. Like most accidents, it looked like a disaster at first. Soon everyone in music was trying to intentionally produce the same shimmering effect in their work.

  She uncapped a felt-tipped pen and wrote on a DAT cartridge: Riverside Thugster, Sudden and Traumatic Orchiectomy.

  Mostly, Mitzi was giddy. What with the wine and all. Jimmy? Timmy? She racked her brain, suddenly uncertain who this paint-smelling man strapped to her table was. How had they met?

  At this rate she’d never remember turning the crank, lowering the table, leaving this stranger suspended in air by only the strength of his flexed muscles. With her eyes fixed on the console, she cranked and kept cranking, deaf to everything, forgetting how often she’d rotated the handle.

  Even now, her headache was abating. With every uptick of the VU meters, the pain in her skull ebbed further away.

  As all the meters pegged into the red, Mitzi felt a sting on her arm. As if a hornet had stung her just below the elbow. Already blood was wicking through the sleeve of her lab coat. Pulling back the cuff, she found something embedded in her skin. A chip of something green, sharp edged like a green flint arrowhead. She plucked it out and turned to pour herself another glass of wine.

  Both the bottle and glass were gone. Of the wineglass, only the base and the stem remained, standing on the console where she’d set the glass down. Of the bottle, only the thick, green-glass bottom and some ragged portions of the body stood. The green arrowhead in her arm had been a shard of the bottle. It had burst. Both the bottle and the glass had exploded.

  “Let me tell you a story, friend,” said Foster. He waved for Robb to start down a row of graves. Foster jerked the gun for him to turn where needed. Without speaking, they arrived at a white headstone that almost glowed in the dimness. In this, a section dedicated to infants and children, some plots were heaped with toys. So many greeting cards and flowers were banked against one headstone that they obscured the name. There the two men stopped and stood.

  The dark hummed with crickets and tree frogs and the rustle of mice. The sound of things too fragile for the daylight. And the silence of the owls and snakes that preyed upon those most fragile.

  “You were so worried about the quarterly audits,” Foster said. He stood gazing down on the pale stone. “You decided to work through lunch. And then you decided to work late, so you called your wife, Mai, to pick up your kid at day care.”

  Foster knew the story by heart. He’d heard Robb tell it so often in the group. “That day the temperature hit a hundred,” he continued. “Then Mai called from the day care to say Trevor wasn’t there.” The staff said Robb had never dropped the boy off. Robb had insisted he had.
He charged that the day care workers were covering up something. Over the phone he shouted for Mai to call the police. He could hear her relaying his accusation and the staff members insisting Robb had never stopped by that morning.

  Over the phone Mai asked if Robb had taken their son out of the backseat. They’d had the windows tinted. Even if someone had walked past, no one could see inside. Very quietly Mai told him to check the car.

  Robb bent low over the tiny headstone and righted a glittery plastic wreath that had toppled.

  “You stood above the spreadsheets that covered your desk,” said Foster, “and you knew what you’d done.” And if it had reached a hundred degrees that day, it had been so much worse inside a locked car parked among a few acres of cars on an open concrete parking lot.

  Baby Trevor must’ve woken up alone still strapped in his car seat. And Robb would never know how much his child had suffered.

  Mai had left him that day. First hysterical, then sedated to catatonia. The police, of course the police had come to arrest him on charges of reckless endangerment and negligent manslaughter. In short order the quarterly audits became the least of his worries. In part because he’d been fired for absenteeism. That, and the fact that everyone in the company had watched as he’d run to his car. They’d all watched first him, and later the paramedics, attempt the impossible with the small limp body. Foster asked, “You remember?”

  The toys on the grave, Mai’s relatives had left them. Foster didn’t need to move the stuffed bear and the basketball to reveal who was buried here. Foster offered up the story not to torment Robb, but to remind him that Robb, himself, was also human. They were both human. And they would both fuck up on occasion.

  “As brutal as that nightmare was,” Foster said, “at least you know what occurred.” Robb knew the full story to tell and tell to the group until it no longer hurt. Or hurt less. And that was more than Foster could claim.