Back Up

by Paul Colize

  The more Reynolds talked, the more excited and animated he became. He took a fresh sheet of paper, to demonstrate the Shepard tone. He drew a diagram of a piano keyboard and described Shepard’s experiment, conducted in 1964, resulting in a scale that seemed to rise continually. The scale had been used on occasion to compose pieces of music.

  By the time Reynolds got on to the melody of silences, Stern was half-exhausted.

  Reynolds left the room and returned with another spool for the Revox.

  The tape played a sort of background noise in which Stern thought he could make out a melody.

  Reynolds was exultant. The melody didn’t exist, but was created in the brain by the silences between the notes. He embarked on a complex explanation peppered with a host of technical terms – tonic and phasic receptors, coding of the duration of stimuli and the brain’s adaptation to the latter.

  Stern was dazed.

  He could take no more and was about to say so when Reynolds moved on to the most impressive aural illusion of all.

  He fetched a third spool of tape and slipped the headphones back over Stern’s ears.

  This time, Stern heard sounds coming alternately from the left and right. He heard a woman’s voice pronouncing an unknown, two-syllable word, the same word on each side, but a short interval apart. Little by little, Stern began to hear other words, interspersed between the original word, and finally a complete phrase accompanied by a kind of melody.

  Reynolds was enjoying himself immensely.

  The words, phrases and melody that Stern heard were not on the tape. The phenomenon was due to the human brain’s constant search for meaning in the things its hears.

  The meaningless syllables were associated by the brain with known words, then combined to form other words, or even complete phrases.

  Scientists called the phenomenon ‘ghost words’.

  73: THE CALL OF DUTY

  Days passed. Autumn came, and winter soon after. Snow covered the mountains on the opposite shore of the lake.

  Rock music was more and more strung out. Tracks were getting longer and longer, and I was beginning to tire of it all. The Doors and Pink Floyd were leading the field. The Beatles’ latest album, Magical Mystery Tour, marked the beginning of their end. ‘Nights in White Satin’, a terrible single by the Moody Blues, oozed endlessly out of every radio.

  For my part, I stuck with pure, hard, fast-paced rock, like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, from The Stones.

  I settled into the routine of work at the hotel. I earned my share of comments, criticism and reprimands, and I learned my trade. The hotel guests found me discreet and efficient, and the management were satisfied.

  I began to talk. Mostly stock expressions of politesse or answers to standard queries. But I could address a person and look them in the eye.

  The pain in my shoulder gradually eased, but a stiffness remained. Broad, sweeping gestures were impossible. I refused to contemplate the thought that I might never play the drums again. I told myself I would get physiotherapy later, when my life was properly settled.

  I came off the drugs. No more dope, beyond the few joints I smoked with Andy on my Wednesdays off. Alcohol was my intimate friend, but it took a vast amount for me lose touch with reality. I took sips of drink all night long. I was sober when I came on duty, and left before the morning shift arrived. My habit went unnoticed.

  Each time we met, Andy would announce his imminent departure. With that out of the way, he would talk about his painting, and I would talk to him about rock music.

  On New Year’s Day, he told me his latest project was ready at last. He agreed to show it to me before shipping it to New York.

  I went to his room for the first time – an attic at the top of an old building on Rue d’Etraz. He begged me to ignore the bewildering mess.

  A huge colour photograph, two metres by three, filled the end wall. It showed a big, blue American car parked in front of a shoe store in a big American city, evidently New York. He must have used the print as the inspiration for his work. Andy asked me to move closer to the picture. I could see now that the huge picture was composed of individual elements, each about fifty centimetres square.

  I moved closer still, and stood open-mouthed. Never before in my life had I seen such a realistic painting. The car’s reflection was visible on the glass of the store window, each element of the composition, every object was reproduced in a wealth of extraordinary detail. The effect was striking. I hardly dared imagine the time such minutely detailed work would take.

  I stepped back and sat down. I stared in admiration at the masterpiece for over an hour, examining every part of it.

  Andy was delighted. He danced around me as I looked. He asked if I understood now why he would be rich and famous one day.

  By night, at work, I pursued my research. I noted my observations and linked them to the events I had witnessed. When I felt sleepy, I would turn on the TV.

  The more I read, the more I learned. I became an expert on hearing, sound and acoustics.

  I can scarcely recall the countless articles I read at the time, but my conclusion was clear: the guys at the studio had tampered with the tapes of ‘Girls Just Want It All Night Long’.

  I concluded that their work was subtler than the insertion of a few phrases recorded backwards, though they may have used that technique, too.

  I focused on ‘ghost words’, as the specialists called them: non-existent words generated by the human brain, from sequences of phonemes. I reckoned they had been linked together at very low frequency, making them undetectable. Low frequency sounds, inaudible to the human ear, explained why animals could sense the onset of natural disasters. At the subconscious level, the frequencies could bring about profound alterations in behaviour.

  The ghost words explained why only a section of the audience in the night club in Ramstein had responded to the stimulus, as not everyone would have been able to understand English.

  The truth came to me one night in February 1968.

  I had just finished my tour of inspection. I had fetched a glass of beer and switched on the television. It was almost midnight and the channels were shutting down for the night. I watched a report by a team of journalists working for a Swiss station.

  The studiously impartial report gave a detailed picture of the daily life of G.I.s in Vietnam. The camera had followed a number of units. Mostly, the military authorities had ordered them to stop filming and sent them packing.

  But they had nonetheless succeeded in infiltrating an American camp a few kilometres from Hue. The Tet offensive had just begun, and the American authorities were in over their heads.

  The journalists had seized the opportunity to film the installations and preparation for a mission. Soldiers were seen running in all directions, priming their weapons and equipment, paying no attention to the camera.

  A few notes of music were heard.

  One of the journalists questioned a G.I., a spotty young kid. Laughing, he told them the song was their anthem. It was played every time they set out on a mission. The officers had fixed loudspeakers to the half-tracks and the choppers.

  My blood froze.

  Amongst all the to-ing and fro-ing, I heard that wild, ferocious, jubilant noise. Steve’s riff. Larry’s bass entered the dance. I felt an icy wave run through me, to the very tips of my fingers and toes. Transfixed, I heard my own intro fill, and Jim’s opening bars.

  While the kid joked about the anthem, Larry Finch hollered until his voice cracked. The bass guitar, and my big bass drum, kept the beat.

  On the screen, the G.I.’s face was transformed. His eyes became wide and staring, his features set hard. He added that the rock track gave them courage, and brought Charlie out in a cold sweat.

  Then he turned on his heels, muttering that he had to go. The call of duty.

  74: CLASP HIS HAND

  Dominique stopped for groceries on his way home from the cemetery. He was emerging from the supermarket when Gér
ard Jacobs called back.

  He couldn’t resist a joke when he recognized the police officer’s voice.

  ‘You Belgians are quick off the mark. I thought the police were supposed to be slow to respond?’

  ‘Well, we have been trying to identify this man for an entire year,’ Jacob quipped. ‘Without you, we’d still be at square one.’

  ‘Anything new to report?’

  ‘Yes. It seems to match up. Odile Chantraine was born in Brussels in 1920. In 1942, she married Roger Bernier, a Belgian citizen, born 1917, in the Namur region. They had two children, both boys. Pierre, born September 1943, and Jacques, born August 1945.’

  ‘The woman I met at the cemetery said one of the sons was dead.’

  ‘Absolutely. The elder boy, Pierre, died in 2006. Roger Bernier died in 1988, and his wife in 1991. Pierre Bernier was married, with one daughter. His wife died, too, but his daughter is alive. She’s forty now, married and living in South Africa.’

  ‘So Jacques is my patient?’

  ‘Very likely.’

  Dominique gave a long sigh.

  ‘Jacques. I was almost there. We’d gotten as far as Isidore.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry… Nothing. So X Midi is Jacques Bernier?’

  ‘That’s not all. Jacques Bernier disappeared in 1964.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘On January the second, to be precise. He was supposed to report for military service in Malines. He never showed up, and there’s been no trace of him since.’

  Dominique did the figures quickly.

  ‘He’s been missing for forty-seven years?’

  ‘I can understand you’re surprised. But we register around a thousand missing persons every year, about three a day.’

  ‘And they’re never found?’

  ‘Usually, they are. Most are runaway minors, which would have been Jacques Bernier’s case at the time. We Belgians only decided 18-year-olds were adults in 1990! Many are confused, or have dementia, and go wandering. But there are suicides, too; accidents, and family fights. The Missing Persons Bureau has over sixteen thousand case files, and about eight hundred have never been closed.’

  Dominique could hardly believe his ears. He stood beside his car, his shopping bags at his feet.

  ‘What’s he been doing for forty-seven years?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. But according to the file, he never got in touch with his parents, though they were a happy enough family, it seems.’

  ‘What do you know about him, apart from his disappearance?’

  ‘Very little in the file. A decent kid, quite quiet. He was involved in an accident when he was about fifteen, and suffered severe concussion, which may have had long-lasting effects. That’s one of the theories in the case file. He was declared fit for military service, though.’

  Dominique was deep in thought.

  ‘So he came back after forty-seven years? Why? To ask his ma to forgive him, and put roses on her grave?’

  ‘He may have thought his time was up. Criminals often react like that. A last wish to get something off their conscience.’

  ‘No, that’s not it. That doesn’t feel right to me.’

  ‘Then keep communicating with him. Try and find out more. I’ll try and find out if there’s any other family left. You should get in touch with his brother’s daughter. I’ll call you if there’s anything new.’

  Dominique ignored his day off and turned up at the clinic next morning.

  He walked into X Midi’s room unannounced, lifted him with both arms and sat him upright in bed. Next, he placed his laptop on the trolley table and wheeled it to face him. He opened the image viewer and showed X Midi the picture he had taken the day before.

  Then he sat on the bed and took his hand.

  The man’s eyes misted over.

  For the first time, Dominique felt X Midi clasp his hand.

  75: THE WRONG I’VE DONE

  Your smile is the smile I’ve always known. The years haven’t taken their toll. I can go now. I hope you forgive me for the wrong I’ve done.

  76: TO SUPPORT HIS THEORY

  After visiting Reynolds, Michael Stern was certain that Pearl Harbor’s deaths were connected to Jacques Berger’s unexpected reappearance at the Berlin studio.

  Berger hadn’t been tripping. The men he described to Mary Hunter weren’t imaginary. They were there in the studio, tampering with the tapes.

  Stern was convinced, too, that the events in Ramstein, and the death of the night club disc-jockey, were linked to the affair.

  But his own firm belief wasn’t enough. No journalist worth his salt ever exposed a topic without a minimum of facts, and he had no tangible proof that would change his editor-in-chief’s mind.

  Jacques Berger could well have been killed himself, by now. The men in the studio had no idea he’d been standing in for the group’s regular drummer, which explained why Paul McDonald had been eliminated. But they would certainly have discovered the truth later, and hunted him down. As to the motive for all this, it was plain as day. Stern was something of a history nut. He knew that the world’s great powers had sought ways to galvanise their troops, or weaken their enemies’ defences, since the dawn of time. The history books were full of examples.

  One ancient text, The Art of War, and its mysterious author Sun Tzu, declared that war was based on trickery.

  Sun Tzu recommended the use of propaganda and disinformation, to convince the enemy that defeat was inevitable. He suggested other tactics to undermine morale or increase stress levels.

  In the eleventh century, the Ismailis practised a secret science that was thought to confer magical power: knowledge that was revealed only to the initiated, by degrees. Apprentices at the first level learned how to use hashish to develop their physical courage and achieve enlightenment.

  The Mongol lord Genghis Khan was known for leading hordes of bloodthirsty riders across Russia and Europe. His reputation for total command was reinforced by the psychological conditioning to which his troops were subjected.

  Hatred of the enemy was all-important, but for his men, the knowledge that they were free to pillage, kill and rape – a favourite spoil of war – was a useful boost to morale.

  More recently, in the Second World War, the Nazis had injected their soldiers with testosterone to heighten their aggression. The Wehrmacht’s doctors distributed tens of thousands of doses of amphetamines to keep their men awake and bolster their fighting spirit.

  After the Second World War, the US army hired behavioural psychologists, following the results of a study that showed the majority of combatants were reluctant to kill, even on the field of battle.

  To alleviate the soldiers’ feelings of guilt and increase their aggression, they had established a battery of drills designed to condition individuals to think and act as a group, transforming them into a kind of killing machine that was better able to consider the enemy as non-human.

  It was rumoured that early in the Vietnam war, the US army had experimented with LSD.

  After taking the drug, troopers showed symptoms of psychotic schizophrenia, and could be pushed to commit violent acts against others.

  Another rumour held that the experiment had been a disaster, and that the military authorities were now testing more sophisticated methods: psychotronic weapons, devices that used electromagnetic waves that could make people act unconsciously, and unleash their aggression.

  For Stern, the tragedy that had unfolded in Ramstein was the result of an experiment with new technology, designed to programme human beings: a finely-tuned system capable of stimulating aggression in one section of a mass of people, and weakening the defences of the other.

  It remained to gather the evidence he needed, to support his theory.

  77: THE NUMBER I KNEW BY HEART

  I would have gone home, if I hadn’t been arrested. My identity crisis was coming to an end, I was no longer in revolt, I was becoming reconciled to the human race, little
by little.

  I thought of my mother every day, of the pain she must feel, the same gut-wrenching pain that I felt. I thought of my father and my brother, too. Distance and time had erased the grievances I held against them.

  I would have gone home, I would have held my mother in my arms, I would have clasped her in my arms, without a word. She would have asked nothing of me.

  I would have overcome all the obstacles. I would have justified myself. I could do that now. I would have expiated my misdeeds. I would have trusted to justice. I would have taken responsibility for my actions and accepted my punishment.

  The Swiss television report had left me shaken. I knew what was afoot now, I knew what they were up to. I wanted to shout it out loud, to tell it to every single guest I encountered at the hotel, but there was no one I could talk to.

  I could have confided in Andy. Our friendship was frank and sincere, but he knew nothing about my past. I had made a clean break, and invented some half-baked story that floored me whenever he asked.

  Sometimes, I failed to answer when he called me by my name. He was the only person who knew me as René. Everyone at the hotel called me ‘Monsieur Schnegg’. This was a new difficulty: when I ordered my first fake ID, I had deliberately chosen a name similar to my own, to avoid precisely that eventuality.

  I carried on writing my story over the days that followed.

  There was enough to support my theory. The further I got with my text, the more convinced I became; I was tormented by the urge to speak out.

  One night, when I had drunk more than usual, I could keep the secret no longer. It must have been three or four in the morning when the inspiration came to me. I knew who I needed to speak to. I knew who would listen.

  I picked up the telephone and dialled the number I knew by heart.

  78: RECORDING SESSIONS

  In early February, as Michael Stern struggled to corroborate the facts, he received a telephone call from Jim Ruskin’s ex-girlfriend, Birgit.