by Jack Livings
If he’d suffered a heart attack or a stroke, it was certainly one of the more genteel in medical history, as he was arranged in the manner of a chem major catching a few winks in his carrel, head atop neatly folded arms. The rain was trickling down the bow window, projecting colloidal shadows that drained up the back of Lazlo’s tweed suit coat, through the gossamer atop his head, wiggling like tadpoles across the various texts spread out before him, through the glass jar of pencils, across stacks of tape reels, the gray tape decks, the row of books barricading the far side of the desk, over the sill, before meeting again at the glass their progenitors. She’d not been at his desk in several weeks, and it was hard to ignore the unusual symmetry of the items atop it.
Her father had bisected the space so that on the right were Urdu texts: academic papers, brochures, recipes, maps, and notebooks filled with glossaries, phrases, grammatical rules. A couple of primers on the German language for the ambitious speaker of Urdu. On the left were German texts on Urdu. On both sides were translations of original texts into the correlative language. The collected poems of Khawaja Haider Ali Aatish in both tongues. A two-volume original and translation of Baḥrul faṣāhat, Najmul Ghani’s treatise on versification. Also sprach Zarathustra and a twelve-volume set of Goethe ( volumes 1–15). What was here was there and what was there, here.
In the background, the two Grundig TK 45 suitcase reel-to-reel tape decks, friendly-looking fellows: each one had two big spools for eyes and a set of push-button teeth along the bottom. The left was slaved to the right with a bit of wire so that they would start and stop simultaneously, controlled by the playback buttons on the right-hand unit. RCA cables fed into a Y-connector that had been modified so that the right tape deck played only in the headphones’ right ear cup, and the left deck played only in the left.
When Turk found him, the decks had spun out their reels and the flopping tails of tape were spanking the heads at about fifty bpm. As mentioned, her father looked to be snoozing peacefully, and she reached over him and turned them off, unalarmed. Not a light sleeper, it usually took him a while to come around, and after some gentle nudges Turk finally gripped him by the shoulders and gave him a coconut-tree shake. Pale, a distant look in his eye, he rose, tapped his chest, and said something that sounded like, Obligartiamo essa boulxin plang qualz.
Turk, considering the options available to her father—Esperanto, Italian, Chinese, German, Dutch, Schweizerdeutsch, Wallisertiitsch, Creole, Persian, De Gammon—all of which he spoke on a conversational level, all of which she thought she might have heard within the miasmic tones he’d uttered, not to mention hints of a couple of others with which he had a passing familiarity—a touch of Gullah or Hokkienese?—answered as she’d always done, speaking only some Bornean tongues and a couple of the more pedestrian Romance languages herself: ¿Que?
He obliged, even in his diminished state attempting, as always, to teach by example, and, under the impression he was repeating himself, slowly drawing out the words so she might make some sense of their construction; to his alarm, what came out of his mouth bore no resemblance to what he’d said before. Stung. in. tr’amal. eng. er. wayeh! he said. His fingers walked over his lips, as if to identify the strange source of these splatter paintings. Turk was now alarmed.
A stroke, she thought. He’s obviously had a stroke.
The Brunns were not a particularly affectionate family—reunifications after extended absences had always unfolded like middle school dances, no one sure where to put their heads, their hands, their—dear god—their bodies, the advances and retreats comical if not for the desperate tang of anxiety, the frozen, apologetic rictuses, all in the name of a simple embrace—and Turk found herself patting her father down, as if searching for a weapon, her hands tattooing the length of his arms, legs, torso, though she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps for the same reason Peter insisted on touching the wound in Jesus’s side. A person who loses his lingual ability does suddenly transform into an alien being, profoundly unknowable.
It was a few weeks after her father had been installed within the taupe and avocado confines of the Pickering Institute, his own macaronic limbo, before she could approach the tapes. They stood in four neat towers on his desk, each slender BASF box identified with a letter, A–Z, each one preceded by (U) for Urdu or (D) for German. She knew nothing about what he’d been working on, and he had by then become a monolith, speechless and nearly motionless (his writing, before he froze up, was just as bad as his talking: given a pencil, he moved it, but imperceptibly, taking an entire day to form a cursive I), thus he wasn’t much help. She suspected that he had been developing a course of home study that would allow the Brunn Institute to capitalize on all the stereo equipment coming onto the market.
The setup on his desk was easy enough to figure out. She put on the headphones and began with the tapes that were still loaded on the machines. She rewound the spools, but she was in no hurry to depress the START key, and her finger rested atop the smooth white cube until she felt she’d amply prepared to receive the secrets of what had derailed her father. Physically, he’d been fine after the attack. The doctors allowed that it was possible, if undiagnosable to the standards of modern medicine, that he’d suffered a mild stroke, which accounted for his aphasia. At first he’d appeared capable of understanding when spoken to in English or German, though he responded with gibberish. After a week he seemed to have lost his ability to comprehend any form of communication and he’d sunk into a depressive state, sitting silent as a stone in his wheelchair. Small groups of teachers from the Brunn Institute were brought in to see if he’d respond to any of the forty-five languages offered at the school. If they made sense to him, he didn’t, or couldn’t, show it—and by the end of the month he exhibited signs of distress (rapid breathing, eye-rolling) unless he was facing a featureless white wall.
Turk might as well have been sitting in front of a pair of guillotines. She detected in the machines’ stillness a predator’s coiled study of its prey, though eventually she swallowed, threw back her shoulders, and pressed the key. The spools began to turn. Test tones hummed a three-dash ditty at 220-440-220, synchronous in the right and left headphones, followed by a few seconds of tape hiss, and two voices began speaking, Urdu on the right, German on the left. Men’s voices, evenly matched in pitch and tone, identical in volume, similar in their cadence, though not matched word-for-word. In the gaps she could make out specific tones in Urdu, or pick up a word or two in German. She pulled the right cup away from her ear and listened to the German. It was Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s prologue. She put the Urdu back to her ear and removed the German side. She listened to the rolling song of the Urdu, picking out Zartosht here and there before replacing the German cup, closing her eyes, and linking her fingers over her belly.
Comprehension was a pinball shooting back and forth between two bumpers, impossible to catch, impossible to control, and she eventually found a space between her head and the window, somewhere over the desk, into which she could focus her mind, a place that allowed her to hear without listening, as if she were a child sleeping in the backseat, catching splashes of her parents’ conversation from the front mixed with the buffeting of an open window, the crescendo of a car blowing by in the opposite lane. A mellow, passive state of existence. The tapes ran for nearly an hour and Turk scarcely moved. Her mind wandered, tripping over memories that had been buried for years, odd sequences of images—a field of corn, a box of donuts, a curl of black hair on a white sheet, a fence, a newsstand, a pencil sharpener, the face of a woman she’d loved—and she’d recoil, reintegrate with the physical world, she’d feel the interlocking web of her fingers, the prickle of the rug beneath her feet, her eyelids bursting bright red, spotty, dark, and she’d slip back into another sequence, and the languages would rise up in her head and fall away, and she wondered what her father had heard, what difficulty he must have had in throwing his supremely analytical mind forward, away from cognition, from linguistic structure, identific
ation of proclitics, the intricacies of transliteration …
She’d begun to wonder if he had embarked on a deliberate act of self-abnegation, an attempt to reach a state of divine blankness, a slippery, liquid emptiness, endless and featureless, an ethereal water, if that’s even what it was, not the angular, assertive stuff we have on earth, when the tapes stopped. She opened her eyes and reached up to remove the headphones, aware of a slight spatial distortion, a little blurring of vision, and the knuckles of her right hand bumped the plastic headphone cup before her fingers found purchase. She’d just set them down on the desk when she was overtaken by a wave of nausea. A burst of air rose up from her stomach like a weather balloon and exited as hoarse and resonant as a bullfrog’s call. She tumbled out of the chair, head spinning. A gyro had broken loose inside her skull. No matter which way she rolled, she was falling ass over teakettle. The floor was the ceiling, gravity in revolt. She grabbed a leg of the desk and held on for dear life, moaning, burping, moaning, burping. When her bowels turned to lava, she dragged herself across the floor toward the bathroom and climbed into the tub.
In the process of tumbling in, her foot caught the shower curtain and the whole assembly came down with a hollow clang, the rod cracking her on the head as she struggled to get her pants off before the liquid came bursting forth. When it came, boy did it come, rushing for the exit with the ungodly reek of death, her anus a searing ring of copper from which shot a fiery glop, and she tore away the curtain, groped for the shower lever and its blessed stream of rain, the cold water baptizing her while the shit streamed around her calves and heels, her body heaving like a bellows, her mind a—well, what was it? It was not the usual catacomb of dim, lizard thoughts that accompany extreme physical discomfort. Dizzy, yes, but the dizziness was pure, not dancing with its usual half-wit, pusillanimous partner, the physical, the one who made a career of stepping on toes and droning in complaint with rotten breath about the temperature and the humidity in the ballroom. Somehow her mind was quiet, at a remove from her body, and after the expulsive forces relented and she’d pulled herself vertical bit by bit, a one-woman revival of the evolutionary chart, tested her balance, her legs shaking jellies, her hands sleep-weak, and after having shifted the lever to send some warm water running over her quivering frame, soaping up when she felt she was capable, afterward wrapping up in a robe and towel, shuffling to the kitchen where she rolled small balls of Wonder Bread and with trepidation lay the host to dissolve atop her tongue—after all that, she recalled that during the worst of it her mind had been like a TV with bad reception, displaying crackle and snow, nothing more. No stranger to the effects of amphetamines, ephedrine, barbiturates, marijuana, mescaline, she couldn’t say that this feeling of simple blankness and disengagement was in the same family. All the white-clear spirituality imposed on a peyote trip came from external interpretation after the fact. But the deep blankness she’d experienced was self-generated.
She handled the tapes with delicacy on subsequent visits to her father’s audio lab, listening for only a few minutes at a time, and thus avoided violent reactions while still getting to bask in the warm dawn light that poured through her every cell, vaporizing the smoggy film that had built up on the portals connecting her physical and spiritual selves. With the blankness came some minor spatial disorientation that disappeared as quickly as taking a couple of deep breaths, some esophageal tremblors behind her sternum.
A new side effect appeared after a couple of weeks, discovered when she’d gone directly to the kitchen to make a grocery list after removing the headphones and her hand had been frozen, the graphite stuck on the notepad’s blue anchor line, as though it were a curb the pencil couldn’t hop, unable to initiate the g in grapes. Like the kid’s game of trying to force two magnetic dipoles to kiss, letters repelled one another, and when she finally roused the muscles in her hands from their glacial sleep, what they produced looked like a man-o’-war, tentacles trailing beneath the surface, a cartoonist’s shot at Sanskrit.
What had happened to her father? Perhaps he’d shorted out his Broca’s area, fried Wernicke’s to a crisp. If medical science would classify what happened as a stroke, so be it—he’d induced a stroke. In a case like Lazlo Brunn’s, diagnosis is a trip around the Monopoly board. Is it treatable? No? Roll again. Call it Bronze John or dropsy or the screws, if you can’t reverse the tapes and pour his brain back into his ear, you can say he’s got the clap or whatever and it won’t change a thing. She visited him every week, and told him about her voyages with his recordings. If he meant to warn her away from them, he gave no outward indication. He gave no indication that he knew she existed. He’d blown the popsicle stand and left a scarecrow leaning on the counter.
* * *
It was during one of her visits to see him that her apartment had been burgled. As far as Turk could figure, they had penetrated the Apelles’ defenses peacefully, probably disguised in the slacks and clip-ons favored by city pipe and wire inspectors, entered 14D by picking the service door, or the front door (impossible to tell, so thorough was their erasure), and removed the tapes, the notebooks, the texts, the headphones, and the decks, which conveniently came built into their own stylish black leather suitcases with chrome clasps. They took the pencils and the paper clips, the rubber bands and Pelikan jars (blue, black, indigo), the letter openers, the wax seal bearing the yin yang, and they took the ring bearing Lazlo’s father’s seal, FFK. They took the fountain pens. The ball of twine, the matches, the cigarettes, ashtray, a tidy packet of identification papers he’d carried with him from Germany, and an accordion-fold series of sepia babes secreted in a snuff box. They took the ancient business cards Lazlo had ordered at the print shop on East 3rd in 1925, the curlicues of his name like flying pennants atop the stolid serifs of the Brunn Institute for Linguistics and Cultural Advancement, 271 W 20th Street, BALDWIN 5741. They did their part to reverse his condition, returning his desk, if not his brain, to a preterite state, wiping it clean of wax drippings, ash, dust, fingerprints. If they touched anything else in the apartment, Turk didn’t notice. The extreme care taken to denude the desk signaled to her that not only would the police be of no help, but that this was one of those true crime situations in which alerting the authorities would precipitate a blindfolded van ride to an undisclosed location. She knew about her father’s work for the U.S. government during the war, knew that spycraft had been of more than passing interest to him in the ensuing years, and suspected that his study had been visited by members of whatever acronymic group was paying him to research the efficacy of binaural language acquisition. They’d no doubt dropped in on him at Pickering, but she knew better than to ask the staff there for a clue. They’d have been paid well to shake their heads at her and pause before answering, No, no, nothing that I can recall, why do you ask?
The tape decks turned up in Caracas a few years later, in a standard concrete holding cell otherwise outfitted with one high-intensity lamp, one wooden table, one restraint chair. By 1971, a form of binaural erasure had become commonplace at the Canadian black sites charged with reeducation of American double agents and the occasional Soviet defector. In 1973 the methodology briefly found its way into a language lab at Denison University, the result of a conversation between an ex-spook and an enterprising college professor at an airport bar in Madrid, both men down in the dumps on account of it being Super Bowl Sunday and every TV in the whole damn place being tuned to a Montserrat Caballé concert, which led them to overindulge on kalimotxo, the spook to overshare a little bit, the professor to mishear a little bit, and the brief hospitalization the following fall of four Spanish 101 students for dizziness and disorientation. As application and methodology underwent refinement through the late twentieth century (audio engineers at DARPA caught Lazlo’s pie-pan toss and flipped it back with hyzer), it shed its sinister overtones and for a brief shining moment showed potential as a means of erasing intrusive memories after battlefield trauma. Funding was diverted after 2001, however, into
projects designed to create more battlefield trauma.
Turk changed the apartment locks and closed the door to her father’s study. Her mother had died the previous Christmas (pneumonia contracted doing charity work), and once Lazlo had been declared legally incompetent, her brothers, Seamus and Teddy, sold the language school and the three siblings divided their parents’ remaining holdings. Turk got the apartment, sizable deposits to her accounts, and closets full of evening gowns, tuxedos, shelves of high heels, drawers of undergarments, socks, garters, watches, jewelry, banker’s boxes of files, photo albums, yellowing notepads, a hundred pounds of letters, some bound in twine, some by rubber band, some with ribbons. Artifacts of an earthly existence. Her father had not touched his dead wife’s things. Thus she inherited the tangible absence of both parents all at once and, being a good Brunn, immediately set to categorizing and organizing. Her father’s office at the language school arrived in fifty boxes, mostly books. She’d gone through the lot of it within a week, working daily from dawn until midnight. The personal effects took a month. Turk held on to the books, the pots and pans, the furniture, papers. A solitary sentimental gesture, she kept her father’s wristwatch, a Technos Atomium, and wore it every day. The jewelry she unloaded in the Diamond District. Everything else went to the incinerator or to the Catholic church on 82nd. And then she was alone.
