The Invention of Sound

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The story. The grave. It was something Robb could grasp.

  Foster added, “My friend.” He pocketed the gun and produced the check. All the money he had in the world. The check he’d already written and stashed in his pocket, he handed it over.

  And Robb took it.

  Mitzi paced along the rows of filing cabinets. Her fingers trailed across the file drawers, each crammed with tapes recorded at least a generation before. The metal cabinets thick with dust. Dust muffled the sound of her footsteps on the concrete floor.

  Under one arm she lugged an open shoebox. Juggling a wineglass in that same hand. Her head a little foggy from the wine, but intent on her hunt. Her other hand she dipped into rusted file drawers and rotting cardboard boxes. She examined Girl Rider, Crushed, Stampeding Bison. She wondered how someone had staged that scenario. Surfer, Flayed Alive, Vampire Bats. It boggled the mind. Both of these had been before her time.

  When the shoebox was full or her wineglass was empty, she’d head back to the sound pit and play her selection.

  The studio storerooms presented a hoarder’s warren of stacked boxes patched with strapping. Heavy boxes had crushed those beneath them, spilling out reels of unspooling magnetic tape. A firetrap is what it posed. Flammable shellac. Hardened wax. Here and there trailed leftover movie scenes on silver nitrate stock, dubbed long ago by the predecessor of her predecessor of her predecessor and promptly forgotten. The fish-smelling, low-tide stink of decaying celluloid.

  A match, even just a spark, and the entire trove would burn like the Hindenburg.

  Mitzi considered the recorded phone calls left by people seated aboard hijacked jetliners doomed to crash. Those, and the voicemails left by people trapped above the fires in the World Trade Center. These messages were all over the web. People sounded so rational saying their good-byes and their I-love-you’s to an answering machine. Especially considering how so many of those same people would be among the two hundred–plus who’d shortly jump to their deaths.

  What moved Mitzi’s heart was how the people who received those messages went on to treasure those tapes and duplicate them and to duplicate the duplicates to be certain those final words would never be lost.

  That was always the impulse: To preserve, to curate. To cheat death.

  Ambien did a great job of punching holes in her short-term memory. It was her long-term memory that was the problem.

  What had it been like to be eleven years old? Twelve? If she couldn’t sleep, her father would pile together a nest of old blankets in the middle of the sound pit. She’d curl into the nest, and he’d extinguish the lights. In that soundless, lightless place he could delete the whole world. Then slowly he’d construct a new world around her. Seated at the mixing console he’d create the sound of wind. He’d add the crackle of logs in a fireplace. The sonorous tick-tock of an antique clock. The rattle of a loose pane in a leaded-glass window. Her father would build a castle around her and place her in the highest tower. Doing all of this with only sound, he’d place her in a canopy bed hung with embroidered velvet, and she’d fall asleep. That was her memory of being twelve.

  Foster jerked awake. A dog’s bark, or something like a dog’s bark, had broken his sleep. Slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, he found himself parked at the edge of a grassy yard. A rotund man tossed a baseball to a cap-headed little boy who tossed it back. Not a dog barking, the noise had been the slap of the leather catcher’s mitt the kid wore.

  His car was nosed into the curb. He’d parked at an angle to the lawn of an apartment complex, in one of a long row of diagonal parking spaces. The spaces on either side of his were empty.

  Slouched as he was, Foster could see the man and the boy, but it was unlikely they could see him. The car he’d bought off Craigslist. Fifteen hundred dollars for a beater Dodge Dart with duct tape patching the seats, and a couple hundred thou on the odometer. An AM radio. The oil pan leaked. A fry cook in a fast-food uniform had signed over the title. They’d done the deal in the parking lot during the cook’s lunch break. The tags were good for another ten months. Big bench seats meant he could sleep if he didn’t get caught for vagrancy.

  The fry cook said he trusted Foster to transfer the title. Fat chance of that.

  Whoever had tinted the car’s windows had done a lousy job. The blue film had bubbled and rippled until it felt as if he were underwater. Still, it was good enough to keep out unwanted attention.

  According to the Internet Movie Database, the film dubbed with Lucinda’s scream was called Babysitter Bloodbath. To his surprise the actress was a bit of a legend. Blush Gentry, she’d played the pretty sidekick in a generation of horror films. Always the funny blonde sexpot, she’d cracked the jokes and denied there was a serial killer until she became his victim. In most of her roles she died with blood bubbling from her lovely mouth.

  Most of Ms. Gentry’s work had fallen from public awareness, but this one film still drew an audience.

  Seventeen years ago, when she’d made the movie, she’d been twenty-four. That put her age at forty-one. A few years Foster’s junior, but not many.

  These days Blush Gentry paid her bills on the convention circuit. At Comic Cons and Wizard Worlds and Dragon Cons she charged for autographs and for posing with fans for pictures. She maintained a sizable following on social media.

  The old man and the kid continued to toss the horsehide between them.

  Intuition prompted Foster to activate his phone. He knew not to keep it on for long, not when any ping off a cell tower could bring a SWAT team down on him. He shuffled through his database of photos just to be certain.

  It was the old man. Without question. The man playing catch was Otto Von Geisler, the notorious Belgian child pimp. Foster’s proof was a low-resolution Interpol photograph of the monster’s ear.

  Foster weighed the risk as he unbuckled his seat belt. He slipped the gun from his shoulder holster. Big redbrick apartment houses and small lawns stretched in every direction.

  His plan: Grab the kid. Save the kid and pistol-whip the predator.

  A horn honked. A crackle of radio static and the hushed roll of tires brought another car into the space on the passenger side of his. A police cruiser, it nosed into the curb.

  From where Foster slouched he could see only the rack of lights on the roof, but he heard the driver’s-side door. Staying low, watching across the length of the front seat, he saw a uniformed patrolman step out and walk toward the game of catch.

  A voice called out, “Hello, officer.” The man, not the boy. Von Geisler’s voice.

  As Foster watched, the patrolman offered a phone to Von Geisler and said, “Sorry to bother you nice folks.” He nodded to draw their gaze to the phone. “But have you seen the man in this picture?”

  Von Geisler took the phone and studied it. The boy closed the gap between them and craned his neck to look. The monster elbowed the boy and said, “Looks like a mean hombre, don’t he?” To the officer he said, “What’s he wanted for?”

  The officer said, “Assault with a deadly weapon.” After a quick cautious glance at the boy, he added, “And knowingly receiving online images of an illegal nature.”

  Whoever had gotten into his office computer had known how to search better than Foster knew how to scrub.

  The doctor said, “Congratulations.” He was peering down into his stainless-steel sink. Studying a new mess of ashes scattered across the bottom.

  The specter of pregnancy jolted Mitzi. Otherwise she felt like a normal person. Her hangover had passed, and she hoped that was the cause for congratulations.

  It wasn’t a child Mitzi wanted to avoid so much as the day she’d eventually have to tell the child the true nature of the family business.

  At school, Mitzi, little Mitzi, insecure only-child Mitzi with no mother at home and only her father, she’d been a broken record. My daddy makes movies. My daddy did the voice in that cartoon, in the part where the mermaid trades her tail for two legs, where she screams. Kids b
eing kids, her classmates had wanted to meet him. And he’d obliged them, allowing little girls to drop by his studio, the warren of concrete rooms. In the sound pit he’d made them close their eyes while he’d create a special effect. They’d shout out Rain! And he’d show them how rain was really the sound of ball bearings in a wooden box tipped to one side. Thunder! And thunder was a flexible sheet of aluminum waved in the air.

  If they asked about the screams, he’d lie. He’d tell them that he hired actors who specialized in screaming. Then he’d have each little girl step up to a microphone, and he’d record her scream. When he played each scream back, they’d all laugh. It would sound so fake. Mitzi, too, would laugh. Back before she knew the truth.

  Now she shuddered to think how easily her friends came to visit. The screaming and the laughing, afterward. Tension and release. One girl in a hundred would ask why the studio smelled like bleach, and Mitzi would shrug. To her that was just the smell of her father. He’d always smelled like bleach, his hands in particular. It had become a smell her nose no longer detected.

  A snap. The doctor snapped his fingers. The noise jump-cut Mitzi back to the here and now. Sitting in the smoky examining room, the charred crud littering the bottom of the sink.

  Dr. Adamah examined the ashes. One eyebrow arched almost to his hairline, and he asked, “Does the name James Fenton Washington ring a bell?”

  What the doctor had dropped flaming into the sink was a stained bandanna. The red cloth smelled like acetate, like spray paint, even more than her bed did. Mitzi didn’t understand why, but she’d sensed that it was the item to hand over.

  The cloth had blazed up in a flash. In the sink, flames had crawled over it, blue flames coated it. The cloth had twisted like something in agony. Charred patches peeled away like the black skin of a snake. Like shed scales. Larger pieces shattered into fragments. Fragments broke into flakes and fizzled out with a last spiral of acrid smoke.

  The doctor lifted a hand to the taps. He twisted one and let the water run until steam rose from the sink. He moved a hand under the faucet, fanning his fingers to direct the water. Rinsing away the ash. Pumped liquid soap from a bottle and washed. He pulled paper towels from a dispenser on the wall. With clean, dry hands he turned to the electronic tablet on the counter and began to keyboard something. Not looking up, he said, “According to James you’re not out of the woods yet.”

  Mitzi didn’t respond because she really, really did not want to hear the answer.

  Regardless, the doctor asked, “When did you have your last period?”

  Bless the scalpers. Even here, lining the sidewalk outside the convention center, young men stood waving lanyards. From each loop of cord dangled a laminated badge. For three hundred in cash Foster procured something to hang around his neck, and that, that got him inside the doors.

  Inside presented a new dilemma.

  Not two steps into this melee, a uniformed security guard was stopping entrants. She directed each elf or pirate to extend his or her arms straight out sideways while she ran a wand up and down them. And not a magic wand, this was standard issue for detecting metal. Same as guards used at airports worldwide. The gun, Foster had stowed it in the loose, flopping top of his boot. Before he could retreat out the doors he’d just entered, the guard was already waving him forward.

  “Arms up, please.” Her tone was bored. Clearly, patting down mermaids and robots had long ago lost its charm.

  Hers was an impossible task, to judge from the arsenal of ray guns and scimitars, crossbows, pitchforks, blunderbusses, muskets, fencing foils, daggers, spiked maces carried by knights, axes wielded by Vikings, the vampire killers armed with stakes and mallets, the Romans with broadswords, the hand grenades, claymores, staves, machetes, lances and pikes, the tridents, bullwhips, harpoons and tomahawks streaming into the building.

  Foster resigned himself to getting busted. Busted and arrested. She ran the wand up the inside of his leg. The wand began to bleat.

  “Sir,” she said, “I’ll need you to remove your boot.” She moved back a step.

  Foster stood on one foot and pulled off the boot. Something clattered on the concrete floor. The gun.

  The guard hooked the wand to her belt and placed a hand on her own holstered revolver. “Put your hands on top your head,” she said. She crouched to retrieve the gun. There was no mistaking it for a toy. What she didn’t do is check the clip for bullets. She stood and stepped back and ordered, “With one hand, remove your mask, now.” She unsnapped the guard on her holster.

  If the crowds pressing past him noticed, no one reacted. Slow, with no sudden movement, Foster gripped the top of his executioner’s hood and pulled it off.

  The guard gave him a long look. She slipped a phone from the back pocket of her slacks and held the screen near his face. Her eyes twitched between him and whatever image her phone displayed. “Here,” she said, and handed him the gun. “You have a good convention.”

  Startled, Foster accepted the gun and started to thank her, but the guard was already shouting over his shoulder, “Next!”

  Brainless wasn’t bad. Today, brainless was right up her alley. This world of grunts and clanking iron, the same tasks repeated mindlessly until failure, Mitzi loved it the moment she’d stepped through the door of the weight room. The Sisyphean repetition of lifting and lowering. Nothing represented life better than this endless losing battle against gravity. The grunts and cries that conveyed so much more than words ever could.

  Here was an assembly line where people manufactured themselves. On these weight benches and calf machines. With its pulleys and pull-up bars, this clanking room was something Henry Ford might invent. Or Louis B. Mayer. A conveyor belt for the mass production of gods and goddesses, where people were the workers and the product. Here they paid to sweat, performing bicep curls and leg extensions in the hope of becoming some dream version of a new self. Whether it was making a movie, frame by frame, or bodybuilding, it was only the results that most people saw. Or wanted to see. The actual labor was too deadening to watch.

  Mitzi accepted a clipboard from the girl at the front desk. A standard insurance liability waiver. Where it asked, “Are you pregnant?” she checked the box marked NO.

  A scream, a woman’s ragged, choking scream made her jump with surprise.

  One thick-legged behemoth was resting between sets in the squat rack. The scream had come from a phone he held sideways, his eyes glued to the screen.

  Again the scream rang out. A woman. A woman’s sobbing, rasping scream, it was a movie playing on his phone. The scream drowned out the grunts and clanks. It was some woman, begging, beseeching, “Please, no! You can’t! I’m your wife!”

  The scream stood Mitzi’s hair on end and drew a cold finger down her back. She knew this one. It had been used in a cheap Halloween release years back, the kind of schlock shocker theaters rent to show at midnight on Friday the thirteenth. The movie’s title was The Warlock’s Blood Feast. The scream’s formal title, written in her father’s handwriting on a tape Mitzi had found by accident, was Traitorous Woman, Dispatched Quickly, Rusty Ice Pick. Mitzi had listened to it more times than she could count.

  This scream was precious to her. It was her mother’s.

  Gates Foster flowed with the tide of costumed witches and spacemen. He let the mob steer him through the convention hall. There, booths showcased television programs and comics publishers. Huge banners hung from the rafters to tout blockbuster summer movie releases and video games. Everywhere he looked, Foster saw nothing but people massed together.

  Somewhere in this maze of aisles divided by booths selling toys and tables where artists drew and autographed their work, somewhere was Blush Gentry. According to the convention program she’d be meeting her fans—for a fee. The program listed her in Hall K. Where that was, Foster had no idea.

  He’d felt idiotic while buying the elements of his costume: the hood, the spandex leotard and tights, the boots and breastplate and ridiculous cape. The
gloves. The store shelves had been picked almost clean by convention-goers, so he’d been forced to mix and match. His spandex sagged, or it bunched in the wrong places, showing the lines of his underwear and binding. The holes cut in the executioner’s hood seldom aligned with his eyes, so he often stumbled over galactic storm troopers or hobbits. But here he wasn’t foolish, in costume he was invisible.

  The gun sunk lower in his boot. Its hardness bit into his ankle with every step. The hood trapped his breath and made his scalp itchy with sweat. A map printed on the back page of the program showed that Hall K would be to his right, and Foster tacked slantwise to cut in that direction through the lurching robots and staggering zombies.

  He was always on the lookout for Blush Gentry, for her trademark blonde curls. On pirated internet videos he’d seen her eaten alive by an army of rats. Since the dawn of films when young women had been tied to railroad tracks and tied to logs sent into huge sawmill blades, Hollywood had never lacked new ways to take pretty girls apart.

  He found her line long before her. Long, long before. It snaked into Hall H, three halls away from where she sat at a folding table autographing glossy photos and chatting with her fans. It cost fifty dollars merely to receive a ticket and join the line. He hadn’t gone three steps before another cache of fans had paid their money and fallen in behind him.

  The place was a target-rich environment for any pedophile. Tens of thousands of children broke away from their parents and milled in awestruck wonder at the sight of their cartoon heroes. Everywhere, exits linked the halls to the outside world. Any pervert in a Teddy bear get-up could take his victim by the little hand and spirit her away without notice.

  Foster tugged his eye holes into place and studied his phone, comparing his gallery of screen captures with people in the crowd. Not far from him, an astronaut removed his helmet and tucked it under one arm. The man’s thin hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and his haggard face had flushed red from the heat. Not only did this middle-aged geek look out of place, he looked familiar.