The Invention of Sound

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Before she’d felt anything, the sudsy water in the sink turned dark red. Proof of how a deep slice in warm water might not hurt, not at first. She brought her hand to the surface, and the skin below her thumb, below the ham of her thumb, spouted like a red whale. The slice curved like the bite from a child’s mouth. It surged with blood Mitzi couldn’t bear to look at, so she plunged the hand back to the bottom of the sink.

  Warm water and a cut so deep, her body was filling the sink as if she were plumbing.

  She wondered how long the decision to survive was hers to make. If she ought to call someone to come rescue her. Or to simply wait for her body to make the other choice.

  Foster let himself be dragged along. His free hand brushed smooth metal and the rough cages he took to be the burners of a gas stove. His leg slid along the metal door of a refrigerator, jarring his hip bone against the handle. Flailing in the dark, his free hand felt the knobs and edges of cabinet doors and drawer fronts. He didn’t lift his feet for fear of tripping over something, and the floor felt like smooth tile under his shuffling.

  Now all he knew of Blush Gentry was her smell and the feel of her strong, smooth hand. He could guess at the size of rooms. To judge by the echoes the spaces must’ve been huge.

  Blush stopped. “Take the handrail to your right,” she said. “We’re going up a flight of stairs.”

  Foster waved blindly until he found the rail. A dimly lit archway rose above them. At the top of the steps, they entered a room large enough to host a basketball game. The first blue shade of morning filtered through the dirty windows. Dust cushioned their steps.

  “Your house?” he asked. He was whispering. A house without food or water. A house without heat or power, it didn’t seem such a great hideout. He followed her to a built-in bookcase where she shoved aside some leather-bound volumes.

  Her fingers worked at something in the shadows at the back of a shelf. A pneumatic hiss sounded, and the bookcase swung away from them, revealing a dark space behind it.

  Blush touched the wall within and lights blazed. She touched again, a keypad mounted there, and cool air issued from vents near the ceiling. She waved him inside, saying, “Panic room. Earthquake preparation. Bottled water. Generator.” She plucked her phone from her bag. “No cell phone reception because the place is lead-lined or zinc-lined or something in the event of a nuclear bomb…” She pointed toward an old-school phone mounted on one wall and trailing a long, coiled cord. “But we do have a landline. Unlisted, of course.”

  Right on cue, the phone rang.

  Blush stared at it, her face dark with worry. It rang seven times and stopped. She sighed, “Wrong number.”

  The ringing began again. Seven rings, then it stopped. As it began again, she reached to lift the receiver and bring it to her ear. “Schlo!” She cupped a hand to cover the mouthpiece and whispered to Foster, “He’s a friend. A producer, but a good guy.” Into the receiver she said, “Let me put you on speakerphone.”

  The voice burst into the room like an extended belch. “I knew where to find you,” it said. “You there with your kidnapper?”

  “Foster.” Blush nodded to indicate the phone, the little mesh-covered speaker on it. “This is Schlo. Schlo produced the babysitter bloodbath.”

  The belch said, “Blush, little girl. You’re not planning to attend the Oscars, are you?”

  Blush cast another worried look at Foster. “That was my plan,” she said.

  The belch insisted, “Just don’t. Trust me.” The connection went dead.

  Blush dropped her bag and shucked her jacket before ducking away. To retrieve the lug wrench. To camouflage the damage they’d done to the plywood covering the street door. As she left she swung the bookcase shut behind her.

  With no idea how to open it, Foster became the captive.

  He dug the phone from his pocket and snapped the battery into place. So what if he couldn’t get a signal? The police couldn’t find his location, either. He swiped through screens. He wanted to show this movie star something. A video. So what if it was grainy and without sound? It lasted no longer than a birthday candle, but it was the most important movie in his life.

  Schlo proved himself to be no mere friend. Such a prince, he bribed the doorman of the Fontaine. That was Schlo. The doorman used a passkey and they found Mitzi insensate, the pile of her blacked out next to the kitchen sink, redecorating the cork tile to blood red. How he knew to do this, who knows. But Schlo sent the doorman out for superglue and hydrogen peroxide, and Schlo got Mitzi’s arm above her heart and applied pressure. He could’ve been a doctor.

  Levelheaded like a person wouldn’t believe, he said, “Mitz, what I don’t know could fill Yankee Stadium, but I do know something’s wrong.”

  The Imperial, the falling down of it. A palace of a landmark building that had withstood its share of earthquakes, the government was calling it an earthquake. Detroit they were calling snow load. The next theater, God forbid, they’d call it terrorism.

  Mitzi should pack her bags is what the man meant. Take the money she’d socked away and pull a Roman Polanski. “Destroy the master tape,” he ordered her. “This isn’t only me talking. It’s our entire industry. We’ve been duped.”

  Schlo was like a wizard. Maybe she wasn’t the first girl he’d glued the cuts in her wrist shut, but Schlo rinsed the area with ice and dusted it with cream of tartar. And when the bleeding stopped for just a moment, he pinched the cut closed and dripped on superglue.

  Hollywood being Hollywood, who didn’t want to play the hero?

  Woozy on the kitchen floor, she asked, “But what’s happening?”

  Standing over her, Schlo said, “It’s Jericho! Baby girl, Jericho is what’s happening.”

  Foster showed her the video last. First they got loaded, a little loaded but for a long time, on the bottle of rum she brought back after fixing the street door so it wouldn’t attract attention. Rum because she liked the sweetness, like high school parties she’d never attended because she’d been too busy playing the role of a teenage slattern to actually slattern around. Playing a sexpot had kept her a virgin until her first marriage.

  They were camped out in her panic room. Blush lifted her glass and made a grand sweep. “How do you think I could almost afford this wonderful house?”

  Even to judge from what little he’d seen, the place was massive.

  “Sure,” she said with chagrin, “it’s big for a house, but small for a world.” When she’d bought it at the height of her career, she’d been just as trapped in it as she was now. Photographers waited outside to follow her. Lunatic fans waited.

  They’d poured more rum. More Coke. They toasted her crowdfunding when it broke twenty grand.

  They’d fallen silent. Still sipping their drinks as the television showed a live on-location report of the first human remains being recovered from the Imperial Theater. Body bag after bag, each holding something too small to be a whole person. Not even a teenager.

  She’d fallen asleep, and Gates Foster had told her sleeping self about the wreck of Lucinda’s fake funeral and how a fellow member of the support group, a doctor even, had botched the Bible reading. Instead of reading the section Foster had chosen, the man had read from the book of Joshua. The account of Joshua’s army shouting until their combined voices had collapsed the walls of a city.

  He told her sleeping form how the funeral itself had evolved so quickly into a public humiliation. Almost as if it had been an organized conspiracy to goad him into rage.

  On television the newscast broke to show Amber making an emotional plea for him to free his hostage and turn himself in to the police. Poor Amber.

  Blinking awake from her nap, Blush said, “Don’t even think about it, buster.” She looked at the woman on-screen, Foster’s ex-wife, and said, “She’s pretty. Did your little girl take after her?”

  Only then did Foster show her the gallery on his phone. First his favorite photos of Lucinda, then various age-progressed port
raits that had appeared on milk cartons over the past seventeen years. With each one, yes, she did look more like her mother.

  He showed her his rogue’s gallery of pedophiles and described his endless hunt. As if he were tracking down Nazi war criminals. The irony being that now he was the one hunted.

  Only after all of that did Foster show her the video. The soundless few seconds. The grainy security video lasting no longer than a birthday candle, it showed Lucinda being led down a hallway and out a door of the Parker-Morris Building. She was holding hands with a slightly older girl. Most likely around twelve, the girl stood a head taller as she led the smaller girl through the door to the street and out of sight forever.

  “Lucy had always wanted a sibling,” he said as Blush played and replayed the short video captured by a security camera so long ago. “She’d always ask us to have another baby so she could have an older sister,” he remembered, “but we tried to explain that the older one had to come before.”

  Blush paused the video at the moment the older girl’s face seemed most visible. “I wonder what she looks like now.” Her eyes squinted to study the coarse image.

  Foster took back the phone. He swiped through a gallery of images. “I asked the same people who did the age progression…” He handed the phone back, saying, “Of course, I had to pay for it myself.”

  There on the screen was a woman in her late twenties, possibly thirty years old. Clearly the unknown girl from the video, but her blonde hair had grown a shade darker. Her round face had thinned, giving her wide cheekbones and accentuating her eyes. She was lovely, the kidnapper. It felt wrong to call a twelve-year-old a kidnapper. It felt wrong to think of himself as a kidnapper. If anything, this was a mutual kidnapping.

  Blush looked at the photo of the grown girl. She looked a long time, long enough for Foster to finish his drink and reach for the bottle.

  As he offered to fill her glass, she said, “I know her.”

  The knife wouldn’t fit in Mitzi’s handbag. The blade was too long: a German Lauffer Carvingware knife. From where she couldn’t venture a guess, but she’d found it in the studio prop room still wrapped in FedEx packaging.

  Her damaged wrist she’d wrapped in paper towels, where it was still glued. Stitches or staples or whatever doctors did these days, she still needed doing.

  But who should Mitzi Ives meet at the doctor’s office but a moving van. A crew of men in blue uniforms, they were carting sealed boxes out the front door of the office.

  Taped in the front window of the building was a sign that read “This Space for Lease.”

  While down the block sat the doctor’s Daimler with the good leather seats, a Boston fern inside. This Boston fern that used to look so small on a plant stand in the only window of the waiting room, in the doctor’s car it filled the whole backseat.

  Mitzi didn’t panic. She made polite, nodding eye contact with the movers. She edged past them through the street door and into the empty waiting room.

  If the movers noticed or not, she held up the FedEx package as if she were just delivering it. The doctor stepped out of his examining room. Just pulling on his coat. Just this close to a clean getaway, he saw Mitzi and smirked. He snapped his fingers until one moving man looked. “That”—the doctor indicated the Toledo scale—“goes to the warehouse, also.”

  The scale the man struggled to lift. He carted it to the door, and for just that long Mitzi saw her chance. She fumbled the knife out of its wrapping and waved it toward the examining room.

  The doctor rolled his eyes. Shook his head at Mitzi’s knife wielding, but walked back.

  The place, a person wouldn’t know it. Stripped. Even the sink, gone. Just the plumbing for the water and the drain stubbed off at the wall. Already some workman had come through with a putty knife and prepped for new paint. The doctor, he waved Mitzi inside and closed the door. Locked it. Locked himself inside with a knife wielder. He said, “You won’t stab me, Mitzi.” He looked at the paper towels wrapped so tightly. Asking, like he cared, he asked, “What’s up with your hand?”

  Mitzi brought the knife up a little, asking, “Who are you to say I won’t stab you?”

  “Because,” Adamah said, “you’re a coward.” He stepped closer and reached for the wounded wrist. “You’re the worst kind of victim: a victim who thinks she’s a villain.”

  Mitzi let him take the wrist and begin stripping away the paper towels.

  As he did so, the doctor said, “It’s sickening the way you come running to me for absolution.” He uncovered the cut, the slash still puckered shut under a shining layer of glue. “Look what you’ve done,” he said, touching the wound tenderly. “You stupid piece of shit.” Softly he said this. “You couldn’t even cut yourself adequately.”

  With the doctor so close, leaning low to see the damage, Mitzi, she brought up the knife. Laid it against Adamah’s throat. Held the honed edge of it to his throat. “You don’t know anything,” said Mitzi. “I’ve murdered dozens of people in ways you’d never imagine.”

  Not pulling away, even leaning his neck against the blade, the doctor told her, “Prove me wrong.” He tossed his head to indicate the waiting room, the movers. “They won’t know. They’ll be gone in a moment. Kill me.”

  Afraid, Mitzi pulled back the knife, but the doctor leaned closer until his throat was creased by the blade, again. Mitzi pulled it away and held it at arm’s length. Unnerved, she said, “Not until I get some answers.”

  The doctor slipped a hand into his coat pocket. A plastic box marked First Aid he took out. A needle pre-threaded with a length of nylon string he took out of that. A sealed plastic packet like of ketchup, he tore in half and pulled out a gauze smelling like rubbing alcohol.

  “Give me your hand,” he ordered. As he’d done since Mitzi was a teenager, he took Mitzi around one wrist and shook it and told her, “Hold still, please!” And this alcohol swab he began swabbing across the patch of glue, the smell of which brought tears to Mitzi’s eyes and almost made her drop the knife because it stung so much, the swabbing did.

  She was a butcher. Mitzi knew it. A Last Wave Feminist. A serial butcher and a killer, and nobody was going to say she wasn’t.

  The doctor held the damaged hand firmly, teasing her, “Look at you. Your stomach is so weak you can’t bear to watch someone eat a runny egg.” A sham, the office had been. For so many years, set dressing.

  The needle entered her skin, and the doctor asked, “Remember I told you how a siren makes dogs howl?” The needle exited, pulling a few seconds of string through her hand. “A siren triggers a pack instinct in all dogs,” continued the doctor. “It’s a primal scream dogs must share in.”

  As Mitzi kept her eyes on the wall, the needle entered again. It exited, tugging the string through her skin.

  The doctor said, “Imagine if there was some human equivalent. A cry like Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp that would evoke the primal scream of everyone who heard it.” The needle entered. Exited. String moved under the skin.

  Mitzi winced. As the string pulled, she felt herself pulled. A puppet, she felt like, tethered to the doctor’s words. As if she were a kite or a balloon, something with which the doctor played. Under the smell of cigarettes, the smell of bleach on his skin. The smell of her father she’d swallowed so many pills to forget.

  “Your father was a great man,” said the doctor. The needle entering. Exiting. That tugging at something inside Mitzi. “Your father was the last in a long chain of men on this magnificent project.”

  The needle pricked into her skin, drove through and emerged dragging the string behind it. “My advice to you is this,” said Adamah. “Take your baby and your money. People are going to call upon you. Give them the master of the last scream. Take your baby and your money and begin a new life someplace beautiful.”

  Afraid to move, leashed by that strand of nylon, Mitzi couldn’t pull away. The pain, the sting felt small, but it was the fear of so much thread laced through her and how it would
tear open, rip open like a zipper, if she tried to escape.

  “You’ve done nothing.” The doctor said the words with contempt. “Nothing messy. Oh, you knew how to control the recording levels and the brightness. You worked that magic. It wasn’t as if we could bring in an outsider.” The string tugged, stretching the skin. “But you never killed anyone.”

  Mitzi managed, “But I did.” Sweat pasted the blouse to her back and rolled down the inner sides of her arms.

  The doctor leaned so close his breath was warm against the wounded hand. He cinched a knot and used his teeth to bite off the extra thread. He said, “No. I killed them. You were too squeamish, not a bit like your father.”

  Mitzi turned to examine her hand. The neat row of stitches that now closed the wound.

  As Blush told it, first the PayDay candy bars had disappeared. No one would say where to. It wasn’t as if the vending machines had run out and someone had forgotten to restock. The next day the Snickers were all gone, the spiral of metal that held the Snickers was just some empty spring. Gone in quick succession were the peanut butter cups, then those cellophane packages holding orange crackers sandwiched around peanut butter in the middle.

  The vending machines were all but barren save for some old Red Vines and packets of cherry Life Savers nobody wanted. Some fossilized Skittles.

  Blush Gentry told her story from a beanbag chair. She and Foster, sealed inside the panic room. Without a window, with the air recirculation system blasting, neither could tell if it was day or night. Their drinking had given way to storytelling.