The Invention of Sound

by Chuck Palahniuk

  And soon Schlo would be staggering into the building alongside them. The most glamorous death march in history.

  “Did he?” Schlo asked. “Did your father help this little lost girl you brought home?”

  Mitzi watched the television. A young actress in a gown, diaphanous and white as any virgin sacrifice ever wore to be thrown into a volcano, this young woman stumbled and fell to her knees on the carpet. Her face streamed with tears, and she raised jeweled hands to fight off anyone who tried to help her to her feet. As two formally dressed security guards caught her under the arms and began to drag her toward the theater doorway, the camera cut to a smiling newscaster.

  On an afterthought Mitzi reached into her bag, again. Instead of pills her fingers plucked out a sealed packet of earplugs. If anything happened, maybe if Schlo couldn’t hear he’d have a chance. Like Odysseus plugging the ears of his crew with wax. Maybe if Schlo didn’t hear the Sirens he might escape. She offered the packet like she wanted he should take it.

  After a look at the earplugs, then at her, he took them and shoved them into his pocket. Looped and sleepy-eyed, Schlo persisted, asking, “Just how did your father help this little lost girl you brought home?”

  The panic room amounted to a panic suite, five rooms with two full bathrooms. One with a bidet. But after a few weeks of hiding, even with forays into the rest of the house, cabin fever loomed. Just as Blush had said, even a big house still made a very small world.

  Tonight they were knee to knee watching television. On the screen a young woman in a shimmering white gown stumbled. She sank to her knees on the red-carpet runway.

  “I know her,” Blush said, pointing a finger. “She’s what’s-her-name. The girl who starred in that Civil War picture and got stabbed.”

  As they watched, two black-suited handlers complete with mirrored aviator sunglasses hoisted the actress by the elbows and dragged her in the direction of the grand theater. First one, then the other silver stiletto slipped from her feet and remained, left behind on the runway as the limp young woman sagged between the two men helping her.

  Blush smirked. “Looks as if someone had some pre-party cocktails too many.”

  Among the Hollywood royalty none looked too happy. Most staggered and lurched with drugged, half-lidded eyes. A few wept, clutching rosaries or prayer beads between prayerful hands. Some Oscar hopefuls carried Bibles. Bibles! Foster marveled. As if they were condemned prisoners walking to the guillotine. This was a level of Academy Award jitters Blush had never seen.

  On the television a famous action hero froze at the doorway to the grand theater. As two burly uniformed ushers stepped up to guide him forward, this two-fisted he-man grabbed the doorframe. In what had to be a slapstick comic setup, a third usher hurried in and swung a small truncheon against the actor’s handsome head. Knocking him unconscious it would appear. Reducing him to a crumpled pile of evening clothes. It was a brand of offbeat physical humor Foster had never seen at the gala event, and he wondered if the Academy was experimenting with stunts in order to boost their television ratings.

  After an interval Blush shouted, “There’s Schlo!”

  Foster looked.

  “You know,” she said, “the man who made the babysitter bloodbath movie.”

  Foster looked closer. Here was the man with the voice like so many belches.

  Blush leaned close to touch the television. There her producer friend was swaying, none too steadily as he brought up the end of the procession. She said, “He hired the Foley artist who did my scream.” Schlo turned slowly to face the dominant camera. As if looking directly at Blush, he seemed to blow her a kiss before toppling through the doorway and out of sight.

  Part Three:

  The Perfect Scream

  The buzzer went off. The one for the front door, the street door. A sound Mitzi had almost forgotten, it had been so long since she’d heard it.

  Days, she’d kept busy reviewing the inventory of tapes. In the hope that she’d find the master of the scream. The weak, garbled version that people could hear from the Oscar night telecast, it was a squeak, instantly swamped by the combined howling of thousands and the electronic shriek of microphone feedback. To judge from the effect, the recording had been a good one, but it was toast now.

  The synchronized limbic systems of three and a half thousand people. All of them spurred to hit the same note, like dogs howling along with a fire engine. Hitting the perfect frequency and volume needed to shatter a building as if it were a champagne glass.

  The same way twenty thousand music fans will ride the same limbic wave at a rock concert. To share the same moment of euphoric brain chemistry. Or some fifty thousand fans will pack into a football stadium to share the massive limbic rush created by a winning touchdown. That high isn’t available to them sitting alone at home in front of the television.

  The Jimmy scream had weaponized people’s emotional reaction. It had harnessed their terror. Poor Schlo.

  A light blinked on her phone to show one new voicemail. From Schlo’s number, a message from that night. A final good-bye. Like those messages left by people before they’d leapt from the World Trade towers. The phone gave the voicemail’s length as fifty-three seconds. These last fifty-three seconds of Schlo’s life, she couldn’t listen to them, not yet.

  She’d been letting that light blink for days.

  In the sound pit, Mitzi watched the proceedings on live television with the volume muted.

  Blush Gentry had staggered out of nowhere clothed only in a shimmering white silk slip. She’d hijacked media attention and the emotions of ten million real-time viewers. A world starving for one ray of sunshine, it glommed onto her. An ambulance nudged its way through the dense crowd. On camera she waved feebly, cradled in the arms of religious leaders who’d abandoned their eulogies to offer themselves as part of a better story. Such a pietà, this near-naked woman lifted on high by collared priests and bearded rabbis and turbaned imams.

  As Mitzi’s eyes watched Blush ferried away in the ambulance, her ears listened. Through headphones she reviewed one scream after another. Needing to hear only a snippet to know it wasn’t Jimmy’s.

  After a fraction of one scream she switched tracks to hear a fragment of another. Not a scream, but a noise beyond the earphones she almost heard. Hit Pause. Lifted one side of the headset.

  She listened to the acoustically dead room. Pea gravel packed in the spaces in the walls to deaden any echoes. The only noise was the electrical ringing in her own head, the room tone of what it meant to be a living human being.

  On television the crowds were massed around the police barricades.

  Mitzi settled both earphones in place only to hear another noise. Behind the screams, not part of any recording, Mitzi caught the sound of something.

  She stopped listening and removed her headphones to hear this new noise.

  Mitzi checked the camera for the front door. There stood a dad-shaped stranger, a salesman minus any sample case. Not dressed stiffly like a street preacher. She pressed the intercom, “Yes?”

  He looked around until his eyes found the camera mounted on the wall above him. “Hello. Is this Ives Foley Arts?”

  The man on camera wore Buddy Holly glasses with lenses so thick they stretched his eyes until each filled the frame. His hair was combed in a good-boy cut, parted on one side and shaved up from the ears. Decent shoes. A handsome catalog face. Something familiar about it, as if she’d seen him on the news. Throwing his voice toward the camera, he said, “I need a scream. People say you’re the best.”

  Haunting her was the idea that we each summon our own death. Some in moments of greatest suffering. Some summon death in their moments of greatest joy and love, out of the awareness that such a moment is a pinnacle never again to be reached.

  Perhaps, after all the years she’d gone trolling dive bars and flirting with bottom-feeders in pool halls, her death had come to her door. Wearing glasses.

  Mitzi crossed the sound p
it, exited to the hallway, went up the flight of stairs to the street level. As she opened the door, she flinched. Unless he had a twin brother, this man she knew.

  Through his glasses he regarded her with stunned eyes. His face froze mid-gasp.

  It was him from the news. The maniac who’d kidnapped Blush Gentry.

  Blush knew the face on Foster’s phone but couldn’t pin a name to it. So as not to be totally useless, she wrote him a list of local Foley studios. These legacy outfits had been around forever. She’d shown him how to access the panic room so he could sneak back if need be.

  In a flash she promised to make good with the bank, and they could be living in the house legit.

  To return the favor, he peeled shreds of old duct tape off the seats of his fifteen-hundred-dollar Dodge Dart. These he artfully wrapped around her wrists and ankles, shredding the ends to look frayed and gnawed at.

  Like a commuting couple they’d driven into Hollywood, to within a few blocks of the mammoth funeral taking place around the pit that had been the Dolby Theatre. Barefoot and wearing her second-best Victoria’s Secret slip, Blush had kissed him good-bye. After all these weeks holed up, she’d cut his hair a few times. Just as he’d washed hers and touched up the roots. And since anything hair-wise was foreplay, they’d had panic room sex. Pass-the-time sex. Nothing-on-television sex.

  Stockholm syndrome sex. Although who was keeping whom hostage could be debated.

  They’d kissed good-bye in the car, and Blush had hobbled off toward the grieving throngs. About to become a sensation.

  For his part, Foster had put on his best tie and the last fresh shirt from his suitcase. A suitcase he’d packed months ago for a trip he’d never taken to Denver. A trip maybe Lucinda herself had foiled. With the list in hand, he’d dropped by a few of the Foley studios. The door for Ives Foley Arts stood in a narrow back street, almost an alley, alone among the back entrances to an Asian restaurant and a tire warehouse. Any parking was between dumpsters.

  Bolted to a concrete wall, the sign—“Ives Foley Arts”—its paint had blistered and a tagger had overlapped half of it with spray paint.

  It took some looking, but Foster found a push button on the doorframe. He mashed it and heard nothing from within. Not surprising. The building looked to be solid concrete, poured in layers with the wood grain from the forms still visible so long after it had been built.

  He mashed the button. Nothing stirred behind the door.

  The dumpsters reeked. Foster’s was the only car on the street, and he worried how safe it might be. He mashed the button with his thumb.

  This time a voice came back, “Yes.” A female voice. The sound came from above, so he looked up to find a camera mounted well above the door. He ran a hand down his tie to straighten it and called up to the camera, “I need a scream. People say you’re the best.”

  Her voice sounded scratchy and mechanical through the small speaker.

  Nothing followed for a time. No footsteps. No calling out. At last the rattle and clank of metal suggested deadbolts being turned. Stout burglar bars being moved aside. The rattle of door chains being unhooked. The door swung inward.

  Framed in the doorway was a woman in her late twenties, possibly thirty years old. Blonde hair, but a shade darker than he’d expected. If she wasn’t Lucinda’s kidnapper after all these years, she was the kidnapper’s sister. It might’ve been his imagination, but she seemed to flinch. Her eyes went wide and her teeth showed, clenched.

  After that awkward pause, she offered her hand. “Hello,” she said.

  None of the dark web images had prepared him for this. A small, pregnant woman. Very pregnant. She wore a pair of headphones loose around her neck, a long cable trailing away.

  The rage he’d held for so long, it seemed to swell in his hands. The plans he’d made to burn this person alive, to flay the skin of whoever had stolen his child, this fury swelled in his fingers for a moment. Foster might’ve choked her to death at this door. Swung his fist and crushed her skull. She seemed hardly larger than the girl she’d been in the security video leading Lucinda away.

  Instead his hand met hers and they clasped and let go. He managed, “My name’s…I’m Gates Foster.”

  “Hello,” the woman in the doorway said, “I’m Mitzi Ives.”

  Mitzi waved him inside. Motioning down the concrete stairs into the sound pit. His head turned slowly as he took in the equipment, the webs and network of cables and cords that spliced together the jerry-rigged audio components. A cave it was, with the stalactites in the form of mics dropping in dense clusters from the dim ceiling. As stalagmites, floor mics of various heights stood in groups. The table filled the center of the pit. The mixing board wrapped most of two walls, tier upon tier of dials and switches and meters whose twitching needles registered their every step and breath.

  Shadowing him, she chided, “Maybe you don’t bullshit me anymore, okay.”

  She watched as he did his snooping. “Like I told your people, I sell the license for a scream. I never sell my original master.”

  This Foster circled the room, his head canted back, marveling over the banks of equipment, the ancient analog of everything, sniffing at the burning scent of overheated vacuum tubes and the lingering memory of bleach. He said, “Sorry, lady, I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”

  Mitzi prompted. “It’s the magnificent product of your long chain of glorious men.” She really stepped on the word men.

  This man, this Foster, he shrugged. He’d killed Schlo. He’d killed everyone at the Dolby Theatre. For whatever his reason, he’d killed the business.

  Mitzi went to the mixing console and grabbed up a ream of pages she’d printed off the web. “Resonance disaster,” she said. “That’s your game.” She’d read the 1850 account of the Angers Bridge, of soldiers marching in step, creating a vibration so strong it buckled the bridge and killed more than two hundred. She shook the pages at him. She ranted about the skywalks in the Kansas City Hyatt, so crowded with dancers in 1981, so many dancers doing the Lindy Hop in synchronized time that the sky bridges had crumbled, killing one hundred fourteen.

  A chair she pulled out and swung around for him to take a seat. She pinched an Ambien from the cloisonné plate on the console and slipped it into her mouth. Her tongue felt the smooth, soft promise of it before her molars bit down and ground it to mud. She lifted a wine bottle, then a second, then a third before she found one that wasn’t empty. Picking at the cork’s wire cage and the foil, she asked, “Champagne?”

  This Foster looked away.

  She said, “Don’t think I don’t know why you’re here, Mister Deep Operative.” She popped the cork. “You’re here to tie up loose ends, I’d say. And I’m a loose end, I’m thinking, no?” The printed pages were stacked next to her elbow on the console. She gave them a shove, and the papers spilled and skittered across the floor.

  She retrieved three champagne glasses from a shelf and blew the dust from each. Like a witch she felt, pouring champagne into dirty glasses. Waddling around her chilly basement. She offered him a glass of champagne. He took it but didn’t drink.

  She drank from her own glass to prove it was safe. Champagne and sleeping pills, her baby was being raised on them.

  This Foster drank from his. The glass left a line of dirt across his lips. He offered only a search-me shrug. “I’m looking in particular for a scream used in the movie Babysitter Bloodbath.”

  The buzzer sounded once again. It drew Mitzi’s attention to a new image on the monitor. A view of the sidewalk just outside the building’s front door. There stood a young woman with wavy, dark hair worn across her shoulders. Around her neck she wore a gleaming double strand of natural pearls. This figure at the door lifted a finger to press a button on the doorframe.

  “If you’ll forgive me,” Mitzi said, “I’m expecting someone for a recording session.” She leaned toward a microphone and said, “Won’t you come in, please?” She touched a button. A door opened at t
he top of the stairs. Footsteps descended.

  Both the actress and the stranger, this Gates something, they froze at the sight of each other. After the hesitation the actress, she stepped forward. She extended a hand, saying pointedly, “My name is Meredith. Meredith Marshall. And I’m here for an audition.”

  He accepted her hand. Then jerked his hand away as if her grip had crushed his fingers.

  Mitzi went to the console and brought back the third glass of champagne. Presenting it, she said, “Perhaps you’d like a drink before you read for the part?”

  To avoid making introductions, Mitzi said flatly, “Mr. Forester…”

  “Foster,” he corrected her.

  She repeated, “Mr. Foster was just leaving.”

  Foster had left. What choice did he have? If he flat out warned this Lucinda that the Foley artist was a kidnapper or worse, he’d never find his kid. And she’d never have believed him. Not after he’d threatened her with a gun. He’d humiliated her.

  So he’d left the Foley studio. He’d driven back to the foreclosed house on the ridge. Pulled aside the plywood that hid the street door. Crossed through the vast, dusty chambers. Used the landline in the panic room to call a number he knew by heart.

  A voice answered, “Talents Unlimited.”

  Foster said, “Hello. This is member number 4471.”

  The voice, a man’s voice, asked for a password.

  “Pot roast,” said Foster.

  The voice softened, genial. “What can I do for you, Mr. Foster, my man?”

  “You know that girl,” Foster began. He stepped up and switched on the room’s television. Muted the sound. “I always book the same girl.”