The Invention of Sound

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Over the phone the sound of keystrokes filled the pause. On television Blush Gentry sat upright in a hospital bed crowded by bouquets of flowers. Billows of orchids and roses. A scene so like Lucinda’s funeral.

  Over the phone the man said, “Sorry, man, your girl’s booked.”

  Foster watched Blush preen and bat her eyes on the TV. A clear tube fed a needle in her arm. Whatever the painkillers were, they only made her face more smooth and relaxed. Her head lolled, exposing her lovely neck and the cleavage at the top of her lace bed jacket. He told the phone, “That’s why I’m calling.” He said, “I saw her with some unsavory people. She might be in trouble.”

  A scroll along the bottom of the television screen announced that the crowdfunding for Blush’s medical expenses had topped three million dollars.

  The man on the phone laughed. “On the contrary, your girl’s on a legit audition.”

  Blush received an armful of lilies in her hospital bed. Her face and gestures looked so serene, so graceful, the pain meds had to be potent. Her fingertips kept softly touching her cheeks and lips as if feeling for proof she was still alive. The press leaned very near her as if she were answering their questions in a whisper.

  Juggling the landline, Foster texted the girl, the latest Lucinda. Or Meredith. Neither one responded.

  “You hear me?” the man over the phone said. “This is our girl’s break.” He explained that a casting director had been calling around. A casting director had been phoning and emailing, trying to book a girl the same age and looks as some missing girl on a milk carton.

  The girl on the bed stirred. She blinked slowly, and her lips curved into a loopy, dopey smile. Her bare arms and legs twisted, stretching against the rope that held her wrists and ankles tied to the posts of a bed.

  Mitzi lowered a Shure Vocal SM57 until it almost touched the girl’s lips. Next to it, an old-school ribbon mic waited. Reaching in from other directions were can mics. A shotgun mic dangled down. Each connected to its own preamp. She waited for the girl to speak, watching for the needles to jump on each of the VU meters.

  The needles twitched as the girl spoke. “Are we rolling?” She gave Mitzi a slow-motion, underwater wink. Lifting her chin, she looked down at her exposed breasts, her complete nakedness.

  Mitzi nudged a mic closer. “You fell asleep during our talk.” In response to a monitor, Mitzi withdrew a mic a smidgen. She said, “I need to check my levels. Meredith, can you tell me what you had for breakfast?”

  Still woozy from the sedative, the girl lifted her face toward the Shure. Coming so close she looked at it cross-eyed, she began, “Almonds…yogurt…”

  Mitzi chewed another Ambien and washed down the taste with champagne. She considered if she should readjust for room tone.

  Mitzi pressed on. “Do you know what the Wilhelm scream is, dear?” The girl’s eyes found her own.

  The girl shook her head.

  Mitzi gave the standard lecture. How ordinary people give everything and never see the huge profits generated from their life and death. How even the most intimate moments of our lives are now reproduced and sold as a commodity.

  The girl giggled. “Not always,” she said. She pulled against the cords binding her, not so much fighting them as pulling against them to stretch her muscles. The meters jumped as she said, “Wylie Gustafson.”

  In a slurred whisper she described a struggling country singer who’d come to Los Angeles in the 1990s to find success. In a world of hip-hop and rap, his yodeling style of roots music didn’t catch on. Among a few odd advertising jobs, he recorded a yodel for a tech start-up, a three-note yodel. They paid him some six hundred bucks for one-time use of it. Two years later, he heard himself yodeling during the Super Bowl, hired a copyright lawyer, and filed a lawsuit for five million dollars. Today he runs a vast horse ranch, paid for by the settlement.

  The girl smiled dreamily. “He named his horse Yahoo.”

  Mitzi couldn’t help but smile. For once, it was nice to hear a Hollywood story with a happy ending. An instance when the little man had won.

  She stretched a latex glove over one hand. Watching the meters pulse softly, she stretched on the second glove and began to bundle her hair under a cloth surgical cap. She poured another glass of wine and took a few sips with a pill.

  The drug’s typical side effect had started, the mania. Mitzi reached up and pulled the shotgun mic a skosh closer to the girl’s mouth. She asked, “Now tell me what else you ate for breakfast, please.”

  Her voice reduced to a breath, the girl said, “Black coffee…”

  Mitzi tore open a small plastic package containing two foam rubber plugs. With latex fingers she twisted one until it would fit inside of her ear. The small stranger inside her belly shifted and kicked.

  Mitzi was unrolling the express envelope, about to remove and unwrap the knife. She had to do this. She had to know if she could commit this horrid act.

  The monitors, their needles bounced softly with every sound.

  Mitzi patted the girl’s shoulder to roust her. She held the girl’s gaze and told her, “The name of your character is Lucinda…”

  The girl’s eyes went wide. Pale and suddenly awake, she struggled for real, twisting against her restraints.

  Shushing her, telling her to relax, Mitzi said, “Your line…the line I want you to say is ‘Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!’”

  Her breathing shallow and fast, the girl asked, “What’s my cue?”

  At this Mitzi held the huge knife where the girl’s eyes could find it.

  So this Foley person had put Foster to work. He’d wanted to buy a scream from the back inventory, so she sat him down at a console and fitted him with a pair of earphones. She lugged an armload of tapes and set them within reach and showed him how to thread each reel. He was to listen his way through a hundred-plus years of screams.

  He didn’t ask about the actress Lucinda. He couldn’t risk spooking this Mitzi person and losing her trust. Fastened around her neck was a double strand of natural pearls that filled him with rage.

  She placed a reel on the spindle and threaded the tape. “There’s only one scream I want for you to keep,” she told him. She drew his attention away from the volume controls and told him, “It’s a man screaming from profound agony, I kid you not.” She stressed, “At the peak of the scream you’ll hear glass breaking. A bottle and a wineglass, breaking.”

  The rest of the inventory she dismissed with a flick of her wrist, a wave of her hand. The other shrieks were leftovers. Dross.

  Then she carted over another stack of reels, and a third. But even with the console piled with reels, each trailing a loose header of tape, this wasn’t a divot out of the boxes and file drawers filled with similar recordings.

  So Foster had put on his headphones and thrown the switch. The hiss in his ears changed pitch, and a bellowing shriek made him jump to his feet so fast his chair toppled over behind him.

  Sitting next to him, her elbow next to his as she listened to her own stack of reels, the Mitzi person shook her head and grinned as if embarrassed on his behalf.

  Each scream was over quickly and followed by a margin of tape hiss. On occasion a man’s voice gave instructions. Not always the same man, but clear coaching directed at the person who was about to scream. The scream came, shrill and sharp and long. Or ragged and sobbing.

  The tape crackle changed pitch, the signal for a new scream. Listening for his daughter. Eavesdropping on these cutting room scraps. The snatches of talk that framed moments of torture. Torture or terrible acting.

  After the tape hiss changed tone yet again, Foster braced himself for the next assault. Instead, a woman’s voice spoke.

  “Of course I’m fucking Schlo,” the woman said. Her voice, the clarity of it, replaced the present moment. Only this woman from the past existed, shouting, “Untie me this instant, you’d better!” She shouted, “Do you think that little baby is your child? Don’t make me laugh! That beautiful lit
tle girl is Schlo’s!”

  He shot a look in Mitzi’s direction. To where she was reviewing and erasing, oblivious to the drama inside his headset. She might get a kick out of this corny vignette. More likely she’d heard worse.

  The scream dragged on, cursing, ranting, “Walter, you bastard!” The preserved echo of plain old melodrama. Leaden dialogue from a trashy movie lost to time. Foster had to laugh even as the woman’s scream faded to silence. He rewound the section. He hit the Erase button.

  To Mitzi’s great relief the wires reached. They unspooled all the way from the console in the sound pit, through storerooms, to the locker. There she’d found the dress.

  Not even Ambien could blot out the old memory. Nothing triggered memory better than the smell of that fabric. Nylon tulle and acetate satin stiff with age. The scent of cigarette smoke and hairspray. The stink of mothballs had both poisoned and preserved these, her last memories of her mother.

  The light on her phone still blinked: Schlo’s last words, still unheard.

  The night of the Oscars, first she’d been brave. After that, she couldn’t remember.

  First she’d donned the dress to crash the awards ceremony. Who doesn’t want to play the hero?

  Getting in, bypassing the red-carpet protocol had been simple. The security had been too focused on keeping people corralled inside the auditorium, not out. What’s more, no one would stop a woman who didn’t exist. Even the guards had looked past her. They’d looked through her as if she’d been invisible. Mitzi would’ve never zippered herself into this dress if she hadn’t needed the disguise. The gown featured skirts within skirts within skirts. So many tiers of dry, white satin. She might’ve been a ghost as she’d roamed up and down the aisles of the Dolby Theatre shouting for Schlo. Shouting for him to plug his ears and escape with her.

  Around her neck, in place of a diamond necklace, she’d worn her noise-canceling headphones. Her skirts she’d lifted as she stalked past people who refused to make eye contact. People with trembling smiles and the crazed eyes of cattle trapped in a slaughterhouse.

  A pariah, she’d shouted, “Schlo! You don’t have to die!”

  A Cassandra, she’d shouted, “Come with me. Take my hand!”

  Onstage a young actress, barefoot, had clutched an Academy Award and wept into a microphone. She’d gasped, saying, “I don’t want this,” and shook the statuette. “I want to live!” As the orchestra had struck up a fanfare, she’d shouted louder. The music had drowned out her words, and she’d lifted her Oscar. Lifted and flung the flashing, gilded award. Crashing it into the violin section before a pair of men had grabbed her by the thin, bare shoulders and carted her into the wings.

  A booming voice had announced the nominees for Best Sound. A film clip had begun as the lights dimmed. The audience had drawn its collective breath, but this hadn’t been the scream.

  It was then, in the near-dark, a voice had said, “Mitzi, baby girl, are you nuts?” Schlo it was, hissing from where he sat, a few seats off the aisle.

  Mitzi had lunged, stumbling over the knees of famous people. She’d reached to get him around one hairy wrist and haul him to his feet.

  A wraith, she’d screamed, “I’m here to rescue you!”

  A second film clip had begun to play. Another not-scream. And the audience had released a vast sigh of relief.

  Schlo tried to shake her off, but Mitzi had held firm. She’d intended to drag him to safety.

  That’s when the world had exploded. Something, some force bigger than Ambien and alcohol had struck her. She hadn’t saved anyone. What took place next, she couldn’t remember. She’d woken up the next morning, dazed, wearing the white dress in an alley in Hollywood.

  Her neck had stung. The voicemail on her phone blinked as a clue.

  Now she stood to regard the dress as it hung in the locker. These, these flounces of tulle and satin, such a flash fire they were, just waiting to happen. They’d make the best primer for a bomb. Below these Mitzi stacked reels of silver nitrate film. To the brittle skirts she clamped little alligator clips. The clips she spliced to wires. The wires stretched all the way to her doomsday scenario.

  Foster tried the phone number once more. For Lucinda. For Meredith Marshall. Neither woman answered.

  The dogs howled an ambulance out of the night. As if just by joining forces, every Pomeranian and Chihuahua in the building, every corgi and dachshund in the Fontaine Condominiums, they howled to manifest a siren. The siren created the flashing strobes of red and blue. The lights brought the ambulance to the building’s front door, where it idled at the curb.

  Reflected in the building across the street, a bright square of light framed a figure drinking wine. The mirrored Mitzi pinched up an Ambien and placed it on her shadow tongue. She tipped back a shadow glass until it was empty.

  How her last session had gone, she had no idea. As always, she’d blinked awake to find the actress gone. No blood. No body. A length of tape had spooled from one reel to the other, but she’d not had the heart to listen to herself butchering anyone. She touched the pearls that hid the last faded bruises on her neck. Where the necklace had come from, she had no idea.

  She watched out the window as her reflected self fitted earphones on her head. She was listening for clues about her mother. About the death of her father. Any extra chatter on the tapes that might fill the gaps in her memory. To answer the questions she had about how she’d arrived at this place in her life. On the street, the paramedics were unloading a gurney and bumping it up the front steps.

  The reflected her poured a new glass of wine. A shadow finger reached to press Play on her media player. A voice filled her head. The voice of a child, it blotted out any reality of the present.

  Bright, bright and clear, clear and soft, the voice said, “My name? My name is Lucinda Foster.”

  A man’s voice followed. The voice of Mitzi’s father, as blocky as his handwriting, said, “Would you like to be in a movie, Lucinda?” The question rose and fell in volume as if he were turning away and not giving her his full attention.

  “My name is Lucy,” said the girl. “My mother’s name is Amber. Amber and Gates Foster are my mom and dad.”

  Mitzi stopped the tape. Rewound a section. Hit Play.

  “…and Gates Foster are my…”

  She repeated the process to be certain.

  “…Gates Foster are…”

  The girl on the milk carton. The girl Mitzi had been trying to remember for so long. Someone else had been looking for her, the man she’d been working beside for the past few days. This man who’d come to her studio slinking like an ears-back dog, asking if he could buy an old scream. Gates Foster. Not the Oscar-night scream.

  The baby kicked, and her breasts began to leak. To quell the acid reflux she downed another pill with more wine.

  She watched her shadow self press Play.

  Her father’s voice said, “Your father is coming for you right now.”

  The child asked, “Where’s my friend?” She asked, “Where’s Mitzi?”

  The reflection across the way froze with a wineglass held halfway to her mouth.

  Protesting, the child’s words began to falter as her voice in Mitzi’s head said, “Where did Mitzi go?”

  In a soft voice the man shushed her. From experience, Mitzi knew he’d be watching the monitor in the studio. He’d be toying with the levels. Adjusting the mics.

  The girl said, “Tell Mitzi that I don’t like this game.”

  At that, Mitzi rewound the tape. She rewound the tape and erased all of it.

  Foster could almost peg the speaker. The voice on the tape, a man’s voice. He rewound a section, glanced at Mitzi Ives working at his elbow, deaf to anything beyond her headphones. He adjusted his own headphones. Pressed Play.

  “Jeez, doc,” the man said, “did you have to dirty every knife in the prop room?” Someone else laughed. Several men.

  He rewound. Pressed Play. “…dirty every knife in the prop room?�
� The laughing.

  Foster listened until the tape ran out. Rewound, again. He hit Pause after certain words, after “every,” after “room.” Two faces would almost come into focus. Two of the few people he considered friends. He ran an inventory of the men at his office. He surfed his memory for a sound bite of Amber’s father, Paul, and pulled up a snippet. Paul saying, “Merry Christmas!” big and bold at the front door to their house while his wife, Linda, crouched down to hug Lucy.

  The voice wasn’t Paul’s. It was no one at the office.

  Those were the limits of his life. Then the support group occurred to him. When he ran the faces through his mind, both voices fit as perfectly as a key sliding into a lock. He wondered if there might be voice twins, vocal doppelgangers. Any two men in the world who shared the same voice as exactly as they might share the same fingerprint. The two men on the tape, it couldn’t be. It would be impossible. Foster erased the tape, but the truth of what he had to do next crushed him. It bowed his head and slumped his shoulders. The miserable task that lay before him after the sun set that day.

  Mitzi built a garden. When the stranger growing inside her fussed, she did just as her father had done and set up a cot in the sound pit. Within reach of the mixing board, she heaped the cot with old blankets and lay back upon their musty softness, the smell of basement drains and damp laundry left too long in the washer. She stretched an arm to shut off the studio lights, bank by bank, until the dark and silence were absolute. Doing so, she erased the world so she could build it anew.

  The stranger within her held still as if curious. Waiting.

  As her father had done, Mitzi found knobs by touch alone. She lowered the room temperature. She cued a chorus of nighttime crickets. She brought up the sound of peeping tree frogs. The gushing sound of water she adjusted to a trickle. A melodious trickle like a fountain. The fountain’s tinkle she matched with the sound of wind chimes.