Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  Sonja of course found him equally fascinating—welcome, even, because Goliath validated her own suspicions that the common knowledge of our remote past is patchwork at best. She also enjoyed no end of amusement at his discovery site, amongst her one-time neighbors to the west. There's always been this thing between Swedes and Norwegians. They'll tell the most vicious jokes about each other. Same jokes, a lot of the time—they just switch the nationality.

  "I think he predates the borders," I told her.

  "Maybe so," Sonja said. "But I can still smell the herring on his breath."

  Things like that, she would say, then she'd laugh, and I'd remember how lucky I was. If I told you she was blond and cruelly beautiful, would it surprise you? I doubt it, because that's what we've come to expect from Swedes and they rarely disappoint, even when they don't work for airlines.

  We met years ago when Graham Pennick and I were touring Europe together, in an actual organized fashion, if still in a low-rent, scuffling sort of way. Sonja was a Stockholm music journalist who'd come to see what was up with these American electro-savages known for inducing headaches on a good night and small-scale riots on a better night. There was also the tie-in with my father's history, which I wasn't above exploiting whenever it served, and which I immediately saw appealed to her as perversely ironic.

  "Who are you trying to kill?" she asked during the interview after the show. "His memory, or yourself?"

  Sonja had, I was astonished to realize, picked out in our maelstrom of sound a few samples from my father's vinyl legacy that I thought I'd mangled beyond recognition.

  Whatever callous armor I was wearing over myself in those days, I was glad she saw through it, since by then—after enough melees and one-night stands and one-week girlfriends—I'd gotten it in my head that I could never spend my life with an American woman, because in my experience, or at least in my strata, I felt they didn't have enough of a sense of where they'd come from and who they really were…and these things were becoming important to me.

  After our tour ended in Germany, Graham returned to the States, but I went back to Sweden. When we'd left three weeks earlier, Sonja dropped a strategic promise to show me more of her country the next time I came. So I made a strategic reappearance to take her up on it, staying long enough to see both the midnight sun of summer and the near-perpetual night of winter.

  And I would have to say that my work as Megalith was born directly out of that sojourn. It did something to me, my time on this peninsula flanked by the cold North and Baltic Seas. The mists and fog seeped past my skin and dampened some of those fires that burned inside, smothering them to smoky billows. As we sat and watched the bellies of low gray clouds scrape over mountain peaks, I would feel swallowed by the mystery and timelessness of the moment. Where I'd once sought the voices inside the rust and girders of Chicago, I could now sense an infinitely more ancient call from huge stones, righted and carved by hands that had long since returned to the soil.

  So I listened, and, when shortly afterward Sonja finagled me some time in a friend's studio, I tried to echo. It felt like rebirth. As if I were finally channeling the sounds I'd always been meant to make.

  Then there was Sonja herself, quick-witted and coolly impassioned, blue-eyed and with hair like the sun shimmering on ice. She knew who she was and what she desired out of life, and one of those things was me. I'd been in lust before, often, and even in mutual loathe a few sick times. But at last I could say that I was in love.

  Of course, if I'd known then what I know now, I might've killed her years earlier.

  *

  Because of their mood and atmosphere, the CDs I've recorded as Megalith seem to attract an inordinately high percentage of fans that are into occult practices to one degree or another. These are not the same people who are listening to Celine Dion. Some of those I've met, or who have contacted me, seem to have come from, or at least belong on, another planet. Others really do strike me as being onto something.

  One motif that I've found recurrent among them, from pagan celebrants to ceremonial magicians to devil worshippers, is a conviction that simple belief is the single greatest step toward being met halfway by the powers they wish to contact. And that as soon as they're ready, someone or something appears in their lives to aid and guide them. Events transpire, or seem to conspire, that only later reveal the symmetry of some grand design, not unlike the Nazca lines in the high Peruvian desert: meaningless as long as you're too close to them, but full of purpose and pattern when viewed from a broadened perspective.

  He sings, my uncle told me. I swear that, on occasion, he sings.

  So was it Terrance's telling me this that made it true for me, as well—the force of suggestion an induction into the possibility? At the time, I thought maybe it was a delusion manifesting as the first outward symptom of his illness. But because he remained so clear-headed about everything else during their visit, I wondered if instead he wasn't turning poetic in these final months of his life. If he was describing the skull's impact on his soul and imagination in terms similar to those I'd used for my own time in the Scandinavian countryside, the call that I sensed there. When you're touched by something that has its roots in the infinite, rational language is of little use; you can speak of it only in the figurative. So I decided that perhaps Terrance had at last discovered a need for such an expansion in his vocabulary.

  Yet there it lay within me:

  He sings. I swear that, on occasion, he sings.

  Were these words, however unlikely, my first seed of faith toward making it happen? Did they usher me to a state of mind in which I could hear it too?

  All I know is that I crossed the threshold in a moment when it was the last thing on my mind. Like most creators, I can lose myself completely in my work, and Goliath was just another quirky item of studio decor that had become invisible. But late one night, while sculpting the imagined sound of vast subterranean walls, I found myself growing cranky when no adjustment of volume faders or console buttons could isolate a track that had generated the unexpected artifacts I was hearing. Processed sound does that sometimes: combines to generate something unforeseen. Occasionally it's useful, other times not. But first you have to find it…

  This time I found it only when I'd turned the playback off and the speakers went silent.

  He sings.

  It wasn't an intrusive sound, or even a direct one. It seemed to come from more than one place in the room. If it had been coming from something with flesh on its bones and air in its lungs, I would've guessed that it was made high in the being's throat, but bifurcating somehow…a denser fundamental tone paired with a higher trilling harmonic. Yet still they clashed, these tones. They rubbed and abraded against each other; they made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. They moved in tandem, but slowly, lingering long on some notes, with much shorter duration on others. The rhythm was hard to pick out, and the scales or modes like none I'd ever heard before.

  But the longer I listened, spellbound, the more apparent it became: There was structure here. Deeper insight came when I heard a strange flourish that briefly reminded me of vocal ornamentation in Gregorian structure.

  No, not singing, I decided. Or intuited.

  He's chanting.

  It didn't even occur to me right then to wonder to whose glory the chant was being offered.

  Because I was too busy attaching a contact microphone to the skull itself, and setting up others within the studio to record the impossible.

  *

  Late the next morning it seemed important to establish that I wasn't losing my mind, or at least letting it play tricks on me. Goliath had been silent for hours, and I'd managed a little sleep to clear my head, so I called up the half-hour's worth of that strange keening drone I'd recorded to see if it really was there.

  I still heard it. But since some delusions can be persistent, I called Sonja down to the studio.

  "Do you hear that?" I asked her, cautiously.

  "Why shouldn
't I," she said. A little furrow creased between her brows. "It's very creepy. How did you get this? It sounds like a duet between a hippo and a lark."

  I told her she was close; that it was animal sounds after lots of processing.

  Few were the lies I'd told her over the years, and they were nearly always to spare her a worry or keep a surprise. But this was different. I couldn't tell her the truth and expect her to believe it, at least not without Sonja hearing it happen for herself. I wasn't sure I could tell her even with this miracle furnishing its own proof. Having heard it in the dead of night, I felt it to be a secret thing, an aberration of time and space, matter and energy. That it wasn't meant to be acknowledged widely, because building up a shared awareness of it would give it more power, creating templates of expectation for it to follow, meet, surpass. It would broaden the portal for whatever lay behind this primeval echo.

  So I kept it to myself…and before long it was as though we began working together, Goliath and I.

  Very late, after the house was silent and the forested hills were hushed with the chill of autumn nights, I would listen to the recordings. I would play them through each different pair of monitors, through headphones, listening while striving to grasp it on a deeper level. If it was a chant, that implied language…but words and syntax eluded me. Whenever I'd get close to syllables, they would slip from my grasp. And throughout, it seemed at once both remotely alien and tantalizingly familiar, as though I should know it if I would only listen a little harder.

  Which sounds obsessive, and I suppose it was, but not debilitatingly so. To the contrary—because I have no other explanation for the enormous dam-burst of new ideas that flooded me during the next couple of weeks.

  Over the years I've collected a diverse library of sound sources, and one morning I awoke with the idea of taking radiation waves recorded from deep space and converting them down into the spectrum of human hearing. The noise emitted by celestial objects consists of the same basic two components as the sounds we hear every day—amplitude and frequency—but the frequencies of stars and galaxies range from one to one thousand gigahertz. Fractionalizing the data into something audible to human ears—between twenty and twenty thousand hertz—is simply a matter of number crunching, and computers excel at this. The resultant stream of digital data I could then use to trigger software oscillators.

  On my shelves were CD-ROMs of data recorded by the radio telescopes at Kitt Peak, in Arizona; near Socorro, New Mexico; at Germany's Southern European Observatory; others. I had my pick of several, but found myself drawn to the disc of Sirius A, the Dog Star of the constellation Canis Major, and its twin, Sirius B. A binary pair, their frequencies would be close, but not exact; the sounds they made would flutter and beat against each other, like the thrumming of two guitar strings tuned microtones apart.

  And slowly, as the ancient skull of homo sapiens primoris watched on, I began to decipher the music of distant stars.

  *

  Now, of course, I freely admit that there was a greater design to even this.

  I'd thought my idea was my own. And that I was making a choice for Sirius based on sonic needs, the tension inherent in the detuned frequencies of binary stars. Consciously at least, the other matter hadn't occurred to me, or factored in as part of the appeal, even though when I'd read about it years ago in a book by a writer named Robert Temple, I'd found it wholly fascinating.

  Do you know the secret of the stars called Sirius? Probably not.

  For millennia, only one was known to exist, Sirius A alone visible to the patient eyes of astronomers who knew the night skies better than they knew their own families. By the mid-nineteenth century, an unseen twin was suspected because the Dog Star showed effects of an unexplained gravitational pull. Sirius B, no larger than our Earth, wasn't seen until 1862, and not understood in detail by science until the 1920s, when Sir Arthur Eddington posited the theory of those collapsed stars now known as white dwarves.

  Except this minuscule star, invisible even to early telescopes, had already been known about by uncountable generations of a West African tribe called the Dogon. They also possessed sophisticated knowledge of our own solar system long predating the first efforts by Copernicus and Galileo. They knew of the moons of Jupiter, and of the rings of Saturn. They knew of the elliptical shape of the orbit of Sirius B, and of A's off-center position within it…even that the length of a single orbit takes fifty Earth years.

  The Dogon knew all this, they claimed, because it had been told to their early ancestors by gods who had come from a watery world lit by these mated stars.

  I've sometimes wondered why it is that skulls seem to grin.

  Now I think I know.

  It's because of all the secrets the dead are at last allowed to remember about who and what they really are.

  4

  Marriages usually do their floundering when you're too busy looking the other way. Mine, I discovered, was not immune to this.

  For years I've considered it a luxury to only rarely need to know what day it is. In the studio, working on the soundtracks and audio design of films and videogames, the days are all the same, time like the melting watches of a Dali painting. And when it all runs together and I run out of steam, there's always the couch along one studio wall. It can be a long time before I need to come up for air.

  I'd always thought Sonja indulged me in this. But the note left behind on the kitchen counter set me straight on that fallacy:

  Maybe we need to spend a little time apart.

  Not that we haven't already been doing that under the same roof.

  What scared me—even more than seeing myself in the mirror—was not being able to pinpoint which of the past three or so days she would've written it.

  You could say I'd spent that time off in my own world, but then the same thing could be said about every project as it neared completion, and there was no reason to have expected my work on Subterrain to prove any different.

  But it was. Because this most recent world in which I'd lost so many days wasn't mine, I was coming to realize. I'd never created it, only permitted it. Only tuned it in and turned up its volume.

  It poured from the speakers around me, thick swirling textures like veils of mist from distant aeons, pulsating with colors that weren't part of any nature familiar to us, from equator to poles. There were deeply hidden rhythms in it, too. Sometimes I used the frequencies as a modulation source, rather than audio, driving banks of my own sounds and hearing them reborn as percussion, like batteries of drums made from the resonant skins of animals glimpsed only in fever dreams. The polyrhythms astounded in their complexity. The louder I turned them up, the deeper they reverberated in bone and brain, and I understood more completely than I ever had why the martial cadences of vast drums have always stirred men to war.

  He sings, my uncle had told me.

  He chants, I had decided.

  Could I really have discovered the source of Goliath's rhythms in so little time, without…help? Or had I known them all along, at a level that air and daylight never reached?

  Late one night, my third alone, so far as I knew, I decided that the house was insufficient to contain such primal orchestrations. My studio has a pair of sliding glass doors that overlook the hills and sky and woodlands—which destroys any hope of soundproofing, but it's more inspiring than four solid walls, and we're remote enough that it's rarely a problem. I pushed those doors wide and hauled speakers through the opening, snaking out cables that hadn't budged for years. I set them facing the world of streams and leaves and mossy stones, then walked back inside to the master volume fader on the control board…

  And let the worlds collide.

  How would they react, I wondered, everything that lived out there in the night—the creatures who still carried on the primal legacy endowed them by their ancestors? Answers came soon enough, with the screeching of birds awakening and bursting into panicked flight, and the shrill cries of things I couldn't quite identify, and fi
nally, from far out in the darkness, the escalating snarls and wailing of coyotes pushed beyond mere savagery. I imagined, from such a din, that they must've been rending one another to pieces.

  So I ducked back inside one more time and toted out a portable DAT and a few omni- and unidirectional mics, thinking what the hell…I'll record this, too.

  *

  I'm not a complete hermit. Can’t afford to be.

  Even in the midst of my dour funk over Sonja's getting away by herself (at least I hoped it was by herself), I still maintained routine contact with Graham and the director of Subterrain and a few others involved in the soundtrack. Movies are made by committees, often in conflict. Post-production, from my perspective, and since it's all I've ever been involved with, is the worst—okay, we've got a bunch of raw footage…now what do we do with it? Needs can change on the momentary whims of any of a dozen or more people. Oh, so you're using the underwater sequence after all? Sure, I can come up with something for that by next Tuesday.

  And then there was Uncle Terrance, who, after a few days in Alaska, had had to cut short their trip because the rigors of travel were getting to be too much for him. He and Liz had returned to Chicago so he could rest and, I suppose, try not to lie there imagining he could feel the growth advancing inside him like vines. We were on the phone with each other at least every other day, and at first it was as though he'd never left off that crate and its contents. He didn't mention it the first time or two we spoke, but eventually, almost tentatively:

  "Have you heard him yet?" my uncle asked. "Has he sung for you?"

  I told him yes, along with my theory that it was actually a chant.

  "I never thought of that. I'll have to pass that along."