by Jack Livings
Yes. This is why we’re here. They’ve found Vik. The snowdrift of photos on the bed. His shirts piled on the floor. And oh dear, yes, I have excavated from the back garden of my mind, grown over with weeds, that most unsound idea, nestled among the glimmers of hope, as they say, doses of magical thinking, the pathetic possibility that Vik had, on that day of all days, emerged from the subway and because of the remarkable and well-documented atmospheric clarity had been drawn toward the splendor of the Jersey City skyline, and in an entirely uncharacteristic display of nonchalance toward our financial well-being, instead of turning left into the North Tower, strolled right on down Vesey, all the way over to the river, where he’d boarded a ferry, aflame with the same poetic inspiration that had consumed him the night of the blizzard, and upon disembarking on the other side and seeing over his shoulder the dark poppy bloom, and having been spared the executioner’s blade, had decided to keep going west, ever west, traversing the continent, boarding a ship at San Francisco bound for Guangzhou, from there walking westward across the provinces, up into the mountains, passing through Burma, over India, Pakistan, into Iran, and that until the moment Officer Postman arrived he’d been walking, while I’d been mentally tracking him, advancing his pixel a micrometer a day, ever traveling, ever safe.
Or, or, bear with me, or that he’d been mugged in a dark corner of a subway station on that terrible morning, received a blow to the head that erased his memory, and caught up in the chaotic aftermath of the attack had been deposited in a hospital where, unable to identify himself, he was eventually discharged to the care of the state, and after a brief stay at Bellevue allowed to reintegrate into society because despite his identity problem he retained his working knowledge of finance, and within a few years had established himself at some off-the-grid firm, probably in Boston because who would stay in New York after that, perhaps awaking in the middle of the night with ghostly images of my face floating on the backs of his eyelids.
Or—or! Or perhaps he’d simply been one of the survivors, one who got out just in time and seized his chance to start anew, and was living now in Phoenix, running a smoothie shop, feeding his neighbors’ cats when they went out of town, contemplating, wondering, missing me but convinced it was all for the best. I would have preferred it. I would have preferred anything to this. Well, that little tin box had been excavated from the garden and its contents deemed inadmissible. News flash, Hazel: your husband is dead.
Part IV
26.
In my bag were five reel tapes, recordings of Turk’s father’s voice, made in 1961 by a doctoral student doing a rotation at Pickering. His daily rounds there were considerably more agreeable than the hand-to-hand combat he’d endured the previous year at Bellevue, though lacking the smorgasbord of schizoid antisocial behaviors available at the public institution, and he’d invented a side project to keep himself engaged between circle group meetings.
Curious, he’d thought, the narrative leaps made by schizophrenics. A schizophrenic, recollecting his day’s activities for an interested party, would deliver a standard top-down tour of a Dadaist countryside, a game of narrative pachinko that offered the interlocutor gems like, Sally cow tank drank so much gasoline through her ball, and The empty crows and so many furrows in the doorways, the only safe place to land, the frying pan. Given enough time and coffee, any moderately inquisitive English major could parse meaning—indeed, a multiplicity of meanings—from a section of schizophrenese, but what happened in those gaps, those spaces between phrases where the speaker abandoned sensical connection, disappeared into the mist, and emerged again on the other side only to utter a completely unrelated word or phrase? What dark magic occurred in the silence? What meaning existed there, and how schizophrenic did the listener have to be to understand the leap?
So that he might have accurate transcripts, the doctoral student had been recording his patient interviews, thinking he might be able to get some grant money next cycle to have them transcribed. Which is to say, he didn’t have much to show for his research beyond the stacks of tape boxes on his desk, when in wheeled Dr. Lazlo Brunn, the mad babbler.
At Pickering, not a revolving-door operation but a well-funded private institution that tended its flower beds and kept its kitchen floors clean, an intake was an all-hands affair by virtue of its rarity. That first week, Lazlo Brunn talked nonstop, and since no one quite knew what to do with him, the student figured he’d make some tape just in case it turned out the patient’s diagnosis fell within the scope of his research. He wheeled his aluminum cart into Brunn’s room, introduced himself, got some gibberish in response, asked in turn if he could record their conversation—more gibberish but no physical signs of disagreement—and proceeded with his first question: How do you feel today, Doctor Brunn? The patient took one hour and four minutes to deliver his logatomic response, and he was still talking when the tape ran out.
The student was named Asher Schiff, the same Schiff who would later treat my father, and I’d come into possession of the tapes when I’d made a research mission up to the Bronx to see him, hoping he could tell me something about my own state of mind in those days immediately after the Vornados’ party.
The morning after the party, when I had emerged from my bedroom and asked who the man who’d been thrown over the balcony was, Schiff had been my father’s first phone call, and he’d trudged through the snow to our apartment that same day. As I understood it, we’d talked for a long time, and then I’d been to see him in his office several times after, but I had no recollection of his face, much less our conversations.
He apologized for not being able to speak extemporaneously on the subject of our sessions, but he couldn’t remember anything specific himself, and we descended into his basement, where he dug around in some old steel file cabinets until he found his notes, which weren’t much help, either.
According to this, he said, we met five times. Twice I came to you, and the other three, your parents brought you to my office. I never wrote much down, for legal reasons—standard practice, not because of the details of your case. So there’s not much here, I’m sorry to say. I see that I referred you to Sandy Stern. Did you see her for long?
I told him I had, about five years.
She’s who you should be talking to, he said, but she passed away some years back.
Yes, I said.
You already knew that, he said, and smiled. Suddenly I remembered his smile—crooked, rumpled, compassionate, the smile of an inveterate listener. Do you want to talk about anything now? he said.
Oh no, I said. I’ve done plenty of that, thank you.
I had only a vague idea of what I was looking for. Some clue that he’d seen Albert Caldwell peering out from within me, I suppose. Some written proof that I’d spoken like a guilt-ridden old lawyer.
So, I said. We’re like a couple of old war buddies who can’t remember the war.
He gave me that smile again, and a shrug that either meant, Oh ho, I remember the war all too well and I’m not opening that can of worms, or else it meant, simply, I’m sorry. Either way, there was no more conversation about that night in 1978. So we talked about other things. He was a lovely man. He asked about my father. When I told him I still lived at the Apelles he asked if I happened to know anyone in the Brunn family. Sure, I said. Follow me, he said. Up we went to his office on the second floor, a room with books for walls, towers of ancient journals and papers begetting yet more papers, two desks obscured by a long, long career’s worth of psychological detritus—the Egyptian reproductions, the old chess pieces, a graveyard of laptops, flowerpots where he’d cultivated twigs and dust. One smiling shelf was dentured with slender reel tape boxes, and he picked through them until he’d found the ones he was after.
You get old, you try to disburse, he said. The family might want these.
I thanked him for his time and took them home.
* * *
It took me a while to get around to the tapes. They slipped my mind, to
be honest. I was a little preoccupied putting my house in order. I’d finally managed to dispatch the hundreds of photos of Vik into manila folders. His shirts had gone to the mission on 82nd Street, the same place Turk had taken her parents’ clothing. His coats, his shoes, all gone. I expected a sudden weightlessness, some bliss-of-purgation kind of uplift, a setting off on the open sea type of feeling. There was new space in the closet. Lightness in the drawers, extra shelves in the medicine cabinet. I felt the same.
It was as much out of a desire to avoid that sameness as any feeling of obligation to Turk that I went rummaging in my parents’ basement storage, abstractly looking for their old reel-to-reel without any real concern over whether I’d find it or not. Maybe I’d listen to the tapes, maybe I wouldn’t. Why did I bother? Why didn’t I just take the tapes to Turk? When I think about how close I came to missing my salvation, how many ways I tried not to discover it, I’m only more convinced of the truth of what I found.
I camped out on the storage room’s concrete floor for a few hours paging through old photo albums and pulling open the cloverleafed tops of unlabeled boxes. Even after I excavated the tape deck from a mountain of twine-bound National Geographic s and hauled it back up to the apartment, it sat on the floor in all its dusty glory for a couple of weeks before I carried it into the dining room and set it up on the table. I had to buy an adapter for my headphones, which put me back another week. But finally, finally, one night, somewhere in the concavity between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., I spooled up the tapes and pressed play. I wouldn’t say I was floored by what I heard in the five minutes I listened that first night, but it was obvious that Lazlo Brunn was not babbling incoherently—not at all. His noise had form and rhythm, to be sure.
A few days later I downloaded some software to digitize the tapes, thinking it would be easier for Turk to listen that way, if she wanted to listen at all. In a marathon session, two bottles of wine, an entire roast chicken from Fairway, I transferred all five tapes.
The software’s enhancement suite was comprehensive, offering pitch, tone, and speed adjustment, layering, reversing, noise reduction. Pretty basic, I suppose, to any twelve-year-old with a laptop, but it wasn’t until I, analogue-brained, remembered Gene Hackman in The Conversation, twisting knobs so powerful that they could make the truth rise up from the magnetic surface of his tapes like ghosts from the grave, that I thought to use the software to manipulate the sound.
Why did I do it? Wine and sorrow. And boredom and idle curiosity. I certainly didn’t expect to unearth ancient bones. Or did I? It’s hard not to think I was somehow drawn to investigate the tapes, given what happened next, but let’s be honest. I wasn’t sleeping and you have to kill the time somehow.
First I tried giving the playback loop a little drag, slowing it until Lazlo’s yammering was baritone yowling, then whale song. Then some more, until the sound fell away completely, the waveforms flattened, and his vocables lay down unmarked in the sonic boneyard.
I pushed the sliders in the other direction. I doubled the playback speed and got a Chipmunks Christmas album. Quadrupled it and got Twiddlebugs on helium. Quadrupled again. Mechanical chirps. At thirty-two times the recorded speed I sat back and let it play out, almost inaudibly high, sonic detritus emitted by the earth’s crust, magnets serenading each other, the hour-long audio reduced now to about two minutes. And it was there, in the electrostatic ether, through the whistling cracks, that a voice spoke out.
Are, it said. I was quite sure my mind had fabricated it, that my sadness had finally metastasized inside my frontal cortex, but then came another word: You. Another ten seconds passed. Speaking. Another ten. To. And finally, Me. The recording ended.
What kind of whackadoo sci-fi bullshit is this? you might ask. Because I sure did. I slammed shut my laptop and went directly to bed. I was drunk, of course—that was it. Drunk, yearning for a voice from the beyond. I passed out and slept deeply, dreamlessly, and the next morning I had almost convinced myself that I’d heard nothing more than an echo off the inside of my own skull, a question I would have done well to ask myself. Who was I speaking to? No one. It was after dark when I approached the recording again. I put on my headphones and clicked play. The tangle of sound began. It was incomprehensible. How pleased I was not to hear a thing. What a relief, I was thinking, basking in the knowledge that I had fabricated the whole episode, when he spoke. I felt a shock strike the back of my neck, as real as if someone had slapped me open-handed. What kind of madness?
That night, sitting at the table in my socks and cotton shorts, slurping on an over-milked lukewarm coffee, how could I have comprehended what he’d done? My ears had not yet been opened. I could hear but I was not listening. I was a novitiate to Lazlo’s order. It took a couple of months. I did everything I could think of to the tapes. I scrambled and descrambled them. I re-recorded his five-word question, sliced and diced it, ran it backward, forward, sped it up and slowed it down. I stretched, deconstructed, rebuilt, and inverted the sounds, all the while hoping that I could create another phrase, something that would prove I had made his words out of nothing more than coincidence and selective hearing. I recorded my own voice, trying to mimic the trick. I couldn’t make it work. I deleted the software, packed up the deck and tapes, and stuffed them in the closet.
I took it all back out. I bought a new reel-to-reel deck, one that was capable of controlled high-speed playback, hoping to discover that all I’d heard was a fluke of the software. But the words were right there on the tape. Finally I had to accept the most likely possibility—the one that didn’t point to coincidence and luck but to a carefully constructed truth: Lazlo Brunn had slipped outside a human perception of time. Not so complicated in the end, not so crazy, and completely within the bounds of modern scientific and neurological understanding of the brain. Researchers have known for decades that the smaller an animal, the more refined its perception of time. To a frog, the child’s grasping hand moves in slow motion. To a flea, a minute is an endless expanse. To a microbe, a day is a lifetime, but one filled with endless variation and experience, a life no less astonishing in its scope than any human life. I’m not suggesting Brunn invented an anti-gravity machine or made himself invisible. I’m merely suggesting that he lived on, physically unchanged, silent as a mouse, occupying his room at Pickering until the day he died in 1982.
But within his normal human life span, he’d made himself immeasurably large, a perceptual giant, so that to him, the white-frocked orderlies would appear and disappear like lightning flashes. To him, there’d be a shimmer in the doorway; it would spit out a heartbeat’s worth of incomprehensible blather, and vanish. Lazlo had shifted to geologic time. He’d become a glacier creeping across a landmass. For him, a day was the beat of a hummingbird’s wing. A week was the length of a breath, and felt like pressure in the ears, relieved with a yawn. His own body must have been a thing of wonder, a blazing electrical arc that sparked from bed to wheelchair to bed and back without a thought. Did he even register the trays of food put before him? Wheelchair tours of the grounds?