gonegirl5: Everyone’s going to know what you did to me.
gonegirl5: I’ll make sure of it.
EXHALATION #10
A. C. Wise
IT’S NOT A SNUFF FILM, at least not the traditional kind. The single MiniDV cassette was recovered from the glove box of a crashed beige Ford Taurus. The car had passed through a metal guardrail and flipped at least once on its way down the incline on the other side. No body was found. The license plate had been removed, the VIN sanded away, no identifying information left behind.
The handwritten label on the cassette reads Exhalation #10. The film it contains is fifty-eight minutes long; fifty-six minutes of a woman’s last breaths, and her death finally at the 56:19 mark.
Henry watches the whole thing.
The padded envelope the tape arrived in bears Paul’s handwriting, as does the tape’s label—a copy of the original, safely tucked away in an evidence locker. It’s no more than a half-hour drive between them; Paul could have delivered the tape in person, but Henry understands why he would not. Even knowing this tape is not the original, even touching it only to slip it into a machine for playback, Henry feels his fingers coated with an invisible residue of filth.
Expensive equipment surrounds him—sound-mixing boards, multiple screens and devices for playback, machines for converting from one format to another. Paul warned him about the tape over the phone, and still Henry wasn’t prepared.
During the entire fifty-eight minutes of play time, the woman’s body slumps against a concrete wall, barely conscious. She’s starved, one arm chained above her head to a thick pipe. The light is dim, the shadows thick. The angle of her head, lolled against her shoulder, hides her face. The camera watches for fifty-eight minutes, capturing faint, involuntary movements—her body too weak for anything else—until her breathing stops.
Henry looks it up: on average, it takes a person ten days to die without food or water. The number ten on the label implies there are nine other tapes, an hour recorded every day. Or are there other tapes capturing every possible moment to ensure her death ended up on film?
“Just listen,” Paul had told him. “Maybe you’ll hear something we missed.”
Henry’s ears are golden. That’s what his Sound Design professor at NYU said back in Henry’s college days. As a kid, Henry’s older brother, Lionel, had called it a superpower. By whatever name, what it means is that as Henry watches the tape, he can’t help hearing every hitch, every rasp. Every time the woman’s breath wants to stop, and every time her autonomic system forces one more gasp of air into her lungs.
He never would have agreed to watch the tape if he hadn’t been a little bit drunk and a little bit in love, which he’s been more or less since the day he met Paul in film school. Paul, whose eye for framing, for details, for the perfect shot is the equivalent of Henry’s golden ear. Paul, whose cop father was shot in the line of duty three months short of graduation, causing him to abandon his own moviemaking dreams and follow in his footsteps by becoming a cop as well.
Henry has always known better than to chase after straight boys, but what he knows intellectually and logically has never been a defense against Paul. So when Paul called at his wit’s end and asked him to just listen to the tape, please, Henry agreed.
After fifty-six minutes and nineteen seconds, the woman dies. After another two minutes and forty-one seconds, the tape ends. Henry shuts down the screen and stops just short of pulling the plug from the wall.
* * *
“Jesus Christ, Paul, what did I just watch?”
A half-empty bottle sits at Henry’s elbow in his bedroom, his phone pressed to his ear. He locked the door of the editing suite behind him, but the movie continues, crawling beneath his skin.
“I know. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if…I didn’t know what else to do.”
Henry catches the faint sound of Paul running his fingers through his hair, static hushing down the line. Or, at least, he imagines he hears the sound. Even after all this time he’s not always sure if what he thinks he hears is just in his head, or whether he really does have a “superpower.”
After watching the video of the dying woman, he’s even less sure. He watched the whole thing and didn’t hear anything to help Paul. But he can’t shake the feeling there is something there—a sound trapped on the edge of hearing, one he hasn’t heard yet. A sound that’s just waiting for Henry to watch the video again, which is the last thing in the world he wants to do.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says again. “It’s just…It’s like I hit a brick wall. I have no goddamn idea where this woman died, who she is, or who killed her. I couldn’t see anything on the tape, and you can hear things no one else can hear. You can tell which goddamn road a car is on just by the sound of the tires.”
In Paul’s voice—just barely ragged—is his fear, his frustration. His anger. Not at Henry, but at the world for allowing a woman to die that way. The ghost of the woman’s breath lingers in the whorls of Henry’s ears. Do the shadows, carving the woman up into distinct segments, stain Paul’s eyelids like bruises every time he blinks?
“I’ll try,” Henry says, because what else is there to say? Because it’s Paul. He will listen to the tape a hundred times if he has to. He’ll listen for the sounds that aren’t there—something in the cadence of the woman’s breathing, the whirr of an air duct he didn’t notice the first time, something that will give her location away.
“Thank you.” Paul’s words are weary, frayed, and Henry knows it won’t be a stray bullet for him, like the one that took his father. It’ll be a broken heart.
The drug overdoses, the traffic accidents, the little boy running into the street after his ball, the old man freezing to death in an alleyway with nowhere else to go. They will erode Paul, like water wearing down stone, until there’s nothing left.
Closer than Paul’s sorrow is the clink of glass on glass as Henry pours another drink. The bottle’s rim skips against the glass. Ice shifts with a sigh. He pictures Paul sitting on the edge of his bed, and it occurs to him too late that he didn’t bother to look at the clock before he called. He listens for Maddy in the background pretending to be asleep, rolling away and grinding her teeth in frustration at yet another of duty’s late-night calls.
Henry likes Maddy. He loves her, even. If Paul had to marry a woman, he’s glad Maddy was the one. From the first time Paul introduced them, Henry could see the places Paul and Maddy fit, the way their bodies gravitated to one another—hips bumping as they moved through the kitchen preparing dinner, fingers touching as they passed plates. They made sense in all the ways Paul and Henry did not, even though their own friendship had been instant, cemented when Paul came across Henry drunkenly trying to break into an ex-boyfriend’s apartment to get his camera back, and offered to boost him through the window.
At the end of that first dinner with Maddy, Henry had sat on the deck with her, finishing the last of the wine while Paul washed dishes.
“Does he know?” Maddy had asked.
Her gaze went to the kitchen window, a square of yellow light framing Paul at the sink. There was no jealousy in her voice, only sympathetic understanding.
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” Maddy reached over and squeezed Henry’s hand, and from that moment, their relationship had been set, loving the same man, lamenting his choice of career.
Henry wants to tell Paul to wrap himself around Maddy, take comfort in the shape of her, and forget about the woman, but he knows Paul too well.
“I’ll call you if I hear anything,” Henry says.
“Henry?” Paul says as Henry moves to hang up.
“Yeah?”
“Are you still working on the—”
“The movie? Yeah. Still.”
His movie. Their movie. The one they started together at NYU, back when they
had dreams, back before Paul’s father died. The one Henry is now making, failing to make, alone.
“Good. That’s good,” Paul says. “You’ll have to show it to me someday.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Henry rubs his forehead. “Get some sleep, okay?”
Henry hangs up. In the space behind his eyes, a woman breathes and breathes and breathes until she doesn’t breathe anymore.
* * *
Sweat soaks thirteen-year-old Henry’s sheets, sticking the T-shirt and boxer shorts he sleeps in against his skin. His mother left the windows open, but there’s no breeze, only the oppressive heat they drove through to get to the rental cabin. His brother snores in the bunk above him, one hand dangling over the side.
The noise comes out of nowhere, starting as a hum, building to a scream, slamming into Henry full force. Henry claps his hands to his ears. Animal instinct sends him rabbiting from the bed. His legs tangle in the sheets, and he crashes to the floor. The sound is still there, tied to the heat, the weight and thickness of the air birthed in horrible sound.
“Henry?” Lionel’s voice is sleep muffled above him.
Henry barely hears it over the other sound, rising in pitch, inserting itself between his bones and his skin. There’s another sound tucked inside it, too, worse still. A broken sound full of distress and pain.
Footsteps. His mother’s and father’s voices join his brother’s. Hands pry his hands from his ears.
“Can’t you hear it?” Henry’s voice comes in a panicked whine, his breath in hitching gulps.
“Henry.” His mother shakes him, and his eyes snap into focus.
“It’s just cicadas. See?” His father points to the window.
A single insect body clings to the screen. Lionel trots over and flicks the insect away before pulling the window closed.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lionel asks.
Even with the window shut, the noise remains, filling every corner of the room.
“Can’t you hear?” Henry’s hands creep toward his ears again.
His mother gets him a glass of water. His father and brother watch him with wary eyes. They don’t hear it. They hear the cicadas’ song, but not the broken, stuttering sound that digs and scrapes at Henry’s bones. No one hears it except for him.
Later, Henry learns that the sound is the cicadas’ distress call, the noise they make when they’re threatened or in pain. And over the course of the two weeks at the lake, Henry learns his hearing is different from the rest of his family’s, possibly from almost everyone else he knows. There are tones, nuances, threads of sound that are lost to others. It’s as though he’s developed an extra sense, and he hates it.
Lionel, however, turns it into a game, dragging Henry around to various parts of the lake, asking him what he hears, getting Henry to challenge him to see if he can hear it, too. Henry’s big brother grins, amazed at every sound Henry describes—birds murmuring in distant trees, small animals in the burrows, dropped fishing lines, an aluminum rowboat tapping against a dock all the way across the lake.
Henry almost allows himself to relax, to have fun, until on one of their excursions he hears the crying girl.
Henry and Lionel are deep enough in the woods surrounding the lake that the dense, midsummer foliage screens them from the road, the water, and the other cottages. Henry scans the tree trunks, looking for shed cicada shells. The sound comes, like it did the first night, out of nowhere—a ticking, struggling sound like hitching breath. Except this time it’s not hidden in cicada song but stark and alone, somewhere between mechanical and organic, full of pain.
Henry freezes, cold despite the sweat-slick summer air. Lionel is almost out of sight between the trees before he notices Henry is no longer with him.
“What’s wrong?” Lionel trots back, touching Henry’s arm.
Henry flinches. He’s sharply aware of his own breath. His chest is too tight. Underneath the insect sound there is something else—distinctly human, horribly afraid. He tries to speak, and the only sound that emerges is an extended exhalation, a “hhhhhhhh” that goes on and on.
Lionel’s repeated questions fade. Henry stumbles away from his brother, half-blinded by stinging eyes, catching tree trunks for support. He follows the sound, its insistence a knife-sharp tug at his core. He needs to find the source of the sound. He needs…
Henry crashes to his knees, nearly falling into a hole opened up in the ground. The edges are ragged and soft, the forest floor swallowing itself in greedy mouthfuls. There’s a caught breath of alarm from below him, wet with tears, weak with exhaustion, fading.
“There’s someone down there,” Henry pants, the words coming out between clenched teeth, his whole body shuddering. He’s doubled over now, arms wrapped around his middle, where the sound burrows inside him.
“What—” Lionel starts, but then he looks, seeing what Henry sees.
The girl is barely visible. The tree canopy blocks direct sunlight, and the hole is deep enough that the child is a mere smudge at the bottom.
“Get…” Henry’s voice breaks. Tears stream on his cheeks. “Mom. Dad. Get help.”
Lionel sprints away, and despite the pain, Henry stretches out flat on his stomach. Leaves crackle, branches poke at him. Things crawl through the earth underneath him, worms and beetles and blind moles further undermining its integrity, impossible things he shouldn’t be able to hear. He stretches his arm as far as he can, pressing his cheek against the ground. He doesn’t expect the girl to be able to reach him, but he hopes his presence might comfort her.
“It’s okay.” His shoulder feels like it will pop out of its socket. “I’m not going to leave you.”
From the dark of the earth, the girl sniffles. Henry stretches further still, imagining small fingers reaching back for him.
“It’s okay,” he says again, terrified the girl will die before rescue comes. Terrified it will be his fault, his failure, if she does. “Just hold on, okay? Hold on.”
* * *
The second time, Henry listens to the tape with his eyes closed. It scarcely matters. He still sees the woman, slumped and taking her last shallow breaths, but inside the theater of his mind she is so much worse. She’s carved up by shadow, her skin blotched as though already rotting from within. At any moment she will raise her head and glare at Henry, his powerlessness, his voyeurism.
He stretches after any glimmer of identifying sound, wondering if his unwanted superpower has finally chosen this moment to abandon him. Then, all at once, the sound is there, sharp as a physical blow.
A faint burr, rising from nothing to a scream. The cicada song he can’t help but hear as a herald of doom. It knocks the breath from his lungs, bringing in its place the heat of summer days, air heavy and close and pressed against the window screens. He shoves his chair back from the desk so hard he almost topples, and stares, wide-eyed. The image on the screen doesn’t change. After a moment, he forces himself to hit rewind. Play.
Ragged breath, stuttering and catching. There’s no hint of insect song. Even though Henry knows exactly when the rise and fall of the woman’s chest will cease, he holds his own breath. Every time her breath falters, he finds himself wishing the painful sound would just stop. It’s a horrible thought, but he can’t help it, his own lungs screaming as he waits, waits, waits to hear whether she will breathe again.
Then, a sound so faint yet so distinct Henry both can’t believe he missed it and isn’t certain it’s really there. He reverses the tape again, afraid the sound will vanish. Sweat prickles, sour and hot in his armpits. He barely hears the woman breathing this time, his strange powers of hearing focused on the almost-imperceptible sound of a train.
A primal response of exaltation—Henry wants to shout and punch the air in triumph. And at the same time, the woman on the screen is still dying, has been dead for days, weeks, months, even, and there�
��s nothing he can do. Henry forces himself to listen one last time, just to be sure. The train is more distinct this time, the lonely howl of approaching a crossing. Goose bumps break out across Henry’s skin. His body wants to tremble, and he clenches his teeth as though he’s freezing cold.
He must have imagined the cicadas, even though the noise felt so real, a visceral sensation crawling beneath his skin. The train, though, the train is real. He can isolate the sound, play it for Paul. It’s an actual clue.
He thinks of the summer at the lake when he was thirteen years old, Lionel snoring in the bunk above him. That first terrible night where it seemed as though all the cicadas in the trees around the lake had found their way into the room. Then, later, how their song had led him to the almost-buried girl.
Henry reaches for the phone.
“I’m going to send a sound file your way,” he says when Paul answers. “It’s something. I don’t know if it’s enough.”
“What is it?” Water runs in the background, accompanied by the clatter of Paul doing dishes. Henry imagines the phone balanced precariously between Paul’s ear and shoulder, the lines of concern bracketing his mouth and crowded between his eyes.
“A train. It sounds like it’s coming up to a crossing.”
“That’s brilliant.” For a moment there’s genuine elation in Paul’s voice, the same sense of victory Henry felt moments ago. And just as quickly, the weight settles back in. “It might give us a radius to search, based on where the car was found, and assuming the killer was somewhat local to that area.”
There’s a grimness to Paul’s voice, a hint of distraction as though he’s already half forgotten Henry is on the other end of the phone, his thoughts churning.
“Thank you,” Paul says after a moment, coming back to himself.
The water stops, but Henry pictures Paul still standing at the sink, hands dripping, looking lost.
Final Cuts Page 6