Repetition

by Alan Gallauresi

  The prohibitions against electronics have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with control. The cabin crew wants your complete attention at a moment's notice, and they expect you to know your place -- a explicit permissions system where everything is denied unless specifically allowed by a mandate over the intercom. It's just like elementary school, a level of helplessness we thought we'd left before, like having to raise your hand to go to the bathroom, irrespective of how badly you need to go or the inevitable consequences of not going no matter what the little light says. They tell you some nonsense about interference with the plane's instruments so you fall into line; it's the same line they give you about the blue gel on fire alarms that doesn't come off your hands -- so you'd better not pull it or they'll know you did it.

  Muffled bombastic noise escapes from 17-C’s earphones. Wald smiles in appreciation at 17-C, who is studying the illustrations in her book. He’d accidentally eavesdropped on a hundred songs leaking from headphones on subway cars, the sounds filtered and adulterated into something unrecognizable. With that band, those few chords, there was nothing to strip out or dumb down – it was unmistakable.

  Finally, the light in the overhead displays light up and the clipped ding of freedom rings out. Stephen Wald visualizes the emergency air masks dropping down in celebration, their balloon bags covered in festive colors and the mouthpieces made into tinsel noisemakers. Rainy day recess, kids – play quietly at your desk or just put your head down, he thinks as he loads up a single song, hits repeat and stops thinking.

  You gotta calm me down, pleads his player over and over. I wanna be sedated, says 17-C, again and again. Music is a laundering scheme. Constructions made of the same familiar structure, the same 12 notes – stolen, broken down, chopped into meaningless parts -- rebuilt, repackaged, resold and replayed, ad infinitum.

  We dig dig repetition, said the poet.

  ###

  Here is what an audiophile would tell you, in-between talking about binaural beats and grav turntables: sometime in the August of 2019, Jacob Malvino, an unaspiring and uninspired session drummer, met three ex-bandmates at a dirty bar in Chicago's Hyde Park. No matter how times the bar was renovated and placed under new ownership, it remained dirty – a four-story converted walk-up with the decaying odor of beer and nicotine soaked into its bones. The dirtiest part of the bar was the pack of humanity that filled it up past overflowing every night, with a babel of noise making communication revert to antediluvian levels. Patrons in a place like that sip and gesture their way through conversations. They're reduced to one free hand and a tilt of the head to get what they want: a refill on their gin and ginger; a chance to flirt with the red-head in black glasses; the money they're owed for getting two rounds in a row. This is also how an audiophile would tell you this, with an incongruous level of detail, spurred by an imaginative view of things that probably don't really exist.

  During the night -- a night that occurred sometime in the August of 2019, a decided fact -- during one of the moments where Jacob was saying nothing and given over to a cock-eared staring that could be generously interpreted as listening attentively to a friend’s shouting, the DJ played a piece of classic rock. The audio was a deep thrum, not the whole sonic spectrum, just the bass and the percussion and a glissando of pitch on top that he could imagine was a guitar or vocals, but only out of habit. And it sounded fantastic -- maybe better than the song itself, a song he can't place at the moment. At this point, he turned to the first acquaintance, a guitarist he played low-fi electronic fuzz with in a band called Lots of Kicks. They were described as dizzy and mesmerizing by the agent who found them working their way through the local Rochester dive scene. The A&R exec who signed them described them, with considerably less enthusiasm, as deadweight a couple years later. The band split before their sound had gelled, unrecouped, owing three-quarters of their advance and any chance of royalties back to the company store. The guitarist had left the band before they had signed and had ended up in Chicago ahead of Malvino. They rarely saw each other now.

  So Malvino turned to Acquaintance #1, and asked what song is playing. Aloud, loudly, but not audibly. What’s this song, he mouthed with exaggeration. The guitarist couldn't make out what he's saying, and it no longer mattered. Jacob Malvino has had a novel idea, or rather what the general public now considers nothing more than an idea for a novelty, if they consider it at all.

  It took Jacob Malvino three years to produce the work known as Music for Vocal Spaces. He devoted his free time to it, playing session music during the day to pay the bills, teaching guitar in the evening and stealing studio time at night. During the time he barely saw Acquaintance #2 – a pop-punk fan who he used to run into in the days when seeing a show was something they did every other day. They kept meaning to get a drink sometime but something always came up. When the period of self-imposed solitude ended, Malvino released the album online, without any fanfare or hope for profitability.

  Most people approaching Music for Vocal Spaces expect the aural equivalent of standing next to a passing drum major in parade – a flurry of bass rumbling and sharp thumping not unlike a toddler’s guess of how a heart attack sounds. The raw audio of the recording in fact has little in the way of low spectrum material, the exception being an ever-present and constantly shifting drone. It is a tense sound born of an orchestral tympanum drummed with a single mallet while being rapidly tuned and detuned by the drummer’s skilled off-hand. The unusual technique transforms the instrument into a generator of barely controlled otherworldly hums – a modern critic noted that the instrument tortured in that way lacks only an accompanying theremin and the flowing voice of glass armonica to produce a sonic assault of space exotica as played by an inept garage rock trio, which is presumably meant to be complementary. In Malvino’s head -- and an audiophile couldn’t have known this -- he had heard something ancient in the sound – the beating, the singing, a single mixed down track to accompany Gilgamesh in a stage play: Gilgamesh at the gates of Uruk, his bare muscled back turned to an unheeded audience that can read his greatest deeds inscribed on the towering walls bowing away from him; read his ultimate failure in the taut lines and the pregnant pause before he walks through, thinking good enough, for a man, while the tympanum plays.

  The better part of the noise (and most people will tell you it is, in fact, noise and not music) is hard to qualify – a mishmash of electronic tones and breathy indefinite instrumentation over a scale of sound recognizable to the human ear. There’s little to be gleaned from it, even from the most forgiving and open of listeners.

  Soon after Jacob Malvino died in February of 2068, Acquaintance #3, promoted to good friend through attrition, acquired and released the electronic source material for the album. A sudden narrow revival of interest birthed a conundrum. There is no gratifying alternate mix with the full sound of the original recording, no demo where the drums are played in a basement stairwell -- only the single album with thousands of recordings of unlabelled ambient background noise.

  There is a possibility in all that noise, the possibility that for years listeners have been hearing the music all wrong. In that pile of recordings there is a single key, a perfect wave that cancels out two tracks of cacophony into artistic harmony, if you could just hear it -- a mosquito tone of compositional brilliance. That is what an audiophile would tell you.

  ###

  Chandrasekhar stared, not for the first time, at the chromatically shifting disks of the drive he had built, and wondered how it worked. He considered it as a word temporarily lost from his consciousness. His brain knew the word; it was just that those particular synapses wouldn't connect right now. Days later he would remember, and say the word aloud, instantly, unbidden. He had been expecting to say the word for months now, and it had yet to reach his lips.

  There was a magnetic attraction for Chandrasekhar in the thing beyond his efforts to understand the unknown principles hurtling it with unlawful speed toward the galactic core and the cent
ral emptiness that lay there. Carrying a tiny toy ship along with it. The disks thrummed with life; the air about it whistled, unexpectedly cool. The white noise blanketed him hypnotically; a young boy drifting off on a hot day with his cheek inches from an oscillating fan and a grown man stealing a nap in a server room. His ears buzzed with deafness as in the instants before falling into unconsciousness. It was a problem to solve and a place to hide, away from Siri Anders.

  The thrumming vibrated throughout the ship, loud enough to make conversing difficult outside of the sealed cabins. Luckily, Siri had shown as little desire to communicate with him as he had with her, absorbed in his craven guilt. Alone in her cabin, she had witnessed the ship hang in open space. She had seen the white points of the celestial background dissolve into nothingness as the drive spun up. Chandrasekhar knew from the logs that she had accessed the ship's information he had left open to her, including their course and the estimated length of their journey. The date they would enter their medical pods.

  That had precipitated their first, and so far only meeting, since the night at the museum. Three days ago, he had slid open her door and faced her, her hand still pressed against the door's response panel. She had walked past him, glancing about the cramped ship before staring out of the cockpit's viewport. Chandrasekhar waited, ready to react. How many people have done what we are doing?

  Guessing her meaning, he had replied: Four thousand and some change. She had paused and continued speaking. A century of that some change, trapped in tiny metal boxes strapped to chemical rockets. Then four thousand all at once, in the grandest fashion. And now we regress; two people in tiny metal boxes inside a slightly larger tiny metal box for seven months of our lives. We should be rolling down the skyway on our cosmic wheels, said the poet.

  I'm sorry it is not the luxury you're acquainted with, he had said without inflexion. She had laughed and headed back to her cabin. I said we.

  He had been waiting for her to ask, but she never did. She had never asked him why.

  The computer registered a replication approval request on his gauntlet. Siri had limited control over the replication terminal in her cabin; Chandrasekhar had allowed her to make meals and personal effects without interference and without the need to talk. He reviewed the request, a bottle of wine, and pursed his lips. It was a very old vintage, though not a complex construction: trace amounts of chemicals from the materia banks -- nothing to worry about it -- although it was destined to taste like swill to the refined palate of an heiress. It was the glass that made the prohibited materials list. The computer considered the possibility of broken glass to be a threat and suggested an unbreakable synthetic polycarbonate replacement. Chandrasekhar thought a moment and approved the original request, unaltered.

  He forgot about the girl over the next few days as he habitually reviewed the ship's vitals for signs of deviation. So far, everything was running well. He puzzled over a slight change in the hull's vibration for a an hour before tracking it down to Siri's cabin. Music. He was chagrined that it had taken him so long to figure it out; he had left every reasonable form of entertainment open to her and it shouldn't have surprised him that she would take advantage of it. The music was loud. He decided against limiting the volume controls and continued on.

  The next day, just as the ambient ship lights began to dim in a facsimile of a day/night cycle, the computer registered another request. Chandrasekhar rose, still unprepared to answer her questions. He pressed a button and her door opened. May I come out? she asked, and he nodded in return. She carried the bottle carefully, keeping it from touching a simple white dressing frock she had changed into. The glass was grimy; the replication had included a couple centuries of perfectly simulated decay. What's your real name?

  Chandrasekhar, he said. What would he say to her? The truth as he knew it: that he had kidnapped her from her life on the basis of a note? But that wasn't the real truth. The note only convinced him of something he already believed, that he had brought her because she was going to be there. He waited for her to continue questioning him.

  What do you call this ship, Chandrasekhar? He wondered if he she was as uncomfortable as he was: facing her captor, facing the better part of a year in close quarters with him. She didn't seem it. I don't. It's just a modified gravcar.

  The second interstellar flight of humanity, and you don't think it deserves to be christened? She held up the bottle and he immediately tensed, clicking his neck. She held up a hand with open fingers and placed the wine on the ground between them.

  He picked it up, still watching her. He glanced at the scratches engraved of the surface of the dark glass. 1787 Lafitte. And below, the initials Th. J. A replicated copy of one of the oldest and most expensive wines ever created, supposedly belonging to Thomas Jefferson. The original bottle had been a fake with a ginned up provenance; it had whipped oenophiles into a fervor of bidding nearly a century ago, driven by a market that had wine experts searching for self-created and self-perpetuated knowledge. Siri could have created the original as it would have tasted in 1787: the approximate chemical formulas were publically available and were recreatable by even mid-range replicators. She had instead chosen a cheaply made imitation of an expensive imitation of 300 year old vinegar -- a joke.

  I think it's almost time for me to a take a long nap. She turned slowly, still aware of his tense stance, and strode back to her room.

  Thank you, he said, lifting the bottle. She turned and smiled. Drink it slow, she said. You're going to get thirsty stumbling down this highway.

  The door closed and Chandrasekhar was alone with steady hum of the ship, punctuated a few moments later by the crash of glass in the materia recycling bank.

  Chapter 6

  Nerves | We're All Dying | Nothing to Do

  The plane enters a pocket of slight turbulence. In the dimly lit second-class cabin, most of the people around Wald are napping unaffectedly, the plane’s restrained shaking lulling them to sleep like a toddler in the back-seat of a car.

  17-D excepted. Across 17-C’s curled up form, Wald can see the thickset teenager polishing the aisle armrest nervously. At every bump, she turns left and right, casting suspicious glances at the areas of the plane making the most noise. Wald is empathetic. He would like to explain to her that the probability of a plane experiencing structural failure during flight is an extremely small and highly predictable number, much less likely than dying in a traffic accident or having a heart attack. He doubts this would be any consolation. Teenagers don’t think about heart attacks. They don't watch their heart rate rising on the LED displays of an elliptical machine, and wonder if they should slow down because it is a good excuse to be lazy, or because they think they might quite literally die. More importantly, if her napping father in 17-E suddenly had a heart attack, his heart wouldn’t explode from his chest, tearing the plane into shrapnel and killing everyone aboard. If you say something, reflects Wald, don’t say that.

  Wald had a history of heart disease in his family, which is the no shit way of saying your family was lucky enough not to die of some hereditary gene ailment before they had heart attacks. The entire human race has a history of heart disease. Doctors ought to congratulate you on it.

  A series of bumps hits the plane, dropping Stephen's stomach. 17-D catches her breath, and her father awakes with a start. He stretches out his legs, displaying his bright orange pants banded by two grey military stripes down the length of each leg. A pronounced logo - a pair of pilot wings - straddled the grey bars in brilliant white. Flitepants, they called them, and they were specially designed for flying. They had no metal zippers or buttons to cause trouble at security gates, and they were constructed of a special mesh that slipped against your skin, eliminating the need for a belt while stretching comfortably. The fibers relaxed when you sat, loosening as you remained still so as to eliminate the constricting quality of regular clothes, then snapping back when you moved. They were ugly as sin. It's hard to discount the genius of marketers wh
o take sweatpants, make them so hideous that no one would wear them without a good reason, and then tell them the specific reason is to sit on an airplane, thereby making it socially acceptable.

  17-E's gut does look comfortable. He nods off again while the plane continues its rough ride. His daughter rubs a charm dangling from her wrist, a Saint Christopher medal, and breathes slowly through her mouth; she has nothing to do but dwell on her own death. We all gotta die of something, Wald's mother had once said. When he was young, Stephen had imagined it would be something sudden and eventful like a plane falling out of the sky, but now he saw it as the inevitable conclusion of his body wearing out one piece at a time. He suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome from typing on a keyboard all day, sometimes resulting in hands clenching into tight balls. Sometimes he experiences a sharp and sudden pain around the back of his neck and skull that goes away immediately but leaves him dizzy. He used to jog until he ended up with shin splints so painful he could barely move the next day. And there was always the two cherry-red spots on the underside of his lower left forearm. He couldn't remember where they had come from; he had just woken up one day in elementary school and seen them, unnaturally bright and perfectly round. He had spent the next couple days half-worried and half-exhilarated that he had been bitten and was secretly turning into a vampire. He still sees it occasionally and wonders if he should get it checked out. Congratulations Mr. Wald -- you have not inherited porphyria from vampires intermarrying into your genetic line! You are lucky enough to be a candidate for heart disease!