They chase the truck through the countryside until they arrive at the HarvestTime™ headquarters, monolithic as the orbiting fruit in their TV commercials. A kind of dystopian silo. The ice cream truck zips through an entrance which appears like a glitch in the building’s armored exterior. Pikkoro and Tako plunge into the darkness after it. The ice cream truck brakes, squeals in a circle; Tako whiplashes out of his motorcycle form and Pikkoro jumps off. She lands on her feet.
The two HarvestTime™ men slither out of the truck and slam the doors. It is so dark in here: the light at Pikkoro’s back fails to clarify the dimensions of the room. A fluorescent lamp snaps on overhead; then another, and another, springing like hunting snares. Exposing in their painful light: smooth sloping walls. Inert conveyor belts. Pronged beams. Vertical labyrinths of ladders.
Pikkoro steps backwards into Tako’s ready arms.
A regal woman with silver hair is poised on a gangplank that overlooks the room. Her fringe obscures her eyes. Her voice is soft but paradoxically resonant.
—Sugimura Pikkoro. What a surprise to see you.
Pikkoro withholds a gasp. Her eyes are shining, lacquered with tears, but it is critical that she does not cry. Tako is perfectly still. The two HarvestTime™ men are so unnoticeable that they may as well disappear between frames.
The silver-haired lady spreads her hand.
—Or maybe it is not such a surprise. You are, after all, highly talented.
Pikkoro allows herself only a few seconds to shiver.
—What do you mean?
The lady’s lips curl into a smile.
—You are special, Sugimura Pikkoro. The other children are not like you. They will never be like you. Not one of them would pick the mango from the road, would question the play, would peel back the sticker. Even for a puzzle of such low difficulty, of such relative transparency to the outside observer—the other children would struggle to notice even half of what you perceived instantly.
Pikkoro tightens her face. She tries to keep it in, but a tear finally escapes her eye. She bunches her fists.
—No! No, I don’t understand! Why did they come to my school? Why did they change the play? Why did they make us wear those costumes?
For a moment the lady stops smiling, and Pikkoro shrinks. She lowers her eyes. The same fallen face that Pikkoro holds as she marks her mathematics homework with a red cross. That old, large sadness.
The lady, as if with some renewed awareness of Pikkoro—so small, earnest, her octopus poncho hanging so dearly to her little shoulders—offers a different sort of smile.
—Sweet child.
And then:
—You will grow old so beautifully.
Tako shifts his weight. He remains silent, as if speaking would be a trespass. Pikkoro, with her clenched fists, tremoring with indignity and anger and foreboding which exceeds anything she has felt before, must proceed alone.
—Explain it to me!
—Explain what to you, Sugimura Pikkoro?
—Just... explain everything! I don’t get it. What’s the point of all this? I... I don’t even know what questions to ask! I need you to explain what’s going on! And why. Why does it have to be?
The lady laughs. A feathery sound, motherly and infinitely patient.
—How apt, Sugimura Pikkoro. You astutely describe the central problem of existence. What is going on? Why does it have to be? What questions am I supposed to ask? What am I trying to understand? What does it even mean, to understand? Explain everything. Explain, explain.
Pikkoro becomes aware now of the giant crates that surround them, piled high with silent fruit. Apples. Mangoes. Peaches. Each marked with the HarvestTime™ sticker, like white glossy eyes. The silver-haired lady continues:
—I think you will find, dear Pikkoro, that much of adulthood is dedicated to erasing the why of everything. It is the act—a game, we should say—of adhering to the rules without actually knowing them. Any question that the uninitiated might ask is, inevitably, the wrong question.
The silver-haired lady holds out her hand and unfurls it softly. A dull plum sits on her palm, one which also bears the HarvestTime™ sticker.
—Isn’t it strange, Sugimura Pikkoro? The complexity of these imaginary rules? Even this fruit, which pre-exists humanity, is the follower of rules. Its ancestors have been bred selectively, the pollen scraped from their bodies, the natural logic of their seed corrupted. This fruit does not know that its special genetic code is the intellectual property of this company. A receptacle for crucial data. It does not know that we have intervened. It simply adheres to the rules. As we all must.
The hand that holds the plum remains there, as if the lady is a statue at a shrine. The sticker gleams. Pikkoro seems to swell with something unspeakable; she can hardly breathe, can hardly stop her eyes from trembling with tears. But she must be brave. She must. She must take a new breath. She must ask the next question.
—What has all of this got to do with me?
The silver-haired lady lifts her lips.
A smile like a trapdoor.
—It’s harvest time.
And then Pikkoro is falling, a clean, slow movement—propelled by a separate momentum, unforgiving as gravity. Her eyelids fold, and the limbs of her poncho, so utterly unrelated to her whole, descend separately, splaying like outstretched fingers, scattering from her perfect fall.
Tako catches her before she can hit the ground. He enfolds Pikkoro in his many arms. And then, in swift easy seconds, Tako turns into a helicopter, bursts out of the HarvestTime™ headquarters, away from the invisible gaze of the silver-haired lady—flies Pikkoro over the countryside and across the river, four blades perforating the baffled sky. Humming like a heartbeat.
What does Pikkoro see during her moment of unconsciousness? Does she tumble like Alice through red crosses, eraser shavings, corrective ink? Does her unfinished homework loom around her, large as blimps? Sly pterodactyls of long division? Gap-toothed comprehension tests? Perhaps she sees newspaper headlines, or white oval stickers, a tree of hearts. Perhaps fruit orbits her body, rotating on their secret axes, their unfathomable formulae. Perhaps she sees, again, the silver-haired lady’s smile, disembodied, a terrifying omniscience.
Perhaps she understands that this is merely the first episode of many to come. That she has embarked on a steep trajectory of self-discovery, and her progress is witnessed by more worlds than one.
Or perhaps, with rare benevolence, the universe grants young Pikkoro a moment of respite, sparing her the burden of thought—and she sees nothing at all.
And so, after receiving whatever insights darkness might offer, Pikkoro reawakens at night, in her home, in her soft and colorless bedroom. Tako is sitting next to her bed, reading Seeds of Time beneath a dim lamp. Pikkoro’s octopus poncho hangs over the back of her chair like a sleeping child slung over her father’s shoulder.
Pikkoro sighs—a sigh of safety—and Tako lifts his eyes from his novel. When their eyes meet, they feel keenly the insufficiency of words, so they resist the blunt intrusion of language. Pikkoro rolls over, holds Tako’s closest arm, and, together, they fall asleep.
When the morning comes, Pikkoro is dressed for school. Her bag is gridlocked with books, and there are clean white socks on her feet. Tako and Pikkoro stand at the entrance to their home, contemplating a blue sky that holds no clues.
—Are you sure you want to go to school today?
—Yes. I need to see if things are back to normal.
Pikkoro’s eyes are cleaner and sharper than the sky. She says:
—I’m not scared.
Tako gazes out over the town, at the trim rows of apartments and traffic lights and dotted white lines. In the far distance is the bridge they flew over yesterday—and further out, invisible, the HarvestTime™ headquarters, the silver-haired lady.
Pikkoro says:
—I’m so sorry about your ice cream truck.
—It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that
you are safe, Pikkoro-chan.
—What are you going to do now?
—I’m sure I will find something else to do. It doesn’t worry me at all.
Pikkoro looks up at Tako. She encircles him, the best she can, with her small arms. Tako leans close to her.
—Take care, Pikkoro.
With that, Pikkoro sets off to school. She hoists her schoolbag high onto her back and walks down the gray staircase, slips through the apartment gate, patters across the footpath. She waits for the green man and crosses the road under his bright approval. She stops at the bottom of the hill, clutching the straps of her bag. She looks up at her school. A flock of birds trawls the sky like a fishing net.
At home, Tako carries a cup of tea from the kitchen and takes his seat at the table. With his peaceful arms, moving in elegant concurrence, Tako rests his cup on the placemat, stirs the water with a spoon, and leafs through the employment section of the newspaper. His sapient eyes study the entries. Outside, early-morning sounds float on the air—drowsy, inseparable, overlapping like tongue-twisters. Bicyclist. Cicada. Bicyclist. Cicada.
T
There is Ulysses, heavy across his knees—the weight of a cat, somehow so paralysing. Tim lies in bed a half-hour more than he intended, legs baking, watching a slit of sky turn bluer. He can hear the main road lacquered in traffic; he can perceive himself waking, a moment he has narrated ten times or more—the loneliest moment of the morning, non-unconsciousness, crusty and overripe. He moves his legs out from under Ulysses, and Ulysses, pretending he chose this moment to rouse himself, arches his spine and vanishes over the edge.
The day of the month floats to the top of Tim’s mind. He wanders to the bathroom, takes a syringe from the cupboard, and slides the needle into his skin.
Tim feeds Ulysses a bowl of hard kibble, die-cut into shapes like fish and bones. Tim always wonders: for whose benefit are these shapes cut? Can a housecat appreciate what a representation of a fish looks like, or a bone? Tim pours himself a bowl of unbranded cereal and tries not to think of them both, this cereal and the cat food, as being produced by the same process of extrusion, maybe even on the same factory floor, injected with steam, cooked by friction, sprayed with fat.
Every now and again, both in the cat food and in Tim’s cereal, there will be a piece that evaded some part of the process, and will seem to have melted together with another piece. Tim will always feel a peculiar sympathy for them, these odd ones.
Today is the day of the stranger, the hard knock at ten o’clock. Tim wipes his mouth on his sleeve, crosses from the kitchen to the front hallway, and opens the door. The stranger is perhaps a shade older than him, a little more clenched, holding a cat in one arm.
‘Do you have a cat?’
Tim blinks. ‘Yeah, I do.’ He looks over his shoulder at Ulysses in post-breakfast lickdown. ‘He’s over there.’
The stranger looks past Tim. ‘No, no. That’s not your cat. This is your cat.’
It is only when the stranger foists the cat into his arms that Tim realizes the cat is a dead ringer for Ulysses—short black fur, lean muscle, quick green eyes. The cat is even wearing a red leather collar that Ulysses used to wear, but Tim assumed he had recently lost. In his surprise Tim takes a step back, unintentionally permitting the stranger to step inside the house. ‘That’s my cat,’ the stranger says, pointing at Ulysses.
‘Whoa. Wait.’ Tim fumbles with the cat in his arms.
The stranger scoops up Ulysses with familiar confidence. ‘I live in the next street. My mother’s been house-sitting while I’ve been abroad. She didn’t notice that the cat wasn’t mine.’
‘But this guy’s been living with me for...’ Tim stops. When did the collar go missing?
‘It’s Ulysses, right? Your cat’s name is Ulysses. It’s on the collar, right there.’
Tim looks down at the cat in his arms. He overturns the label on the collar. ULYSSES / 29 SIGMUND ST.
‘Oh,’ says Tim. The cat formerly known as Ulysses, curled against the stranger’s chest, looks at Tim balefully. The cat labelled Ulysses yawns. ‘Gee. I’m terribly sorry. I had no idea. They look identical to me.’
The stranger shrugs. There’s something unforgiving in his face, that clenchedness. ‘Cats like to wander. I would’ve called ahead but—’
‘I don’t have a phone. Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have a phone.’ The stranger gives Tim a searching look. There’s an accusatory edge to his statement that Tim could just be imagining.
‘When Ulysses showed up without his collar I just assumed he lost it. I mean...’ Tim falters. It hardly seems worth correcting himself. ‘Uh. It won’t happen again.’
The stranger gives Tim one last searching look. ‘Well.’
Ulysses begins to struggle. Tim gathers him close to his chest and uses his elbow to get the door. ‘Thanks for returning my cat.’
When the door is closed, Ulysses jumps down, trots to his food bowl and begins crunching kibble. Tim watches. A jet engine builds behind his ears.
The manuscript he’s been working on is full of enigmatic one-sentence paragraphs.
In our haste we left two stones unturned.
There were too many things living in the water.
We didn’t have a plan.
When Tim can’t tell which one of two readings sounds the best, he Alt-Tabs to the pictures supplied by the artist and scrutinizes them for five minutes. He hasn’t seen anything quite like them before: such tall, shrivelled figures, drawn with claustrophobia-inducing detail, melded with teapots, tables, trees, fastened onto each other. They must move leglessly, or perhaps they are rooted to the landscape. Tim switches windows.
Little did he know that a slow, interior catastrophe was underway.
A collision of sorts.
A miscalculation of cells and their trajectories.
He stops the recording. Swivels out of his office, to the kitchen, and depresses the kettle switch. To get there he must first pass Ulysses, occupying the living room sofa, eyes convex with half-sleep. Tim hasn’t said one word to Ulysses since the stranger left. Not one word. He’s not sure where to begin, really. He hates to think of all the private, inane things he’s been saying to that other cat.
‘Bet you had fun, didn’t you,’ Tim says as the kettle boils and clicks itself off. ‘Lording it up in some old lady’s company.’
Ulysses’s eyes shrink. The cups of his ears rotate away from Tim’s voice. Tim retrieves a chamomile teabag from a crumpled box. Shields the hot mug back to his office.
He returns to those one-sentence paragraphs.
It was not our intention to lead the others astray.
We used to be right for each other.
Our blood carried messages that our organs misunderstood.
By the time the sky turns purple Tim has collated all his recordings into a ZIP folder, which duplicates itself in some faraway server, along with his message:
Hi Ursula,
Please find attached the audio files for your project. Let me know if there are any problems.
Best of luck,
Tim Spiegel
It might be said that a recording is a documentation of sound events.
A sound event can be a cat’s meow, a dropped pencil, a passing jet engine, a warning bell.
Like stories, every sound has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some people refer to these as the attack, the sustain, and the decay. To plot a sound event on a graph would therefore produce the shape of an envelope—the attack being the sound’s journey to peak volume; sustain, the peak’s constancy; decay, its recession.
The sound of boiling water might have a slow attack, a long sustain, a gradual decay.
A cymbal might have a fast attack, a short sustain, a long decay.
One bounce of a basketball might have a fast attack, a quick sustain, the scantest decay.
It is the task of some recordists to capture all these minute violences that comprise a soundscape, while fo
r others, it is the erasure.
Recorded speech is made perfect by the removal of hesitations, blunders, breath intakes—noises that betray the body.
One way to look at it is that recordings of speech, edited in this manner, gesture to a kind of dead space; a neutral, unechoing context, a voice without a human.
Another way to look at it is that sound must always gesture to space, even if that space is a hypothetical envelope plotted on horizontal and vertical axes.
Tim used to have a theory that cats can slip in and out of a parallel dimension, a realm which permits them to move invisibly, to reappear without sound. To swap places, even. Certainly, looking into Ulysses’s eyes, those blurry hexagons, Tim knows that Ulysses has seen more than he has seen, that Ulysses is acquainted with a separate, softer world.
In the morning, Tim receives an email from the artist.
Hello Tim! Thanks for these! They sound great. I knew you’d be perfect at it. I’ll send you details re: the opening night soon! Take care, U
They have never met in person. Her emails are cheerfully incongruous with her artwork. It makes it impossible for Tim to construct any mental picture of Ursula at all.
Today Tim has to update some tech support options for an old employer, a job which he thinks will take less than half the day. He knows he has to start sniffing out new work soon. For a while he’s had the luxury of being picky, taking small projects that he can record at home, but perhaps it’s time to put himself out there again.
Thank you for calling technical support for your Seed device. Please listen carefully, as our menu options have recently changed.
Please hold. An operator will be with you shortly. Please note that, for training purposes, your call may be recorded.
To hear these options again, press five.
It had occurred to Tim just two weeks ago, when he was riding a late train home from the city, why his Seed recordings never sounded quite right to him. It was one of the newest trains, with the names of each passing station spelled out as red dots on long, visor-like black screens. Doors closing, said a male voice, startling him—and he realized, everywhere, in elevators and telephonic menus and train stations, he was accustomed to hearing an automated female voice. As if city planners built around themselves an elaborate uterus of thermoplastic and cables and signals, presided over by an unseen mother, her permeating voice, maternally omniscient. He started to feel strange about his work then, like he was impersonating the voice of the father, or the Devil. Some in vitro ventriloquism act.
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