Tim hooks his headphones around his neck and pinches his eyelids. Time for a cup of tea.
Ulysses is sitting on the living room windowsill, contemplating the outdoors. Tim strokes Ulysses’s spine with a cupped hand, which Ulysses does not acknowledge. Ulysses, Tim has discovered, is impossible to startle. Even on the day that Ulysses was first brought home in a cardboard fruit carton—a gift from a well-meaning neighbor, who knew Tim was recovering from surgery—the cat’s emotional tenor did not rise above anything more than mild interest. Tim walks to the kitchen and starts unravelling a chamomile teabag.
For some reason, it’s only from this distance that Tim notices the object of Ulysses’s gaze.
Standing in Tim’s overgrown garden is the stranger’s cat, the Ulysses doppelganger.
The two cats stare at each other, chiselled, impassive as chess pieces. Tim crosses into the living room to stand by Ulysses again, as if seeing things from Ulysses’s angle would make the situation legible, but the cats simply look on, neither of them bristling. Tim lifts a hand to Ulysses’s neck, to feel his leather collar, to overturn the nametag once more. ULYSSES / 29 SIGMUND ST.
Tim wonders if he ought to catch the cat and bring it back to the owner, but he realizes that the owner never gave his address. And Tim doesn’t know how he could possibly catch a cat that has already outsmarted him for weeks. It doesn’t matter though, because, when the breeze picks up, the doppelganger rises on his haunches and departs.
No other fairytale characters have been so fooled and foiled by a voice as Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. This story strikes even children as improbable. The wolf, at the grandmother’s door, pitches his voice high: ‘Oh Grandmother! It is me, Little Red Riding Hood!’ And the grandmother, her borders so penetrable, invites the wolf inside, and in turn finds herself inside the wolf. Little Red Riding Hood emerges from the woods some time later and enters her grandmother’s house. This entails a different performance from the wolf, and one that is received with a little less conviction. ‘What big eyes you have,’ Little Red Riding Hood will say. ‘What big ears you have. What big teeth you have.’ In some versions of the tale, Little Red Riding Hood wonders at, but does not enquire about, the difference in her grandmother’s voice. Perhaps it is because Granny is sick, she reasons. In some older versions, in which the grandmother is not swallowed whole, the wolf even feeds a part of the grandmother to Little Red Riding Hood. In the darkness of the cottage, the girl is none the wiser. The story is a warning to little girls—don’t talk to strangers, don’t stray from the path—but it is also, in a way, a warning to us all. A story about the inescapability of our bodies, the inextricable relationship between sound and space. Don’t even try to escape. Your body will always find you out.
Two weeks later Tim is on the train again, heading in the opposite direction to the peak-time commuters. The carriage is almost empty, even with the clusters of Friday night party-goers—men glistening with hair gel, women adjusting their strapless tops. Their chatter is excited enough to penetrate the techno gloom of his iPod music. The shuffle has decided to score this moment with ‘Clubbed to Death’, a song that instantly teleports Tim to 1999, to glowing green kana streaming like rain behind opaque sunglasses. And he remembers that déjà vu visited Neo in the form of a cat.
Tagging off out of the station, climbing the vertiginous escalator two steps at a time, jaywalking to the Horseshoe, plunging into the Cultural Centre, weaving around buskers. Down the lurid candy steps outside the State Library. The gallery is already humming like a beehive. Tim winds his earphones around his iPod and tucks it into his pocket. He enters a foyer clogged with friends and family of the exhibiting artists; everyone is holding plastic cups of wine or orange juice, glossy programs rolled up under their armpits. Sponsors’ banners teeter on black tripods, wobbling every time someone brushes past. On the reception counter there’s an abandoned program, fastened to the laminate with a dried circle of spilled wine—Tim peels it off as he edges by.
Stationed outside Ursula’s installation is a table of freshly baked bread, cartoonishly loafy, the kind with bulbs of overflow at the top. Visitors may feel free to eat the bread or scatter the crumbs around the site, like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of crumbs to find their way home, advises the program—so Tim rips off a communion-sized piece and chews on it. The main delight of the installation, which has primly dressed and even elderly visitors getting down on their knees to inspect it, is a low tunnel constructed of mattresses, pillows, and stacks of chairs draped with blankets and quilts. Tim waits for a gap in the flow of visitors, tucks his program into his back pocket, and crawls through the entrance.
And what greets him is his own voice, emanating through the tunnel via secret speakers, hidden like cancerous pockets—
Little did he know that a slow, interior catastrophe was underway.
A collision of sorts.
A miscalculation of cells and their trajectories.
Tim crawls over the spongy terrain. It is humid and airless. The gallery lights outside the tunnel illuminate the weave of the blankets until they look membranous, heaving, organic.
‘It’s like a pillow fort,’ Tim hears somebody giggle.
The tunnel delivers Tim to a wide room, ringing with his own voice—Opportunities winked all around us like stars. A slide projector casts Ursula’s drawings onto the wall in a square of yellow light. This one features a Roman general, his arms dissolving into root vegetables, his legs thin as stilts.
Click.
A trio of babies, sharing the same thick woody torso, playing a game of cards. Our trades meant nothing; it all came from the same hand.
Click.
A woman in a tall hat with a trumpet for lips. We had to escape.
Click.
A long-faced man with a merry-go-round for a ribcage. We had to cut off the limbs that were holding us back.
Click.
The other viewers, made so small by the scale of Ursula’s projections, drift into Tim’s blind spot and disappear. Even though it’s his own voice, and even though he’s seen all the images before, Tim is filled with a strangely delicious terror, standing here with his back to the sagging, breathing portal. Like he’s a child, peeking through his fingers, at a movie he’s too young to watch.
There’s an email from Ursula in the morning:
Hi Tim! I saw your name in the guestbook from last night, but I didn’t see _you_. Sorry I didn’t say hello—I’m not quite sure what you look like! I hope you enjoyed the installation. I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and I hope you are too. Thank you once again for making such fabulous recordings at such short notice, and take care! U
Today, thanks to a special at the supermarket, Ulysses is eating canned food. He is happier than Tim has seen in days, his round head bowed over his bowl, eyes closed in ecstatic concentration. Tim crunches his cereal. He tries to compose a reply to Ursula in his head, but he feels peculiarly unready to communicate with her. As if he is one of her characters, without fingers to type with. Without the privacy of a singular body.
The residue of visiting Ursula’s installation has yet to evaporate entirely, still palpable enough for Tim to look at Ulysses not as Ulysses but as a collection of black strokes and tessellated green hexagons, gathered together loosely and inadequately with collar and nametag.
As it happens, Tim—as Ursula wished—is taking care of himself. He has secured a job, the best kind, he thinks, the kind you can linger over without too much impatience from the client—a novel to be turned into an audiobook. The manuscript has just arrived in the mail today.
It begins, as many narratives do, with a moment of waking. Despite their repetitiousness, Tim never tires of narrating them; they always take him back to his favorite awakening, the one after the surgery that would shortly deliver Ulysses to his doorstep. Never had consciousness been such a relief. There was still all the post-surgical therapy, of course—the capsules, the injections. He could not work fo
r almost a year as his voice stabilized so gradually, undergoing its own adolescence, slipping semitone by semitone into the voice Tim uses today. Ulysses would have listened to his voice’s many fluctuations during post-surgical therapy, would have endured Tim testing out his new vocabulary. Cricoid, thyroid, epiglottic. Arytenoid, cuneiform, corniculate. The vocal folds, that other sonic envelope, thickening and lengthening in slow motion.
Perhaps Ursula’s drawings have refreshed that just-woken feeling—the excitement of Tim’s consciousness in Tim’s body, edited by scalpel and stitch. Not one of Ursula’s figures, for all their anatomical circumlocutions, looks unhappy.
In cinema, a little bit of sound can achieve the greater deception of continuity. Even if the sound is unexceptional—just the empty blare of traffic, for instance—a scene composed of multiple shots filmed over irregular days in different locations can pass as chronological, can create a coherent space. The sound and the scene need not even have the same duration—the sustain segment can be lengthened, looped, so that its decay coincides exactly with the scene’s conclusion. A film is not completely unlike actual perception, anyway. A series of discontinuities assimilated into a provisional whole. Whatever can make sense. Close enough is good enough.
Sometimes an image can be reassigned a new sound. The trick is to forget the names of sounds. To realize that they are manipulable frequencies with no real special identification. A squeaking violin can be a bird. A waterfall can be an explosion. A boot heaved out of mud can be an organ pulled from a body.
Tim has one last encounter with the stranger—this time unaccompanied by cats—as he walks through the park on the way home from a doctor’s appointment. The stranger is sitting on a bench smoking with a friend. ‘Hey, you’re that guy,’ the stranger says. He blows smoke from his nostrils, tapping his friend on the shoulder and gesturing theatrically to Tim with his cigarette. ‘That’s the guy I was telling you about. The one who swapped cats with me for a couple of weeks.’
The friend snorts and takes a drag.
‘I saw your cat in my garden,’ Tim tells the stranger. ‘About a fortnight ago. Just staring at my cat.’
The stranger smiles, to Tim’s surprise. ‘They must have some sort of secret. A telepathic understanding.’
A mobile phone rings brightly. The stranger’s friend jumps up and walks away to take the call. He cups one hand over his ear when he says hello. The stranger watches him. ‘Hey. The other day I realized I knew you from somewhere.’
‘Where?’
The stranger balances his cigarette in his mouth and rummages in his back pocket. He holds up a Seed.fon. ‘Thank you for calling Seed technical support,’ the stranger says.
‘Please listen carefully,’ Tim obliges, ‘as our menu options have recently changed.’ The stranger chuckles. Tim says, ‘You have a good memory for voices, then.’
‘How do you stand it, man? Having to hear your own voice every time you call tech support.’
‘Easy. I don’t have a phone, remember?’
‘Oh yeah. Right.’ There’s that searching look again. ‘I would’ve thought they’d just give you one. Seeing as you’re the voice of tech support and all.’
‘I freelance. I do other stuff.’
The stranger pockets his phone. ‘I’ll have to keep an eye out for you. An ear.’
Tim smiles uncertainly. He’s about to head off, but then he asks: ‘What’s your cat’s name? And where do you live? In case I have to return him someday.’
The stranger crushes his cigarette. ‘He’s Max. Unoriginal, I know. We live on the street next to yours. Kent. Number 18.’
Tim nods. He thinks about asking the stranger’s name, but it feels unnecessary. ‘Max,’ Tim echoes. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
Later, when Tim arrives home, Ulysses jumps down from the windowsill and paces in front of his food bowl. And how Ulysses can pace, can dramatize hunger—making every part of him small except for his eyes, tail raised in expectation. ‘Hello, Ulysses,’ Tim says. ‘I saw our friend today.’
Tim breaks the perforated spout of a new box of cat kibble, and jiggles it over the bowl. The last morsel has not fallen when Ulysses rushes in, snapping a fish with his teeth. Tim strokes Ulysses’s spine. A purr creaks through his body like an old wooden ship.
Good Birds Don’t Fly Away
Oh to be Peter Pushkin, the personification of woe—such a singularly joyless figure, so crushed with dismay—lunchbox lid in one hand, schoolbag drooping from the other, uncontained juice dribbling onto the pavement. Peter Pushkin, soggy with failure, just like his inedible sandwich. His leaking juice box is still slotted innocently in the lunchbox’s grooves. Other things have been ruined too: his school diary, which he must ask his parents to sign each week; his library book, Seeds of Time; even the letters inserted into the tight plastic windows on his pencil case spell PETER. The only thing safe, it would seem, is his recess-time snack: an Uncle Toby’s granola bar, preserved in its white wrapper, which Peter tries to wipe dry. It is just past eight o’clock and nobody is here except for the kids whose parents work at the school, or have jobs that begin early. Peter’s own mother has driven off, probably on the freeway by now. The air is so crisp that it hurts. Peter rescues a scrapbook and an exercise book from his bag. The bottom of each book is damp, stained with watery orange.
Peter Pushkin—paralysed by indecision, soaked in betrayal—remains standing at the front of his school. Late for something.
A black car glides into the school driveway and slips into a parking space. Out steps a boy Peter hasn’t seen before, and whose uniform is unmistakably new—his jumper lint-free, the color true. He glances first at Peter and then away to the school flagpole. The driver’s door opens and the boy’s mother steps out, smoothing her skirt, shutting the door. She, too, gazes at the school. ‘It looks like we’re just in here, Jem,’ she says. She triggers the car’s inaudible locking mechanism—the headlights flash succinctly—and strides towards administration. The boy follows. Even his schoolbag is new.
Peter waits until the boy and his mother have disappeared. A cat with a red collar flashes through the bushes. Juice creeps across the pavement, sliding into the gaps between bricks, as if this sleazy stickiness seeps from the earth itself. Peter jiggles the last drops of it from his bag, tucks his rescued books under his armpit, and trudges towards the gymnasium.
The rooms for private music lessons are nestled in the corners of buildings and repurposed storage cupboards, like cells for monks or bees. Peter takes his piano lessons in a room on the gymnasium’s upper level, one of two jammed at the top of the stairs, each with what Peter believes to be an overabundance of windows—a square window for outsiders to look in, a window on the door, and a window overlooking the school’s vast oval. It seems that even with the morning’s disaster, Peter has arrived ahead of Miss Amar, for the lights in the room are off, the piano lid is closed, and the door is locked. Peter is Miss Amar’s first student for the day, and she has been the second to arrive before, so this situation does not yet strike Peter as odd. Instead he takes up his position on the waiting chairs, places his books in his lap, and leaves his bag on the floor.
Later, in Handwringer Hamsden’s office, his mother’s face will wrinkle with exasperation or concern. ‘Why did you just sit there, Peter? Why didn’t you find someone to help you?’
Find who? Peter will want to ask, careful to angle his head so he won’t have to smell the musty citrus odor that will persist throughout the day, recorded in the stain on his music scrapbook, the paper’s dark lip. For the world is still a big place to Peter, like a sweater he will never grow into, and even if it did ever occur to him to find someone he would scarcely know what to say to that someone. If someone else really is to be found at this corner of the school fifty, forty, even thirty minutes before the bell is due to ring.
No—Peter sits there in front of the music room, listening to the slow crescendo of activity on the oval. He would imagine all the thing
s that have made Miss Amar late if only he could imagine Miss Amar doing ordinary human things like sleeping through her alarm clock or missing the bus. But this is what Peter thinks about: whether he will have the discipline to ration his granola bar over recess and lunch; how he should dispose of his ruined sandwich without a teacher questioning him; and why it is that Miss Amar prompts him to select a sticker each week from her collection, and add to his own collection on his Megasaurus Scrapbook; and how was it, precisely, that stickers came to be used in this fashion, to sweeten children into obedience.
When footsteps and voices sound in the stairwell, Peter is still contemplating these questions. ‘We have two practice rooms up here with pianos in them—both Yamahas,’ a voice is saying. ‘For school concerts we use the Kemble.’
Three heads emerge: Handwringer Hamsden, followed by the mother and son that Peter saw in the car park. ‘There is one other piano teacher besides Mrs. Yorke—Miss Amar, who takes care of the beginning and intermediate students—and we also have Miss Jung, who accompanies the choirs and instrumental students as required.’ They have reached the landing now, and Peter’s lonely chair. The deputy principal’s eyes gloss over Peter—stumbling a bit in his tour-guide speech, unsure whether to acknowledge Peter or continue. ‘The, uh, rooms are soundproofed, so we can have two lessons going on at once. This is where you’ll be, Jeremy, with Mrs. Yorke.’
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