Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  Then, the very next year, Neha’s father’s mind was blown once again, when he first laid eyes on the prototype for Dragon’s Lair, the first video game to utilize laser disc, with a higher level of graphics than had ever been seen before. Animated rather than programmed, with movie-quality visuals and stereo sound, critics were already predicting that these new units would eclipse traditional games, and he had to agree. So he took all the profits he’d made from the other games and re-invested. Dragon’s Lair was so popular that they had to hire an additional two maintenance men just to repair them, and the actual LaserDisc player inside, the Pioneer PR-7820, had to be frequently replaced. They were going to be rich.

  The only real drawback was the game play, which was actually much simpler than on other units. People largely ignored this in the beginning because the visuals were so breathtaking. But then people started to figure out the pattern. In all of the games that came before it, there were infinite ways to win, countless permutations on moving left and right, or up and down, jumping, eating dots, firing missiles and spinning in place. There were, in fact, so many that it would have been impossible to commit them all to memory as a strategy for victory. With Dragon’s Lair, however, victory was assured so long as you followed the correct steps, which in this case were (with asterisks denoting time-critical moves): SWORD*, UP*, RIGHT, RIGHT, SWORD, UP, RIGHT*, DOWN, LEFT, UP*, UP, LEFT, LEFT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, LEFT, UP, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT*, RIGHT*, SWORD*, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, UP*, and so on. And as long as you memorized the exact sequence of moves and your rhythm was good, you could monopolize the games for hours on only a quarter or two. Maynard had to hire local children to periodically bump the cabinets, knocking the laser disc off its base so the game jumped to another random point, quite often with Dirk the Daring crushed in the tentacles of the opening scene.

  But the damage was done. The curtain on the magic of laser disc games had been yanked aside. Subsequent titles floundered, or were shelved almost immediately. One last-ditch effort was made to create a laser disc home system, named Halcyon after the computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The creators promised more than a gaming system. They were presenting the future, where a tiny box could run your entire home, controlled exclusively by new voice-recognition software. Unfortunately, with a sticker price of twenty-five hundred dollars, the company tanked, taking Neha’s family fortune with it.

  Wouldn’t it be so much better, Neha said on their second date, if nothing ever changed? If they could just find a nice rut and stick with it? A place where time stood still, devoid of the progress and innovation that were ruining everything?

  And he agreed.

  He graduated with a Communications and Public Relations degree, and was recruited straight from his program by an investment firm in Colorado that wanted his environmental background for a new venture in socially responsible investing (SRI). With the country’s upscaled participation in Vietnam, a new brand of investing was emerging, for people who didn’t want to contribute to the war machine any more. It was the early-seventies. The first SRI mutual funds were emerging, with a focus on war (bad), as well as women’s issues and the environment (good), and he didn’t really even have to understand the financial side of things, they said, they’d have someone else for that. All he had to do was take a look around, to make sure nothing was grossly affecting the surrounding flora and fauna. He recommended against several pulp and paper mills because they used highly toxic defoliants in their manufacturing processes. But it was also a huge growth period for what was then considered an environmentally friendly alternative to burning coal for energy: nuclear power plants. In 1973, forty-one new plants were ordered in the US, and even after the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, they continued to sprout up like dandelions, so that approximately one quarter of energy today comes from nuclear power. He continued doing it for several years because the money was good and he’d already developed several expensive habits. Then, he met Julie.

  Colorado was also where he started running. When he and Julie first moved to Denver back in 1989, their apartment was on the top floor of a residential home overlooking City Park, a three-hundred-and-seventy-acre green space right in the middle of the city. Julie found her workplace very competitive, particularly as a woman in her late-twenties entering a career path infested mostly with nineteen-year-olds. So one day she stomached the public transit a little longer than usual to pick up some runners and some Dri-FIT socks, dropped the new bundle in front of him, and suggested maybe they try it together. Only because he wanted to be supportive did he agree to try it, and despite crippling knee pain that meant crawling up and down the stairs to their apartment for nearly a month, he continued to wake up with her every morning at 6:00 AM With all the late nights she was spending at work trying to impress her new employers, this was the only time she felt she could squeeze it into her day. The only problem: she wasn’t squeezing hard enough. And when the alarm came to with an abrupt regularity, she somehow managed to sleep through it. Or she’d sit up, mimic a stretch, and by the time he came back from putting in his contacts, she was already back under the sheets.

  She had a knack for being unconscious, even when she was awake, could zone in and out of conversations like unplaceable odors. Even when they first met. One minute, no one could take their eyes off her. The next, everyone forgot she was there, forgot they had even met her.

  And once he was awake, that was it for the day. So what else was he going to do with an hour-and-a-half until breakfast?

  At six-thirty in the morning, the area around City Park used to be rotting with foxes and coyotes, gliding across the pavement like miniature science fiction monsters, with their tendril legs, their reflective eyes. Along the hairy lip of Sloan’s Lake, small badgers and turtles crossed paths inconsequentially. Once he saw a possum, prancing around like a mossy log, following its tail more than chasing it, before losing its footing and tumbling off the path. Shortly after his agency made him a partner, they moved out to where the Sand Creek Greenway was about to open. And because it was so new, and so popular among those who wanted to forget they were living in a city, it was rare to see anything but squirrels. Or middle-aged housewives with iPods and fierce determination, walking their dogs. Maybe some angry wasps around a discarded ice pop.

  When they first moved in together, Julie had never once done laundry. The apartment they rented in Denver had a European stacked washer and dryer, located just outside in the stairwell, and whenever they needed to use it, they had to haul it over in front of the door so the water hose would reach through a special window into the kitchen. When they were doing laundry, there was no escape. After a month, Julie complained that the dryer was broken, and when he removed the lint guard from its cradle, he found it choked with a cotton moss, mostly green from the fleecy set of towels they’d received as a housewarming gift, stitched together with their errant body hair. But they were so new to their love he let it slide.

  Her parents had spoiled her, leaving her unable to perform even the simplest tasks, like plunging a toilet, or resaturating the sponge in his humidor. She avoided rooms with expired light bulbs. And she became terrified and then hostile towards the ants that occupied their apartment in the Spring and Fall, spending entire days mashing them against the wall with her shoes. Their shells felt like crumpled plastic wrap between her fingers. The way they kept coming, they seemed immortal. And yet several of them seemed to have committed suicide in his bucket of home-made wine. There was nothing they could do until the weather became too hot or too cold again, and the ants went into hibernation or found it easier to scavenge food outside.

  He didn’t feel like the running defined him at all. There were “runners” in the world, to be certain, people who didn’t feel whole unless they were in full motion, who marked their lives by 10ks and marathons, or their quarterly footwear purchases. There were those who others saw and thought to themselves, with either envy or pity, there’s a runner, that person is a runner. But
even for them, the daily act of running, while therapeutic and invigorating, was so habitual and repetitive that it blurred one day into the next, without definition or influence. He forgot them much as he forgot how he would get home after a night of drinking, a trip he made so often that it would never again imprint itself on his memory. The running was part of him, but not a part that was likely to shape his life in new directions, not likely to truly shape who he was.

  Then, one day on his morning run, he found a magic coin.

  The first thing he needed was the proper space to conduct his experiments. He recorded three albums with his band Cookin’ By Numbers (The Seven Sermons to the Dead, The World Within, and Modern Man in Search of a Soul) and another two with Carpet, and he’d grown so disillusioned with it all, particularly with the current states of blues, pop and rock. It had become clear to him, for example, that most people did not like music, and only purchased it out of the same desire to accumulate as with anything else. He had also observed that there were two kinds of listeners: these gatherers, and the explorers. When the brain hears music, it tries to anticipate what comes next, as it does with most anything else, trying to make sense of seemingly disparate information by assembling it into a coherent form and predicting the next steps in the sequence. And so the reason why most music was hopelessly derivative was because it made people feel good to recognize a song immediately on the first listen, rather than be challenged by something new and exciting. It was music for people who hated music, and who really only longed for the endorphin release of predictability. But then Chris Eaton was paralyzed by the equally frustrating tendencies of the second group, who seemed to praise so-called ingenuity, but at the expense of true beauty or feeling, as if combining uncomplimentary colors into a grey sludge was some stroke of genius. Stuck somewhere between the two, he was unable to do anything.

  Then he began playing with ghost frequencies, the notes between the notes, created when two strings were plucked or hammered in unison. Every note has a frequency measured in Hertz (Hz), and the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. A traditional piano, for example, begins with a Low A of 27.5 Hz and ends with a High C of 4186 Hz. But with two notes at once, a third sound emerges at a frequency equal to the highest common denominator of the original two. If notes of 200 Hz and 300 Hz are plucked simultaneously, the frequency you are most likely to hear is one at 100 Hz. And these connections are what makes music sound so beautiful and lush.

  What Chris Eaton wondered was what would happen if the tuning of a piano were fudged to use only prime numbers as frequencies instead, extending from a Low A# at 29 Hz to a High A# at 3709 Hz. Each note would still be so close to the prescribed string lengths (the traditional 7th A# harmonic, for example, would be 3712 Hz) that the ear would still hear the proper note, but it would also be just enough off that, of all the combined fundamentals and harmonics in any two notes, the only common factor in both would be 1, a noise so low that the human ear would be unable to hear it, a keyboard of prime frequencies cancelling each other out. A symphonic white noise. The perfect sound of silence.

  All he needed was a sonically sterile environment where he wouldn’t have to worry about the extraneous sounds of the streetcars or mating cats. The neighborhood children. His apartment shared a wall with a couple that fought incessantly, and a floor/ceiling with someone who liked to play POV video games through his stereo. At the music store, they told him that absolute soundproofing would be impossible. If a helicopter were to hover fifty metres above the roof, for example, even top-of-the-line studios could only get outside noise levels down to 30 dB. And these places would have removed the windows, installed lead doors at a cost of several thousand dollars a piece, and built them as far from civilization as possible. If he really wanted to do it right, the guy with the long hair and tie laughed, he had to reconstruct the walls. Or, rather, he had to build another drywall on top of the other, so that the two never touched, and then carry out his experiments inside this smaller room, without any direct light or contact otherwise with the outside world. This, he did. And just to make sure, between the two walls he installed a set of early acoustic panels from the abandoned Black Arrow program, acquired through an ex-girlfriend at the British Defence Research Agency (which were just sitting in a warehouse in Belfordshire, anyway, and no one would really miss them). One eighth of an inch of this viscoelastic polymer was the equivalent of one foot of poured concrete. So he installed a foot of it. And then he was ready.

  At first he just sat there. On the Sallomön chair he’d picked up at the Ikea for under twenty euros. When he realized it squeaked from the loose spindle on the back legs, he switched to the floor, which meant he also had to cut the legs off the piano. This was followed by a painstaking retuning of the strings. But it didn’t work the way he had hoped. It just sounded like an out-of-tune piano. He thought maybe things were being thrown off by the clacking of the keys, or even the cottony tear as the mallets dismounted their wiry partners. So he redesigned each key to work on a system of well-greased pulleys instead of the squeaky wooden action levers, simultaneously removing all the black keys to prevent indirect friction and replacing the hammer and damper ends with hard rubber. The Sound Pressure Level Meter he had borrowed from the television station was still picking something up, though, and in the end he was forced to realize that the piano was an imprecise instrument, designed for making noise, not silence. No matter how much he tweaked and prodded the thing, he could never quite get it right. The meter still showed 8 dB. Quieter than ice melting and too low for him to hear, but not the mathematical silence he was searching for.

  Reprogrammed electric keyboards were no more successful, once more arousing the needle of his meter. This time he could rule out any of the mechanics of the instrument. There were no moving parts. He’d even disconnected the fans. 8 dB. So he turned to the human voice, which initially failed due to improper training. He could not block the nasal twang of most of the singers in his own peer group, or the glossal gossiping of the amateur women’s choir he approached through a friend at the Methodist Church. He approached the choral department at the university, which was pretty close but still tragically too novice. And finally he was forced to approach members of the London Opera Company. They wanted more money than he could afford, but by this point he was too close to abandon the project, so he pawned all of his instruments, maxed his line of credit, and crammed the singers into his room, rehearsing for weeks before they could manage to hit the notes exactly as he wanted.

  And then he realized the problem was the sound of his own heartbeat.

  As the end of the project drew nearer, Cohen’s list kept growing. Unwilling to see the collection completed, he made requests for figures representing the actors themselves, half in costume, with Chewbacca’s head replaced by a Han Solo head with hair extensions to resemble Peter Mayhew. They made two heads for Darth Vader (who was acted and voiced by different people). Then Cohen began compiling lists and photos of the stand-ins and the production crew, composer John Williams, the full F/X team, the casting company and the caterers, George Lucas himself, anything to prolong the thing that had begun to define him, to define both of them. More old figures – probably collector’s items in their own right – were purchased and destroyed as additional fodder. Cohen’s display room had to be expanded again by knocking out a second wall. But what did it matter? They were both happy. And when they’d run out of gaffers and grips, Cohen asked Chris Eaton to render his family: And be sure to include yourself.

  This was when Chris Eaton began to realize that, when Cohen talked about all of this, he didn’t just mean the project, he was actually referring to his entire estate: the house, the art, the horses, the moustaches. He wouldn’t really get all of it, of course. Cohen’s wife, though they rarely spoke any more, would be taken care of. And Ocean. But when all of this was done, he would never have to worry about anything again.

  And by then he was just four figures from the end.

  The e
asiest ones were of Cohen and himself. Cohen’s wife was also amenable to the idea, but she would only let him work from old photos of her, as if this past woman was the only version of her that was really truly her. Ocean’s reaction, however, was at best reluctant. By the time she was in her early-twenties, as might be expected growing up in the seventies and eighties, after Altamont, and surrounded by punk and extended Republicanism, Ocean had already begun insisting that people call her Trish. Up to the point that she was asked to do a sitting, Ocean/Trish had treated her father’s little game with the same apathy with which she had showered all of his other little games before it. Being asked to take part was the last straw, and she pouted through the first session without saying a word. When she saw how much fun Chris Eaton and her father were having together, though, her mood changed, and at her second sitting, when Cohen was not present, she asked how he and her father had met (That figures, she said unintentionally, and they both laughed), what kind of family he came from, what sorts of things he and Cohen talked about while working on the collection, what he thought of bands he’d never heard of, and gradually worked her way to his accident, where he broke down in her arms reliving the day he learned he’d never walk again. They started having lunch together. Although she lived in her own apartment across town, she visited frequently. She even began acting as his model for his own project, creating an entire line of characters to reflect the dreams he was having, as a nurse, nun, teacher, actress, until she accused him of just trying to place her in sexual fantasy roles. He looked down at that, and they were both awkwardly silent. She turned away, coyly inquired about the logistics of sex in his condition, if he could still feel anything down there, and then looked back.