Earworm

by Colin Varney

  “Apartment?” Spencer cast a sceptical look at his surroundings. He was thinking of airports. Why was that? “The walls must be paper thin. Hear that music?” He looked around. He couldn’t work out if it was coming from next door, or the “apartment” above.

  I guttered in Spencer’s head. Fading in and out. Made of wisps. I knew I wouldn’t be there long: I couldn’t gain any traction. Yet I had a feeling of déjà vu. Imagine you came across Keith Richards fifty years ago. Arrogantly youthful, saturninely handsome. Satin fleshed. Then your life spooled on and you paid no more attention to him until you saw him again, fifty seconds ago. Rutted, cratered, sultana-ed. You might pause, creasing your features in poor impersonation of Keith, wondering where you’d seen him before. That’s how I felt as I shimmered in Spencer’s consciousness. It was familiar, but rundown.

  Yes, definitely déjà vu: a feeling rather than a memory. I have a strong territoriality. Spencer had my scent on him.

  “What music?” asked the real estate agent.

  Spencer concentrated. She was right, there was nothing. Only me, echoing between his ears. I was a piecemeal thing consisting of the hook from my chorus and mumbled vocalisations that never consolidated into actual lyrics. A verse stammered embarrassingly before petering out. Something about the flat had conjured me. Memories bobbed past like bubbles; as I tried to grasp them they popped. I cupped one and glimpsed another dingy lounge room, far back in Spencer’s history. There’s a figure, but I can’t make her out. There’s an impression of black and yellow striped leggings and an eruption of red hair.

  Spencer fought to eject me. I was a phantom with nothing solid to sustain my grip. But as I felt myself being shaken free, I realised why he was inspecting the flat. He planned to leave his wife. He was looking for somewhere to run. Or dreaming of driving to the airport and catching a plane. Destination: anywhere.

  Then Spencer burst from around me like one of those popped bubbles.

  Spencer who? I didn’t miss him. I continued my inventory, checking on my hosts: their cheers and fears, joys and ploys. Some were preparing great celebrations; others were plotting put-downs and humiliations. I’m no critic—I don’t judge. But I do know that I’m a product of human creativity, so I suspect you lot can’t be all bad. I checked on Nicole and found her dozing off to Dr Phil.

  I was surprised when I sputtered back in Spencer’s head later that day. An office shimmered about him, solidifying into focus. His elbow rested on a desk, beside a framed photo of a serene, plump-faced newborn with a severe ridge of forehead. A row of people perched before him, perusing photocopied sheets. To his right were shelves stuffed with textbooks: treatises on journalistic ethics, media diversity, the importance of balance in political reporting. Closer to hand, arrayed across the desk, was investigative non-fiction by Sontag, Hitchens, David Marr.

  I had the impression there were many sets of inert, beady eyes at his back. What was that all about?

  As Spencer’s mind coalesced around me I realised the supplicants before him were students and he was their tutor. I saw he was uneasy about this, almost guilty. Not that he considered himself a bad teacher. Rather, he felt like a musician in a wedding band, punching out popular standards for the inebriated merrymakers. Assured of his skills, strumming with a fixed grin, but unable to believe in the material even as he admired the enthusiasm of the dancers. Many wedding combos have treated me that way. Haughty sixty–forty.

  Spencer was testy with the textbooks. Yet he revered the clutch of investigative works cluttering his desk, as if they were beautifully constructed instruments he could never hope to play.

  I was insubstantial within him: an eerie backing vocal. There was no music in the room and I wondered what had summoned me. Spencer was fixed on one of the students. Marla was bundled in a bomber jacket despite the warmth of late spring. A blond wig in a sixties pageboy style curtained pallid cheeks. Her features were careworn. She was older than the others—Spencer guessed early forties. Liver spots invaded the back of her hand. He imagined her at home, trying to find a quiet place to study while teenagers hurtled around her. She read with beetling intensity, her scanning pupils occasionally halting to interrogate a sentence. Then the network of creases around her eyes would deepen into asterisks and her right leg would bounce on the fulcrum of her toes.

  She gave the impression she was late for something.

  It was Marla who connected me to Spencer. No, not quite—something about Marla reminded Spencer of the figure with the leggings in the bubble memory. It was her restlessness, her caged energy. The notion that she needed to be elsewhere. And thoughts of the smudged shade in black and yellow hose made me percolate in Spencer’s brain. As he scrutinised Marla I solidified. I felt friction. And then—whoa yeah!—he clicked an index finger on his desktop. He gave a gravely rasp at the back of his throat: an absent-minded sound doodle.

  Let’s hear it for me!

  Marla targeted his tranced croaking.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Spencer’s finger froze as he snapped from his spell. Friction vanished. I scrabbled.

  “What’s what, Marla?”

  “That thing you were humming.”

  “I wasn’t humming anything.”

  Yes, he really believed that. I can do that to humans. You think you’re evolution’s darling but I can bamboozle you so easily.

  Marla cleared her throat and glared at his finger. It was still raised, about to strike. Spencer tried to recall what he’d been rapping. Hopefully a jazz jam from Coltrane or Miles Davis, but it could as easily have been Kylie. He hoped he hadn’t been reproducing something from a TV talent quest.

  “I don’t know what it was, Marla,” he admitted. “Something random.”

  “Know it. Can’t place it.” She attempted to reproduce me with vague vocal scat. It dwindled. “Too lame. Needs a bevy heat.”

  “Heavy beat?” Spencer was used to Marla’s speeding words crashing into each other.

  “Yeah. You weren’t doing it right.”

  Spencer felt obscurely affronted. He cast a backwards glance. Behind him were two shelves lined with a parade of dolls. Raggy figures slumped beside plastic clones; Barbies cuddled against Cindys. As his gaze swept along them, brief flashes of how he came by each one blipped: the op-shop finds, the market stalls, the toy departments. Bright scenes, stretching back in time like strung beads. At the end of the thread there was something else: something forbidding, churning like a storm. As if a long line had snagged a frightening creature in the depths. I ventured to make contact but maleficence repelled me.

  Spencer squirmed. He felt he’d been belittled before his cloth and polymer brood. He reassured them with a mask of parental authority before turning back. “Of course I was doing it right.”

  “How do you know if you don’t know what it was?”

  Spencer watched amusement transform Marla’s face. Laughter lines buried the asterisks at her eyes. Pale cheeks issued a lunar light. Moon bloom. And now he identified the liver spots as specks of paint. She wasn’t in her forties. Younger.

  He pictured himself driving to the airport again. But now Marla was in the passenger seat. And look, those cheeks are pale no longer. They prickle with pink. I checked for a baby bump, wondering where those hurtling teenagers had disappeared to. Marla had crossed a line in Spencer’s head: a boundary as uncertain as the one that separated punk from new wave.

  He shook the vagary free before I could get a grip on it, but I’d seen enough to realise I’d misunderstood him earlier. The driving scene had been playful—bedecked in Technicolor. He wasn’t plotting to leave his wife: he was merely idling with the idea. Like noodling on an instrument without seriously playing. I chided myself. I take pride in my expertise with thought and fancy, but this time I’d confused scheme with dream.

  “Perhaps we need to concentrate on the handout,” Spencer advised coolly.

  Just as I was becoming intrigued, he sloughed me away like a dog shak
ing itself dry.

  In Darwin, a couple sup from stubbies and dance naked to me in the warm afternoon wet. In Melbourne, a student researching her PhD on me is ever more obsessed: it’s like fending off an over-enthusiastic admirer. In Hobart, Nicole ignores another of Heinrich’s pesky cold calls. Spencer faded into the audience, anonymous.

  Until …

  Flicker falter. Firefly in a fog. It took a while to realise I was back in Spencer’s scone. Things were muddled; muddied. Fusty thoughts. Spencer tippled at a tumbler and cheap scotch seared his palate. He ambled around his lounge, dum-de-dahing: so pleased with himself for making up a ditty that he performed a clumsy jig. Except, of course, he had invented nothing. I was pulling the strings and he was dancing to my tune.

  I’m accustomed to inhabiting inebriates. Many appreciate me more when they’ve had a few. I’m a smash hit with the smashed.

  The only illumination emanated from a television with the sound muted. The shifting sheen of the screen made objects tack and toggle around Spencer. Shadows leapt, then cowered. Although alone, Spencer felt surrounded by the presence of his wife. In the jittery light, the posters of the operas Vivienne loved jerked from their frames in feigned attacks. A cup on a low table contained the spicy dregs of her herbal tea. He ran a fingernail along a row of paperbacks with differently coloured spines. The first—Love Is Pink—was bent out of shape so that it shouldered the others aside. It looked smug: the breakthrough publication; leader of the pack. The final one—Love Is Green—stuck out as if recently perused.

  “Nominated,” Spencer muttered.

  The shortlist for the Eros Prize had been announced that day with Love Is Green as a favourite. Spencer couldn’t suppress his sozzled grin, yet almost resented the pride he felt. His stomach knotted with fear that she might not win. Earlier in the evening he had fielded phone calls from journalists begging to interview his wife. The first had been one of his ex-students, although he’d hardly recognised her weary monotone. In class, she’d been driven and idealistic, convinced that one day she would be ferreting out secrets and lies for the public good. Now she was wheedling for access to a minor celebrity. Crushed crusader. Spencer wondered if the spark died in all of his students and broke open the scotch. He was on his third when Vivienne’s agent rang, demanding to know why Spencer had turned the journalists down.

  “She’s busy, Eva. Writing.” Spencer was already slurring. “Someone set her some unrealistic deadlines. Oh, that’s right, it was you.”

  Eva ranted. Spencer sipped loudly to let her know he was drinking, then promised he’d get Vivienne to return her call. He hung up, aware he hadn’t won. He knew Vivienne would initially refuse the interviews, then be talked around by eager beaver Eva. He seethed. How come Vivienne could find time for publicity, but none for him?

  He sloshed more scotch into the tumbler and raised the glass to a red-dressed gypsy flouncing from a Carmen poster. Suddenly there was another tune in his head, muscling me aside. I so hate competition. We bulldozed against each other. If we’d been able to communicate we might have snarled, but songs are islands. Worlds unto ourselves. I don’t mind Nicole’s infatuation with other hits because I reign supreme in her bean. I looked forward to kicking the guests out once they’d overstayed their welcome. But this was different. I had no purchase in Spencer. I was slipping on shale. And he was familiar with the interloper. It was the Habanera from Carmen: he stamped out a paltry parody of flamenco footwork. Boozy Bizet. He smiled as he recalled Vivienne’s self-effacing chagrin when she’d admitted this was her favourite aria. As an opera buff she felt she should celebrate something more arcane, but its infectious melodrama seduced her every time.

  Spencer reached out to Vivienne’s record player. It looked anachronistic, like an antique phone. Its boxy bulk usually delighted him, but not tonight. When was the last time she’d laid a black platter on its turntable and let Bizet blare forth? When was the last time she’d played anything?

  He was fading from around me now, thoughts fizzing away. The Habanera expanded, forcing me aside. Spencer wandered up the hall and peeped through an open door into Vivienne’s writing den. She sat rigidly at the computer, her back to him. Flurries of tapping were interspersed with aching pauses. Spencer was entranced by her nape, the sliver of skin there. He had an urge to lean in and inhale, drawing the aroma from under her collar. The warmth beneath her clothes.

  Tendrils of red mist tickled into view. In the room, yet not in the room. I was surprised by them, and so was Spencer. Not because his vision was being painted over—he was accustomed to that—but because he knew the Colours only came under strict conditions. One of these was the presence of music. He cocked an ear. Was there enough of a rhythm in the clatter of keys to trigger the Colours?

  Hey, buster, what about me? What do you think I am, ricocheting around your shell? I could feel myself in that smoky scarlet, as if I were visible vapour being breathed in front of him. Incarnadine condensation.

  Vivienne turned in her chair. She blinked at Spencer blankly. No flicker of recognition. Spooked, he stumbled back, the mist blown from his sight as if by a gust. Then she shook off her bewitchment and beamed. She noticed the tumbler and her eyes narrowed in mock approbation. She blew him a kiss. He caught it in his left hand. Her grin broadened and she turned back to her …

  Bizet’s bully bounced me out. I fell away. Or rather, Spencer disintegrated from around me. He effervesced into nothing.

  I returned only minutes later, burning brightly. Images blasted past, vivid and familiar as a recurring nightmare. A deserted Ferris wheel, plaster laughing clowns rotating their heads in slow denial, a hula doll as a sideshow prize. A hunchback and a hag stumble through a hall of mirrors in which they’re reflected back as brawn and babe. They’re propelled towards a glass and—splash!—it proves to be a perpendicular pool in which they submerge. Babe and beefcake swim in submarine green, in slanted sunbeams, emerging on a tropic coast, wet clothes cleaved to their curves. My second verse careens towards my chorus.

  I have mixed feelings about my film clip. It has a certain charm and I have much affection for it, but it hasn’t weathered well. The special effects are clunky and—let’s face it—that beauty/beast, mirror/water thing has been done to death. A cocktail of Cocteau. My main objection, though, is that any imagery, cut-price or cutting edge, can never match the set pieces, flavoured by memories, forged in each individual imagination. Seriously, you humans underappreciate that thing you’ve got rumbling away up there.

  The Joneses filled Spencer’s computer screen. My two dads! They were made up to look like cheap prizes from a spruiker’s stall. Morris was a Raggedy Ann while Johnny was a Pinocchio puppet. Johnny turns and Morris bobs to avoid the limbo pole proboscis. Dad jokes are so embarrassing.

  Morris’s dress-up made Spencer think of the dolls in his office.

  Cross-legged on his bed, nursing the tumbler, Spencer leered closer to the laptop. The castaway couple were back, embracing in a tropical forest. Desert island desire. Spencer was momentarily confounded by his presence in the clip, hovering around the huggers like an oversized genii, until he realised his darkened domain was generating his likeness on the screen. A flower dropped from the babe’s hair into a stream. It babbled along in the current. At the point in which it toppled over a waterfall there was a freeze frame. The petals were suspended in the spray. I moved towards my triple chorus and fade.

  Spencer shivered. It was a pleasant spring night, nudging towards warmth, yet his bedroom felt chilly. He thought he could still hear the pitter-patter of his wife typing. He pictured the dexterity of Vivienne’s fingertips dancing across the letters and then imagined them quick-stepping over him. His pulse quickened and he became aware of the hiss of his exhalations.

  Vivienne’s fingers hadn’t foxtrotted upon him for some time.

  He began my clip again, watching with a tinge of distaste. I was a pinch too poppy for him and he found my images somewhat vapid. The word “commercial” lin
gered in his mind as a mild obscenity. I can’t say I was completely comfortable with this, but I was helping him to graze against the bubble memories. I tried to make him fully grasp them, to bring them centre stage, but he resisted. It felt wrong to him, especially while he was aware of the tap-tapping digits from the room down the hall. The figure in the leggings remained misty.

  He eased from his hunch. As he settled against the pillows he heard a muffled crackling. He slithered his hand into the pillowslip and touched paper. He extracted it with a sigh: a printed sheet from his wife’s latest chapter. He held it up to the bedside light and scanned.

  She circled him, each sidelong step bringing her nearer, caught in his gravitational pull. A vein at his temple throbbed, making the delinquent curl that hung there tick and quaver. He didn’t snatch but reached for her slowly, hesitating at the last moment before his talons caught her clothing to allow her time to retreat. She did not. She let the clothes pull away from her body a little before relenting, thrilled by the shock of cold air that crept beneath the garments. His expression was calm and confident, his teak-coloured irises condensing around the dark pupils. The tiny cicatrix above his left eye, normally elusive as a watermark, became shaded like a fine sketch. Suddenly they were pressed against each other and she felt the knots and cushions of his body. Still, he did not hold her, permitting escape. She grabbed his wrists and forced them around to the small of her back …

  At the bottom of the page were a tilted heart and three Xs. The heart’s top left curve was sunken, as if deflating. The lower spokes of the crosses were longer, while the stunted tops were almost joined by a wisp of ink. They looked like the sand-prints of a sidestepping bird.