On sight, she knew whether a stranger at the library would let loose with a full-throated giving up compared to a teeth-gritting, stubborn, grunting death. Or the worst, the mewling of a leaky balloon, something almost laughable, like a dog’s squeak toy. Actual people actually died that way, a few.
And if she hadn’t worked directly with such a person, she had her studio collection to fill in the blanks. The collection she’d inherited. Rows and rows of file cabinets, filling room after room, they held samples going back to the earliest forms of sound recording. Among them, tin foil wrapped around metal cylinders and banded with the hill-and-dale imprints of a stylus. A yellowed-paper tag tied to one cylinder read: Recent Irish Immigrant Man, Chest Crushed, Basalt Millstone. Tucked away were the machines that could still play such relics. Mitzi had picked through drawers filled with hollow cylinders of hardened wax. Iroquois Squaw Strangled, Slow Middle Distance, Leather Cord. She’d spend weeks exploring rooms filled with hard rubber and celluloid disks. Shellac disks and finally vinyl.
Such a trove of screams, it made her wonder whether films were invented simply as a medium to display them. Here was a sort-of immortality, agony preserved, archived and curated. She wondered if Native Americans were right. If a photograph could steal a person’s soul, perhaps these recordings were the souls of the dead. They were dead but not in heaven or hell. They were inventory. They were making money. Some were—most were warehoused. Property cached away, here in these sliding metal drawers in these chilly concrete rooms.
This commodification of pain.
She’d pour a glass of Riesling. Sip enough to swallow an Ambien. Keep the bottle beside her for refills.
Each recording was a drug. Each made her heart beat faster. Her breathing slowed until she’d be forced to gasp for air. Each scream spiked her blood with adrenaline and endorphins. Slumped over the mixing console, her head clamped in earphones, she’d sit. Scream surfing.
Only at the end of her strength would she cue up her favorite. The master recording of her favorite: Little Sister, Dies in Terror, Calls for Father. She poured herself another glass of wine. She pressed Play.
His hand throbbed. The bite had become infected, the bite on his thumb from the airport. If he didn’t keep his elbow bent, if he allowed his hand to hang low, it swelled up like a mitt and dripped something.
The doctor from his support group, Dr. Adamah, asked those present to bow their heads. Adamah was supposed to read the twenty-third psalm from the book of Psalms. But by glaring mistake he read from the book of Joshua, the account of Jericho’s destruction. Not that anyone seemed to notice, the onlookers smiled raptly and nodded their approval.
Dr. Adamah wrapped up his reading, “…the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed…and destroyed…every living thing in it—men and women, young and old…” He closed his Bible, and the doctor motioned for Foster to take his place.
Standing at the podium, Gates Foster began to deliver the eulogy. His swollen hand raised as if he were testifying. With the exception of the few faces he recognized from the group, the entire assembly of mourners were strangers to him. Each stared until he flinched and looked away. In every direction he found the unblinking eyes of strangers who whispered to each other behind lifted hands. Someone giggled.
That’s when Foster saw her. Amber. Amber Jarvis, now. Seated in a folding chair at the end of the chapel’s back row was Lucinda’s mother. It had been a long shot, but she was at the funeral. Alone, it seemed, she’d come. Wearing a tan coat that was easy to spot in that sea of funeral black.
“When Lucinda was six,” he began, “she asked her mother how to cook.” He risked a look at the woman in the back row. She nodded for him to continue. “They were going to cook a roast for dinner…” A smile flitted across Amber’s face as she saw where the story was going.
Foster paused and smiled back at her for a beat. “They took the roast out of its wrapping paper, and her mother asked Lucinda to get the pan out of the bottom cabinet.” Each action and detail moved him to the next memory. “Her mother placed the roast on the cutting board and slid a knife from the knife block and explained that the first step was to slice about two inches off the smaller end of the roast.” Saying this, Foster found his hands placing an invisible chunk of raw meat on the podium in front of him. His swollen hand straightened as if to make a karate chop, becoming the knife.
As he cut the invisible pot roast, he recounted how Lucinda had asked why they needed to shorten the roast. Her mother answered automatically that the smaller end cooked too quickly and would serve up dry and inedible, so it had to be set aside and cooked separately.
Foster laughed. “Lucinda didn’t buy it.” She’d asked why and kept asking why the entire roast wouldn’t cook at the same rate. “That’s how smart a kid she was,” he said, even though it hurt to talk about his child in the past tense.
Behind him, now, the casket lay open, heaped with worn toys. Robb and the group had sent a whopping big casket spray of white carnations. Like something you’d throw over the back of a winning racehorse. A second-grade photo of Lucinda, smiling, enlarged to poster size, sat on an easel beside the casket.
Foster glanced up to meet the eyes of his ex-wife. A woman with her daughter’s heavy, dark hair combed down her back, but threaded with gray along
