It was a divine something guiding him to reunite with Lucinda. Or it was his child’s soul demanding resolution and revenge. But something, something had been directing his path.
He could see Robb wasn’t buying it.
Foster proposed writing a check. A check for every dollar he had in the bank. Making it out to Robb. Robb only needed to cash it and deliver the cash to him. With cash Foster could buy a junker car off the web. Live in it. Sleep in it. Not transfer the title and drive it to pieces as he searched out Lucinda’s scream in the movie.
Before he could ask, Robb said, “Nothing doing.” He didn’t need an aiding and abetting charge on his record. Not with his own past.
Foster pulled the gun from his pocket. “Walk with me?”
Jimmy had yet to realize that he was naked. His beef jerky body, corded with muscle, was tied spread eagle to a waist-high wooden platform. The usual audience of microphones crowded around him. Others hung by cords, close above his face.
Mitzi had tied a long strand of piano wire to a hook in the studio ceiling. This led down to where a small noose lay against his sunken belly. She looped the noose around the top of his scrotum and cinched it snug. That he did notice. Her touch immediately produced an erection.
At the mixing console she poured herself a glass of pinot gris and tossed back an Ambien. She asked, “Did you know even dogs have laugh tracks?”
As she stretched her hands into a pair of latex gloves, Mitzi described how animal studies had identified the way dogs pant while at play. Analysis with a sonograph shows the panting includes bursts of various frequencies. These are similar to the high-frequency “chirping” rats produce during rough play and sex.
Mitzi bundled her hair under a surgical cap, saying, “Both the chirping and the panting seem to function as laughter.” When researchers recorded the specialized panting and played it back to anxious dogs confined at animal shelters, this canine laugh track prompted tail wagging. The recorded laughter triggered face licking. Dogs abandoned stress-related behavior such as pacing, and those same dogs began to play.
She flicked a fingertip against a can mic and watched the needle on the corresponding meter. “Yawning and laughter,” she went on to explain, “are contagious because they were the protohuman’s method for regulating the mood of their group or tribe.”
Jimmy’s eyes drifted closed. He appeared to be slipping back into dreams.
“A major trait of psychopaths,” she explained, “is that they don’t yawn when people around them yawn. Psychopaths don’t feel empathy. They lack the mirror neurons.”
She placed a gloved hand on a cold metal handle and cranked it a half rotation. The handle drove squeaky gears. The mechanism was archaic and rusty and hadn’t been used. At least not in her time. She muscled it, and the platform lowered until the wire to the ceiling drew taut.
As she fitted earplugs into her ears, Mitzi thought vaguely about Odysseus plugging the ears of his crew with wax, then lashing himself to a ship’s mast so he alone could listen to the Sirens. It was typical, how a mere sound could lure people to their doom.
Jimmy blinked awake and looked at her with confused eyes.
She turned the crank another half rotation. The table edged lower. He’d soon get the picture.
As she tried to explain it, the platform would lower while Jimmy’s wrists and ankles would stay bound at the original height. If he could keep his entire body rigid, the noose wouldn’t pull tighter and do any damage. As long as he could hold all of his muscles tensed and keep his body hanging stiffly in space, he’d keep his testicles.
She poured another glass of wine and chewed a couple Ambien for faster effect. The meters bumped, their needles jumping in response to the slightest noise. Lastly, she fitted a pair of goggles over her eyes. In the event of blood spray. She donned noise-canceling headphones over her earplugs to complete her sphere of silence.
She wanted to tell Jimmy about the Grateful Dead. How they’d invented the phenomenon known as “tape bleed.” An early master tape of theirs had been wound too tightly, and magnetic coding from one section seemed to imprint on adjacent sections of the tape. This produced a ghostly reoccurring echo. An unintended overdubbing, this faint layer of sound in the wrong places. Like most accidents, it looked like a disaster at first. Soon everyone in music was trying to intentionally produce the same shimmering effect in their work.
She uncapped a felt-tipped pen and wrote on a DAT cartridge: Riverside Thugster, Sudden and Traumatic Orchiectomy.
Mostly, Mitzi was giddy. What with the wine and all. Jimmy? Timmy? She racked her brain, suddenly uncertain who this paint-smelling man strapped to her table was. How had they met?
At this rate she’d never remember turning the crank, lowering the table, leaving this stranger suspended in air by only the strength of his flexed muscles. With her eyes fixed on the console, she cranked and kept cranking, deaf to everything, forgetting how often she’d rotated the handle.
Even now, her headache was abating. With every uptick of the VU meters, the pain in her skull ebbed further away.
As all the meters pegged into the red, Mitzi felt a sting on her arm. As if a hornet had stung her just below the elbow. Already blood was wicking through the sleeve of her lab coat. Pulling back the cuff, she found something embedded in her skin. A chip of something green, sharp edged like a green flint arrowhead. She plucked it out and turned to pour herself another glass of wine.
Both the bottle and glass were gone. Of the wineglass, only the base and the stem remained, standing on the console where she’d set the glass down. Of
