Blush leaned close to touch the television. There her producer friend was swaying, none too steadily as he brought up the end of the procession. She said, “He hired the Foley artist who did my scream.” Schlo turned slowly to face the dominant camera. As if looking directly at Blush, he seemed to blow her a kiss before toppling through the doorway and out of sight.
Part Three:
The Perfect Scream
The buzzer went off. The one for the front door, the street door. A sound Mitzi had almost forgotten, it had been so long since she’d heard it.
Days, she’d kept busy reviewing the inventory of tapes. In the hope that she’d find the master of the scream. The weak, garbled version that people could hear from the Oscar night telecast, it was a squeak, instantly swamped by the combined howling of thousands and the electronic shriek of microphone feedback. To judge from the effect, the recording had been a good one, but it was toast now.
The synchronized limbic systems of three and a half thousand people. All of them spurred to hit the same note, like dogs howling along with a fire engine. Hitting the perfect frequency and volume needed to shatter a building as if it were a champagne glass.
The same way twenty thousand music fans will ride the same limbic wave at a rock concert. To share the same moment of euphoric brain chemistry. Or some fifty thousand fans will pack into a football stadium to share the massive limbic rush created by a winning touchdown. That high isn’t available to them sitting alone at home in front of the television.
The Jimmy scream had weaponized people’s emotional reaction. It had harnessed their terror. Poor Schlo.
A light blinked on her phone to show one new voicemail. From Schlo’s number, a message from that night. A final good-bye. Like those messages left by people before they’d leapt from the World Trade towers. The phone gave the voicemail’s length as fifty-three seconds. These last fifty-three seconds of Schlo’s life, she couldn’t listen to them, not yet.
She’d been letting that light blink for days.
In the sound pit, Mitzi watched the proceedings on live television with the volume muted.
Blush Gentry had staggered out of nowhere clothed only in a shimmering white silk slip. She’d hijacked media attention and the emotions of ten million real-time viewers. A world starving for one ray of sunshine, it glommed onto her. An ambulance nudged its way through the dense crowd. On camera she waved feebly, cradled in the arms of religious leaders who’d abandoned their eulogies to offer themselves as part of a better story. Such a pietà, this near-naked woman lifted on high by collared priests and bearded rabbis and turbaned imams.
As Mitzi’s eyes watched Blush ferried away in the ambulance, her ears listened. Through headphones she reviewed one scream after another. Needing to hear only a snippet to know it wasn’t Jimmy’s.
After a fraction of one scream she switched tracks to hear a fragment of another. Not a scream, but a noise beyond the earphones she almost heard. Hit Pause. Lifted one side of the headset.
She listened to the acoustically dead room. Pea gravel packed in the spaces in the walls to deaden any echoes. The only noise was the electrical ringing in her own head, the room tone of what it meant to be a living human being.
On television the crowds were massed around the police barricades.
Mitzi settled both earphones in place only to hear another noise. Behind the screams, not part of any recording, Mitzi caught the sound of something.
She stopped listening and removed her headphones to hear this new noise.
Mitzi checked the camera for the front door. There stood a dad-shaped stranger, a salesman minus any sample case. Not dressed stiffly like a street preacher. She pressed the intercom, “Yes?”
He looked around until his eyes found the camera mounted on the wall above him. “Hello. Is this Ives Foley Arts?”
The man on camera wore Buddy Holly glasses with lenses so thick they stretched his eyes until each filled the frame. His hair was combed in a good-boy cut, parted on one side and shaved up from the ears. Decent shoes. A handsome catalog face. Something familiar about it, as if she’d seen him on the news. Throwing his voice toward the camera, he said, “I need a scream. People say you’re the best.”
Haunting her was the idea that we each summon our own death. Some in moments of greatest suffering. Some summon death in their moments of greatest joy and love, out of the awareness that such a moment is a pinnacle never again to be reached.
Perhaps, after all the years she’d gone trolling dive bars and flirting with bottom-feeders in pool halls, her death had come to her door. Wearing glasses.
Mitzi crossed the sound pit, exited to the hallway, went up the flight of stairs to the street level. As she opened the door, she flinched. Unless he had a twin brother, this man she knew.
Through his glasses he regarded her with stunned eyes. His face froze mid-gasp.
It was him from the news. The maniac who’d kidnapped Blush Gentry.
Blush knew the face on Foster’s phone but couldn’t pin a name to it. So as not to be totally useless, she wrote him a list of local Foley studios. These legacy outfits had been around forever. She’d shown him how to access the panic room so he could sneak back if need be.
In a flash she promised to make good with the bank, and they could be living in the house legit.
To return the favor, he peeled shreds of old duct tape off the seats of his fifteen-hundred-dollar Dodge Dart. These he artfully wrapped around her wrists and ankles, shredding the ends to look frayed and gnawed at.
Like a commuting couple they’d driven into Hollywood, to within a few blocks of the mammoth funeral taking place around the pit that had been the Dolby Theatre. Barefoot and wearing her
