Foster risked a sideways look at Mitzi Ives. He wanted to wave, to ask her if she knew these characters. What melodramatic soap opera was this from?
Oblivious in her headphones, Mitzi was mouthing silent words. As if saying her prayers or learning a foreign language. She sat with her knees tucked under the mixing console, as close as her belly allowed. With one hand she petted herself, running her fingers in long strokes over the swelling shape of her unborn child.
The man in Foster’s head panted for air, panting out the words “Do not be afraid.” He said, “Your apprentice, one day he will do this exact same thing to you.”
Foster touched a knob to sharpen the tone. Turned a dial to up the volume.
His voice fading, the man said, “On the day when you are chained in my place, you must remember how proud I am of you.” He gasped, “May you die feeling so much pride.” Here the voice rasped and went quiet.
Replacing the man’s words was only room tone and a steady drip-drip-drip that slowed to one final drop.
At that, Gates Foster rewound the tape and hit Erase.
The tape ended, but Mitzi pretended to still hear something. Her pulse she could hear. She pretended she could hear a second heartbeat, the baby’s.
The Foster person sat cocooned in his headphones. He might cast a glance in her direction, but he couldn’t hear as she whispered to her child. To the child she would never meet. She whispered, “Do not be afraid. You will be raised by a woman who loves you, but that woman will not be me.”
She stroked and petted the shifting mound at her waist, telling it, “You will be part of a family, but not my family. My family will die with me. Our work must die with me.”
Mitzi touched the tiny hand that pressed to touch hers. Without bitterness, she told the child, “You will step into a destiny that will not be the destiny I was tricked into fulfilling.”
Before the next length of tape would deliver the next scream, the next gasping, choking bellow of fear and pain, Mitzi continued to whisper to the infant that held still and even now seemed to listen and understand.
As Foster listened, this Foley person explained how people find the source of a sound. With low-frequency sounds, the human brain analyzes the time delay between when the sound reaches each of the two ears. But with high-frequency sounds the brain analyzes the loss in volume between when the sound reaches each ear.
In this way Mitzi Ives was training him. Her voice, calm, a master schooling her apprentice. Tutoring him. She passed along what seemed a lifetime of knowledge, several lifetimes. A legacy.
“You never hear a dry voice, not anymore,” she said. By that she meant that every song and soundtrack has been sweetened or made more warm and rich. Or the voice has been tweaked to sound more tubby, the reverberation has been lengthened or shortened. She talked about the decay time of a sound. She taught him how to manipulate the fatness of a sound.
According to her father, to stories he’d told her, any wire fence could hold a recording. She described how a person could walk along a fence and use a microphone attached to a needle that would encode her voice along the wire. As a child, she said, she’d spliced a set of headphones to a needle and walked along random wire fences trying to read any secret messages. Barbed wire fences. Chain link.
Likewise, she explained how any speaker could be reverse wired to work as a microphone. This created such a wonderful distortion that musicians recorded their work through speakers intentionally.
She described how crooning had replaced more traditional singing in the 1920s. At the time, carbon would build up in microphones and broadcasters needed to shut off each mic, occasionally, and strike it with a small hammer to clear that buildup. The softer, more prolonged notes sung by crooners created less carbon buildup. Cornets replaced trumpets for the same reason. In short, people could only listen to what microphones could pick up. Technology dictated fashions in music.
Mitzi Ives introduced him to ribbon mics and moving coil mics, carbon mics and electrostatic mics. She taught him about parabolic, omnidirectional, and bidirectional mics. The racks of analog mixing equipment. She showed him vacuum tubes that would cost five thousand dollars to replace, and microphones worth twenty thousand. She toured him through concrete bunkers lined with file cabinets filled with recordings.
She told him about the Wilhelm scream.
Through this warren of rooms ran a pair of wires, just two wires routed along the floor. Their tour followed these wires, but she never called his attention to them. In the farthest reaches of the basement the wires disappeared into a closed locker. Foster opened the door. Inside hung something shapeless and white. Shoved into the locker and hung on a hook, it was a dress. Satin and ruffles as fancy as a wedding cake.
Like a fuse, the wires looped up to clips attached to the skirts. Two metal clips clamped to the fabric and to each other. Beneath the dress, a stack of rusted film reels stank of vinegar.
Mitzi Ives waited, but he didn’t ask. He closed the locker, and she continued his education.
It didn’t sound like much on the web. The cell phone videos from inside the Dolby Theatre on Oscar night, they sounded thin. Screechy. Nothing like Mitzi knew the Jimmy scream would sound on the master tape. These were crude copies. In one clip banked rows of glittering celebrities sat, their heads thrown back, their mouths gaping in a mutual choir of shrieks. Dogs howling. A few among them stood, their necks corded with effort, teeth bared, screaming as debris bombarded them, culminating in the concrete wall behind them crashing over everything like a tidal wave.
Mitzi clicked to another
