It was as much out of a desire to avoid that sameness as any feeling of obligation to Turk that I went rummaging in my parents’ basement storage, abstractly looking for their old reel-to-reel without any real concern over whether I’d find it or not. Maybe I’d listen to the tapes, maybe I wouldn’t. Why did I bother? Why didn’t I just take the tapes to Turk? When I think about how close I came to missing my salvation, how many ways I tried not to discover it, I’m only more convinced of the truth of what I found.
I camped out on the storage room’s concrete floor for a few hours paging through old photo albums and pulling open the cloverleafed tops of unlabeled boxes. Even after I excavated the tape deck from a mountain of twine-bound National Geographic s and hauled it back up to the apartment, it sat on the floor in all its dusty glory for a couple of weeks before I carried it into the dining room and set it up on the table. I had to buy an adapter for my headphones, which put me back another week. But finally, finally, one night, somewhere in the concavity between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., I spooled up the tapes and pressed play. I wouldn’t say I was floored by what I heard in the five minutes I listened that first night, but it was obvious that Lazlo Brunn was not babbling incoherently—not at all. His noise had form and rhythm, to be sure.
A few days later I downloaded some software to digitize the tapes, thinking it would be easier for Turk to listen that way, if she wanted to listen at all. In a marathon session, two bottles of wine, an entire roast chicken from Fairway, I transferred all five tapes.
The software’s enhancement suite was comprehensive, offering pitch, tone, and speed adjustment, layering, reversing, noise reduction. Pretty basic, I suppose, to any twelve-year-old with a laptop, but it wasn’t until I, analogue-brained, remembered Gene Hackman in The Conversation, twisting knobs so powerful that they could make the truth rise up from the magnetic surface of his tapes like ghosts from the grave, that I thought to use the software to manipulate the sound.
Why did I do it? Wine and sorrow. And boredom and idle curiosity. I certainly didn’t expect to unearth ancient bones. Or did I? It’s hard not to think I was somehow drawn to investigate the tapes, given what happened next, but let’s be honest. I wasn’t sleeping and you have to kill the time somehow.
First I tried giving the playback loop a little drag, slowing it until Lazlo’s yammering was baritone yowling, then whale song. Then some more, until the sound fell away completely, the waveforms flattened, and his vocables lay down unmarked in the sonic boneyard.
I pushed the sliders in the other direction. I doubled the playback speed and got a Chipmunks Christmas album. Quadrupled it and got Twiddlebugs on helium. Quadrupled again. Mechanical chirps. At thirty-two times the recorded speed I sat back and let it play out, almost inaudibly high, sonic detritus emitted by the earth’s crust, magnets serenading each other, the hour-long audio reduced now to about two minutes. And it was there, in the electrostatic ether, through the whistling cracks, that a voice spoke out.
Are, it said. I was quite sure my mind had fabricated it, that my sadness had finally metastasized inside my frontal cortex, but then came another word: You. Another ten seconds passed. Speaking. Another ten. To. And finally, Me. The recording ended.
What kind of whackadoo sci-fi bullshit is this? you might ask. Because I sure did. I slammed shut my laptop and went directly to bed. I was drunk, of course—that was it. Drunk, yearning for a voice from the beyond. I passed out and slept deeply, dreamlessly, and the next morning I had almost convinced myself that I’d heard nothing more than an echo off the inside of my own skull, a question I would have done well to ask myself. Who was I speaking to? No one. It was after dark when I approached the recording again. I put on my headphones and clicked play. The tangle of sound began. It was incomprehensible. How pleased I was not to hear a thing. What a relief, I was thinking, basking in the knowledge that I had fabricated the whole episode, when he spoke. I felt a shock strike the back of my neck, as real as if someone had slapped me open-handed. What kind of madness?
That night, sitting at the table in my socks and cotton shorts, slurping on an over-milked lukewarm coffee, how could I have comprehended what he’d done? My ears had not yet been opened. I could hear but I was not listening. I was a novitiate to Lazlo’s order. It took a couple of months. I did everything I could think of to the tapes. I scrambled and descrambled them. I re-recorded his five-word question, sliced and diced it, ran it backward, forward, sped it up and slowed it down. I stretched, deconstructed, rebuilt, and inverted the sounds, all the while hoping that I could create another phrase, something that would prove I had made his words out of nothing more than coincidence and selective hearing. I recorded my own voice, trying to mimic the trick. I couldn’t make it work. I deleted the software, packed up the deck and tapes, and stuffed them in the closet.
I took it all back out. I bought a new reel-to-reel deck, one that was capable of controlled high-speed playback, hoping to discover that all I’d heard was a fluke of the software. But the words were right there on the tape. Finally I had to accept the most likely possibility—the one that didn’t point to coincidence and luck but to a carefully constructed truth: Lazlo Brunn had slipped outside a human perception of time. Not so complicated in the
