She handled the tapes with delicacy on subsequent visits to her father’s audio lab, listening for only a few minutes at a time, and thus avoided violent reactions while still getting to bask in the warm dawn light that poured through her every cell, vaporizing the smoggy film that had built up on the portals connecting her physical and spiritual selves. With the blankness came some minor spatial disorientation that disappeared as quickly as taking a couple of deep breaths, some esophageal tremblors behind her sternum.
A new side effect appeared after a couple of weeks, discovered when she’d gone directly to the kitchen to make a grocery list after removing the headphones and her hand had been frozen, the graphite stuck on the notepad’s blue anchor line, as though it were a curb the pencil couldn’t hop, unable to initiate the g in grapes. Like the kid’s game of trying to force two magnetic dipoles to kiss, letters repelled one another, and when she finally roused the muscles in her hands from their glacial sleep, what they produced looked like a man-o’-war, tentacles trailing beneath the surface, a cartoonist’s shot at Sanskrit.
What had happened to her father? Perhaps he’d shorted out his Broca’s area, fried Wernicke’s to a crisp. If medical science would classify what happened as a stroke, so be it—he’d induced a stroke. In a case like Lazlo Brunn’s, diagnosis is a trip around the Monopoly board. Is it treatable? No? Roll again. Call it Bronze John or dropsy or the screws, if you can’t reverse the tapes and pour his brain back into his ear, you can say he’s got the clap or whatever and it won’t change a thing. She visited him every week, and told him about her voyages with his recordings. If he meant to warn her away from them, he gave no outward indication. He gave no indication that he knew she existed. He’d blown the popsicle stand and left a scarecrow leaning on the counter.
It was during one of her visits to see him that her apartment had been burgled. As far as Turk could figure, they had penetrated the Apelles’ defenses peacefully, probably disguised in the slacks and clip-ons favored by city pipe and wire inspectors, entered 14D by picking the service door, or the front door (impossible to tell, so thorough was their erasure), and removed the tapes, the notebooks, the texts, the headphones, and the decks, which conveniently came built into their own stylish black leather suitcases with chrome clasps. They took the pencils and the paper clips, the rubber bands and Pelikan jars (blue, black, indigo), the letter openers, the wax seal bearing the yin yang, and they took the ring bearing Lazlo’s father’s seal, FFK. They took the fountain pens. The ball of twine, the matches, the cigarettes, ashtray, a tidy packet of identification papers he’d carried with him from Germany, and an accordion-fold series of sepia babes secreted in a snuff box. They took the ancient business cards Lazlo had ordered at the print shop on East 3rd in 1925, the curlicues of his name like flying pennants atop the stolid serifs of the Brunn Institute for Linguistics and Cultural Advancement, 271 W 20th Street, BALDWIN 5741. They did their part to reverse his condition, returning his desk, if not his brain, to a preterite state, wiping it clean of wax drippings, ash, dust, fingerprints. If they touched anything else in the apartment, Turk didn’t notice. The extreme care taken to denude the desk signaled to her that not only would the police be of no help, but that this was one of those true crime situations in which alerting the authorities would precipitate a blindfolded van ride to an undisclosed location. She knew about her father’s work for the U.S. government during the war, knew that spycraft had been of more than passing interest to him in the ensuing years, and suspected that his
