The tape decks turned up in Caracas a few years later, in a standard concrete holding cell otherwise outfitted with one high-intensity lamp, one wooden table, one restraint chair. By 1971, a form of binaural erasure had become commonplace at the Canadian black sites charged with reeducation of American double agents and the occasional Soviet defector. In 1973 the methodology briefly found its way into a language lab at Denison University, the result of a conversation between an ex-spook and an enterprising college professor at an airport bar in Madrid, both men down in the dumps on account of it being Super Bowl Sunday and every TV in the whole damn place being tuned to a Montserrat Caballé concert, which led them to overindulge on kalimotxo, the spook to overshare a little bit, the professor to mishear a little bit, and the brief hospitalization the following fall of four Spanish 101 students for dizziness and disorientation. As application and methodology underwent refinement through the late twentieth century (audio engineers at DARPA caught Lazlo’s pie-pan toss and flipped it back with hyzer), it shed its sinister overtones and for a brief shining moment showed potential as a means of erasing intrusive memories after battlefield trauma. Funding was diverted after 2001, however, into projects designed to create more battlefield trauma.
Turk changed the apartment locks and closed the door to her father’s study. Her mother had died the previous Christmas (pneumonia contracted doing charity work), and once Lazlo had been declared legally incompetent, her brothers, Seamus and Teddy, sold the language school and the three siblings divided their parents’ remaining holdings. Turk got the apartment, sizable deposits to her accounts, and closets full of evening gowns, tuxedos, shelves of high heels, drawers of undergarments, socks, garters, watches, jewelry, banker’s boxes of files, photo albums, yellowing notepads, a hundred pounds of letters, some bound in twine, some by rubber band, some with ribbons. Artifacts of an earthly existence. Her father had not touched his dead wife’s things. Thus she inherited the tangible absence of both parents all at once and, being a good Brunn, immediately set to categorizing and organizing. Her father’s office at the language school arrived in fifty boxes, mostly books. She’d gone through the lot of it within a week, working daily from dawn until midnight. The personal effects took a month. Turk held on to the books, the pots and pans, the furniture, papers. A solitary sentimental gesture, she kept her father’s wristwatch, a Technos Atomium, and wore it every day. The jewelry she unloaded in the Diamond District. Everything else went to the incinerator or to the Catholic church on 82nd. And then she was alone.
Turk, who at the time knew nothing of her father’s origins except that he refused to talk about the shattering loss of his family during World War I or his and Magda’s nearly instant immigration to the United States, had no more reason to suspect that her father was a Krupp than the king of England. Lazlo had been meticulous in his destruction of all physical evidence connecting him to his family, who were, when he and Magda decided to bug out in 1919, very much alive and well and hard at work on the fatherland’s illegal rearmament and military reindustrialization. He engaged a forger in Bonn to produce new birth certificates, transforming him and Magda into Brunns; his property was sold off through an intermediary to raise funds for their new life. If not exactly a cakewalk, an unexceptional series of events in the postwar haze, when regulations weren’t much more than smoke rising off the once-reliably thorny bureaucracy that had gone kaput with the rest of the empire. Lazlo burned photos, letters, diplomas. In Berlin, death certificates for L and M Krupp were drawn up and archived (he was KIA; she starved to death during the British blockade), a final act of erasure before the freshly minted Brunns hopped a train to Antwerp and from there a steamer to New York.
It was after committing her father to Pickering that Turk, just a liberated gal looking for a way to tame her wild despair, underwent a reinvention of her own. No torched documents, no new name, no transoceanic voyage, her ride on the IND Eighth Ave line down to that MacDougal Street basement was no less transformative. She hadn’t been searching for a new self or a new line of work. She was looking only for a little relief, and there was nothing like the loving embrace of the creaking leather straps to help you let go of the feeling you’re responsible for every living thing on the planet. Turk tried it once, got intrigued, became a regular, her tastes expanded, and before long she was on the other side of the dungeon, rigging her own subs. When the bondage market exploded in the early ’70s (Vietnam plus Nixon times Vatican II equals), she put out her shingle.
Twenty years later, Turk was running a well-regarded dungeon, but trend lines were down. The internet was wrecking everything, and she was forced to pivot to a new experiential tableau. She was no dummy. She subscribed to Red Herring and Inc. She was hip to the innovate-or-die ethos.
What she came up with was something like an emotional amusement park, a menu of scenes that would appeal to the varied tastes of her client base. She began testing different complications: hostage situation, verbally abusive parent, bank holdup, little scenarios she could set up and run within the confines of the dungeon. Clients were enthusiastic, but there wasn’t much
