Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

You hear a voice in the crowd and you recognize it. Across all the roar of life, through terrible cacophony, you hear the voice you know and you recognize it, catch it in your hands. What were you saying? I did not know. I heard your muffled and secret voice, slowly, suddenly, hidden in the magnetic tape that came from Averell Harriman’s study at Spaso House.

I played with dials, switches, filters.

You were saying, “LIFT IT!”

It was so clearly you.

But you were not in the room.

This was not a voice in that room, a voice in Moscow, at Spaso House, some visitor calling from downstairs or out in the street.

“LIFT IT,” you said, vibrations caught on a wind.

It was not possible that I should be hearing you.

“Lift it,” you said.

It was not possible.

What were you lifting, wherever you were?

I took off my headset. I sat motionless. I stared at the squared blue lines in my notebook, then I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand.

I wondered if my faculties were failing, hearing a faraway girl in the static of a secret recording.

I took my head in my hands. Yes, my faculties were failing. The air was duping me. You were not there; your voice was not there.

Voices do not stray across the world.

I slid the headset back over my ears, rewound, pushed play.

Lift it, you said.

I WAS NOT ALLOWED TO keep the tape with your voice, nor could I make a copy. Every recording was accounted for, collected by Beria’s men at the end of the day. There is no carelessness to espionage. And so I did not leave the laboratory until late that night, listening and relistening to your intonation, your inflection, your sound. I wanted to memorize your voice as I had never done in New York.

Lift it,

lift it,

lifted.

I could not explain how your voice had come to Russia. Acoustic waves can be amplified; electrical fields can be used as catapults. But the calculations were not realistic. Did the Americans have a new kind of loudspeaker? Were you visiting some physics lab at NYU? Perhaps it was a trick of frequencies, an aural illusion?

I rewound the tape.

No. You were there, Clara.

Perhaps you were not so far away, in Sofia or Wien, talking on a radio program. “Lift it,” you told the talk show host. And then this signal was caught by a receiver in Moscow.

I did not know.

Finally, it was too late and I stood up from my desk. The free worker took my tapes and placed them in a locked steel container. A guard took the container when we left. I went down the stairs to the dormitory, along the wall, to my bed. I sat there. I had missed dinner. My ears hurt where the headset had pressed against them. I could not stop imagining your clear straight look.

IT WAS NOT LONG after this incident that Beria brought me to the lake.

I do not know which lake it was. Maybe Glubokoye. Maybe Pirogovo. They brought me in a Black Maria. Once again I believed I was being taken to my death. Then the car stopped, the door opened, and I stepped out onto moist grass. There were wide woods and the lake reflected everything, and the sky itself seemed green.

Beria stood in the weeds. “Come here,” he said. I padded toward him, into soft mud. It has been months since I was outside, years since I had been in open air like this, wet and open air, with arrowheads of birds running south. There were rich and earthen smells, smells I scarcely remembered, wild raw smells that evoked gardens, boating, my parents’ cellar. Battery Park, after horses have scraped up the sod. The low touches of sex. Beria wore a trench coat tied shut. I shivered. They had not given me anything to wear over my overalls. Far behind us, where the driver waited in his compartment, an engine rumbled.

“Citizen Termen,” Beria said. He made a sound with his tongue.

I did not say anything.

I wondered if he planned to kill me with his small hands. Would I fight back? After all this, would I fight back? “You have done excellent work.”

I did not thank him. I looked at the beautiful straight line of the horizon and clasped my hands. The lake was interrupted only with minuscule stirrings, fish rising underneath. There was the barest suggestion of fog.

“So, now, something new,” he said.

He explained he wanted a bug that did not even require a bug. A way of listening from outside a room, outside the building, without even smuggling something inside. “Microphones on exterior walls,” I said, immediately.

“No, no. From a distance. It must be from a distance.”

“You could easily conceal a small microphone …”

Beria turned. There was a secret in his appeasing smile. “We all have places we cannot go, Termen.” His lips twitched. “And we wonder: what is going on inside?”

THERE WAS STILL MUD on my shoes, blades of grass, when I returned to the laboratory. I sat at my desk with a blank sheet of paper. The free worker watched me from across the empty space. A new curiosity hid in his sandy eyes.

I looked at the stray headset, the empty Spaso tape machine. They had taken the last set of recordings away. I knew I was already forgetting the sound of your voice. I felt a hole in my chest. I smoothed the page with my hand.

I told myself you had always been unknowable. Even in New York, when I thought I saw you, when I thought I was listening at your chest, I never knew.

So many signs are meaningless.

I picked up my pencil and began to sketch an idea, in arcs and squares.

How do you listen to a closed room?

MAYBE YOU LIFTED A THEREMIN, maybe a suitcase, maybe a chandelier, maybe a chest, maybe an infant’s heavy pine crib.

IT TOOK JUST OVER A WEEK. I handed in my request for materials and watched the free worker’s eyes flick down the list. “All right,” he said.

A crate arrived. Radio emitters, dishes, lenses, plywood, two thick sheets of glass, in different sizes. I erected the glass in a little room — like a telephone booth, a vestibule. “Could I ask your help?” I asked my guard. “Stand here. Speak.”

He stood on the other side of the glass, observed me through the pane. The most difficult part was the fragility of what I was observing: the tiniest changes, smaller than the drawing of breath, the tilt of a head.

“Testing, test,” said the lanky, sandy-eyed free worker.

“Yes, like that,” I said.

I was not listening to a voice; I was listening to the reflection of the stirrings of a voice.

THE FIRST RECORDINGS of my new device did not sound like Testing, test, test test testing 1–2 testing test .

They sounded like Shhhhhhkhkhkhff shhhh fffmmm m m mmm-mmshhhhhhh shhhhhh ffmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm khhh and then your voice, I swear it.

You were saying, “Oh, it’s that way, Doris.”

And then, “Of course I promise.”

And then, “Let’s go out.”

THE NEXT TIME I SAW Beria he came to the laboratory. My radio emitters were set up along one wall, with the booth at the far side. The whirring recording device sat beside my notes.

Beria came in with another man, a pale thin man with a blue tie, who waited beside the portrait of Stalin.