Nicholson Baker: Vox

“Do you want to hear something true, or something imaginary?”

“First true, then imaginary,” she said.

“Once,” he said, “I was listening to the stereo with the headphones on, I was about sixteen, and the stereo receiver was on the floor of a little room off the living room, I don’t know why it was on the floor, I guess because my father was repainting the living room — that must have been it — and the headphone cord was quite short, but I was very interested in learning how to dance. It was winter, it was maybe eight o’clock at night, very dark, I hadn’t turned on the light in the room. And I was trying to learn all these moves, but tethered to the stereo, so I was almost completely doubled over, like I was tracking some animal, but I was really ecstatic — dancing, sweating, out of breath, flailing my arms, doing little jumps … once I got a little too excited and did a big sideways bob of my head and the headphones came off and pulled my glasses off with them — but no problem, I just stylized the motions of picking up my glasses and putting them on and repeated them a few times, incorporated them in. And then suddenly I hear, ‘Jim, what are you doing?’ in this horrified voice. My younger sister had heard all this breathing and panting coming from me in the darkness and thought of course that I was …”

“Right.”

“I said, ‘I’m dancing.’ And she went away. I danced for a while longer, but with somewhat less conviction. That was my year of heavy stereo use. Unlike you I didn’t have a big crush on anyone at the time. I think it was more that I had a crush on the tuner itself, frankly. I used to imagine that the megahertz markings were the skyline of a city at night. The FM markings were all the buildings, and the AM markings were their reflection in water …”

“Ah,” she said, “but you’re supposed to be telling me something true, not something imagined.”

“Yes, but the true thing is shading into the imagined thing, all right? And the little moving indicator on our stereo was lit with a yellow light, and I knew where all the stations were on the dial, and I’d spin the knob and the yellow indicator would glide up and down the radio cityscape like a cab up and down some big central boulevard, and each station was an intersection, in a neighborhood with a different ethnic mix, and if the red sign came on saying STEREO I might idle there for a while, or the cabbie might run the light, passing the whole thing by as it exploded and disappeared behind me. And sometimes I’d thumb the dial very slowly, sort of like I was palming a steering wheel, and move up, move up, in the silence of the muted stretches, and then suddenly I’d pierce the rind of a station and there would be this crackling hopped-up luridly colored version of a song that sounded for a second much better than I knew the song really was, like that moment in solar eclipses when the whole corona is visible, and then you slide down into the fertile valley of the station itself, and it spreads out beneath you, in stereo, with a whole range of middle and misty distances.”

“That’s true!” she said.

“It is true? That’s bad, because it means that I still have to come up with an imaginary thing, right?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But my imagination doesn’t work that way,” he said.

“It doesn’t just hop to at the snap of a finger. What do you want the imaginary thing I tell you to be about?”

“I think that it should be about … my beads and my silverware, since they’re all laid out for us.”

“Well,” he said. There was a pause. “Once there was a guy who, um, needed his fork repaired. No, I can’t. I’m sorry. You tell me something more.”

“It’s your turn.”

“I need more confidences from you first. I need to be charged up with a stream of confidences flowing from you to me.”

“Come on now,” she said. “Give it a try.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think I can just be handed an assignment like that. I’m pedestrian. I think I have to stay with the truth.”

“All right, tell me what the most recent thing or event was that aroused you.”

“The idea of making this call,” he said.

“Before that.”

“Let me think back,” he said. “The Walt Disney character of Tinker Bell. I was just leaving the video store, and I came to this big cardboard display of Peter Pan, the Walt Disney cartoon Peter Pan, which has just been rereleased, with a TV beside it playing the movie.”

“When was this?”

“This was today, about an hour and a half ago, I guess. I rented three X-rated tapes.”

“And you’re going to play them later this evening?”

“Maybe. Maybe not, I don’t know. I was going to play them when I got home.”

“The second you got home.”

“That’s right.”

“What about dinner?”

“I ate at a pizza place.”

“What kind?”

“Small mushroom anchovy.”

“All right. So you got home with the tapes …”

“Yeah, and I put them on top of the TV and got out of my work clothes and put on a bathrobe …”

“Just a bathrobe?”

“Well, I have my T-shirt and underwear on underneath, of course.”

“White underwear?”

“Gray, white, somewhere in that range. Anyway, I came out and saw the pile of X-rated tapes on top of my TV, and they’re in these orange boxes. The store uses brown boxes for their normal tapes, like adventure, comedy, slasher, etcetera, and then they use a whole different color, an orange box, for the adult tapes. It’s to avoid confusion, because now there are so many X-rated Christmas tapes and X-rated versions of Cinderella and all that. And I’d never seen two of these particular tapes before, but of course I knew what was in them anyway, and I heartily approved of it, I’m enthusiastically pro-pornography, obviously, but suddenly I foresaw my own crude arousal — I saw myself fast-forwarding through the numbing parts, trying to find some image that was good, or at least good enough to come to, and the sound of the VCR as it fast-forwards, that industrial robot sound, and I suddenly thought no, no, even though one of the tapes has got Lisa Melendez in it, who I think is just … delightful, I thought no, I don’t want to see these right now. Fortunately, I’d also bought a Juggs magazine, because this anti-orange-tape reaction has hit me before. There are just times when you want a fixed image.”

“There’s always the pause button,” she suggested.

“Well, but then you get those white sawtooth lines across the screen.”

“Four heads are better than two, as they say. Of course, the resolution is better on the magazine page, I imagine.”

“It certainly is,” he said. “But it’s much more than that! Don’t laugh, really. No movie still is ever as good as a photograph. A photograph catches a woman at a point where her frans are at their perfect point of expressiveness — the soul of her frans is revealed, or rather the souls are revealed, because each has a separate personality. Nipples in still pictures are as varied and as communicative as women’s eyes, or almost.”

“Frans?”

“Yeah, sometimes I don’t like the word ‘breasts’ and all those slangish synonyms. I mean, just look at the drop in arousingness between Playboy magazine and the exact same women when they’re moving from pose to pose on the Playboy channel. It’s true that I don’t actually get the Playboy channel, so I see everything on it through those houndstooth and herringbone cycles of the scrambling circuit, and I keep flipping back and forth between it and the two channels on either side of it because sometimes for an instant the picture is startled into visibility just after you switch the channel, and you’ll catch this bright yellow torso and one full fran with a fire-engine-red nipple, and then it teeters, it falters, and collapses — and I’ve noticed that the scrambling works least well and you can see things best when nothing is moving in the TV image, i.e., when it’s a TV image of a magazine image, sort of as if the scrambling circuitry is overcome in the same way I am sometimes overcome by the power of fixed pictures. I once stayed up until two-thirty in the morning doing this, flipping.”