Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Evie gently shakes me awake, into that close, womb-like dark that settles over you when you’re driving at night. Look! she says, pointing at the moon. Huge, champagne-coloured, low in the sky. You could reach out and touch it and as I think that, she puts her fingers to the glass. Makes me glad and sad at once to think we’ve reached a point of remembering when she says, Reminds me of the night we drove to Easdale.

28 Sept, New York

They got me doing the statue thing out front for all the freaks coming in. Evie a no-show. Drinking after. Went to sit on what I thought was a chair but turned out to be a cunning arrangement of shadows — a strong grip on my wrist. I was caught in time. Zed. A gymnast’s body and the kind of rolling bow-legged walk of a cowboy. Zed asked about me being painted up like a mime, and I told her my story. She gave me some shit — ‘This’ll make you feel like you’re on stage.’ We spent the whole night talking. Me mostly, about Evie. Her old-fashioned face and tissue paper in her ears and the recording project and the din of herself. Zed told me about anechoic chambers — dead rooms — where all sound is absorbed and all you hear is the blood in your head.

— Evie has just come in and jumped into bed all excited about having recorded some girls singing skipping rhymes in a part of town we were told to stay away from but Evie, she’s an angel who walks unthinking of the harm that melts to let her pass. They just dig her here. Didn’t mention the anechoic chamber.

29 Sept

Monster America! Riding the back of it. An endless spine of road that rolls through rocks and crags and mountains, dark banks of trees as far as forever. The wide, blue jeans sky. We flash by gas stations, small towns, low-roofed barns. We glimpse horses, wind ruffling the pastures and making warm pelts of them. Now and then goods trains run alongside. Different from English trains — more resolved with their long blunt noses. Bull-headed. Evie loves the sound of their horns blaring.

Two hours from Washington we get out at a truck stop and order pancakes. Evie chats to a big-shouldered man on his way to a cattle auction. Asks if she can record him. They go outside into the parking lot. I see her point up at the sky. A single cloud. Can’t hear but I can tell. Auction that, she’s saying. He fixes his eyes on the cloud. Inhales deeply. Launches into a spiel without stopping. A controlled kind of babbling. He looks possessed, eyes rolled up at the sky like that. Evie stands amazed, holding out her mic. He’s finished. For a moment, Evie’s static with shock, then she launches into gestures of amazement.

She played it to us now on the bus. Like nothing I’ve ever heard before. A foreign language. A kind of yodelling. Like the same two strings on a banjo twanged again and again, a rhythm to his babble, and remembering how he looked possessed, I think of speaking in tongues. And then it occurs to me. What Evie is doing with her project. She is divorcing sound from gesture. Opposite to me.

3 Oct (I think)

New York again. Shitty hotel in xx. Our room looks out on to a blackened wall. 5 a.m. and I’ve been lying here since I got in, an hour ago, staring at that wall. Evie not back yet from wherever she went tonight: said she’d go out and record. I had no gig tonight but she didn’t ask me to come. Went out nightclubbing with Zed. Quite a scene here. Everyone a star but me a black one, a collapsed one. Invisible somehow. Afterwards, walking back to the hotel, everything still leaking neon in the early hours of the morning, I had that feeling you get on tour sometimes, of forgetting where you are, your centre. I feel very far away. But from what?

Evie just in. Couldn’t stop talking, then crashed. She rode the subway. She met a group of young guys. They were going to paint the subway trains — graffiti artists. They took her to an underground yard where the trains are parked when they stop running for the night. They made a strange noise, Evie says, like a mechanical panting, a melancholy, musical clanking, the heat of their bodies cooling. She recorded that and the sound of the boys climbing the trains, calling out to one another, the rattle and spray of their cans, the hiss of the paint on hot metal.

That faraway feeling has not gone even with Evie near, sleeping. A mime is used to being silent. But not invisible. Not backstage . Writing helps.

11 Oct, Kansas City

Coming down with something like the Faulty. After last night’s gig — 11,000-seater stadium and only 180 people show up — they got me out front. Zed makes me up to look like D in character, lightning-slash cheekbones, refrigerated lips, hair cut and dyed burned orange and spiked like his. Stand outside all day, a statue of him, to draw in the kids. And they come. And they all look like me, or rather, me dressed as him, and not really him, but him on stage. Me an idol of their idol. I watch the show. The kids, all dressed like him, screaming at him. Him smiling back. I get scared. Leave. Evie wasn’t back. When she came in early this morning — out recording, an anti-war rally — she found me with my head over the sink, streaks of what looked like ink running into the plughole. ‘Sorcière’, it says on the bottle.

Pasted underneath this entry, without comment, is the following paragraph, carefully cut out from the page of a book.

You see, Oz is a great Wizard, and can take on any form he wishes. So that some say he looks like a bird; and some say he looks like an elephant; and some say he looks like a cat. To others he appears as a beautiful fairy, or a brownie, or in any other form that pleases him. But who the real Oz is, when he is in his own form, no living person can tell.

26 Oct, San Francisco

We got to LA and I freaked out. I don’t know where I am I don’t where I am I don’t know where I am . Evie runs in to borrow a map from Jerry-The-Driver. Spreads it out for me. This is where we are, my heart, this is where we are. But so folded over, so used, that where she’s pointing there’s nothing but a deep crease and I bellow in fear.

We went on ahead, to San Francisco, to a b’n’b in an odd part of town with ice-cream coloured houses and steep, winding lanes. Beautiful girls and boys wandering the streets hand-in-hand. Girls with girls, boys with boys. We never felt so free. I write this lying here in bed with E, watching the light from that island prison sweep our walls, in counterpoint to Evie’s stroking of my thigh.

27 Oct, San Francisco

Yesterday. We’re given the most beautiful gift. Evie and I are passing a florist’s. The owner comes out, a flower painted on his face, presents Evie with a bunch of tropical-looking flowers. She charms them, these Americans. I only merit a glance. This glance, taking in my looks, looks no further. But with Evie they look and look. They realize she doesn’t know what she is, and this intrigues them. These Americans, so open, confident of what they are, find people like her a puzzle, those who are a mystery to themselves and are unaware of it. She’s that peculiarly English thing, to them: an eccentric. It’s in her face. Me, I’m invisible.

We chat with the florist. Evie tells him about her recording. He’s fascinated. And what about sounds you wouldn’t normally hear? The sound, he says, touching the flowers, of these birds of paradise singing? Oh, if I could hear sounds like that! And the florist says, You will. He gives us each a tab, and, Alice-like, we swallow.

We talked for a while until, from the corner of my eye, I saw the birds of paradise began to twitch. To preen, poised. Poisonous. Possessed. In their burned orange crests I saw D’s hair. The birds of paradise began to sing. His song. The florist gave us acid, Evie! Stick out your tongue and say Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh … Haaaaaaaaaaaaah, Evie! What fun we had! We thanked the florist and left him smiling, by his singing flowers. We wandered the streets till we reached the water. Water running in different directions, we stood staring, looking at this rush of water, in such a rush, where is it rushing to? we wondered. And then we see him. The dog. A ginger dog, lost. Tail hovering (how are you feeling? Oh so-so). You say, How do you know it’s lost, and I say, Cos it’s alone: dogs on their own are always lost. But what about cats? Cats are different, I said. But why? and I said, Because.