Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

The dog nosed around our legs, sniffed our feet. We could keep it, maybe, you squat down, throw your arms around his neck, kiss his flat, greasy head. No, I feel deep in his bristly ruff for a collar. Look. A bronze disk. ‘Brumby’. That’s his name. He lives at this address. He must have been gone from home a while. He’s lost weight: look how loose his collar is. Brumby lifts his eyes from the pavement, they shift from me to you. His brown eyes have an orange glow. Like amber. No like yours, you say. Then, Who’s Amber?

Brumby licked the pavement. Do you think he’s hungry? Yeah, probably, But we don’t have any money. We should just get him back to his home and then he can eat. Before I realize what you’re doing you run up to a man in the street. You point to Brumby and look at the man, who digs in his pocket and hands you change. Then you run into a shop and run up to me, ripping the wrapper off a Hershey Bar. Brumby swipes his bit off the palm of your hand with his bacon rasher tongue then looks hopeful while we eat ours. We have trouble. This chunk of Hershey Bar is getting BIGGER in my mouth you want to say, but I can’t hear you cos the chunk of Hershey Bar is too big in your mouth and all I hear is grwmmmmgnnn and I say, Same here but all you hear is grwmmmmgnnn. You hold out sticky hands to Brumby saying, All gone, all gone. So Brumby licks your fingers and you melt. Try it, you tell me, Let him lick your fingers. We stand there a while, letting Brumby lick our fingers. It feels like he’s sculpting us with his tongue, like you do ice-cream in a cone. I am an ice-cream statue you say, Let me stand very still until I melt away. But the idea of statues freaks me out right now, Let’s take him back, I say. Let’s claim the reward. Will there be a reward? Oh yes, a big reward, he is a rare and valuable breed, and we snigger, poor Brumby looking up, trying to get the joke. We walk along the water, Brumby trotting at our heels or stopping to bury his nose into god knows what or just standing dead at the waterside looking deep into it. Sour, green. Can you taste that water? Yes, gooseberries. We screw our faces with the tartness. Brumby, what are you staring at? I drag him back by the collar. Fish, you say. There’s no fish in there. Later, we walk down an avenue of tall slim trees with smooth white bark and leaves that snap in the wind. Large leaves, red, white and blue

The entry is incomplete, and there follows several pages with doodles of flowers, giant tropical flowers that often look like birds.

Dania, Atlanta, Nashville

In Dania, or Atlanta, or Nashville, we saw a bus close its doors in the face of a young black girl. Plaits, yellow ribbons, Sunday shoes. She ran a good way down the road, shouting. Evie wanted to get out and record her.

In Dania, or Atlanta, or Nashville, I was spat on by a middle-aged black woman who walked past me and Evie. We were not holding hands.

In Dania, or Atlanta, or Nashville, I picked up a young white boy who was hanging out at the stage door, hoping to see D. He was dressed like D. I took him round the corner and fucked him. Later, in the washroom of a bar, I saw that some of his make-up had come off against my cheek. That same night, in that same bar, in that same city, I got punched by a cowboy.

Before that, long days and short nights in the desert. Crickets, fire, the skitter of lizards. And in the distance, coyotes. Evie records them all. Nothing of me on the tapes. I barely speak. Deserts have a silencing effect.

22 November, New Orleans

Swamp fever. Something weirdly familiar about this city. Feels rotten, tropical. Spoiled. It’s in the air. Easdale! The air draws life from you. I wander like a zombie down antique streets rich with stink. People more variously coloured here. Last night I saw a man stabbed. Wandered out late to buy some cigarettes from a shack. Two winos are pushing and shoving one another, both of them grasping a bottle in a brown paper bag. They seem evenly matched in weight and strength — the pushing and shoving metronomical but then one of the men takes an extra step back — staggers, in fact — and as he does I see a dark spray of blood shoot from his neck in an arc like water from the mouth of an ornamental cherub. I run back to the hotel room. Evie out recording. Evie always out fucking recording.

23 Nov

She came in early this morning. Slept a couple of hours and crept out again. I did not get the chance to tell her about the stabbing. And so it lives in my head and somehow stains my thoughts, the way a drop of ink can tint a glass of water. Sorcière.

The following entries do not have dates, just place names, if anything.

X cities in X days and X nights of the terrors. Not sure if I am awake or asleep or if what I see I have seen before. All these cities, these small towns we pass through, this stuff that unspools outside our windows, this scenery — the furze and the pine and the rocks and the people look painted in.

When she’s lying next to me, or when we fuck, she’s elsewhere, listening to her recordings. I’ve lost the will. Every city we get to she wants to be alone. With that tape recorder. I hear better when you’re not with me. Closest times are on the bus. There’s nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere else for her head to fall when she sleeps, except on my shoulder.

E mummifies herself in tape. Splitting sound from gesture. Me from her. Every time I speak all she hears is a ringing. She winces. Stops listening.

Philadelphia

He looked like a Mormon but I met him in a bar. Weirdly lit. Him, I mean. That’s what they’re like, the Mormons I’ve seen. He worked for the National Association for Standards and Testing. We decide the standards, he said and when I asked, For what? he said, Everything. We talked about testing. He told me about the extreme conditions under which things had to be tested. He mentioned sound.

I promised him a fuck with us if he’d do it. I was asking a lot, I knew. A high state of security exists around such places. I myself in a high state of insecurity. In a room where she’d hear no sound but herself, what else could she do but turn to me?

I asked about her plans. Out recording, she said. Told her she should forget about recording for today. Said I wanted to conduct an experiment on her. An experiment in sound. In listening. She smiled. A proper smile. First time in weeks. She let me blindfold her. And here was Evie. Evie who fell in love with me. Needing me to guide her.

He meets us at the security gate. Flashes his pass at the guard, climbs into the cab with us. Has Evie turn her head away so the guard can’t see she’s blindfolded. We drive to a fire door round the back of the building. An almost anonymous flat-roofed concrete building surrounded by barbed wire. The door’s unlocked. We walk quickly along a corridor with rubberized flooring, Evie mute, having to be steered, giving herself up to the guidance of me on one side, him on the other. Then he pulls open with all his strength a huge black door and pushes us through it.

I should have realized the effect it would have on her. So happy losing herself in this rich new world of sounds. In that room, the atmosphere pressing more heavily than gravity, when I turned to her (still blindfolded) and said, I love you, all nuance, all tone, all resonance, dead on my tongue.

I like this hotel room. White walls, gauzy curtains. Sunlight sifting through the fine mesh. Like that dress of hers. Our things look shabby, travelworn, in this clean, white space. I haven’t seen her beaded headband in a while.

Evie has not spoken since.

New York

Strange shadows. An old factory. What did they make here? The silent machines give off a metal stink in the heat. We live in one small corner, a mattress where Evie lies twisted up in the sheets, asleep. Last night, a terrible scene. Evie sobbing, rocking, racked. Her first real words since. The gist of it: Mother’s womb — an echo chamber. In it she was alive to all sound, ‘and all sound alive to me. And then this dead room you lead me into, this — this — slaughterhouse with its hostile air, enemy to all sound! Yes! (screaming now) the very air seeks out sound, seizes it, crushes it. I heard your heartbeat and I heard it stifled, all at once. When I collapsed you carried me from that anti-womb, stillborn.’