In the process of tumbling in, her foot caught the shower curtain and the whole assembly came down with a hollow clang, the rod cracking her on the head as she struggled to get her pants off before the liquid came bursting forth. When it came, boy did it come, rushing for the exit with the ungodly reek of death, her anus a searing ring of copper from which shot a fiery glop, and she tore away the curtain, groped for the shower lever and its blessed stream of rain, the cold water baptizing her while the shit streamed around her calves and heels, her body heaving like a bellows, her mind a—well, what was it? It was not the usual catacomb of dim, lizard thoughts that accompany extreme physical discomfort. Dizzy, yes, but the dizziness was pure, not dancing with its usual half-wit, pusillanimous partner, the physical, the one who made a career of stepping on toes and droning in complaint with rotten breath about the temperature and the humidity in the ballroom. Somehow her mind was quiet, at a remove from her body, and after the expulsive forces relented and she’d pulled herself vertical bit by bit, a one-woman revival of the evolutionary chart, tested her balance, her legs shaking jellies, her hands sleep-weak, and after having shifted the lever to send some warm water running over her quivering frame, soaping up when she felt she was capable, afterward wrapping up in a robe and towel, shuffling to the kitchen where she rolled small balls of Wonder Bread and with trepidation lay the host to dissolve atop her tongue—after all that, she recalled that during the worst of it her mind had been like a TV with bad reception, displaying crackle and snow, nothing more. No stranger to the effects of amphetamines, ephedrine, barbiturates, marijuana, mescaline, she couldn’t say that this feeling of simple blankness and disengagement was in the same family. All the white-clear spirituality imposed on a peyote trip came from external interpretation after the fact. But the deep blankness she’d experienced was self-generated.
She handled the tapes with delicacy on subsequent visits to her father’s audio lab, listening for only a few minutes at a time, and thus avoided violent reactions while still getting to bask in the warm dawn light that poured through her every cell, vaporizing the smoggy film that had built up on the portals connecting her physical and spiritual selves. With the blankness came some minor spatial disorientation that disappeared as quickly as taking a couple of deep breaths, some esophageal tremblors behind her sternum.
A new side effect appeared after a couple of weeks, discovered when she’d gone directly to the kitchen to make a grocery list after removing the headphones and her hand had been frozen, the graphite stuck on the notepad’s blue anchor line, as though it were a curb the pencil couldn’t hop, unable to initiate the g in grapes. Like the kid’s game of trying to force two magnetic dipoles to kiss, letters repelled one another, and when she finally roused the muscles in her hands from their glacial sleep, what they produced looked like a man-o’-war, tentacles trailing beneath the surface, a cartoonist’s shot at Sanskrit.
What had happened to her father? Perhaps he’d shorted out his Broca’s area, fried Wernicke’s to a crisp. If medical science would classify what happened as a stroke, so be it—he’d induced a stroke. In a case like Lazlo Brunn’s, diagnosis is a trip around the Monopoly board. Is it treatable? No? Roll again. Call it Bronze John or dropsy or the screws, if you can’t reverse the tapes and pour his brain back into his ear, you can say he’s got the clap or whatever and it won’t change a thing. She visited him every week, and told him about her voyages with his recordings. If he meant to warn her away from them, he gave no outward indication. He gave no indication that he knew she existed. He’d blown the popsicle stand and left a scarecrow leaning on the counter.
It was during one of her visits to see him that her apartment had been burgled. As far as Turk could figure, they had penetrated the Apelles’ defenses peacefully, probably disguised in the slacks and clip-ons favored by city pipe and wire inspectors, entered 14D by picking the service door, or the front door (impossible to tell, so thorough was their erasure), and removed the tapes, the notebooks, the texts, the headphones, and the decks, which conveniently came built into their own stylish black leather suitcases with chrome clasps. They took the pencils and the paper clips, the rubber bands and Pelikan jars (blue, black, indigo), the letter openers, the wax seal bearing the yin yang, and they took the ring bearing Lazlo’s father’s seal, FFK. They took the fountain pens. The ball of twine, the matches, the cigarettes, ashtray, a tidy packet of identification papers he’d carried with him from Germany, and an accordion-fold series of sepia babes secreted in a snuff box. They took the ancient business cards Lazlo had ordered at the print shop on East 3rd in 1925, the curlicues of his name like flying pennants atop the stolid serifs of the Brunn Institute for Linguistics and Cultural Advancement, 271 W 20th Street, BALDWIN 5741. They did their part to reverse his condition, returning his desk, if not his brain, to a preterite state, wiping it clean of wax drippings, ash, dust, fingerprints. If they touched anything else in the apartment, Turk didn’t notice. The extreme care taken to denude the desk signaled to her that not only would the police be of no help, but that this was one of those true crime situations in which alerting the authorities would precipitate a blindfolded van ride to an undisclosed location. She knew about her father’s work for the U.S. government during the war, knew that spycraft had been of more than passing interest to him in the ensuing years, and suspected that his study had been visited by members of whatever acronymic group was paying him to research the efficacy of binaural language acquisition. They’d no doubt dropped in on him at Pickering, but she knew better than to ask the staff there for a clue. They’d have been paid well to shake their heads at her and pause before answering, No, no, nothing that I can recall, why do you ask?
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.