First I tried giving the playback loop a little drag, slowing it until Lazlo’s yammering was baritone yowling, then whale song. Then some more, until the sound fell away completely, the waveforms flattened, and his vocables lay down unmarked in the sonic boneyard.
I pushed the sliders in the other direction. I doubled the playback speed and got a Chipmunks Christmas album. Quadrupled it and got Twiddlebugs on helium. Quadrupled again. Mechanical chirps. At thirty-two times the recorded speed I sat back and let it play out, almost inaudibly high, sonic detritus emitted by the earth’s crust, magnets serenading each other, the hour-long audio reduced now to about two minutes. And it was there, in the electrostatic ether, through the whistling cracks, that a voice spoke out.
Are, it said. I was quite sure my mind had fabricated it, that my sadness had finally metastasized inside my frontal cortex, but then came another word: You. Another ten seconds passed. Speaking. Another ten. To. And finally, Me. The recording ended.
What kind of whackadoo sci-fi bullshit is this? you might ask. Because I sure did. I slammed shut my laptop and went directly to bed. I was drunk, of course—that was it. Drunk, yearning for a voice from the beyond. I passed out and slept deeply, dreamlessly, and the next morning I had almost convinced myself that I’d heard nothing more than an echo off the inside of my own skull, a question I would have done well to ask myself. Who was I speaking to? No one. It was after dark when I approached the recording again. I put on my headphones and clicked play. The tangle of sound began. It was incomprehensible. How pleased I was not to hear a thing. What a relief, I was thinking, basking in the knowledge that I had fabricated the whole episode, when he spoke. I felt a shock strike the back of my neck, as real as if someone had slapped me open-handed. What kind of madness?
That night, sitting at the table in my socks and cotton shorts, slurping on an over-milked lukewarm coffee, how could I have comprehended what he’d done? My ears had not yet been opened. I could hear but I was not listening. I was a novitiate to Lazlo’s order. It took a couple of months. I did everything I could think of to the tapes. I scrambled and descrambled them. I re-recorded his five-word question, sliced and diced it, ran it backward, forward, sped it up and slowed it down. I stretched, deconstructed, rebuilt, and inverted the sounds, all the while hoping that I could create another phrase, something that would prove I had made his words out of nothing more than coincidence and selective hearing. I recorded my own voice, trying to mimic the trick. I couldn’t make it work. I deleted the software, packed up the deck and tapes, and stuffed them in the closet.
I took it all back out. I bought a new reel-to-reel deck, one that was capable of controlled high-speed playback, hoping to discover that all I’d heard was a fluke of the software. But the words were right there on the tape. Finally I had to accept the most likely possibility—the one that didn’t point to coincidence and luck but to a carefully constructed truth: Lazlo Brunn had slipped outside a human perception of time. Not so complicated in the end, not so crazy, and completely within the bounds of modern scientific and neurological understanding of the brain. Researchers have known for decades that the smaller an animal, the more refined its perception of time. To a frog, the child’s grasping hand moves in slow motion. To a flea, a minute is an endless expanse. To a microbe, a day is a lifetime, but one filled with endless variation and experience, a life no less astonishing in its scope than any human life. I’m not suggesting Brunn invented an anti-gravity machine or made himself invisible. I’m merely suggesting that he lived on, physically unchanged, silent as a mouse, occupying his room at Pickering until the day he died in 1982.
But within his normal human life span, he’d made himself immeasurably large, a perceptual giant, so that to him, the white-frocked orderlies would appear and disappear like lightning flashes. To him, there’d be a shimmer in the doorway; it would spit out a heartbeat’s worth of incomprehensible blather, and vanish. Lazlo had shifted to geologic time. He’d become a glacier creeping across a landmass. For him, a day was the beat of a hummingbird’s wing. A week was the length of a breath, and felt like pressure in the ears, relieved with a yawn. His own body must have been a thing of wonder, a blazing electrical arc that sparked from bed to wheelchair to bed and back without a thought. Did he even register the trays of food put before him? Wheelchair tours of the grounds?
Surely not. He did it all with an attendant at his side, his body nothing more than a carriage for his brain. The domestic rituals by which we mark the passage of our days became averages for him, a slur arcing across a line clogged with sixteenth notes. If he spent eight hours a night in bed, that added up to a respectable, and noticeable, fifty-six hours a week. But disconnected, each instance of sleep like a blink of the eye, did it all add up to a deep slumber? Or had he, unable to detect his body’s daily motions, separated from the need for sleep entirely? Is it possible that by the end of his first week at Pickering he’d stepped out beyond the end of his own life and was living in a future after he’d died?
He would have spent a hundred hours a week in front of the white wall in his room. He would have seen the wall. He might have registered the sunlight racing across the plaster, the expansion and contraction due to humidity and temperature, the wall pulsing like a vein, the birth and growth of cracks that crept and spread, the subtle shift of color as the paint leached pigment. His body sat there for years, the wall all the while throbbing with life. Where was he?
In that first week, he still would have been evolving, thus capable of recognizing Schiff’s presence, however brief. Lazlo’s question, Are you speaking to me? took the duration of the first tape to complete. Each of the four remaining tapes was an hour and four minutes long, identical to the first. I ran them all through the same process, and did I get secret messages from the beyond? Messages to Turk, to his sons? Confirmation of his scientific breakthrough? Did he quote Goethe, the fly’s thousand dead eyes? Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”?
Blame Schiff for adhering to clinical procedure, leading off with the same question every day: How are you feeling today, Dr. Brunn? One tape a day for five days. Same question, same answer.
I called Dr. Schiff and asked if there were more tapes. I asked him if he had any recollection of the interviews, or any notes.
I could hear him smile and shrug through the phone.
The young Schiff didn’t work weekends, and when he returned to Pickering the Monday following Lazlo’s committal, the patient had gone mute. He never spoke again. I suspect Lazlo had entered a new phase of communication, an adaptation that took advantage of the disparity between his perceptual advance and his physical equipment. His further communications may yet be awaiting discovery, hovering somewhere out there in the future, encoded in the molten core of our planet, awaiting rebirth in a leaf. By that second Monday morning, could he even tell Schiff was there?
Are you speaking to me?
My beneficent madre-in-waiting, architect of the Gedanken, spending her peaceable retirement in repose, puffing on an assortment of electronic one-hitters and watching the Criterion Collection from bed. If not for the bathrobe, a garnet terry-cloth number that had become her day-lounge uniform, you’d have thought Turk a starlet in nova.
Darling, she said when she opened the door.