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.’
What have I done?
Something exhausted about this city. The neighbourhood. The derelict buildings and everywhere rubbish and the people subdued or enraged. I take her out for a walk. Alleys and back-streets and boarded-up shops. The air so muggy, it feels quilted. We see a crowd of people gathered in an abandoned lot. Some guy with a chainsaw slicing into this old clapboard building, cutting out a section from it. The delicacy and precision of this action — instead of a wrecking-ball, say — makes it a particularly intimate, painful kind of destruction. Almost loving. Evie makes no mention of recording.
Today we had news of her father’s death. Evie unmoved, it seems. A growing sense of terror in me. Because of her lack of emotion, I think, which is monstrous. She wasn’t close enough to him for this to be shock. Nor does it seem as though she’s pre-feeling: on the edge of feeling something, just trying to work out what. She doesn’t care. She’s gonna leave.
Evie asleep. It’s airless. I take her for a walk. When we return, we lie on the mattress, drained. I wake when I feel her fingers lightly brushing my belly. Her first real contact with me since the dead room, since before that. She made love to me. Kept saying my name, kept whispering to me. Tears in my eyes which didn’t spill cos I couldn’t move. I just lay there and let her wander all over me, and I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling except it just built and built until I thought I would choke, and then the tears did slide off my face. I moved my head, and that’s when I saw it. A red light, half-hidden under a heap of clothes at the foot of the mattress. She was recording us. These are my last words. I will leave this for her. I’m leaving.
27. Tinnitus
Spring has arrived in my attic. The gulls bicker. The trees are budding and all day rap knuckles against my roof. Small creatures nest in their hiding places under the floor. Inside my head the old familiar rumpus. It’s been several weeks since I completed the transcription of Damaris’ diary. Since then, I’ve written little, and that little has been lost in false starts and evasions. I was trying to recount the days and weeks after she left me in the hotel room in New York, but I was unable to remember anything I could set down in words. My powers of listening weaken daily; and so the gaps in my history grow wider, and the silences more frequent with every page.