The movie this time was "exotic," they'd said.
Auteur
but with a sublime
je ne sais quoi.
Those French ladies claimed to have captured that pivotal moment during sex when lust plucks away a woman's last thread of inhibition.
On s'envoie en l'air?
And they need a soundtrack.
Pretentious. I'd always made a point to avoid these types of gigs—and
the French
.
"It's classy. It's a nice studio," Dalia had reassured me.
She knew I couldn't argue. My whole world is a mental landscape of imaginary blocks. And every block was once a word that Dalia had spoken. Sometimes those blocks have a certain feel or a sound or a smell, but mostly those are secondary features that I tack onto Dalia's words.
I live without sight. Dalia calls it darkness. I don't know what that is, but it must be true.
Why that woman had tied herself to me, I'm not sure I'll ever know, but she's always been my guide—a friend of my family's and my family for life.
I feel her powerful fingers wrap around my arm, clear around until her thumb and forefinger touch. She leads me to a stool. It feels small and square against my knee. Odd shape. I sweep my hand through the "dark" until my knuckles nudge against a row of plastic keys—just to make sure the electric keyboard's actually there. I don't want a repeat of Chicago:
"Ma'am, that's a xylophone."
"You're shaking." Dalia's voice comes from well above my head and conjures a splash of purple in my mind's eye. Synthesia, they call it. Apparently, my brain never forgot all the wonderful colors that I used to see as an infant.
"It's cold." I rub my arms.
Dalia doesn't comment on my rather
minimalistic
style of dress. She never does. As I sit, my bottom tugs my skirt up just past mid thigh. The fabric's strung tightly around my bum, but on top, it drapes across my lap like a thin TV blanket. And deep underneath, a string cradle of lace preserves a wedge of my modesty.
My loose blouse is cut such that it exposes my shoulders. Dalia's giant hands rest there and encompass my shoulders wholly. That girl pins me down whether she means to or not. My Dalia and her powerful six-foot build—and me, her waifish charge. A Valkyrie and her fairy in a box.
Her palms are sweating. They always get that way when she touches me. My skin dampens.
"Can they see us?" I whisper.
"Yes." Dalia squeezes my shoulders. I lay my ear on the back of her hand. "The studio is
clinical,"
she says. "It's
bright."
She purposefully uses keywords that I know. Clinical, meaning cold and bare. Bright, meaning nothing is hidden, all is exposed.
How much can they see?
"What do they look like?"
"I can't tell. Our clients are sitting behind a mirror pane of glass."
I want to ask if this gig is safe, but that would be insulting. "Where am I?"
"You're facing the mirror. They can see your front."
That's never concerned me—at least, not in a bad way. Perhaps it should, but that kind of thing has always had the
wrong
effect on me. Dalia's always after me to close the blinds in my apartment when she visits, "people can see in," but I can't understand why that makes a difference. People can always see in, but I can never see out—whether the blinds are closed or not.
Dalia whispers into my ear. "I can see you, too."
How much?
She knows me so well.
My delicate fingers trace up and down the cracks between the keyboard's keys. It's my ritual. I have to feel every one. The client provided the instrument, but it's my job to know it. Sixty-one keys, I count. Not ideal.
"What brand?"
"Casio. CTK, and I see a three and maybe a five, but the model number is very faded."
It's clearly old. It feels big and boxy, too, like a nineties throwback. Or perhaps even a model from the nineties. From my understanding, the ladies who run the studio are not rolling in dough. Which, I assume, is exactly why they hired me.
An intercom crackles. "'Ello, uh, ah-vwee will play the clip. An' you can do the doot, doot, doots." My employer sounds husky and very French. I imagine her in a smokey dive, puffing on a cigarette with one of those long stemmed things. Like, she sits on a stool. The mic's in front. The act: She's Neil Diamond pinched in undies too tight.
Her voice triggers what I associate with "dusky yellow" in my mind's eye.
A second voice chimes in. "Iss, ah, the mo
mont
when Madame, the small one, opens her legs to Madame, the, ah, big one." She's a lazy pink—dull hearts. "Large, strong,
forte
. An', uh,
la chatte
spreads—"
"Please, stop," I interrupt. My voice is a translucent gray in contrast to the confidently opaque, if buzzy sounding, French women speaking over the intercom.
Dalia cuts in. "Ladies, I appreciate your interest, but Taja has a very specific process that she needs to follow, which was stated plainly in our contract. I find it disconcerting that you would disregard our sole request."
My friend's voice is so strong. I can't remember what real purple looks like. But I have been told that it's a royal color. And actually, it doesn't even matter what "real purple" is because Dalia's voice will always be my purple.
The French ladies seem much smaller in my mind now.
"Apologies," says the lazy pink one. "Less juss play the clip."
Good. My rule is simple: Don't describe the visual details. There's very little that I can do better than people who can see, but sound, I feel, is one of them. Even in film, my method makes my work unique. I genuinely believe that.
Their soundtrack plays. I hear that dusky yellow voice say, "au coin de la rue," like a narrator's introduction kind of thing.
Footsteps fade in and begin to clitter-clack on a hard surface. There's some tweety bird sound effects, so I assume the setting is outdoors, maybe a town center? A lady says, "Walla, walla," which is kind of funny. Another lady mimics her. And the "walla, wallas" keep piling on until it creates the effect of indiscriminate babble.
Despite the babble effect, every voice is one of the same two colors: Pink and yellow, the very colors of my two clients. Clearly they'd just looped in their own voices. Maybe they couldn't afford actors?
The soundscape begins to strain out the idle thrums of chatter and focus in on two voices in particular. They're the only voices saying anything other than "walla, walla."
"Non pas ici; no, not here," says a lazy pink voice, gratefully overdubbed in English.
A dusky yellow voice replies, "Tout le monde regarde; everybody is watching."
Buttons
snap, snap, snap.
"Non, non."
I hear a zipper. "Je vous en prie, arrêtez-vous! Please, stop!"
"Devraise-je? Should I?" The dusky yellow voice asks.
The crowd quiets to punctuate her decision. "No," Lazy Pink mutters.
The chatter returns and an ambient rain noise swoops in. The rain's a fuzzy black static that covers most everything up. It's hard to make anything out over the static. I do hear a woman's moan. Perhaps a soft slap against flesh, a muffled cry of surprise. Fabric tears, and I don't
hear
so much as
feel
a powerful undercurrent to all that noise.
It's not enough for my brain to process, but my body seems to recognize it, and my hips squirm. Dalia's sweaty palms still pin my butt down to the stool, so I can't wiggle much.
"Pause, please," I tell the ladies as professionally as I can manage. "Is it layered?" If it isn't, I'm not even sure I want to be working with clients that incompetent. "Can you remove it, that rain effect, and play it again?"
"Certainly," the husky one replies.
They play it again, minus the rain, and it's—Oh, wow—
sucking,
and so very wet, like they're lapping up a drink from a bowl on the floor. Can water be red? Because my mind sees it as drips of maroon. I can sort of understand the "artistic vision" behind the rain sound effect, now—still pretentious but I get it.
Lazy Pink moans, and Dusky Yellow slurps, but even now that the rain's gone, it's still partially obscured by the crowd's chatter.
I feel Dalia squeeze my shoulders. With all the sweat from her palm, her fingers feel soggy against my skin. Surely she's watching the actual scene on a projector or a television set or whatever regular people watch films on.
"Do you like that?" I ask her.
She doesn't answer me, but her thumb absently strokes the side of my neck. Her touch is so clumsy. She's just smearing sweat, but it flitters butterflies into my spine all the same.
This gig already feels rather unusual. Regardless of what the
auteurs
claimed on their ad, they basically need me to compose a porn soundtrack for them, which couldn't be further outside my wheelhouse. I do
telenovellas
and some Bollywood rips (those are fun), but Dalia picked this gig out special. She seemed so excited about it, too. And I know she wouldn't set me up to fail, so all I can do is my best.
"Can you please filter out the crowd's chatter, too?" I ask.
"Iss important context," Dusky Yellow tries to argue.
"I want to hear it—" I search for the right word. "—raw."
"Ahh." I can hear the smile in her voice. "Certainly."
The lazy pink one adds, "We will be watching," which stutters my heart.
"Just, just loop it, please." My face is burning up. Dalia touches my ear.
Their soundtrack plays, again.
"Au coin de la rue,"
the narrator announces.
Now, the only ambiance is the layers of footsteps—
click-clackity-clock, click-clackity-clock.
They allude to a large crowd of possibly unwilling observers to the women's sex. Oddly, they're all on the same rhythm, as if they took a single gait and multiplied it a dozen times.
I know the theme is
wet.
So in that context, I imagine a perfectly still lake. It's yet to be defined, but that's where the women's story will occur.
I have to stretch my imagination a bit, but the colors that those
click-clackity-clocks
conjure in my mind become rows of taut blue strings that just barely graze the surface of the water. Every person who I can sort from the crowd has their own string, and every click, clack, and clock is a single pluck on that person's string. It ripples the water. At first it appears that the ripples are discordant, all criss-crossing and fusing together, but the thing is, they all have the same magnitude and spread at exactly the same frequency. I pick one out. That one's my tempo.
My fingers touch the keys, but there's nothing I can add here.
I imagine that lazy pink voice as an idle buoy. She says her line,
"Non pas ici; no, not here."
Kerplunk. That's a bright green splash. I know that shade of green. I strike then hold a single C-sharp to match.
