How long? Six months. From Sydney’s winter to the beginning of Sydney’s summer. Six months of audio paradise.
During the day I walked around in a trance, the sound of her orgasm still echoing in my ears from the night before. It was the nearest thing I’d ever experienced to happiness. I felt myself softening under the continual stream of beautiful cadences, harmonics, arias and extended solo notes. They threaded through the house like glistening spider webs. I mean, Jesus, I became poetic. Religious even.
One morning in the bath, I decided that if God had a sound it would be the sound of Felicity’s orgasm. I’m telling you, I would have married this woman.
MACK
We had a Christmas booze-up that year, the usual orgiastic affair with the odd overdose in the back toilet. I can remember that one vividly because that was the only time I got to meet Felicity.
By now Quin had actually stopped smoking. He even told a client off for swearing—a heavy-metal singer renowned for the tattoo on his penis bearing the legend TIGER LOVES TAIL. Tiger was not amused.
Neither was I. I mean, this was business. OK, the guy could hum a perfect A, but I couldn’t have him alienating my clients. But sentiment is a powerful thing. Besides, there weren’t that many guys I could listen to Patti Smith with. So I decided to give him another six-month trial before firing him. That was between me and my karma.
So I’m sitting there, can of beer in one hand, joint in another, a gorgeous blonde number on my lap, listening to this really cute female country and western singer giving a feminist reading of Christmas—a deconstruction that cast the Virgin Mary as the true Messiah, Jesus Christ as the parasitic male invader and the Holy Spirit as an amorphous death wish. And I’m kinda focusing on this high concept of cunt worship. The blond babe is wriggling nicely at every mention of Christ, and the dope is cool, very cool. At that moment, Quin walks in with his mother.
At least I thought it was his mother, I mean what’s a guy to assume when he sees his best mate with a short, comfortably stacked female around forty-five? So I’m leaping up, stashing the dope, brushing the coke off my beard, getting ready to give Mum a kiss on the cheek, when Quin says, “Mack, meet Felicity.”
Mack, meet Felicity!
I’m struck dumb for a solid five minutes, and then this creature, this harridan that has destroyed my best friend’s life, opens her mouth and says in the sweetest, juiciest pitch I’ve ever heard, “Mack, you’re famous around our house.”
And I find myself looking around for a six-foot black siren with melon breasts and a wasp waist, until she whispers again in saccharine tones, “Surely Quin’s told you about me?”
Her magical voice still suspended in the air, I realized then that Quin was a marked man, possibly the new Messiah, lost to the cause. He will die for his ears. Like I said, it was great cocaine.
Three weeks later I’m locking up the studio. You know, pacing down the corridors, switching off lights, pulling shut the padded door.
Down the end I can see the lights still on in Quin’s studio. Night owl, I’m thinking, and a little part of me starts hoping that perhaps he’s reverting back to the lovable neurotic insomniac he once was, in his torn leather jacket and matted dreadlocks, emerging like a phoenix. You get these thoughts late at night in the studio. Maybe it’s just turning forty-three, who knows.
So I walk in and there he is, bent over the desk like a possessed shaman, headphones engulfing his narrow head.
“How’s it going?” I ask, but he’s gone, twitching to a barely audible sound track. It’s the final mix of Taunting Tongues. I check the needles on the dials; none are over. Quin’s the ultimate acrobat when it comes to balancing sound. It is then that I notice the cassette. I lift it up and am just deciphering Quin’s black scrawl when he snatches it out of my hand. Quickly, really quickly—and I thought he was lost to the music.
“C’mon,” I say, “what’s this? The unreleased final Elvis track? Michael having sex with his monkey?”
Quin says nothing. He just sits on that cassette, man, slams the headphones back on and points me out of there. Six months, I’m thinking to myself. Like I own that joint.
QUIN
From beyond the headphones I can barely hear Mack’s footsteps fading. Gone. Left alone. At last. I turn toward the mixing desk. It gleams in the dark. It is my control panel. My cockpit. In here I have the agility of a Harrier fighter. I spin, thin and powerful as my fingers dart from one track to another. In here I am master of the universe.
I love this desk. It’s the oldest in the studio, conceived of long before digital audio technology. Hidden somewhere behind that gleaming panel are a few glowing valves. I can feel them through the metal. Comforting beacons of rationality, promising real sound, not some computerized semblance of noise. Mack thinks the desk is haunted by the ghost of an audio engineer, electrocuted while mixing an acid-rock band in the late sixties. I don’t care. He was probably a great guy. He must have been, if he loved my desk.
I control all.
In goes the cassette. Black and streamlined, it slots in perfectly. Machine sex, an intercourse of microchip and plastic. The sound of Felicity’s climax belts out from the huge speakers, reverberating around the padded walls. She sounds like a choir of vibrating harps. I stop the tape, rewind and play again.
I lay the track down on one channel, then play it back an octave higher and at twice the speed. The result is a rap, celestial but erotic.
Now for the strings. Carefully pushing the controls, slower, slower, I weave the sounds together, pulling up the cello. It will play behind the climax, its low, wailing tone threading through the descent. At that speed the pleasure translates as anguish. I plait the cello over the original track, creating a Greek chorus of wailing strings and human voice. Then I overlay the descent, high-speed version. I breathe a short prayer before playing it back—a prayer to instinct, to the intuitive ear, the only gift I have. It works. It is a carnal cantata. Felicity’s orgasm is the eye of the storm, the tracks above and below it echoing and roaring like furious winds.
I grow hard. I am dictator. Conductor to a whole quartet of dewy-eyed, panting mezzo-sopranos, aggressive contraltos and one acquiescing falsetto.
I close my eyes and reach for the drum machine.
Nothing is sacrosanct. So I had the cassette, so I changed it. Maybe I wanted to play God. We all need to at some time in our lives. I was innocent. Like Einstein, I just wanted to improve on nature.
MACK