Paulie lets the strings of his sweatshirt go slack; his face opens while he considers the gravity of this, and the camera hovers on his eyes and lips again. Then the great hole of his mouth flaps open and in a flash he’s gone—“What is that bug?” yelled from just off-screen—and replaced by a peeling patch of paint. The camera, exhausted, remains in place while exclamations continue. There is, inevitably, a bang, a silence. Edward’s sigh fills the sonic space. The film cuts.
Over weeks and then months, the cache of recorded bits of life accrued. Paulie in full color, making his way down their street in the first hints of spring, backpack so high it almost meets his head, stopping to crouch at chalky, budless flowerboxes and yelling, “Hey in there, unborn motherfuckers!” and the sound of Edward’s sniggering at his influence on Paulie’s vocabulary. Paulie in a quiet moment on the stoop, leafing through Popular Science with eyes wide: “Ed, do you think you could really trust something that reproduced with itself?” Paulie prone on Edward’s visibly lumpy red cotton couch, asleep, one arm dangling off as though to exhibit his watch, the arms of which forever circle a miniature Aldrin and Armstrong taking a giant leap for mankind. Paulie on his thirty-third birthday, wearing a conic and glittering hat as well as the tie Claudia has fashioned him from streamers, standing at his keyboard, triumphant, hammering away.
Late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, Edward let these play back, sometimes stopped to edit, trim a life down to its brightest core. Other nights he turned off all other sources of light, the standing lamp and the screen of his phone and the microwave display, and just watched.
BEFORE THOMAS HAD HEARD HER CRYING, he’d heard her singing. He hadn’t mentioned it when she had first begun taking him in, reaching across his chest and squeezing as they slept, but sometimes when she spoke to him it recalled the strain of her voice, through the wall, reaching a note, of the guitar rising to meet it. Only two or three sung words had ever reached his apartment from hers, few enough that they could have come from the street, or a film played at a low volume somewhere in the building.
He was curious, wanted to hear her, but there were so many other unanswered questions—Who had she been before this? What had driven her to a life so compacted?—and so he had not asked her about the sounds, which trembled high and faded slowly. Dustless old guitars, steel strings taut on smooth wood, leaned here and there around her apartment, and he looked at them with something akin to lust, knowing they’d interacted so closely with the pulsing of her throat and the pursing of her mouth.
After seeing her play and sing at Edith’s party, he’d begun to feel greedy. He wanted to experience that sound alone, watch her long fingers curl and move up and down the neck, to hear her voice without the interruptions of drunk people. So when he found the bulging notebook wedged between the thick novels on her nightstand, the careful lists in her inconsistent handwriting, he was hungrier than usual, less gentle, more insistent.
“Adeleine,” he called to her where she stood in the kitchen, boiling water in a faded tin kettle and soaping some mugs. “What is this?”
If she was angry at the invasion of privacy, she didn’t let on, save the way she tugged gently at her left ear. “Oh,” she said. “Just songs.” He urged her to go on, appearing behind her, gesturing in tight circles with his index and middle fingers, smiling slightly to relax her. She sighed and settled on a high kitchen stool covered in dark green, beaten leather.
“They’re songs about the things I’ve found. I try to give each of them a story.”
His eyes scanned some of the titles on the page.
Rolodex (red)
Photo (three children, one lawn chair, 1962)
Jar of Marbles (19)
Circus Music box (chimpanzee and bicycle)
Beneath them were lyrics in her tight, variously spiked hand, many words crossed out.
“Are you trying to tell me you’ve written songs for all the objects in your house?”
“Not quite all of them.”
And then, as though in defense of some weaker life form: “They deserve it.”
Thomas sensed her resistance spreading and tried to remove the judgment from his voice. He wanted to find the noble aspect of her motivation, to justify it as she had. Where had she found them, he asked. Did she mean to repurpose them, or tell their original stories, or try to imagine the people who had owned them?
She dismissed him curtly, crossed one knee over the other and glanced somewhere over his left shoulder. “It’s intimate.”