The Tapes in the Tin

The Tapes in the Tin

I came up out of the damp basement with the rusted cookie tin held against my chest. Soot off the bottom of it printed black streaks down the front of my white sweater.

The living room was a mess of broken plaster and brick. Gray dust still hung in the air, lit by what was left of the afternoon coming through the window. Emily stood in the corner. She hadn't moved, her arms down at her sides, her face with no color in it, and she was looking at the pile of rubble at my feet the way you look at a grave somebody has opened.

I didn't look at her. I went around her and straight out to the bare yard in front of the house.

The north wind got in at my collar and did nothing about the heat in my head. I got in the car, set the tin on the passenger seat, and turned the key. The sedan rolled out of Milton along the dirt road, through the fog.

I couldn't open the tin in that house. That house had turned into a glass box with eyes set in the walls of it, and I needed a space of my own to look at whatever was locked inside.

I drove out to the edge of town and found a secondhand store wedged into a row of gray brick buildings. The place smelled like rotting wood and damp old clothes, and jazz came scratching out of a speaker box hung from the ceiling.

The old man behind the counter looked at me without any interest at all. I didn't haggle; I put a stack of small bills down and carried out a dual-deck cassette player, gray plastic with the paint worn off the corners and fine dust in the speaker cloth.

I went back in for blank tapes and came out with a shrink-wrapped brick of four, gray shells, $2 for the set. The old man rang it up without looking at the register. When I had the deck on the passenger seat and six D batteries in the back of it, the counter on side B read 0188, and there was nothing loaded on that side.

I went back to the car and parked under an old maple off the interstate. The fall rain started, hitting the roof one drop at a time. That steady sound covered the ringing that had been in my ears since the basement.

I took a breath and got old seat leather and wet weather. The lid had rusted into the groove, so I worked a fingernail under it until it gave.

Pop.

There was no money inside, no checks, nothing anybody could use for blackmail. Four black cassette tapes gone gray with age, and a small notebook in soft leather that smelled of mold.

I picked up the first tape. A strip of masking tape on the shell, pale yellow, with one number on it in India ink: 01.

Under the tapes the tin smelled like a coin held too long in a closed hand. The numbers on all four labels came out of the same pen, the down stroke of the 1 pressed hard enough to dent the masking tape. My father had written 01 and 02. The 03 and the 04 were in my mother's hand.

My hand was shaking. It took three tries before I could get my finger to press the deck open. I put 01 in and pushed Play with the flat of my hand.

Clack.

The plastic gears started to turn, hiss... hiss... Tape noise came through the old speaker in bursts. Then, after five seconds of nothing, a voice.

The Play key sat lower than the others and took the whole thumb to move. Between the words the tape noise came through in a flat band, the way a room sounds when nobody is standing in it. I checked the clock on the dash twice inside what I took for a minute. Nine minutes had gone.

It was my father's voice.

It was not the father I had kept from the years before that night. It was not the man with the low, warm voice who sat on the edge of my bed and held my small hand and said, over and over, "Breathe, James... take yourself out of the pain and it won't hurt you."

The voice coming out of the speaker was flat and level and had nothing moving under it. It had the cadence of a researcher reading findings to a medical board.

"October 14. Phase three report on the dissociative response in Subject A and Subject B." My father's voice held one pitch all the way through. "The dose of the volatile neural suppressant has been increased by 10 milligrams for Subject A, to shut down any resurfacing of the primary violent memories. The founding hypothesis stands unchanged. Creative work at the highest level and violent criminal behavior come from one biological source inside the same shell. We will separate it into halves and raise each half on its own."

I stayed where I was with both hands on the wheel. I looked through the windshield at the road and didn't take anything off it. The rain got further away.

Subject A? Subject B? Separate it into halves?

I rewound about 20 seconds and played the passage again. Then I played it a third time and put the words in order.

I hit stop. The dry clack cut his voice off. I took 01 out and put 02 in the deck.

My father kept reading. This time the dates and the details started to line up.

"Subject A is our biological son and carries the family line and its congenital dissociative tendency in full. Subject B was selected out of the state orphanage system after a long search. This needs to be stated plainly. Bringing Subject B into this house had nothing to do with compassion or with family feeling. B was chosen on neural sensitivity, on capacity for behavioral mimicry, and on an unusual compatibility of brain-wave activity with A under hypnosis."

My hands came off the wheel and I put them under my thighs, and they were still cold when the tape ran out. My father read the selection criteria for Subject B, a live child, in the voice a man uses to read the specs off the side of a box.

They hadn't adopted a child. They had gone out and collected a tool, a container to run their game in.

I put tape 03 in and pressed Play.

Rain had filled the curb and was running past the front tire in a thin brown line. Page six of the notebook had been cut out at the spine with a blade, one clean pass, and the stub was still seated in the binding.

The voice on this one took me longer to place.

It was my mother.

She used the soft, warm voice I had spent 31 years wanting to hear again in a dream. Here the warmth did something else. She was talking about Subject B the way she used to talk me down when I ran a fever as a boy.

"B got two new pages down today..." My mother laughed a little, and the laugh came through the torn speaker cloth. "What's remarkable is that the girl in B's story is killed in exactly the way A imagined it and carried it out in his dream. B knows nothing about that. He believes every one of those details came out of his own head."

"Hnh..."

A sound came up out of my throat and stopped there. I put my head down on the wheel and got both hands into my hair.

The panic took me under. Am I Subject A? Or am I Subject B?

If I was Subject A, then who was the child they called Subject B? The one they kept in the dark down there, the one who cut thousands of lines into the wall and sat playing Parcheesi alone underground. Where had he gone? Where were the novels B wrote back then? Had A killed people, at that age, so B would have material?

I grabbed the last tape, 04.

This one was short. The film inside it was creased and had gone cloudy. My father's voice came up, and the lab calm was gone out of it.

"We're past the control stage. A has found the research file in the basement. He's started to remember. We have to make the decision right now, before—"

Snap.

The tape broke inside the shell. The plastic gears kept turning with nothing on them, hiss... hiss... It stopped at that second and never got to the end of it.

I laid the notebook open on the passenger seat and photographed it a page at a time, lens about 10 inches up, wrist braced on the headrest. Thirty leaves, both sides. Then the four labels, one shot each, and the inside of the lid. The counter in the corner of the screen said 66 when I was done, and I had taken 65.

I set the phone face up on the dash with the microphone end against the speaker cloth. I rewound 01 to the start of the October 14 entry and recorded it through twice, 4:11 each pass. Then the selection criteria off 02, 2:40, and my mother on 03, 1:52. The rain on the roof came through on every one of them.

The deck had a dub key. I copied 01, 02 and 03 onto the blanks at double speed with the engine running, 11 minutes for the three. The film in 04 was snapped two inches in and I left it where it was. I tore four strips of masking tape, wrote the numbers on them in ballpoint, and stuck them to the copies, and the fourth copy had nothing on it.

I drove back into Milton at dusk with the cookie tin and the four tapes on the seat next to me. The rain came down harder and ran on the windshield in pale streaks.

I went into the kitchen and straight to the sink. I bent over it, got both hands on the cold steel edge, and threw up. Everything in me came up, and the sour of it burned the back of my nose.

I ran the faucet all the way open. I put my face into the water and rinsed my mouth with both hands, fast, over and over. The taste stayed where it was.

Then something else started up in me.

I stood up straight. I took a towel and dried my mouth. I looked at the mirror over the sink, at a face with no color in it, the eye sockets sunk, the whites of the eyes full of red lines.

I went out to the car before I did anything else in that house. I lifted the trunk mat, backed the wing nut off the spare, and set the tin down in the well underneath with the four tapes and the mold-smelling notebook closed inside it. There was a clean rectangle in the dust down there, about the size of a hardcover, where something square had been sitting. I carried in the copies and the black leather notebook out of the glove box and nothing else.

I walked back into the wrecked living room. I sat down at the desk, opened the leather notebook, and picked up my fountain pen.

And my fingers... started taking notes.

I held my breath and watched my own hand move across the page. I set down each term carefully: "Subject A", "Subject B", "neural suppressant", "splitting the instinct." I laid out the structure of the experiment and put the dates in order.

Twice while I was writing I stopped and turned the phone over to check the three files were still on it. 4:11, 2:40, 1:52. The lengths hadn't moved.

I got to the bottom of the second page before I stopped and read back what I had written. The handwriting was even, the margins were straight, and I understood what was actually moving in my chest.

Nothing in me had collapsed. The grief a man is supposed to feel when he learns his parents kept him as an experiment had not shown up at all.

What was coming up in me was the excitement of a writer who had found his material.

My own history, what my parents had done, two childhoods turned into a laboratory: the first thing my brain did with any of it was cheer.

"There it is. That's the best material I'll ever have. This is going to be the biggest book I've ever written."

I stopped writing. The nib had gone down into the paper, and the ink spread out around it in a black spot.

You're a monster, James. I said it to myself, flat, with nothing in it for me. You're disgusted by Emily, you hate your parents, and the dirtiest thing in this house is you. You've kept your career alive by chewing on your own damage.

I didn't forgive myself. I wasn't looking for an excuse anymore. Whatever this is in me went into the marrow in that house in Milton, 31 years ago.

Right then something moved at the edge of the living room doorway.

I looked up slowly.

Emily was leaning against the wood doorframe, and I hadn't heard her come. She had a thin gray cardigan on, and half her face was in the dark. She looked at me with none of the panic from that afternoon, only the tiredness of a jailer at the end of a long shift.

She didn't come into the room. She didn't ask what the tin was. She didn't ask where I had gotten the tapes.

From the doorframe she had a clean line on the whole desk: the notebook open at the second page, the fountain pen uncapped on the blotter, three gray cassettes stacked square, a fourth lying apart from them, the deck with its lid up. Five things. The tin was not in the house, and neither were the tapes with the India ink on them, and neither was the notebook that came up out of the basement. Her shoes were on, and wet across the toes.

Emily looked at the open notebook on the desk, and her eyelid twitched once. She lowered her voice and asked.

"How far did you get?"