The World's Loneliest String
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The archivist wore gloves of woven spider silk and catalogued sounds that had never been heard—treefalls in empty forests, arguments in abandoned houses, the particular frequency of unspoken apologies hovering in elevator air. He liked looking for new sounds and listening to old ones. He liked the soft weight of old paper, the sound of rat bones being clicked into the bin.
He tried to record the quality of our voices after we had been cruel to one another.
Each of our voices was so different. When you spoke to me, there were invisible flecks of light skimming the room where we
sat. Your voice was the sound of the door opening, of a foot on the bank of spring snow that appeared outside my window tonight, of fruit baskets left on the doorstep after everyone had forgotten your name. A favorite of the venerable archivist was a collection of recordings that he called The World’s Loneliest String. It was the sound of whispering in an empty auditorium.
And when you spoke to me, your voice never sat so still.
What was it you liked to sing, sitting on my cobblestone doorstep, your feet off the ground? “Love and Theft,” an album I hated. You stomped the strings like you had broken grandpas’ souls and gone blind. You didn’t seem even to notice me, sitting in an empty chair, listening to the dying voice of Charlie Parker’s alto saxophone just feet away from you, your footprints bleeding into the carpet of the sidewalk.
vii For the archivist, that took zealous scrawling. His records weren’t classified by year, number of drum rolls, or cymbals. To the archivist, these were all fluctuations of finite sounds that humans could not escape.
To the archivist, it is absurd that we should expect a response, that we should think anyone kept track of us. In the space of one hazy evening, two hours after a Spanish drink spill, past a convergence of men looking for love and the girl they’re looking for, into a darkened church, the strange feel of cross slats on one’s fingers, the soft ticking of the clock and spiders in candles, until the glass shattered and the fire bloomed, the entire night in that church turned into a sequence of teachings. For the archivist, the rhythmic speaking in that church, uncertain acoustics and whispered apologies, might have been an affidavit—a Jews’ testimony of the world. What seemed important to us was its inaudibility—the sounds we muted so inaudibly our lives became protean because of it.
x More than seventy percent of stories take place on the street. The other thirty percent is a string of inconsistencies reaching through the mountains. The story split us like a rock, like a moon, like the universe. And the way we solve problems and the story is the same everywhere. In the stories we create when we desire each other or don’t. Streetlights, and street noise, no longer felt like an intrusion into our apartment, because with the lights shining through somber windows in regular intervals, it felt as if our world had only ever been a distraction to the outside world. There was then a story our streets could only have. In the summer, when the sun was high, I stayed in my room. I wrote. I invented explosions. I allowed imagined collisions and light-shows to bloom around our building. And when it began to thunderstorm, I pulled my blinds, thick cotton though they were. I lit candles and waited, waiting to see if you would knock at my door. You never did. You didn’t need to. You waited for me to walk out into the storm, summon the courage to stand under a branch that was going to fall, summon the courage to lean inside, where you were waiting. I ran on gut instinct down the frozen steps, where you were waiting. I professed to you the names I’d been thinking of too often to say out loud, how I’d tacked photos of people into the curtains, how opening curtains sometimes summoned people into the
space where before there had been none. You never answered. You did not say my name.
xi Strange, we never thought about noise. And there was noise.
There was always noise. I stopped mid-sentence one afternoon as your chirping phone ran my words over and over in my head.
You cringed. “I can’t,” you began to say, “I can’t do this,” your phone continued ringing. You walked over and snapped the phone over your knee. I stared at the leftovers we’d thrown away. You said nothing.
xii Silence hung in our apartment, but it was not of the kind men pride themselves on encountering.
A two-day silence isn’t substantial. But do you know what silence looks like after five years of noises? Giggles, late night calls, texts indicating the slightest of touches, a reenacted joke that only two people might fully remember—it’s in everything. Those first few years were either days of silence or noise.
My hair given to the hairbrush. Loose pigments dissipating into your closet floor.
Just musings on a page. Lemon skins. A boiled egg. Four cups of coffee. The smell of sandalwood. Chipped paint. Sad, empty cans littering the living room.
xiii Books, the archivist would say, were the masks of writers. On the
first day, our project ignored every wall. We◆ About the ending
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