Wallflowers (5 page)

Say again, Jet Blue?

Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.

=

The
Oregonian
featured the accident front page. I bought a copy at lunch. The girl’s on A3: BACKUP SINGER DIES IN PLANE CRASH. In the photo, she’s surrounded by honeycomb. Her hair’s the same colour. Yellow in the wax light, how sun warms through a sheet of gold tack.

=

Case #1734512

Name: VERNON, Joy

Age: 19

Race: white

Sex: female

Cause of death: cerebral hypoxia

 
due to: asphyxiation

 
due to: aspiration of water into the air passages

Manner of death: drowning

=

In the autopsy photo, her eyes are open. Brown irises. Eyes like wood like warm like walnut. Report says sclerae clear. Report says ears pierced once each lobe and nose unremarkable.

=

She sang backup for Fiona Apple, says the newspaper. And LuAnn de Lesseps. She also released a single of her own, which you can purchase on iTunes for $1.29.

=

My sister sang before she married. Christian pop, which her manager sold as gospel. We weren’t religious. Our car had a Darwin fish. But her manager said there was a market. He said, “Praise radio will eat her up with double ketchup and a side of fries.”

I never liked him. He wore T-shirts with milk stained down the front. “Cheerios,” he’d say. “Sometimes it’s so hard to get them in the mouth.”

=

The new linguist started today. She’ll analyze the resonant frequencies of vocal tracts. “F-values,” she calls them. How we form words from the lips and the teeth and the tongue and the lungs. She combs her hair very smooth. I think she must use a bun setter.

I brought a coffee to her computer station to introduce myself. I said, “Well, if it doesn’t work out here, I think the CIA is hiring.”

She typed the rest of her sentence, then pointed to the small ceramic pig on her desk. It had a Post-it note. The Post-it said
Cunning Linguist Jokes $1.

She’s bright. But she knows she’s bright, which makes it less attractive. Still.

=

We work in the basement, where you don’t see the sun. You see: two computer monitors with equalizer waves; desks made from highly recyclable aluminum; ergonomic chairs, whirly. Our lab is fragrance free and climate controlled, volume controlled, light controlled. Plants cannot grow here. We keep a synthetic lemon tree by the vending machine.

=

To isolate the voices on a CVR tape, you have to clear the extraneous noise in layers. The engine roar, the static. Like filing sand off a fossil, stratum by stratum. Blowing off the dust. Audio archaeology, let’s say. Let’s say Indiana Jones.

I like to listen to routine takeoffs and landings. The pilots sound like performance poets. I picture them crinkled over the control board in black berets, anemic fingers snapping, clasping espressos, eyes cast to the far corner, too cool for contact, for the stewardess with the pretzels and the can of V8.

Flaps five.

Flaps five.

Flaps one.

Flaps one.

Flaps up.

Say what?

Flaps up.

Flaps up.

=

My sister toured once, ten years ago, after her junior year of high school. She hit the major towns on the praise radio circuit. Lubbock, Texas, to Lynchburg, Virginia. “Lynchburg,” I had said when she showed me her itinerary. “Lynchburg?”

She shrugged. “They have the world’s largest evangelical university.”

The tour was eight weeks, to private Christian schools and rodeos. Her merch team sold chastity rings. She brought me home a mug that said TEAM JESUS and filled it with prayer jellybeans. Red for the blood you shed. Black for my sinful heart. Yellow for the Heaven above, and so on. I still have them. I think she meant it as a joke.

She died in childbirth. A C-section that led to a blood clot that led to a stroke. We talked on the phone the night before. She told me they had painted the nursery yellow, which the decorator described as String. She said that yellow can be shrill; it’s hard to get yellow right. She said she got it right. She said, “You know the colour of a wheel of lemon when you hold it to the sun?” I said, “Perfect. Have you settled on a name?” She said, “Yes. Jaime. Because on paper it reads like
j’aime.
”

=

Jaime turned four last month. I talked to her on Skype. When she grins, she thrusts her chin at you like a goat. I can picture her in a garden this way, neck craned to the sun, like day lilies and sunflowers. Heliotropism, I think it’s called.

=

After lunch, I found Joy Vernon’s single on YouTube. The song is called “Delilah,” the video shot at her father’s bee farm. She sings against a barn wall in a breezy shirt dress, and she picks her banjo. A low, pinging banjo, against that wall, and her voice is blue and dusky.

Halfway through the video, I felt a brush at my elbow, and I turned to find April the new linguist behind me in her chair. She had wheeled it from her desk across the aisle. I shifted, and she rolled nearer.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” she said when the video ended.

“Yes,” I said.

“Could you play the song again?”

I dragged back the Play bar. We watched the video from the start. Bees in the wisteria. Joy’s hair in her eyes as she bows to see the strings.

“Carrot slice?” said April. She had packed her lunch in a bento box. Everything compartmentalized. A slot for the chopsticks.

“Thank you.” She passed a carrot into my palm. It looked carefully cut. On a diagonal, the edge serrated.

“I used to work in homicides,” she said. “Voice ID from emergency phone calls, and so on.” We still faced the computer screen—Joy at the barn again, strumming the banjo between verses. “This one case, the vic was an opera singer.” She paused to snap her lunch box. “I never liked opera. But after a week on the case, I ordered her recording of
Evita
online. I listened to the tracks over and over.”

I nodded. The YouTube video had ended. April turned to me. Her cheeks looked worn somehow, smooth and unsunned, but as if the skin was pulled too tightly to her ears.

She continued, “When you replay a voice in evidence for eight hours a day, you can almost know the person. And when you catch a glimpse of their life before, you get immersed. I get immersed. In the knowing of them.”

I stared at her.

She looked down. “Maybe that’s unprofessional.”

When she raised her eyes, I was still staring. She held the eye contact. In that moment, I understood that she understood that I understood everything she said.

=

I often see her at the vending machine. She never buys anything, but she slides her eyes over each item through the glass. I stopped once. When she noticed me, she turned toward the elevator. I said, “Too many choices?” and she smiled and waggled her lunch kit.

=

You get into the habit of transcription: sound of Smarties dispensed from the machine, sound of Coke can, sound of leather soles on a vinyl floor. Sometimes you try to adjust the levels. At the crosswalk, when I race a yellow light. Sound of honk. At home, when the neighbours yell and one of them unhooks the fire extinguisher. Sometimes my fingers stretch for the mouse.

=

After work today, I returned to the newspaper stand and bought the last fifteen copies of the
Oregonian
. I don’t know why. But they were only a dollar each.

=

For Jaime’s fourth birthday, I mailed an Easy-Bake Oven. She loved it. The cookie dough turns pink. She said to me on Skype, “This present is my number two favourite.” But I want to send a gift I didn’t find on page one of the Toys “R” Us flyer. Origami, maybe. Her mother loved origami. I have this Polaroid of her folding paper swans—thirty of them—for her classmates on Valentine’s Day instead of cards or cinnamon hearts. Are four-year-olds into paper?

=

My sister and I bought ants on television once.
An entire colony, queen included
. We converted our fish tank into a two-storey formicarium—poured plaster over a plastic wall, over the clay tunnels we had shaped with our palms. Plus leaves and sand. The leaves you call “forage,” plant material for grazing livestock, a term we adopted. Livestock. Can’t play soccer after school—have to check the herd.

She sang for them. I played rhythm: chopsticks on an empty plastic jug. The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah. Work songs. You could watch them for hours, and sometimes we did. The entire colony shimmering through the chambers, a still black line, though every ant moved. Frames of celluloid projected on a screen, like a river, like blood cells. How motion can be static—it gets you thinking.

When we spotted an ant too close to the cheesecloth, she would fetch petroleum jelly from the bathroom, and we fingered streaks of it around the lip of the aquarium. I told her they harvested Vaseline from jellyfish.

She said, “Do not.”

I said, “Do too,” and smeared a daub of it into her bangs.

We later experimented with radio and production speed. Which is to say, crawling. Which is to say, with speakers situated on either side of the formicarium, do ants file faster to the “Imperial March” or ABBA? The study proved inconclusive.

After a couple of months, the plaster moulded and ants found their way into the kitchen, into the paper sack of flour and the dried figs. My mother made me dump the tank in the park “at least two blocks from our house.” My sister started piano. She signed up for voice lessons twice a week with an Italian woman who sang off-Broadway. I took up coin collection. There was money in coins. Ha, ha.

=

And they all go marching down.

To the ground.

To get out of the rain.

=

A quick hello from your cockpit crew. This is Flight 166 with service to New York. We’ll be flying at thirty-eight thousand feet, mostly smooth, for four hours and fifteen minutes, takeoff to landing.

=

I’ve heard the cabin safety announcement so often I could probably be a flight attendant. In preparation for departure, please be certain your seat back is straightened and your tray table stowed. There are a total of eight exits on this aircraft: two door exits at the front of the aircraft, four window exits over the wings, and two door exits at the rear of the aircraft. To start the flow of oxygen, reach up and pull the mask toward you. Place the mask over your nose and mouth. Place the elastic band over your head. The plastic bag will not inflate.

=

I have this shirt with a soundboard printed on the front. The caption says “I know what all these buttons do.” I think a pilot could wear this shirt also.

=

Today April wears a wool sweater the colour of eggshells, the colour of string. She’s hennaed her hair very red. Poppy, I’d say. I think she must attract hummingbirds.

At break I stopped behind her at the vending machine and watched her scan the items. I don’t even think she brought her wallet. I stood there for a full minute before I caught her staring at me through the glass.

She turned. “Go ahead. I’m not in line.”

“Me neither,” I said.

She shifted her eyes to the potted plant.

“You know they’re scented?” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The lemons.”

She drew her eyes to the yellow baubles of plastic fruit.

“Real wood too,” I continued. “We voted for it last year. They emailed options from a catalogue.”

The elevator dinged open and one of the techs from the fifth floor strolled out behind us. April stepped for the door. I stepped with her.

“What were the other options?” she said.

“Orange.” I walked inside the elevator and leaned against the far wall. “Banana. Bamboo.”