Read Online Quiver by Tobsha Learner - Free Book Online

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.
    Q UIN
    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.
    M ACK
    The next morning I come in around six. Something’s bugging me about the way the speakers sound in studio two. So I’mstumbling down the corridor, hungover, with my jeans dragged over my pajamas, smelly teeth and bare feet. Times like this I wish I was married. I check into studio two, switch the lights on and activate the desk. I glance in the direction of Quin’s studio.
    I’m peering through my bloodshot retinas and what do I see—Quin, head slumped over the controls. Apparently lifeless. Listen, if you’ve handled as many overdoses as I have you go into automatic pilot. In a flash I’m in there, pulling Quin’s head back by the hair, contemplating the risks of mouth-to-mouth, when the bastard wakes up with a scream. I nearly pass out with shock.
    “Don’t do that again, you hear me!”
    “Do what?”
    “Play dead like that!”
    “I was sleeping, for Christ’s sake!”
    You know, sometimes these encounters are fated. Like at that moment I felt there was some kind of weird acid flashback. Like I said, at times like this I wish I was married.
    As for Quin, he was the walking dead. He just grabbed his cassette and stumbled out into the morning, his shades wrapped around that white face of his. And something goes
stop