Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (20 page)

        no, she didn’t leave, we kissed goodbye, we kissed goodbye

Other notorious ballers, the Detroit Piston Bad Boys were known for their unforgiving physical style. One of Rick Mahorn’s tactics was to foul an opponent after another Piston had already fouled him and the whistle had blown. In a display of poor sportsmanship, they walked off the court, refusing to shake hands with the Bulls after losing to them in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals. The Pistons leave behind a vivid legacy and the league’s subsequent addition of the flagrant foul rule, granting the badly-fouled two shots and possession of the ball.

Legacies leave things behind. The left-behinds transform to the lost. None would know how Christ looked had the villagers not run to their huts inspired. Darwin patterns decorate more than exotic animals. The Toyota Camry slowly morphs to the more luxury look of the Lexus. A prominent Cadillac grill copied on a new Ford. Is this the same thing that gets daughters like mothers? Nowadays, teens are texting their picks for natural selection. The process of learning is a brain transmission of ideas, the original electricity of contact and understanding. Are Jesus paintings covers of Jesus paintings? Or of Jesus? One can argue
all
portraits as covers,
sunsets covers too
, a day a cover of the last, a year, a century. The USA is a cover of England. Football a cover of war. This links everything to a repetitive tradition. Lightning bolts assisted in this game of improvement. Saints no longer hoard ecstasy. iPod nanos spark bedrooms on fire. As Jimi Hendrix writes on a postcard home:

25

THE HUMAN SIDE OF
INSTRUMENTAL TRANSCOMMUNICATION

Wendy Brenner

GREETINGS, AND WELCOME
to the third annual Conference of the Instrumental Transcommunication Network. Special welcome to those organizations joining us this year for the first time: the Engineering Anomalies Research Society (“EARS”), the Electromagnetic Aberrations Research Society (also “EARS”), the Tinnitus Family, and Chronic Pain Anonymous. We are delighted to see such a large turnout—surely our growing numbers indicate that the validity of instrumental transcommunication is becoming apparent to even our most outspoken critics.

I would now like to share some thoughts about the meaning of this year’s conference theme, “The Human Side of Instrumental Transcommunication.” For myself, founder of the Instrumental Transcommunication Network, the answer to the question “Why use tape recorders, televisions, and computers to attempt to communicate interdimensionally with spirit beings?” has always been a highly personal one.

My involvement in the field began four years ago in St. Augustine, Florida, where I was vacationing with my wife and son, Nathan—who at that time was the only person in our family with a particular interest in recording equipment. Then seven years old, he already owned a dozen miniature tape recorders, and more cassettes than crayons. When he was only a baby he had discovered my wife’s little Panasonic portable from her journalism school days, digging it out of a box in the basement and screaming when we tried to pry it away. Thereafter, we bought tape recorders for him wherever we saw them, at thrift stores, flea markets, garage sales we happened to pass. They were cheap, we reasoned, too big to swallow, and Nathan couldn’t seem to get enough of them—he carried them around like hamsters and wouldn’t sleep without one or two in his bed. On his first day of kindergarten an entire wing of his school had to be evacuated when the tape recorder he kept in his windbreaker got stuck on fast-forward in the coatroom and was believed to be a ticking bomb.

He just had a way with those little machines. He could rewind or fast-forward any cassette tape to the exact spot he wanted on the first try, without using the counter device, and on long car trips my wife and I took turns requesting songs from the middles of tapes to keep him busy. He would sit on the floor under the dashboard and put his ear up next to the tape deck like a safecracker, and then his whole face would light up as though someone had flipped a switch behind it when he hit the right spot, pressed the play button and my wife’s favorite song came on once again, perfectly cued to the beginning. He never missed, and, like any good magician, he never told his secrets.

Interestingly, though, despite his love for junky cassette players, Nathan didn’t care at all for the brand new Walkman my wife’s mother bought him. His real love was for making tapes, not listening to them, we discovered, so we allowed him to make as many as he wanted. He recorded himself talking in different voices, acting out dramas full of coyotes, opera singers, helicopters, Mack trucks, nuclear emergency alert sirens, hives of angry bees. In his stories people had frequent arguments, and there were many slamming doors, much shouting to be let in or out.

He was so enthusiastic about his sound effects that he tended to neglect things like plot and logic, jumping from one sensational noise to another without explanation, rushing through dialogue and mixing up his voices so that half the time we couldn’t understand what any of his characters were saying, or even what was going on. “You’ll have to slow down and enunciate,” my wife, ever the good editor, would tell him, “because whatever you just said there is not a word.” But Nathan paid no heed. “If it’s not a word,” he argued, “then how come I just said it?”

Of course he could not have understood how meaningful that offhand remark would come to be, to so many of us. He was saying, of course, that
the act of communication is of greater significance than the means used to achieve it.
Who among us today has not felt deeply that very sentiment? But I digress.

On our trip to St. Augustine, I will always remember, Nathan wished for three things: to visit a Spanish war fort, to find and bring home an unbroken sand dollar, and to get the hotel maid to talk into his tape recorder. This was his first stay in a hotel since he was a baby, and he grew very excited when we explained to him that a lady was going to come into our room while we weren’t there and make our beds and leave clean towels for us. “A lady we know?” he asked, and when we told him no, a strange lady, he concluded it was the tooth fairy, or someone just like her, perhaps her friend. This was where they probably lived, he said—in Florida. We tried to explain the truth without letting on that the tooth fairy wasn’t real, but Nathan only grew more certain in his belief. Every morning before we left the hotel room to go down to breakfast or the beach, he set up one of his tape recorders on the dresser with this note:

Unfortunately, the woman never responded. Every night when we returned to the room Nathan ran to the recorder, but it had never been touched, and he grew more disappointed every day. We had already photographed him waving down at us from the parapet of the war fort, and he had not one but several perfect specimens of sand dollars wrapped in Kleenex like cookies and tucked for safety in our suitcase pockets. Yet these successes seemed only to make him more frustrated, as if this were some fairy tale where he had to satisfy an angry king. “Why didn’t she do it, why?” he cried to us, night after night. It was possible the cleaning lady didn’t speak or read English, we told him, or, more likely, she didn’t want to disturb the belongings of guests—or perhaps she never even saw the note, or realized it was intended for her.

Privately my wife and I discussed tracking this woman down and talking to her, or finding another hotel employee who would cooperate, or even disguising one of our voices and recording the message ourselves. We
had
written little notes to him from the tooth fairy, my wife said, and wasn’t this the same thing? But in the end we decided it was best to leave the situation to chance. Since we knew the maid was a real person capable of responding, we wanted her message, should it come, to be genuine. My wife eventually came to question this decision, but, as all of us here today undoubtedly understand, in such a situation integrity cannot be compromised, regardless of how desperately our hearts might long for different outcomes to our experiments.

Consider the pioneers in our field: Dr. Konstantin Raudive, who made over one hundred thousand separate recordings after hearing a single mysterious voice on a blank, brand new tape; or Friedrich Juergenson, who abandoned his successful opera-singing career so he could investigate electronic voice phenomena full-time after some strange voices speaking Norwegian turned up on a tape on which he had recorded bird calls. Falsifying results was never an option for these scientists, as it should never be for us.

Yet despite our faithfulness to the scientific method, we must not ignore the personal factor in these experiments—the human side of instrumental transcommunication. For the personal relevance of the message, when it finally comes, is often what establishes the message’s authenticity. Those of you who have already received such messages report that the sender will often use, as a kind of password, a phrase or nickname or piece of information that only he and you, the recipient, could know. Who can forget the message our esteemed colleagues Meek and O’Neil received on their Spiricom device, in the unmistakable voice of the deceased electronics specialist with whom they had worked for years: “The problem is an impedance mismatch into the third resistor—try a 150-ohm half-watt resistor in parallel with a .0047 micro-farad ceramic capacitor.” Or Dr. Raudive’s own unexpected message from the other side, which came through one night at home on the clock radio of the researcher who had been tirelessly advancing Raudive’s cause after his untimely death: “This is Konstantin Raudive. Stay on the station, tune in correctly. Here it is summer, always summer! Soon it will work everywhere!” It almost seems that the deceased senders of these messages answered the calls of the living, rather than vice versa, as is usually assumed.

In light of these considerations, I strongly contend that my wife and I were justified in our choice not to fake the maid’s voice on Nathan’s tape. We could not have known what was about to occur.

For those of you not familiar with my story, which was reprinted in last month’s newsletter, the paramedics who so heroically attempted to revive my son gave his cause of death as “generalized childhood seizure,” meaning he had stopped breathing before he went under-water, rather than afterward. My wife, who was swimming not far away at the time, agrees; otherwise, she says, he would certainly have splashed or kicked, or cried out for help. She maintains she certainly would have heard him. We did recover the tape recorder in a Ziploc bag that he was carrying so he could record underwater sounds, but he hadn’t sealed the bag properly, the whole thing was water-logged, and the cassette yielded nothing.

It might have been restored, of course, but my wife allowed the bag and its contents to be thrown away at the hospital—an oversight which some of us might find difficult to comprehend, but again, how could she have known? At that time, I myself knew nothing about instrumental transcommunication, not even that it existed. I knew nothing of the hours of research already completed, the extraordinary messages already received, the elaborate devices created by scientists and by ordinary men, like myself.

It was later that evening that the first seeds, as they say, were planted. To get back to our hotel we had to go through St. Augustine’s cobblestoned side streets, past the crowded displays of artisans; one fellow dressed as a blacksmith called out to us, “Smile! It can’t be that bad!” The very quality of the day’s light seemed different, smoky, like a film stuck on one frame, the edges burning and closing in. When we got back, my wife went into the bathroom and shut the door. Our room still smelled cheerfully of bananas and Sea & Ski. The TV was on, for some reason, muted and tuned to the closed-circuit bulletin board. A message was running across the bottom of the screen:
If you like what you are hearing, tune in 24 hours a day . . . If you like what you are hearing, tune in 24 hours a day . . .

That’s when I noticed the recorder on the dresser, the one Nathan had left for the maid. It was black and silver and shining in the TV’s cold blue light. But there was something off about it, I thought, as if it had been touched or moved by someone. Not the way he’d left it. Then, like a punch in the stomach: Of course! The maid’s message! She would have done it this time.
Of course
. I saw it all at once, in simple, clear progression, our lives laid out as in a comic strip, with everything—not just each day of our vacation, each day the maid had not responded, but each day of Nathan’s life, our lives, our parents’ lives before ours—leading up to
this
, this final square, this
joke
.

I had to hear it anyway. I pressed play and held my breath because it suddenly seemed too noisy, not right, and with my breath stopped I felt the air around me stop, the molecules stop popping, everything stop moving, so I could hear this awful answer, this stupid woman speak the words my son had written for her, too late. Instead, there was silence. Then, ever so faintly, something else, something so small, so familiar it seemed to come from my own body—but it could not have. It was breathing—Nathan, breathing. I waited for him to speak, to begin one of his stories, but he just went on breathing, as if he were just sitting there, reading his Sesame Street book, or lying on the floor, battling with his action figures. But
breathing
.

My wife was in the bathroom with the door closed. And my son, my son who I knew was dead, was breathing in my ear.

Like a DJ, God plays the impossible for us. I cannot speak for others, but that was how it began for me, founder of the Instrumental Transcommunication Network. I did not mistake the sound on the tape that night for the aspirations of a ghost, a message from the other side—but when I heard it, I knew such things were possible.

My wife was not there to receive the message. Was that only a fluke? Had she not been in the bathroom at that moment, I wonder, would she have heard it, too? Or did she leave the room on purpose, following some premonition, practicing a kind of willful deafness, the selective hearing of parents? It is impossible to say. Later, I brought home books for her—
Phone Calls From the Dead
,
The Inaudible Made Audible
in the original German, every seminal text in the field—but she refused to look at any of them. I might as well have handed her a stack of
Playboy
s.

At the time of our divorce, we catalogued Nathan’s tapes and stored them in a safe-deposit box so that I could continue my research, and so that she could listen to them for what her lawyer called “sentimental reasons”—an accusation, apparently.
I
am not the sentimental one, is the implication, not
human
, she has said. Yet it is she who refuses to take her own son’s call, a call I have no doubt he will make, is perhaps preparing to make this very moment. I am ready. Upstairs in my room in this hotel the most sensitive and sophisticated equipment available at this time—thanks to many of you here today—is in operation even as we speak, poised and ready to receive and safeguard the most tentative inquiry, the faintest nudge of sound.