LE STUDIO D’ORPHÉE

An empty apartment with exposed brick walls. Shattered glass in both south-facing windows. A pale grey sky beyond. The distant sound of traffic, faint but constant. At each side of the room, a tape deck rested on a small glass table and plugged into an electric socket behind. A male voice plays on the left tape deck. A female voice plays on the right. A dog is barking in the distance. 

SIDE A [00:00:00]

[RIGHT TAPE DECK CLICKS AND RESTARTS] I called him Orpheus. (Sound of faint laughter) [DOG CONTINUING TO BARK] It was the way he kept looking at me. (Sound of a cigarette being lit and inhaled. Faint rustling.) I wonder why I ever came to this place. Are you from here? (Silence) Where did you get those shoes? You can’t have got those here. Those shoes don’t belong in a place like this. [LEFT TAPE DECK CLICKS AND PLAYS BUT NO SOUND] My mother, she liked nice shoes too. She wanted me to wear pointe slippers. Have you heard of them… pointe slippers? (Silence) They’re pretty little slippers for pretty little ballerinas. She was absolutely determined, my mother. She would bind my feet. She bought these bandages from the internet, from Hong Kong I think, and in the morning, she would wrap them tighter and tighter. [RAIN STARTS OUTSIDE] The smell of it. All the blood. [LEFT TAPE DECK BEGINS TO MAKE CRACKLING SOUND] It would rush to my head and I thought I was dreaming. My vision would change. Colours and sounds. (Sound of cigarette being inhaled) It would all shift outside the window and the whole city looked like magpie feathers, oily turquoise. I fainted when the bone snapped. Didn’t scream once. I think she was proud. But sports are just obedience, right? [LEFT TAPE STARTS] (Sound of rhythmic music, distant, percussive, quiet at first) [RAIN CONTINUES] ... 

[INTERLUDE 00:18:52]

[SPEECH CONTINUES FROM RIGHT TAPE DECK] I can hear it now… (Rhythmic music steadily increasing in volume, becoming warped and distorted) [A DOG BARKING IN THE DISTANCE] A large cloister of shuffling feet, to-ing, fro-ing, sheltering from the rain. Rainfall, in streams, one on each side of the covered promenade; accumulating, draining, running parallel to the concourse. The pitter-patter of feet. The pitter-patter of rain. (Distortion) The crowd filled the length of the cloister. I was on hands and knees looking for something lost. A few feet away, I saw you stumble over an object on the floor and our eyes met within the clamour of footsteps. (Prolonged distortion) [A MALE VOICE] I think I might have found your […] (Sound of laughter) [A FEMALE VOICE] That’s exactly what you said. [MALE VOICE] Sorry, I asked if this was yours. [FEMALE VOICE] Yes, you know it is. (Distortion) [MALE VOICE] Sorry, I don’t think we have met. [FEMALE VOICE] Don’t you remember? (Sound of laughter) When we first met, I said: “Oh, I didn't think I was going to find you,” but I meant “I didn't think I was going to find IT.” It was so embarrassing. (Grinding sound as tape mechanism sticks) [MALE VOICE] I didn’t think I was going to find you now. [FEMALE VOICE] So you do remember? (Distortion, tape restarts) [MALE VOICE] Sorry, I don't know why I said that. I should… Here’s your slipper [FEMALE VOICE] Please, no don't go! We haven't got long? (Sound of a buzzer from somewhere far away) NO! [LEFT TAPE DECK SHUTS OFF] (Faint sound of sobbing)

END RECORDING [00:32:09]

SIDE B [00:00:00]

[RIGHT AND LEFT TAPE DECKS CLICK AND RESTART] (Sound of buzzer again then a door clicking opening. Footsteps on tiles.) [LEFT TAPE DECK CLICKS AGAIN] It’s you again. (Silence. Chair legs scraped across tiles.) You must like it here. (Silence) How much do they pay for this kind of work? (Silence) I bet they pay OK. (Fizzing sound of a can opening) The man in the next room, the fat one with the head-plate. He said I could drink. How did he get that plate? [DOG BARKING IN DISTANCE] I knew this lifeguard once, down at the coast. His life was basically fishing out corpses over the summer before the smell got too much for the luxury resort at the other side. He had one of those old Smith & Wesson but kind of missed. And they just glued it all back together like muesli. [TRAFFIC BECOMES LOUDER. SOUND OF RAIN.] She loved the rain. If it rained, we spent all day in bed and watched the shadows swim down the wall. Tadpoles. There was this little patch of damp in the corner. [RIGHT TAPE DECK CRACKLES] I don’t know if it was all the cocaine at the time but I thought I could control the weather. And she believed me too. [FEMALE VOICE] He took me on holiday to Mexico once. He liked to hike and fuck in the sunlight. [MALE VOICE] There was this leak in the kitchen sink but somehow it came through the bedroom ceiling. It finally looked like this faint silhouette. When I was fucking her, sometimes I looked up at the blank face in the wall. [SOUND OF BIRDS] Unreachable. [FEMALE VOICE] There were ruins that the tour guide showed us, recommended through Airbnb. It was an Aztec plateau at the top of a hill that had once been a great pyramid. Now there was a wooden seated area and a smoothie bar. (Faint sound of music) [MALE VOICE] I remember how she was standing in the middle of the city. I hadn’t taken any cocaine but I think she’d smoked some heroin. She kept quoting the Gilgamesh poem. (Belches) [FEMALE VOICE] They made these idols covered in seeds and honey and human blood. They ate the image of their own god. [LEFT TAPE DECK ACCELERATES AND THEN SLOWS] [MALE VOICE] She was convinced I made the sun appear. What was the horrible line from the poem? (Silence) The dream was marvellous but the terror was great. [LEFT TAPE DECK CRACKLES AND REPEATS] She was standing in the middle of the city. (Faint rustling) She was standing… (Distortion)… middle of the... (Distortion)…

[INTERLUDE 00:25:34]

[SECOND MALE VOICE] There is a reason I have come. There is a reason I am telling you all this. (Sound of cigarette inhaling) Your friends, your family. Animals are not safe. [DOG BARKING] There is a great threat that pervades all and transforms everything it touches into culture. (Silence) I want to teach you how to exceed the culture it pervades. (Silence) Everything as deterritorialized-affection transformed. Find it now in dreams. Take it and make it unknowable. Attention-reproduction, perception-boundaries alike. [SOUND OF BIRDS] Come to the covering, early before the-everything-explosion. See everyone fall to their knees. See the rain, black like midnight miles. [RIGHT TAPE DECK CRACKLES] Where trees are fish plunged. (Sound of distant laughter) Where the scared carry an island on their backs. Where we are birds of the caught water. See lieutenants fly blind and take carcass-cover over the bones lagoon. Churn and burn with us after formation. Black roots boiling. An evil fire inside. Join us, just sodden and ordinary people gathered around melted fingers and detonated birds. Magpies. [LEFT TAPE DECK CRACKLES AND REPEATS] She was standing in the middle of the city, like a burial plot held in perpetuity. A hole dug deep for me and only for me, and always for me. [SOUND OF BIRDS] [FEMALE VOICE] What does he look like now? Can you tell me? [MALE VOICE] Does she still smoke? She moved like a dancer. [FEMALE VOICE] I called him Orpheus because he kept looking at me to see if I’d escape. He was scared I would leap through the air and out the window. I saw him look at me from across the room at a party once and I froze on the spot. He made me into a statue. The stain in the wall. [SECOND MALE VOICE] This is a warning. I came here on a thundercloud. [MALE VOICE] How did she describe me? (Silence) Tell me. [SECOND MALE VOICE] A hole dug deep for me and only for me, and always for me. [RIGHT TAPE DECK CRACKLES] [FEMALE VOICE] I saw him look at me from across the room. [BOTH TAPES CLICK AND STOP IN UNISON]

[END RECORDING 00:44:09]

A faceless man with a briefcase enters the apartment. He takes a brush out from a cupboard on the far wall and sweeps up broken glass beneath the windows. The wind continues to batter outside and the rain intensifies. He removes each cassette tape, first from the left-hand deck and then the right. He opens his briefcase with an unknown code and places each tape inside. Outside the rain grows louder, a dog is barking. Sound of traffic.

by Matthew Kinlin & Daniel Harlow

Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works are Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press), Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press), The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit) and Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books).

Daniel Harlow is the founder and editor of Fugitives and Futurists as well as a founding member of AI literary project DeepSNAKES