LJ Idol Exhibit B.10: Beneath the surface...
"Son, you mind telling me what it is that has so completely captured your attention since we left Kansas City?" said Mordecai Collins, as he guided the truck he was driving off the Interstate. The young man in the passenger seat, whose name was Bill and who was, in fact, no relation to Mordecai, looked up from his iPad, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"I've been reading about some legendary Hungarian gypsy tune that's supposed to make people feel so sad they want to commit suicide," he said. "It's part of some research I'm doing to fine-tune the act by adding some sound effects."
"So playing music that'll have people want to do away with themselves while watching my 'Amazing Mordecai' act would be beneficial, exactly, how-?" asked Collins.
"Don't be a jerk," said Bill, though Mordecai was old enough to be his father. "I'm researching how sound affects people-and audiences."
"Sounds like a gimmick to me," said Collins, and then: "You really think there's anything to it?"
"Yes, I do," said Bill, "but it's hard wading through all this stuff-there are no definitive answers, except maybe for this gypsy tune thing, which is almost certainly a myth. There are people who swear that music played in minor keys-and D minor in particular-makes people sad, but others disagree. One piece I read debunked the idea with examples from Spinal Tap, Miles Davis, and Eric Clapton."
"All very fascinating, I'm sure," said Collins. "Is there a bottom line to all your 'research'?"
"Hey, research doesn't necessarily have a 'bottom line', y'know?" said Bill. "But in the long run, it could come in handy."
"In the long run, kid, we'll all be pushing daisies," said Collins.
"That's as may be, but your act still needs updating."
"One step at a time, junior" said Collins. "I realized, back when I hired you, that the act needed to be reinvented, and you've made a lot of decisions that turned out well. You said: 'Get rid of the capes,' so I did. No capes. You said: 'Touch up the hair,' so I did, and now I don't look so much like a geezer. And branching out from straight read-your-mind mentalism to include a 'speak to the dead' spiritualism segment at the end was sheer genius, the way people lap it up. By the way, how big did the book on this next stop turn out to be?"
By "the book," Mordecai was referring to a printout of information about a town and its inhabitants, which had been collected on the Web by a group of "intelligent software agents" programmed by Bill to gather certain kinds of information that could be skillfully exploited by Collins while pumping audience members and purporting to speak with the dead.
Bill answered the question and was happy that Mordecai had changed the subject. He wasn't eager to mention the new infrasound equipment in the back of the truck, preferring to rely on Hopper's Law- It's easier to seek forgiveness than permission-with respect to his latest intended improvement to Mordecai's act.
* * *The truck turned into the parking lot of the civic center in Novin, Kansas, early that afternoon. Mordecai and Bill got out of the truck to stretch their legs and take a good look at the performance venue.
The building looked as if it had once been the home to some fraternal order. Moose, maybe, or Elks. The portico at the entrance seemed out of place, resembling an afterthought that had been affixed to the main building with spit and scotch tape. There was no auditorium inside, just a raised platform that served as a stage at one end of a long room where folding chairs would be set up for that night's performance. "Reinvented" though Mordecai's act might have been, he and Bill still had a long way to go before they could hope to escape the sub-small-town circuit.
"So what do you think?" asked Collins after the pair had gotten back in the truck, but with Bill behind the wheel now. "Shall we quit while we're ahead?"
"What… and give up a career in the theater?" replied Bill, and started the engine. This exchange had become an arrival ritual for the two, with Bill's response quoting the punch line to one of the oldest jokes in show business.
The two men laughed soundlessly for a moment, and then Mordecai said: "Let's go find the hotel. We'll check in, and while I review the book, you come back and set up for tonight's show. Standard drill."
"You got it, boss," said Bill, mentally adding with a little something extra! as he put the truck in gear.
* * *The size of the civic center belied the local population's thirst for entertainment that didn't consist of the usual shadows flickering on a television screen. The house, as one might hear said on Broadway, was packed. And Mordecai had the audience eating from the palm of his hand, even if most of the mental effects he performed were old before television was invented. Then again, "old" is new if you've never seen it before.
And, as it turned out, "the book" for Novin, Kansas, had been particularly useful for the spirit part of the act. As a typical example, Mordecai was able-using information that Bill's cybernetic "agents" had gleaned from public records, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, and a number other sources-to "channel" the spirit of a beloved grandmother to convey some sage (yet noncommittal) advice about a recent long-distance breakup that had been suffered by a young woman in the audience.
For his finale, Mordecai had decided to focus on a local mystery: the disappearance, a decade earlier, of-of all things-a magician who, as best as Collins could figure out, was performing at this very civic center. According to the stories in the press, at the end of the last of six performances in Novin, Peter Templar had been locked in a trunk by his assistant, who then climbed onto the trunk and raised a curtain around herself and the trunk. At the count of three, the curtain fell to reveal the trunk, but unlike in the previous five performances, Peter Templar was not standing on the trunk. When the trunk was opened, the assistant was inside, unconscious. And Peter Templar had simply disappeared.
"It is time to bring this evening's demonstration to a close," intoned Mordecai, "but it would appear there is an insistent attempt at communication from the other side, from someone who walked as a mysterious stranger among you years ago." He closed his eyes and stretched out his right arm. He could almost feel the silence in the room. But there was something else, as well. Collins put whatever it might be out of his mind. The show, after all, must go on.
"I'm getting conflicting messages, as if this stranger was both supposed to disappear, and at the same time not disappear. Does that make sense?" Most of the faces in the audience nodded, even if nobody said anything. All the locals, apparently, remembered, or had been told about Peter Templar. The tuxedoed performer was supposed to disappear as part of his act, not disappear for real.
Mordecai closed his eyes again. After moment, he intoned: "The stranger says he is not far away." And as he said it, a chill ran down Mordecai's spine, which had never happened before during a performance. Mordecai quickly opened his eyes and saw a gray blob out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to face the blob, it disappeared.
"Did you see it?" cried a voice from the audience. "Yeah," said someone else. "What was that?"
The blob reappeared out of the corner of Mordecai's eye and again disappeared when he turned it its direction. By now, he felt a pervasive uneasiness. His face was drained of color and his mouth hung open. He raised his arms in supplication. The audience, individual members of which apparently were also perceiving some kind of elusive phenomenon, was on the verge of general hysteria when a crash was heard from the direction of the front door.
While most of the audience quickly left the building via the emergency exits, some venturesome souls-including Mordecai, who had recovered quickly and no longer felt anxious-cautiously approached the front door and opened it to see what had caused the crash.
There, on the other side of the threshold, lay the portico, which had become detached from the building and had collapsed outward. As it fell, anchoring sections at the bottom of the structure had scooped out the ground under the tile work that had formed the floor of the portico. And there, sticking up out of the ground at an impossible angle, were several bent lengths of rebar, to which were tied the skeletonized remains of a body, wearing what appeared to be a tuxedo.
* * *The appearance of a body finally gave the police a basis for judging Peter Templar's disappearance to be the result of foul play, but after so many years, the case turned cold the moment the paperwork was filed.
As for Bill, he eventually admitted to Mordecai that he had set up an infrasound generator at the civic center as an experiment. He had read how infrasound-vibrations below the threshold of human hearing-could induce uneasiness and goose bumps in people, and how vibrations at a certain frequency actually caused eyeballs to resonate and create optical illusions. An unintended consequence of Bill's experiment was the generation of a resonant frequency in the building's structure that caused the portico to detach and collapse. In between all the activity associated with the finding of Peter Templar's body, Bill was able to pack up all of the act's props-including the infrasound setup-and stow it all in the truck without anybody being the wiser.
"Well, despite the grand publicity," said Mordecai, sitting on the passenger side with a pile of newspaper clippings in his lap as Bill drove the truck out of town, "I hope this escapade has taught you a lesson."
"Consider me taught," said Bill. "By the way, do you mind if I ask you a question that's been bugging me since that night?"
"What?" said Collins.
"Whatever possessed you to go out on a limb like that and say the stranger was 'not far away'?" asked Bill.
After a few moments, Mordecai turned to Bill and said: "To tell the truth? I've been wondering that myself, because-I kid you not-the words just came out by themselves."
In this week's Exhibit B, I'm intersecting with acalculatedname (whose entry is here).
"I've been reading about some legendary Hungarian gypsy tune that's supposed to make people feel so sad they want to commit suicide," he said. "It's part of some research I'm doing to fine-tune the act by adding some sound effects."
"So playing music that'll have people want to do away with themselves while watching my 'Amazing Mordecai' act would be beneficial, exactly, how-?" asked Collins.
"Don't be a jerk," said Bill, though Mordecai was old enough to be his father. "I'm researching how sound affects people-and audiences."
"Sounds like a gimmick to me," said Collins, and then: "You really think there's anything to it?"
"Yes, I do," said Bill, "but it's hard wading through all this stuff-there are no definitive answers, except maybe for this gypsy tune thing, which is almost certainly a myth. There are people who swear that music played in minor keys-and D minor in particular-makes people sad, but others disagree. One piece I read debunked the idea with examples from Spinal Tap, Miles Davis, and Eric Clapton."
"All very fascinating, I'm sure," said Collins. "Is there a bottom line to all your 'research'?"
"Hey, research doesn't necessarily have a 'bottom line', y'know?" said Bill. "But in the long run, it could come in handy."
"In the long run, kid, we'll all be pushing daisies," said Collins.
"That's as may be, but your act still needs updating."
"One step at a time, junior" said Collins. "I realized, back when I hired you, that the act needed to be reinvented, and you've made a lot of decisions that turned out well. You said: 'Get rid of the capes,' so I did. No capes. You said: 'Touch up the hair,' so I did, and now I don't look so much like a geezer. And branching out from straight read-your-mind mentalism to include a 'speak to the dead' spiritualism segment at the end was sheer genius, the way people lap it up. By the way, how big did the book on this next stop turn out to be?"
By "the book," Mordecai was referring to a printout of information about a town and its inhabitants, which had been collected on the Web by a group of "intelligent software agents" programmed by Bill to gather certain kinds of information that could be skillfully exploited by Collins while pumping audience members and purporting to speak with the dead.
Bill answered the question and was happy that Mordecai had changed the subject. He wasn't eager to mention the new infrasound equipment in the back of the truck, preferring to rely on Hopper's Law- It's easier to seek forgiveness than permission-with respect to his latest intended improvement to Mordecai's act.
* * *The truck turned into the parking lot of the civic center in Novin, Kansas, early that afternoon. Mordecai and Bill got out of the truck to stretch their legs and take a good look at the performance venue.
The building looked as if it had once been the home to some fraternal order. Moose, maybe, or Elks. The portico at the entrance seemed out of place, resembling an afterthought that had been affixed to the main building with spit and scotch tape. There was no auditorium inside, just a raised platform that served as a stage at one end of a long room where folding chairs would be set up for that night's performance. "Reinvented" though Mordecai's act might have been, he and Bill still had a long way to go before they could hope to escape the sub-small-town circuit.
"So what do you think?" asked Collins after the pair had gotten back in the truck, but with Bill behind the wheel now. "Shall we quit while we're ahead?"
"What… and give up a career in the theater?" replied Bill, and started the engine. This exchange had become an arrival ritual for the two, with Bill's response quoting the punch line to one of the oldest jokes in show business.
The two men laughed soundlessly for a moment, and then Mordecai said: "Let's go find the hotel. We'll check in, and while I review the book, you come back and set up for tonight's show. Standard drill."
"You got it, boss," said Bill, mentally adding with a little something extra! as he put the truck in gear.
* * *The size of the civic center belied the local population's thirst for entertainment that didn't consist of the usual shadows flickering on a television screen. The house, as one might hear said on Broadway, was packed. And Mordecai had the audience eating from the palm of his hand, even if most of the mental effects he performed were old before television was invented. Then again, "old" is new if you've never seen it before.
And, as it turned out, "the book" for Novin, Kansas, had been particularly useful for the spirit part of the act. As a typical example, Mordecai was able-using information that Bill's cybernetic "agents" had gleaned from public records, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, and a number other sources-to "channel" the spirit of a beloved grandmother to convey some sage (yet noncommittal) advice about a recent long-distance breakup that had been suffered by a young woman in the audience.
For his finale, Mordecai had decided to focus on a local mystery: the disappearance, a decade earlier, of-of all things-a magician who, as best as Collins could figure out, was performing at this very civic center. According to the stories in the press, at the end of the last of six performances in Novin, Peter Templar had been locked in a trunk by his assistant, who then climbed onto the trunk and raised a curtain around herself and the trunk. At the count of three, the curtain fell to reveal the trunk, but unlike in the previous five performances, Peter Templar was not standing on the trunk. When the trunk was opened, the assistant was inside, unconscious. And Peter Templar had simply disappeared.
"It is time to bring this evening's demonstration to a close," intoned Mordecai, "but it would appear there is an insistent attempt at communication from the other side, from someone who walked as a mysterious stranger among you years ago." He closed his eyes and stretched out his right arm. He could almost feel the silence in the room. But there was something else, as well. Collins put whatever it might be out of his mind. The show, after all, must go on.
"I'm getting conflicting messages, as if this stranger was both supposed to disappear, and at the same time not disappear. Does that make sense?" Most of the faces in the audience nodded, even if nobody said anything. All the locals, apparently, remembered, or had been told about Peter Templar. The tuxedoed performer was supposed to disappear as part of his act, not disappear for real.
Mordecai closed his eyes again. After moment, he intoned: "The stranger says he is not far away." And as he said it, a chill ran down Mordecai's spine, which had never happened before during a performance. Mordecai quickly opened his eyes and saw a gray blob out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to face the blob, it disappeared.
"Did you see it?" cried a voice from the audience. "Yeah," said someone else. "What was that?"
The blob reappeared out of the corner of Mordecai's eye and again disappeared when he turned it its direction. By now, he felt a pervasive uneasiness. His face was drained of color and his mouth hung open. He raised his arms in supplication. The audience, individual members of which apparently were also perceiving some kind of elusive phenomenon, was on the verge of general hysteria when a crash was heard from the direction of the front door.
While most of the audience quickly left the building via the emergency exits, some venturesome souls-including Mordecai, who had recovered quickly and no longer felt anxious-cautiously approached the front door and opened it to see what had caused the crash.
There, on the other side of the threshold, lay the portico, which had become detached from the building and had collapsed outward. As it fell, anchoring sections at the bottom of the structure had scooped out the ground under the tile work that had formed the floor of the portico. And there, sticking up out of the ground at an impossible angle, were several bent lengths of rebar, to which were tied the skeletonized remains of a body, wearing what appeared to be a tuxedo.
* * *The appearance of a body finally gave the police a basis for judging Peter Templar's disappearance to be the result of foul play, but after so many years, the case turned cold the moment the paperwork was filed.
As for Bill, he eventually admitted to Mordecai that he had set up an infrasound generator at the civic center as an experiment. He had read how infrasound-vibrations below the threshold of human hearing-could induce uneasiness and goose bumps in people, and how vibrations at a certain frequency actually caused eyeballs to resonate and create optical illusions. An unintended consequence of Bill's experiment was the generation of a resonant frequency in the building's structure that caused the portico to detach and collapse. In between all the activity associated with the finding of Peter Templar's body, Bill was able to pack up all of the act's props-including the infrasound setup-and stow it all in the truck without anybody being the wiser.
"Well, despite the grand publicity," said Mordecai, sitting on the passenger side with a pile of newspaper clippings in his lap as Bill drove the truck out of town, "I hope this escapade has taught you a lesson."
"Consider me taught," said Bill. "By the way, do you mind if I ask you a question that's been bugging me since that night?"
"What?" said Collins.
"Whatever possessed you to go out on a limb like that and say the stranger was 'not far away'?" asked Bill.
After a few moments, Mordecai turned to Bill and said: "To tell the truth? I've been wondering that myself, because-I kid you not-the words just came out by themselves."
In this week's Exhibit B, I'm intersecting with acalculatedname (whose entry is here).