Rumi wanted the monster to sound as though it had meant to break the chair.
I played her the new version. It began deep in the body, rose through a scrape of stone, and ended with something wet tearing. I had spent most of Tuesday on the ending.
“It sounds hurt,” she said.
“It weighs two tons. It just sat on a dining chair.”
“The chair is hurt. He’s trying to be dignified.”
I moved the cursor back.
“Don’t play it again.”
My studio occupied the back room of a locksmith’s shop. On the other side of the wall, a key-cutting machine began its high, useful whine. I had arranged my recording hours around the locksmith’s lunch. He took lunch whenever he was hungry.
Rumi sat on the only chair with a back. She had brought the monster in a shoe box and put it beside the keyboard. In the film he filled a doorway. In my room he was shorter than the microphone, with a broad rubber face, six crooked teeth and a tuft of red wool behind one ear. One of his feet had come loose on the bus.
“How dignified?” I asked.
We had planned to finish the mix by five, leaving the evening to check her festival copy before it was due. I had agreed to a flat fee because I liked the film and because her producer also made advertisements. For three months my best-paying work had been removing chewing from a meal-kit presenter’s speech. I wanted something for my reel that had teeth.
Rumi’s film had plenty. For eight minutes, her monster stomped through a town trying to frighten people out of their houses. He could lift a gate, flatten a cart, shake a chimney. The inhabitants went on hanging washing and mending things. At last an old woman invited him to tea. He sat down with elaborate caution, and the chair broke underneath him.
Then came the shot we could not finish. He landed on the floor, opened his mouth, and made a noise. The woman waited with the teapot. He looked away.
The shot lasted a little under four seconds. Rumi had dismantled the set to give her landlord back his spare room; changing the animation would mean building it again.
I had built the current voice from my own recordings and an AI sound model. You could give it a scrape, a breath, a description, and get back variations that sometimes seemed to have been made inside a body nobody had invented yet. It had given me a wonderful rolling undertone, like a huge empty stomach full of pebbles. I was keeping that.
For the chair shot I had asked for injured grandeur. Rumi said she had asked for neither injury nor grandeur.
I showed her the message on my phone.
Big, but trying not to make a fuss.
She read it. “All right. I can see how we got here.”
I put the phone away before she could find my reply.
I tried three more of the generated sounds. One had a little wavering finish that I liked. Rumi leaned forward, then sat back when it swelled again.
“There. Before it turned into an orchestra.”
I cut the last half away.
“Now it sounds as if you’ve cut the last half away.”
“I have.”
The key machine stopped. I looked at the clock, then at the microphone.
“We’ve got quiet. Let’s use it.”
I kept a box of things beneath the table: a cracked salad bowl, a leather belt, a length of drainpipe, stiff paper, objects whose proper employment would have paid better. I bent the belt close to the microphone. It made a small reluctant creak. Rumi watched the silent film while I tried the noise against his mouth.
“That’s a chair,” she said.
“Today everything is a chair.”
She laughed. I resented how much easier it was to work after that.
We tried paper in the pipe. I dragged a wet finger around the bowl. Rumi held a folded piece of card and opened it by degrees, making little hard clicks. I recorded all of them. Nothing fitted, though the bowl gave us a sound for the teapot lid that was better than the one we had.
By half past two, the monster had acquired a beautiful teapot and no voice.
Rumi stood up.
“Show me the whole scene without him.”
I muted his voice tracks. The cart wheels, footsteps and crockery remained. The woman set down her tray. The chair cracked. The monster landed. He opened his mouth. The room went quiet except for the slow tick of the woman’s clock.
Rumi watched it twice.
“Maybe that,” she said.
I looked at the shoe box. “You hired me to do his voice.”
“I hired you to do the film.”
She said it without heat, which left me nowhere to put mine.
I could have accepted. The silent version worked in a way. The clock made the pause uncomfortable. We already had his breathing and his stomping; nobody would think the sound had failed. I could send the file, put the rolling stomach in my reel and invoice her.
I played it once more. His jaw still moved as though he had something left to say.
“Give me until four,” I said. “If it’s worse than the clock, use the clock.”
Rumi checked the time. “Four. I need to hear the export, not just the session.”
She went out for sandwiches. I stopped playing the sounds I had made.
Instead I tried doing the shot.
I lowered myself onto the floor, bracing a hand on the table so I would not knock the microphone over. I let my mouth fall open. I tried to preserve the impression that I had chosen to be down there.
Nothing came out but a grunt.
I did it again. This time I imagined somebody waiting to pour me tea.
When Rumi returned I was still on the floor, looking up at the bottom of the mixing desk.
“Is that helping?”
“The first noise is for the fall. The second is for her.”
Rumi put the sandwiches down. She moved the monster’s box away from the table edge before getting onto the floor beside me. Then she lifted her chin and gave a small impatient cough. It was not an apology. It was an attempt to resume the proceedings.
“Like that?” I asked.
“Perhaps. Less like my aunt.”
We got up carefully. She offered me a sandwich and I took the one whose wrapper had not torn.
For the next recording, I emptied my sandwich bag. I crushed it gently, then let it open against my palm. There was a rough intake and a dry little pop. I kept the shape of that sound and fed it to the model with the monster’s existing voice, asking for two short bursts: one low and involuntary, the next higher, with barely enough air behind it.
The first results were too neat. Each burst was the same length. I changed the timing and asked for the second to begin before the first had quite finished.
In one version, the low part dwindled into a flutter like a motor trying to turn over; at the end came a high, stubborn up.
Rumi stopped unwrapping her sandwich.
“Can we hear that on him?”
I put it against the picture. The fall, the opening mouth, the little high sound. The monster looked away.
Rumi smiled, but I shook my head. It happened too early. He appeared to be answering the chair.
I moved the second burst later, leaving enough of a gap for the woman’s hand to stop over the teapot. Then I took out the low rumble I had laid beneath the whole shot. For four seconds the wonderful stomach full of pebbles was gone.
We watched.
The monster landed with the last pieces of chair. His breath came out of him. He got himself together and made the little noise at the woman. She poured.
Rumi put a hand over her mouth. I could hear her laughing through her fingers.
“Again,” she said.
I played it, taking my eyes off her this time.
The creature was still large. He was still being difficult. But now I wanted the woman to find him a biscuit.
We delivered at twenty past five, after finding a click I had missed at the start of the music. The festival portal accepted the file. Rumi paid the balance while I wrote the invoice. Neither of us mentioned her producer’s advertisements.
At the Saturday screening, I sat two rows behind her. There were families in the audience, a man wearing a hat he refused to take off, and several people who appeared to be watching their own work inside their eyelids while other films played.
Rumi’s monster entered. The rolling stomach worked beautifully through the room’s speakers. A child in front of me pulled both feet onto the seat.
I began making a private list of sounds I should have turned down.
The old woman came to the door. The monster sat. The chair went.
People laughed at the collapse. They laughed again at the small noise, before I expected them to. The laugh covered the first part of the pouring sound. For a second I wanted to stop the film and move everything half a beat later.
Then the child with her feet on the seat said, quite clearly, “He wants a cup.”
Her father shushed her. She kicked him without taking her eyes off the screen.
I watched the rest of the film. At the end the monster carried the broken chair away with great care, the woman following with its detached leg.
Outside, Rumi was trying to fix his foot. She had brought him again. When a man reached for his head, she offered him the shoe box to hold instead.
“They missed the pour,” I said.
“They saw the tea.”
“I can shift it for the next copy.”
She fitted the wire into the foot and pressed the rubber around it.
“Send me both.”
I held the shoe box while she settled him inside. She had lined it with the festival programme, folded so the printed names faced upward. My name was under hers, exactly the size we had agreed.
“What are you making next?” I asked.
“Something without knees.”
“Good.”
She shut the lid, opened it again, and adjusted his loose foot so it would not knock against the cardboard on the bus.
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