Bleedover Read online

  BLEEDOVER

  © 2011 Curtis Hox

  All characters in this compilation are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE: THE APPLE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO: THE PORTAL

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART THREE: THE SYMPOSIUM

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SPECIAL THANKS

  THIS IS FOR ROSE

  bleedover n. the transfer of ink, over a period of time, from one page of a book to the facing page, often resulting in nonsensical combinations of letters or designs (variant of ‘bleed through;’ also, a term used to describe radio channel interference).

  PART ONE: THE APPLE

  CHAPTER ONE

  On a busy Manhattan sidewalk, Dr. Hattie Sterling stared at a chaotic scene beneath the multistory Donna Karan New York mural.

  City traffic flowed around reporters and camera crews jostling for position. Blue police barriers failed to stop onlookers, while blaring car horns dampened the sound of the crowd. A few individuals stood under the mural and waved arms. One man bent his knees on the sidewalk; two others danced jigs. Dr. Sterling was looking at the impossible: Somehow, the letter K in DKNY had reversed.

  The old advertisement had been replaced years ago, then repainted last week and, already, bleedover.

  Dr. Sterling pressed her back against an unlit, glass storefront and wrapped her silk shawl tighter. She adjusted her glasses. She was a small, middle-aged woman standing alone in a sliver of shadow. She stared, and waited.

  The city’s residents had squabbled over bleedover before. In fact, so had the nation. Its media was now disputed by scholars, fanboys, zealots, culture jammers, and con artists. The New Phenomenon of Bleedover had infected books with extra scenes and extra characters long after their publication. Random imagery now appeared spliced in film and TV. Billboards like the DKNY mural were altered. Songs now echoed the odd lyric.

  Well now, how retro, she thought. Come on, resonate with something meaningful.

  Hattie never tired of these bleedover artifacts. She’d catalogued them for twenty years like a true believer. Her first monograph opened with: Bleedover, the intrusion that began when mass culture met mass media in a crucible of sound and fury. How adamant, and naive, she had been when she’d written that display of literary hubris. Two decades later people still sought her for answers.

  When, exactly, did bleedover begin? they asked.

  No one knows, she always replied.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” Hattie heard someone say.

  She jumped and almost broke the heel of her right pump. The foot traffic was dense enough for Corbin Lyell to sidle up next to her.

  “At least it’s not upside down,” she said.

  “I’d hoped to see you here.”

  They stood shoulder to shoulder.

  Hattie took a centering breath.

  Corbin Lyell wore a long raincoat, even though the summer night was cloudless. She remembered he had an old habit of stuffing his pockets with tattered paperbacks pilfered from used bookstores. At the cuffs, she saw glittering flashes of matching gold watches on each wrist, proof the world of Lyell Publishing and Hexcom United gave him license to be an eccentric.

  “Corbin, I never expected—”

  “To see me?”

  “You keep to yourself these days.” His recent hiding away was fine with her. They had competed too many times in a world struggling to understand the N.P.B. “Have you been well? How’s your wife?”

  “I’m well enough. Dreya’s busy as ever. She and our daughter spend most of their time flying across the globe. Trouble keeping track of them.” Coruscating flecks of light bounced off the lenses of his expensive glasses, distorting his eyes. “I’ve been invited to the symposium at Riodola to present an article alongside you and our old friends.” He grinned. “The reunion will be delightful.”

  She coughed to mask her surprise.

  Years ago during graduate school at Columbia, their reading group had examined the N.P.B. until tensions had destroyed their friendship.

  Hattie faced him. “Tell me you won’t mention that sword-and-sorcery, pulp horror stuff.”

  “I will, Hattie. Your dismissal reflects your misunderstanding of those early genre texts.”

  She realized Corbin planned to resurrect old arguments at the symposium. He had used a number of platforms to push his thesis that pulp writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard created living mythoi in their vulgar texts that, he believed, were now becoming reality. He’d attacked her in books, TV spots, conferences, reviews, op-ed pieces, blogs, film even. But he’d never shared an audience with her in person. She’d avoided being on stage with him because he was unpredictable. He now only had to wait a few more weeks until the symposium.

  “I hope,” she said, “you keep it professional—”

  “What about you? Anything interesting for the journal article?”

  “Wait and see. What do you have planned, Corbin?”

  He smiled, like he always did, as if he might never stop. “Wait and see. We’ll settle it, though.”

  “Settle it?”

  “Who’s right.”

  “Right about what?” she asked.

  “Who would win.”

  Hattie remembered how he’d insisted that no female wizard could withstand the onslaught of a determined barbarian hero. She’d pushed him out of their reading group, and he had never forgiven her. Conan would destroy Morgaine, no matter her magic, he’d said the last time they’d met.

  She glanced again at the reversed letter K, then at her watch.

  “Good night, Corbin.”

  “See you at the symposium. We’ll settle it there.”

  Hattie disappeared into the crowd.

  She pushed Corbin Lyell from her mind. She gazed one last time at the mural, hoping it might resonate.

  She withdrew a small pad of paper from her jacket pocket and wrote, Too bad. Reversed letter K—just noise. Then, How did Corbin get invited to the symposium?

  Her phone rang. Hattie answered, listened, and stood rooted as traffic surged around her. Her graduate student, Alice Reynolds, said they had succeeded in Hattie’s experiments to generate proof the N.P.B. was real. Alice swore it wasn’t a joke.

  * * *

  A press release to the A.P. from Delirium Production Company, New York, New York:

  ‘No Way Mural Could Have Been Changed’

  Delirium Productions spent three days shooting its feature, When Maggie meets Billy, in Manhattan’s West Village. The night before the DKNY incident, our team spent several hours at the corner of Broadway and Houston polishing a few sequences with body doubles. From 1:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m., we have footage of the mural that shows no work being done in the background. The reversal must have happened sometime after.

  * * *

  From a Web comment by a Brandbuster Skuller team member:

  “we didn’t do the K. no one could have done it in time. it’s a work of supreme resistance. i wish we could claim responsibility. sorry. bleedover strikes again.”

  * * *

  Earlier that day, Masumi
Yoshida knelt beneath a sixteen-channel mixing board, grumbling as she worked a stubborn cable back into place.

  It was dark inside the recording studio, except for the electric blue and green lights of the equipment. A window of glass separated the engineering and recording booths. A couch ran along one wall facing the desk of gear. In the shadows behind her, she heard her guest, Ernest “Towns” Packer, fidgeting.

  She sneezed from the dust. “Just sit and relax, please.”

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” he said. “This studio spins. Doesn’t it?”

  “I supervise for Cultural Studies. That’s it. I don’t believe in that bleedover stuff.”

  Masumi shifted position so that her ass wasn’t on display.

  “Connection problem?” Towns asked.

  “Dr. Sterling said interference could be disrupting the incantations. I suggested it might be a cable problem. I deserve to be down here.”

  He switched from fidgeting to tapping his fingers on his knees.

  “Got it,” she said.

  She bumped her head getting out and tried not to snarl at the skinny white kid with a huge head of red hair. “They sent you down here to incant. Right? To spin? Whatever they call it. You look like you’re still in high school.”

  “I hope they accept me,” he said. “Tell me about the spinning. What goes on here?”

  Masumi sized him up as a boyish, bleedover nerd Dr. Sterling had thrown in way over his head. He sat there, the sofa swallowing him. His black T-shirt, of a guy with an axe killing Pacman, made his pale skin glow in the low light. He wore urban shorts that hung to the middle of his calves but failed to hide his knobby knees. And his oversized Brooks Beasts made him look as if he walked atop two corrective shoes. And now she had to deal with him.

  He was cute, though. “I keep the equipment working. Everyone else who comes in here just makes a bunch of noise. The last woman Cultural Studies tried was Pentecostal.” Masumi punched a few keys at her workstation. “A big Jamaican with a bigger voice. Sang so powerfully I thought the glass might crack. Dr. Sterling always hopes for something special—nothing beyond the usual failures, though. You supposed to be different?”

  “I guess so,” he managed. “This is part of my orientation.”

  “You get lucky in here, you get accepted to Riodola on the spot. Is that it?” Masumi knew Towns had already passed a secret test in the library for the Cultural Studies Department, and Dr. Sterling had given him candidacy into her program. “I heard about you and Alice in the library walking around in the stacks.”

  “Yeah, they had me locate a bleedover interpolation.”

  “I bet.”

  “I did.”

  “Sure you did.”

  Masumi swiveled in her chair, hunched over the controls, and pointed to the recording booth. “Go on. Might as well get started.”

  A door led Towns beyond the glass window into a small room with soundproofing insulation in the form of cardboard egg boxes glued to the walls. She kicked it shut after him. A stool stood before a stand with an expensive condenser mic. A pair of headphones hung from the stand. She signaled for him to take a seat. He slid the headphones on.

  “You’ve been in a studio before?” she asked into the engineer’s mic.

  “Bunch of times in a friend’s basement. We made some demos that sounded good.”

  Masumi began adjusting dials. “Go on. I’m listening. I need your levels …”

  “You can do wonders with ten-K these days. The right mics, the right boards, the right musicians, and a good computer and the know-how to use it, you get something close to what the professional studios produce—”

  “Fascinating,” she said. “Got it.”

  Towns watched her on the other side of the glass. Because the recording and engineering booths were both dim, her face lit up from the multicolored glow of the recording equipment. She was a young Japanese-American woman with long black hair framing a face you might see on a Lancôme ad. Her head floated in space, the mask of an accusing judge who wanted to see how poorly he performed compared to those who’d come before.

  A standard windscreen protected the mic. He edged forward, touching it, smelling the odor that always reminded him of gauze instead of dried spit.

  Through the headphones he heard her ask, “What do you want to audition with? I can download an MP3; you can sing on top of the vocal track. Or I can find something with just music. Up to you. Let’s see what you got.”

  “No need.”

  He opened his mouth and sang in key, a capella. The melody he chose was a favorite of his mother’s and anyone who knew Broadway musicals. He sang about having “rhythm” (of which he had none) and “music” and having his “girl” (not a boy, thank you, which he didn’t have). The choice of the song, “I Got Rhythm,” by the Gershwins was risky because it was so dorky. When he hit the notes for “old man trouble” without any vocal strain, he saw her big smile that made light dance along rows of teeth.

  “Well, who’d a guessed?” Masumi said. “You can sing.”

  “I told you.”

  She had no instructions from Dr. Sterling beyond, “See if he can sing.” Fine, Masumi thought. We’ll see if he can sing. We’ll see if he can do the whole thing. “You’re interested in spinning, right?”

  Towns perked up on his stool, almost losing his balance. “Yeah, totally.”

  “See what you can do with this.”

  She punched the sequence to start Dr. Sterling’s incantation, R.D.A. 1.1.2.

  “Dr. Sterling says to match what you hear in the headphones. Hum along. Fill the empty beats however you please.”

  Masumi triggered the audio so that he could match the series of consonants and empty beats. Towns began humming along.

  A few minutes later, she layered his recorded voice over the audio track.

  “Sounds good,” she said. “You’ve almost matched it. I’ll play a continuous loop. Keep practicing until you have it. Then I’ll add a few extra phonemes at the beginning and end. Don’t forget about the empty beats.”

  “This is spinning, right?”

  “Dr. Sterling calls it a number of things. But, you bet. Total crap, if you ask me.”

  “You work for her—”

  “I work for Dr. Ross,” Masumi said, “the head of Computing Cognitive Science. I have my own lab. Five times as big as this. We do real science. Like code quantum brain computation.”

  “Still,” Towns replied. “Dr. Sterling knows a lot about the N.P.B., even if this studio is small.”

  “I come down here once a week to monitor the lab and make sure she doesn’t sacrifice any bulls or paint the walls in blood.”

  Towns smiled. “You’re a spy.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Bleedover’s real.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s real. My boss thinks your boss is a kook.”

  “I’m not accepted into the department yet.”

  “Here’s your chance. Let me hear it.”

  Masumi listened to him try the incantation. The consonants were much longer than quarter notes, all of them spaced with empty beats. He had no trouble aspirating the entire thing. Five minutes later she stopped the track.

  “You got it,” she said.

  “Got what?”

  Sterling’s R.D.A. 1.1.2., her secret attempt to translate a written interpolation into reality—that’s what.

  Masumi stared at him for a few seconds through the glass. Dr. Sterling hadn’t cleared him to attempt the full incantation. Besides, Dr. Sterling’s research assistant Alice Reynolds usually ran these interminable tests. Masumi hadn’t expected the new guy to match the incantation so easily. They had professional singers who did it quicker, but only by a little.

  “One second,” Masumi said. “I want to compare a digital representation of your voice to one made by the computer.” She fingered the keyboard, then tapped the monitor in surprise. “Look at that—nearly identical. Good job.” With a few quick keystrokes, s
he adjusted the software to remove the noise. “Perfect.”

  “I did well?”

  “Very.”

  “Am I supposed to be doing this?”

  “Doesn’t matter now. You’re doing it.”

  He smiled again. “You’re awesome.”

  “I know,” Masumi replied, letting a smile slip. “Let’s try again, from the top, but first learn this.” She hit a button and added an extra phoneme at the beginning. “Then this at the end.” She added the final phoneme. She let him listen. “Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Masumi turned off the audio and let him repeat the full incantation by himself—about ten seconds of one extended breath comprised of stitched consonant phonemes peppered with empty beats.

  His vocal recording matched the digital model.

  “What about those empty spaces?” he asked. “The silences?”

  “Fill them however you want.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Good for you. But hold on,” she said. “Let me splice this together with the digital version.”

  While Masumi worked at the board, Towns assumed she had turned off the recording equipment and probably even the mic. He almost asked but didn’t because of how focused she looked behind the glass. As the audio in his headphones cycled through the incantation, for each silent beat, he let his voice erupt in a guttural ‘death growl’ that would scare an angry hippo.

  “What was that?” she yelled into his headphones.

  Her nervous laughter, as if he’d been summoning demons, suggested she might run away.

  “I used to be in a band: Death Finger—”

  “Great. Stop it.” Masumi glared, then returned to her board and monitor, until her phone rang. She screened the call. “We’re done here.”

  “Did you record that?” he asked.

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Jeez.

  She kept fiddling with the software. “Real work to do. Follow me out.”

  “Great. What’re you doing later?”

  “Working. Sorry.”

  Towns noticed something odd as he stood. The glass separating the engineering from the recording booth sat in a rectangular wall. On his side of the glass, the wall met industrial gray carpet that looked a decade old—nothing on the floor except wires connecting the two rooms. (He could have sworn nothing else was on the floor.) Although now he saw a shiny Red Delicious apple sitting in the corner—no napkin, no plate—just an apple with a curved stem and crimson skin reflecting the overhead light.