In Laymon's Terms

Trash littered the floor, and vehicles of some sort hulked against the wall ahead of her. There were ropes with dangling objects. Steering wheels and chrome parts and little metal widgets. Nearest to her, four straight rods of steel, of increasing length, drew a rope down until they nearly touched the floor.

“Do you miss his sounds?” a voice asked from outside the light. Evelyn spun around. Everywhere was darkness. Every sound an echo.

Another half turn and she found him next to her.

A man, a small man. Dressed from head to toe in swathes of newspaper and tape. Even a hat, a wrinkled bowler, made of Sunday funnies. He smiled and cocked his head.

Where the HELL is Lloyd? she signed.

The man backed up, his eyes wide.

Evelyn clapped her hands, and he smiled. He clapped back. Then, with a tire iron he drew from behind his back, he tapped each of the dangling bars of steel. They rang in successively higher notes.

Evelyn crossed her arms and scowled.

“You can hear?” he asked.

She nodded.

“But you cannot speak?”

She nodded again, slower. Then she lit into him, backing him up with a hand-flung stream of epithets. She raised one hand as high as she could, swaggered for three steps, spread her arms to show confusion, then finished it again with where the HELL is Lloyd?

The clownish man dropped, sitting on a box of what appeared to be newspapers. He looked up.

“He’s...silent.”

It was then that Evelyn noticed the clown’s newspaper pants were wet, yet his newspaper shirt was dry. She stared off, to the right, at the in-ship lake. Inklings dripped over her, and fear trickled atop her anger. She backed away.

The newspaper clown bounced up and, making a wide berth, beat her to the foot of the ladder going up. She turned again, shooting aft.

That’s when she saw the stars.

Light flooded her eyelids, tickling so much that Evelyn rolled her face away. She didn’t open them, though, because she didn’t want to see. Not yet.

He crumpled paper somewhere across the room, tearing and wadding in rhythm mixed with regular pauses. Every pause ended in a snort.

The knot at the back of her head didn’t ache so much as it did ripple, like the concentric pulses in a pond after it swallowed a pebble. Ropes tugged at her neck and each of her wrists. Her feet found freedom, but little purchase, on something soft and poorly balanced.

“Woohoo, WOOHOO! Woo woo hoo hoo. Hey.”

She couldn’t help herself; Evelyn cracked an eyelid.

The strange man bound to his feet, flipping open a section of newsprint and bending it backwards. Then in half again. He skipped up to her.

“Evelyn Jolson! That’s you!” He flipped the paper around to a features section done on her six weeks previous. A prattling work all caught up in the eccentricity of her work. Not the cutting edge. Not the new vision. The weird. Evelyn turned her head away.

“I knew I’d seen you-da-do-da-do. I read all these before I wear ’em.” He smirked. “Efficient.” He wandered back to his box, staring at the picture. “Yes, well, this makes everything different. Everything. You’re an artist. Like me. You sculpt and paint, I sing and play and tell stories.” He scampered back into her face. “I’m Jong...short for Jongleur. A minstrel. And this,” he put both palms up and spun in three hundred and sixty degrees, “is my ship. Are you here for...art?”

Evelyn looked at her feet as she shifted and found them spread over four poorly stacked tires. One foot on each side. The tires slid and subtly collapsed with her slightest movement. Her concern wandered to thoughts of the neck rope.

She nodded to him. Nodded hard.

“Me too, you know.” He waggled his wooly eyebrows. “I love noise. I work with sounds. Not music so much, just sound. And I don’t really sing. Not well. But sound is why I love it here, in this ship. There are so many! Look around!”

Instead of looking around, Evelyn looked straight up at the rope. It was a thin nylon thing. It might not even hold her weight, but she didn’t want to learn.

“It’s a dilly, isn’t it? See, you’re sound. Made of sound. We’re ALL made of sounds.” He cocked his head. “Being as you can’t talk, I think your sounds might be different. Fresh. Virginal.” He repeated the last word half a dozen times, moving the emphasis back and forth between letters. Finally he signed the letter “L” to her.

“It’s the L that counts. Here!” He bounced back in the shadows aft of the hatch and started dragging something her way. The metal deck screeched in complaint.

He returned with a metal table, perhaps three feet square with thick legs and a solid wood top. As he approached he flipped sides, pushing instead of pulling. He nudged the table up within inches of the tires.

From behind his back the newspaperman produced a carpet knife, its curved tip ground away by the sharpening stone. With two quick flicks he had her wrists free.