Love Saves the Day

But it turned out there was a recording studio in the basement. Funny-looking block letters etched into the glass-door entrance proclaimed it Alphaville Studios, and Sarah said it was a famous place. A man Laura had never seen before, with a scraggly long beard and deep dimples, appeared from some hidden back office and greeted Sarah with a hug and a warm rubbing of cheeks. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen the likes of you around here, girl.” He sneaked them into an unoccupied recording studio where Sarah put her records on a kind of machine that let her filter out the vocals until all they could hear was the music. Laura had been deeply impressed with Sarah’s knowledge of this complicated-looking equipment. Clearly, she’d spent a lot of time here once. With this realization came the insight, always shocking for a small child, that Sarah must have had an entire life all her own before Laura was born.

Sarah played around with various knobs and buttons until the percussion was a heavy, insistent thump thump-thump thump. That was when she had started to sing Laura’s poem. She’d made Laura sing along with her. And even though, in Laura’s opinion, it wasn’t a very good song, there was little in the world more delightful to her in those years than the sound of her mother’s singing.

Sarah had made a tape recording of the two of them singing together in the studio, which they’d listened to again at home that night before Sarah ceremoniously placed the cassette in a small metal box she’d shown Laura once, claiming it held her most treasured personal belongings.

The City bulldozed the Garden of Eden a few years later, and the metal box disappeared in 1995, the day Laura and Sarah lost their apartment. And now, Laura thought, there was nobody left except her to remember what Sarah had sounded like when she sang, nobody left alive who even remembered (because Laura realized that she didn’t) what Laura’s own voice had sounded like when she was a child.

Where did tapes go when they died? Did they go to a Tape Heaven? Laura felt herself on the verge of a giggling fit as this idea weaved through her thoughts, but she quelled it because by now she was standing in the lobby of the Morgue. Above her head was a motto inscribed in Latin. Laura drew on the Latin she’d picked up in her law studies to translate.

Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights in helping the living.

Perry wasn’t the only one who thought Laura hadn’t taken enough time to grieve. She was starting to feel like one of those dolls, the kind with a string in its back that, if you pulled it, forced the doll to repeat the same litany of phrases. I’m fine, she’d said when she’d returned to work the next day. I’m fine, she’d said after coming back from the half day she took for her mother’s funeral. I’m fine, she’d been repeating to everybody, to Perry, to her fellow fifth-years, to the hard-faced blond woman who answered her phone and filed her papers. I’m fine. I’m okay. You don’t have to look at me that way because I really am fine.

She remembered when she was younger and had started noticing that seemingly every pay phone in New York—not just the ones on the Lower East Side, but all the way up to Grand Central and beyond—had the words WORSHIP GOD etched into its metal base. Laura had wondered about the person who’d poured so many hours and days—months, even—into seeking out each and every pay phone in Manhattan. Had it been religious zeal? A sincere, if skewed, belief that repeating those two words so many times would actually induce others to worship God? Or had it been that the whole weight of this person’s soul had come to rest on those two words, endlessly repeated, and the act of inscribing them was the only way to exorcise the thought?

Laura was inclined to think it was the latter, because if she’d been able to take one of the dozens of paper clips she systematically unfurled over the course of a workday and use it to scratch the words I’M FINE on every desk, phone, and wall in the office, she would have done so. She appreciated everybody’s concern. But the burden of appearing to be fine, so as to keep others from worrying about her, was almost worse than simply allowing herself to feel bad would have been.

She was especially glad now that she hadn’t told anybody when, unexpectedly (and despite taking the appropriate precautions), she’d found herself pregnant only two months into her marriage. Of course, it wasn’t strictly necessary to tell anybody right away—in fact, it was accepted that you weren’t supposed to tell anybody until your first trimester was safely behind you.