ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID AUERBACH lives in Brooklyn. He has worked as a software engineer and has been a graduate student in philosophy and English. He is currently finishing a novel.
OCTOBER 2008
FICTION
POETRY
PHOTOGRAPHY
POETRY IN TRANSLATION
The Lincolnshire Poacher
By David Auerbach
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“I hear voices in the air.”
“And they say?”
“They speak in code.”
“Do you know what the code means?”
“No. Well, I know what it means, but I don’t know what it means.”
“What do they sound like?”
“It’s my voice, always.”
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“It’s my voice.”
“You’re going to be heard by people all over the world.”
“Why did you take ten samples of each word from my voice?”
“We needed different inflections.”
“Those are part of the code as well?”
“Yes.”
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“Olivia, do you want to stay together?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Do you or don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t love me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Can’t really say.”
“But you know you don’t.”
“Yes.”
“But you act the same way you always have. Nothing has changed. Except now you’re saying this. And it’s nuts.”
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Then why even say it?”
“You would want to know.”
“What changed?”
“You don’t look the same as you used to. Not physically, I mean, but how you come across. I can’t really explain it.”
“Do you dislike it?”
“No, it’s nothing that strong.”
“But you’ll still treat me the same?”
“I guess so.”
“You just won’t say that you love me anymore.”
“No. I’m not going to lie to you.”
“Okay, fair enough. But you don’t want to break up.”
“No more than before.”
“You just won’t use that word.”
“No, it’s forbidden.”
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“All right. Olivia, Raise your voice higher at the end, like you’re asking a question.”
“Two-oo?”
“Don’t stretch it out so much. One syllable.”
“Two?”
“Good. Now shout it with anger, loudly.”
“Two!”
“And again.”
“Two!”
“Once more, as though your husband has left you for a younger woman.”
“Two!”
“Good. Whisper now.”
“Two.”
“Don’t use your vocal chords.”
“Two.”
“Good. On to the words.”
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“They’ve cut up my voice. They play it on the shortwave. People pick it up all over the world.”
“You have fans.”
“They pick up on my vocal inflections, but they’ve overestimated them.”
“In the translation?”
“In the speaking of the words themselves. They hear emotions that aren’t there. They’ve separated the four or five inflections I did into twenty or thirty, based on seeming differences of pitch and different listeners.”
“Does it feel strange seeing people analyzing your voice like that?”
“It doesn’t seem like it’s mine any more that they’re talking about. And the emotions don’t mean what they seem to mean. They’re just another code.”
“Oh, and see this sequence right here?”
“With the series of ten letters that repeats over and over?”
“It’s just a separator while no data is being transmitted, to obscure the meaningful data. So I’m not really saying anything right here.”
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“It’s a constant channel of my voice. I put it on when I go to sleep. I hear myself speaking even while I’m there falling asleep.”
“Why do you leave it on?”
“It provides a real sort of company. I put it on in the evenings sometimes too, after it’s dark. Sometimes it’s just noise, and I’ll turn it off if it’s the separator repeating for hours, but if it’s seemingly random numbers or words in any combinations, my mind can’t latch on to any pattern or meaning.”
“Is it random?”
“No, someone out there has the key that allows them to break the code. But I don’t, so its meaning is completely buried. So it’s noise in my own voice. It crowds out the thoughts that go through my head when I go to sleep, the job anxieties and the fear that I’ll be lonely forever.”
“You broke up with Jonathan. Did you worry about being lonely?”
“It was lonely with him too. He was just a presence like any other object. He didn’t keep me company.”
“And now?”
“Now I can hear my voice and the codes even when I’m not listening to the shortwave. In my head, in the air.”
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“Bullshit!”
“Olivia! Shush!”
“Mom!”
“You can’t say those words at school.”
“You say them all the time at home.”
“What you can say at home is different than what you can say at school.”
“Why?”
“Because people are sensitive. And dumb. You can say whatever you want at home, all right?”
“Shit piss fuck.”
“Don’t say fuck. That one is too bad.”
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“I stayed up listening on the shortwave to my voice repeating the separator numbers for a few hours, followed by a long sequence of data. Then I thought that I could remake the world with these numbers. Even if I didn’t know what the code stood for, I could speak some DNA sequence that would form a greater being.”
“How else did you feel?”
“Like my body was becoming a prison for words and numbers.”
“You were irritated when I disagreed with you.”
“The problem wasn’t that you disagreed with me. It was that you didn’t understand what I was saying. Doesn’t that piss anyone off?”
“What didn’t I understand?”
“I explained that to you already. Damn it.”
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“Do you know the story of the professor and the three proofs?”
“No.”
“A student goes up to a professor and says to him that he didn’t understand the proof of some theorem. The professor goes into a trance for five minutes and then says, ‘Yes, therefore it follows.’ The student asks again, and the professor does the same thing. ‘Yes, it follows.’ He does it once more, and the student still protests that he doesn’t understand. The professor says, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve given you three proofs, there’s nothing more I can do for you.’”
“This is how I seem to you?”
“Yes, Olivia. Your explanations are useless.”
“Then they’re useless. Go away.”
“I’d like to talk it out.”
“It’s pointless. I just want peace and quiet and to be by myself.”
“If you want that I can give you that.”
“No, even hearing you speaking is too much noise.”
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“The whole world is saturated with my voice at all hours of the day across the shortwaves. From radio towers through the atmosphere and it descends over the population and coats them in signals. People are oblivious to it but I can hear it. I’m rewriting the whole world in secret code with my voice. And they can’t understand it either. Well, maybe one person out there does. Probably a man, probably someone listening in a hostile environment to my words. He hears every nuance of my speech and checks it against a code book that was given to him months or years earlier, and then he figures out what I meant and makes use of it.”
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“What I wanted was for you to understand what I was feeling right then. I tried to communicate to you that I was uncomfortable amongst your friends—”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You should have seen it in what I was saying and how I was acting.”
“I didn’t.”
“It figures. Before, you could have seen it. Now you’re off my wavelength. It’s even in the way you say my name.”
“Olivia?”
“It’s not like it used to be. There used to be a quiet inquiry when you said it, and now it’s loudly declamatory.”
“I don’t intend it to be.”
“It is, and if you haven’t changed it by now, you won’t.”
“You’re being really unfair to me.”
“No, you just don’t understand.”
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“There’s a new voice on the shortwave. My voice is gone.”
“What happened?”
“It could just be a pointless security measure. Could be my voice wasn’t working out well, for whatever reason. Maybe they wanted someone with a deeper voice.”
“Your voice is plenty deep.”
“A man, I mean.”
“Is he saying the same things?”
“The words are the same, but the way he says them are different. He has three or four different modes of intonation, different from mine.”
“Are you upset?”
“They’ve taken away my voice. But I listen to him now at night.”
“Why?”
“I think I love him. He speaks my language.”
Published October 2008