069: The Echoes

How space can trick us, thought Ruiz, how its echoes might transform. Ruiz would soon be on the train home after his visit to the gallery in the city. Soon he would think about how certain interior spaces make the voice echo. How they augment the voice and, depending on the design, reshape it. They take a whisper and compound the frequency. They take a private question to the woman beside you and deliver it to everyone present and so Ruiz rapidly learned to take care with his voice in chambers that echoed.

“It was a representation of an ancient murder,” Ruiz would tell his friends back home. “The artist, working from documents several thousand years old, recreated the crime scene in as perfect detail as possible. The artists claimed that part of her motivation was archeological, another emotional. She claimed to have a fascination for the moment before death. She claimed also that part of her motivation was to remove the bodies and reconstruct only the patterns and shapes of the incredible violence that had taken their lives.

“The questions the artist answered from the audience were common at first: why blood stains on marble; in what state were the bodies of the murdered; why this grade and color of stone; why a small bench there; how long did it take; how much time did she spend on research; what books had she read and were they non-fiction or fiction? Each question and answer would echo down the chamber and back; voices would rise to the ceiling and fall; the words of the questions and the words of the answers would often have shifted inflection or emphasis; words like ‘did’ or ‘pain’ would appear to our ears to take longer to travel than works like ‘weapon,’ ‘torture,’ and ‘decapitation.’

“Sometimes the words of one question would mix with the words of a previous question so that they reformulated and since the artist appeared intent on leaving, as they say, ‘no stone unturned,’ she would answer the question that had been recast or re-mixed by the walls of the chamber. And so the questions became uncommon and the artist provided information the audience neither asked for and perhaps regretted hearing or found insulting, corrupting their image of the artist. Soon the artist became disarranged, overwhelmed by the swirl of words, taken back by the angry reactions of certain men and women, and the disorienting nature of the echoes. Soon she appeared unable to identify legitimate questions and so she persisted in asking if she had answered the question asked by the audience member but by this time I and a few other people, an old woman and a young man, who might have been a student, remained.

“Then it was time for us to depart as well. I remember looking back. The artist remained where she’d been standing, but now she was observing the gray and black blood stains on the marble floor perhaps with new eyes, as they say, she and her creation surrounded by the dimmest remnants of those tricks of space and those uncanny tricks of the ear.”

“It was simply the nature of the chamber, the materials of the walls and ceiling, and the artist’s inexperience before an aggressive crowd,” Ruiz would tell his friends back home.

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