Who Speaks?

Mark turned on the cassette recorder; he wanted to destroy the conversation in which he was taking part, and the best way to decimate an encounter was to record it. Today, in April 1978, a lack of conviction forced Mark to blow his nose on a page from the Christian Science Monitor, to which his mother had given him a lifetime subscription. The cassette recorder stopped functioning; it shook, made a series of ominous clicks, and then the tape's forward motion halted. Mark's gay lover, a young man who worked for a prestigious publisher, said, "The machine is broken." Jay, the young man who issued this bland statement of fact, sounded distressed, or so Mark thought; Mark worried too frequently, and with an unattractive obsessiveness, about Jay's inner life. Jay, despite his enviable job at the nation's leading publisher of vaudevillian missals, had a track record of mental instability that had caused his employers no small amount of anguish during his first months at the firm. "I think it's best if we leave our conversation unrecorded," said Mark, who had recently accepted a job as librarian at the university's medical school, which boasted four separate libraries, each devoted to a different humor. The university, courting controversy, retained belief in the long-discredited notion of bodily humors. Mark didn't know which humor could explain the grief that Jay seemed to feel on witnessing the machine's sudden failure to continue recording their conversation, which concerned the ethical justification for suicide in cases of severe malaise.

The conversation could have reached a pinnacle of jurisprudential finesse if the recorder had continued to do its job. Perhaps Jay would have been willing, if the tape had continued to roll, to confess the strange (and probably imaginary) fungus that he believed was beginning to form over his testicular sac. So far the fungus didn't impede sexual function; if the fungus had affected Jay's ability to make love, Mark would never have turned on the cassette recorder in the first place. The realization dawned on Mark that the most serious mistake he'd made, since accepting a position as librarian at an institution with only a limited hold over the popular imagination, was to bring a cassette recorder into their lives and to insist that the magnetic device serve not only to witness domestic investigations but to supply the feeble moral pulse to a household—nay, a nation—whose humors were beginning to cry foul ball, if humors have the capacity to play the role of chatty umpire in a game of unlimited yet shadowy dimensions. The game's enigmatic nature was beyond the capacity of any blood, bile, or phlegm to adjudicate. That is why I stepped forward, despite my gout, and declared my verdict, in a voice trembling with emotion and vacillating in epoch. No listener could fix the period of my umpire utterance, and so it had the power to revive the ailing cassette recorder, whose motor began once more to purr. I made sure to backtrack, in the narration I assembled for the cassette's sake, so that the scenes lost to posterity, thanks to the machine's temporary lapse, would now be included in the bewildering, salivating transcript that a paid secretary would compose from the cassette recording in which your interjections and rebuttals play the starring role.