Dual Audio

1/1

They'd already moved from the kitchen. The second bottle of wine was half finished. He sat on the floor with the two girls in front of him on the couch. A record was playing on the system, soft guitar melodies intermingling with almost inaudible vocals.

Merit refilled her glass. Leidys had her eyes closed and was bobbing her head in time with the music. She was either drunk or tired, but not both, because she was still upright. He studied her profile and the line of her leg, her arms draped around her knee.

The music ended. He set his wine glass on the table.

"What's next?" he asked.

"I liked that vibe," Merit said. "Very chill. Let's keep that going."

A little unsteadily (he had always been a cheap drunk), he opened the cabinet under the sound system and flipped through the stack of records. He knew what he was looking for but it took him a minute to find it. This was a 7" single, the cover of which showed a young woman seated in the middle of a deserted road. He took the record from its sleeve and carefully set it on the turntable. The needle fell into place. There was a melancholy fall of chimes, and the strumming of a lone guitar; a man's voice, deep and sad, drawing out each syllable in a slow lament.

"What language is this?" Merit asked.

"I don't know," he told her. "One of the low continent dialects I think. I can't read the album notes."

"Where did you find this one?"

"You know Appin Street Station? On the ochre line. There's a little record shop there I love. They get all this random stuff shipped in from buyers overseas. A lot of it is garbage, but every now and then there's something special."

He leaned back and his head connected with the sound system, hitting the button that controlled the playback speed.

The song's tempo picked up, and the man's voice became a woman's; she sang high and heartfelt, the guitar rising with her, and suddenly they were listening to something entirely new.

"Wait...," he said, rubbing his head. This made no sense; he pressed the button again. Instantly the guitar slowed down and the man's voice returned.

Leidys opened her eyes.

"That's trippy," she said. "Does it work with other albums?"

"It shouldn't work at all," he muttered.

"Maybe they recorded two separate tracks?"

"No, there's only one recording, we're just playing it at different speeds."

He got out another album and tried the same thing, but only succeeded in speeding up the vocals, not in changing them. He went back to the first track again; there was no mistaking it: two versions of the same song, but at different speeds performed either by a man or a woman.

"That's really wild," Merit said. "That's a schism in space time right there."

"Yeah," he muttered. He could see they were getting bored, so he changed the album and let the subject drop.

When all the wine was finished Merit thanked them and they saw her out. Leidys went to bed, but he wasn't tired. To keep from bothering her he wore headphones as he played the track again, at both speeds, listening to a man with a woman concealed in his voice, or a woman with a man trapped in hers.

Hours later he was still there. A schism, Merit had called it. He had no better word for it than that.