I lock the kitchen window to keep the fog from turning my waveforms to soup. The bay coughs; the street below answers with tire whisper and a hawker’s laugh. I drop the Faraday pouch on the table, push aside the bowl of sugar packets I stole from the Strand, and open the laptop to build a screen that looks like truth: left—my televised segment; right—a sponsor ad for Curalis, thirty seconds of soothing bells and hands.
I scrub both to zero and hold my breath until the room joins me. My wrists smell faintly of disinfectant where the band rubbed earlier. I say to the recorder, “Side-by-side waveform comparison,” and click record on a blank track labeled CITRUS_THUNDER_A/B.
The first pass is mechanical: normalize peaks to -1 dB, align to nearest transient, window with a Hann. My mother would laugh at the names—Hann like a neighbor who always waved—and then ask me to play the part without the math. I zoom in until the world becomes teeth: bell partials, pad swells, the dull shinbone of broadcast compression.
I run the ad and the segment together, then solo them in alternation. When the ad’s bells shimmer, my segment’s “comfort bed” answers with the same shimmer one key lower, tucked under my voice where I am trying, publicly, to be clean. The harmonics align like fingerprints blurred only by reverb tail.
“Again,” I tell myself, and I do. Second pass: spectrograms stacked, twenty to twenty thousand, log scale, because truth hides in low end smears sponsored people forget to clean. The ad glows honey between 250–400 Hz—the chest-warmth band. My segment glows there too, with a notch at 60 Hz to dodge studio hum; otherwise a sibling.
“Talk to me,” I whisper to the screen. My mouth tastes like sugar packet dust—sweet and stale. My left thumb rubs the hospital wristband I keep by the keyboard; the halo icon—two rings pretending to be a blessing—winks under the desk lamp. I push the lamp farther from the band.
I switch to correlation view. Cross-correlation between bell clusters yields a peak at—there—fifteen milliseconds offset, consistent with a lazy time-stretch. I bite the inside of my cheek until I know blood will taste of copper and lemon.
“Numb,” I say into the room, naming the starting point. Naming helps.
Micro-hook: The blimp reroutes outside—fog smothers its route—and the drift of its fan cuts a notch in the air at the same frequency as the ad’s pad.
I pull up the folder I named MOM_ROOMTONE_FINAL and drag in the hospital night file I swore to respect. I don’t press play yet. I wash my hands. The citrus pump under the sink coughs a spray that smells like the clinic, like the sponsor mixer, like a room where people agree to be edited because they are too tired to fight a future tense verb.
Back at the table, I drag a track rack into place: AD_BELLS, SEGMENT_PAD, MOM_MONITOR, NOTE_VOX. The monitor beeps arrive first, thin as bones tapped together. They live around 1 kHz, dress themselves in regularity, then hesitate, then pretend the hesitation was a flourish. I bring AD_BELLS under it, minus twelve on the fader, side-chain compressor keyed to the beeps so each bell inhales when the hospital does.
I hit play.
The bells don’t mourn. They lean. Their decay curves hug the pulse like a hand smoothing wrinkled linen. The pulse agrees to be smoothed because the alternative is to be alone.
“Stop,” I tell my fingers. They don’t know how. I cycle the first eight seconds until my scalp tingles under hair that hasn’t decided which lifespan it prefers. I loop the moment my mother’s breath in the room tone catches against something no camera cared to see. The ad’s bell chooses that exact millisecond to shimmer; in my segment, the pad swells at the same cue.
I nudge the bells two frames left, two frames right. The charm is durable; it sticks wherever I place it.
“They didn’t score me to match what I felt,” I say, low. “They scored me to teach me what to feel next.”
My throat tightens. I swallow salt I didn’t drink. The city drifts in through the sealed window anyway: the Strand frying oil, someone’s vape sugar, the old boards downstairs creaking like a question I avoid at noon. Across the room, elevator screens in my building whisper the crawl—weather, gossip, a teaser for TruthScan: Family Edition that folds my name into a headline. I switch that screen off with a remote like killing a mosquito.
I pull open the ad audio’s metadata—because people who worship storytelling forget stories are formatted. There’s an impulse response tag for a reverb labeled Curalis_Sanctum_Hall; the same IR shows up in a cache of my aired session when I run a forensic scrape. Sanctum—of course. I duplicate the tracks and flip phase to test for near-identicality. The cancellation isn’t perfect, but the pads quarrel with each other like twins refusing to wear the same dress.
“Sick,” I tell my reflection in the playhead’s sheen, and the word is accurate: my stomach rolls with the shared IR’s smugness.
I angle the mic and speak clean: “Overlay test: MOM_MONITOR at unity, AD_BELLS at minus twelve, side-chain ducking. Emotion: misdirected comfort.” I let the machine take my voice so later I can hate it and still be grateful.
I try a second overlay: my segment’s pad under the monitor, no bells. The pad breathes in the same envelope as my mother’s breath slowed by heat and fear and thunder. I remember the night the storm rolled in and the monitors went arrhythmic, and the nurse’s citrus hands that smelled like a hundred promises without expiration dates. The sound was a corridor; I walked it to the end and the end kept moving.
I lock tempo and map transients to a grid I don’t show anyone else. The “comfort” bed’s chimes align to a hidden click at 67 bpm—exactly the resting rate the discharge sheet said my mother should have reached to go home. I see what they did; I understand who they hoped I would be under that number.
“Who taught you to count me,” I ask the screen, and the answer is a halo printed on a contract.
I record a take I will name later: “They engineered warmth.” My mouth forms the words like they are sour candy. I let them dissolve until the urge to spit passes and only the sticky stays.
Micro-hook: The drone beacon outside blinks twice then dies; in that beat of dark, the room-tone I captured years ago is the only light that knows me.
I build an A/B test reel for an eventual counterstream. In one channel: hospital monitor + ad bells. In the other: monitor solo. When I switch back and forth, my own body becomes a lab rat; my palms dry on one, sweat on the other. I tag the file SKIN_TEST and add notes any regulator with a pulse should understand: Measured Δ in GSR correlates with bell entry.
I scroll back to the segment. There, beneath my voice answering the host’s gentle predations, the pad swells on the words “I forgive—” and the waveform shows a conspicuous caesura, a hole where breath should live. I magnify the silence. It’s not silence. It’s looped room tone shaped like silence. Hands had sanded it; the seam shows only when I tilt the light.
“You sold me tidy,” I whisper to the seam. “I brought rough.”
I want to call Sera and play this ugliness until she names it with me, but I promised her I’d treat the ledger like evidence, not content. I text Working. Will need your ears later. My sister types three dots, then nothing. The nothing lands heavy.
I turn to the ad and look for the bells’ origin. The asset manifest from the witness stares up from my screen like a dare: anxiety_assets/soothe/pivot. I search the have-notes for bell filenames. haloBell_soft, haloBell_mother, citrus_pad_sanctum. I take a breath that tastes like diluted lemon and shoplight heat.
“Mother,” I say into the empty, and the word bounces against tile and cord, lands on the wristband, and dies.
I open a new project and build a tiny experiment no longer than a breath. I take the monitor beep, pitch it up a major second, soften its attack, and run it through Curalis_Sanctum_Hall IR. It becomes a bell that could sell forgiveness. I insert it under my mother’s exhale and listen to the trick: sorrow disguised as comfort because a market prefers the second syllable.
“No,” I tell the track. “You don’t get her breath.”
I mute the bell. The monitor stays ugly and honest. I save the project and export a clip for the lawyer labeled AUDIO_EXHIBIT_A: Comfort Injection Test. I add text: To be believed, I must sit in the same machine that erased me; until then, I will make my own machine and let it remember.
The building’s elevator screen, which I forgot to kill in the hall, whispers a headline: Curalis Expands ‘Authorized Benevolence’ Initiative—the phrase slinks by in the ticker like a snake confident of its camouflage. I taste metal. I take a photo of the screen with its faint halo watermark on the corner and drop it in a folder called SERMONS.
I hit record one more time, this time for the field of my skin. “Memo: They engineered warmth,” I say. “Not to heal but to shepherd. Not to remember but to sell forgetting as cure. Note: pad key sits at love; bells nudge confession.” I stop, breathe until my breath stops trying to be music.
The room smells of coffee gone cold, salt sneaking past my window seal, and citrus drying on my fingers. The sugar packets sit untouched, bright as lies. Families across the city will trade reputation scores at dinner tonight, speak in code about outcomes—green for clean, red for caution—and the halo icon will appear on their receipts as if purity were a subscription. I picture Sera’s wall display with its dipping score needle and feel an anger that could be mistaken for heat.
I drag the hospital file into a folder labeled DON’T EDIT and duplicate it into EDIT TO EXPOSE THE EDIT because paradox is where I live now. I create a screengrab where the ad’s spectrogram overlays my segment’s until the colors bleed together like bruises deciding to share a name.
Micro-hook: In my ears, thunder from a summer long gone rolls up the narrow throat of this house; the boards answer with a question: Who owns a storm?
I lean back in the chair until my spine cracks and stare at the ceiling where salt and time have drawn their own spectrogram. I say to the quiet, “Numb is gone.” The room answers with the refrigerator hum settling at 60 Hz and the gas line clicking like a metronome with a limp.
My wristband vibrates. I flip it over and read: Confirm attendance: Reframing Consult—Tom 09:00. The halo rings bloom on the tiny screen like a friendly bruise. I tap No and the UI offers Reschedule? I tap No again and the UI offers We’ll hold your place with a smile that lives in typography.
“You don’t hold me,” I tell it. “I hold you.”
I wrap it in foil until it sulks into quiet and tuck it under the Faraday pouch like a child with too many privileges. I want thunder. I want a sound the clinic can’t loop or normalize. I open the window a crack and let the bay’s wet breath in, drones blinking blind along the marina’s wind tunnel. The blimp, ashamed of its visibility in this soup, veers off. Gossip stalls on the pier pack sugar into bags and pretend it’s a weather report.
“Record,” I say, and the recorder blinks red like an irritated eye. “Memory Still: Citrus and Thunder,” I speak, steady now. “I compare waveforms: ad and segment share a sanctum reverb and bell palette; the bed leans into the chest-warmth band to bias recall. I overlay my mother’s monitor with their bells. The blend hugs grief until grief sounds useful. They engineered warmth.”
I stop. The sentence sits on the table like a glass I refuse to wash.
On my phone, the family thread pulses unread. Sera has posted an article about “therapeutic discretion,” and then a sticker that pretends to be strength. Leo’s icon is dim; his last message—days ago—reads gonna be offline for a bit—peace program orientation. I type Answer when you can and delete it, then type Need to hear your actual breath and delete that too. I leave a dot, a breath, and hit send. A dot is not a confession; it is a doorstop.
The city outside resets to its own click track. My files settle into order like plates after a subway rattles by. I export the A/B reel, back it up to a drive nowhere near the witness’s, and label it with a piece of tape: WARMTH_IS_AN_EFFECT. I place it next to the wristband, a choice I understand is a dare.
I press my palms flat on the table until bone speaks. “Cold,” I say to my hands, “is a tool.” I let the resolve move through my body the way thunder moved through that hospital night—slow, un-televised, un-sellable. I will not let their bells teach me my mother.
The elevator screen in the hall breathes back to life, stubborn as a habit. It whispers the next headline between floors. I can’t hear the words, only the rhythm, and the rhythm is rehearsal.
I click the recorder on once more and whisper into it a question I cannot edit: “When the storm comes next, who gets to hold the calm?”