There is only one way to collect the last words of the dead: stand where they died, and stay there long enough.
Mook had been standing in the middle of the abandoned recording studio in Soi Ari for nineteen minutes.
The studio had shut down when CDs first stopped selling. The former owner had turned it into a storage room. The gray acoustic foam still covered the walls. The control-room window was cracked like a spiderweb in the lower corner. The room smelled of dust mixed with the old rubber of jack cables. The building manager had let her in because she said she was taking photos for an album cover. He hadn't asked why she needed to take them in a room with only one working light.
She shifted another half step to the left.
“Don’t record over it yet,” a man said beside her left ear. “There’s still a breath in this take.”
Mook closed her eyes, memorized the voice and the pause before the word “breath,” then opened the notebook in her bag and wrote it down.
She had started that notebook three days after passing the audition. The first page held a photocopied map of Bangkok from the shop at the mouth of the soi, with red-ink pins marking one spot at a time. Each pin had a person’s name, the date they died, and the words they had left unfinished there.
The first pin was the third chair in the rehearsal room on the theater’s third floor—the person who told her to raise the second verse by half a step. The second was the back stairs of a pub around Thong Lo, where a saxophonist had suffered a heart attack in the middle of the second set. He had left off with, “Don’t follow the drums. Let the drums follow us.” The third was in front of a hospital bathroom. A woman no one knew had once been a vocal coach said, “Open your throat wider than what feels wide enough.” No one knew who she had been speaking to then. Now she spoke to everyone standing there who could hear her.
Nineteen days. Eleven pins. Seven words she could actually use.
The other four were useless because they had nothing to do with music. One person talked about medicine they hadn’t taken yet. One called out the name of a woman Mook didn’t know. One told someone to close the window because the rain was going to blow in. And the last person said only, “Wait.” She wrote all four down in the notebook too, on a page without any pins, because it felt like if no one wrote them down, those people would have left their words there for nothing. For fifty years.
Those seven words had made her sing better than any teacher had ever taught her in twenty-six years.
“You bitch.”
Auntie Phai’s voice drifted in from the doorway. Mook kept writing until she reached the end of the line.
“You bitch, I called you three times.”
Mook looked up. “How many times did you call me?”
“Three.” Auntie Phai stood with her arms crossed, a large bag hanging from her arm. Her eyes swept over the abandoned studio. “You’ve been standing alone in a room like this for half an hour? The boss called and asked me if your singer was all right.”
“I was practicing.”
“Practicing silently with the walls.” Auntie Phai drawled, “You bitch, if you’re going to be a medium, tell me. I know a lady around Pathum who channels a godfather spirit. Her teacher’s fee is three thousand. But she’s a fake—I could tell from day one. She lit the incense with a gas lighter and her hand shook when it was time to collect the money.”
Mook laughed. Her laugh came half a second later than Mook’s usual timing, and Auntie Phai caught it.
Since the day of the audition, Auntie Phai’s voice hadn’t disappeared completely. It came back in patches, like a radio that couldn’t quite lock onto a station. Some sentences arrived whole. Some came with only the last half. Sometimes Mook saw Auntie Phai’s lips form ten words and heard three. Her survival strategy was to answer as briefly as possible, then read Auntie Phai’s expression to see whether she’d gotten it right.
Yesterday, she’d answered wrong twice. Today, she hadn’t made a mistake yet.
“There are eleven days left until the qualifying round,” Auntie Phai said, changing the subject. She set a folder on the mixing console, where the dust was an inch thick. “Twelve hundred people down to one hundred. It’s going live too, you bitch. This year they’re filming from the qualifying round.”
“Okay.”
“What song are you going to sing?”
Mook opened the notebook to the page with the saxophonist’s words and answered that she didn’t know. It was the first time in her life she had lied to Auntie Phai about work. She already knew what she would sing. She had known since the night the second pin went onto the map. And she knew that if she told Auntie Phai now, Auntie Phai would ask who had taught it to her.
Before she left the building, the manager called her over at the desk in front of the elevator.
“Are you done taking your pictures? Please sign out before you go.”
He handed her a thick hardcover notebook. The cover read: Recording Studio Reservations, Volume 4. People around here still used it because the former owner refused to throw anything away. Mook signed in the bottommost space on the latest page, then her hand stopped.
She flipped back through the pages.
Ten pages at a time. Twenty pages. The years in the headers kept retreating, from this year to last year, then ten years ago. The paper changed from white to yellow. The ink changed from black to faded blue.
The page where she stopped was from the year Mom disappeared from the industry for an entire year. The year everyone in the business believed Daoruang had gone to another province to recover. The year there were no new tapes, no concerts, no pictures in the magazines.
In the reservation field, in handwriting she had recognized since before she could read, it said: Daoruang Wichianchai.
Every Tuesday, from two to four in the afternoon, for three straight months without missing a single session.
The same room. The room where she had just been standing.
Mook ran her finger along the line until she reached the far-right column, the one labeled Notes. Normally, that column throughout the notebook contained words like vocal recording, instrumental recording, mixing—or else it was blank.
In Mom’s Notes column, the same words had been written all twelve times, in Mom’s own handwriting.
Don’t turn on the mic.