I usually wrestle with sleep, uncomfortable in a strange room. But the events of the day had exhausted me. I slept deeply. And dreamed. Dreamed about Hunter. The way it used to be with him. Before he sold out.
When we met, he was an acoustical engineer (with a reputation as something of a maverick) working for a defense contractor. I was a temp for the same firm, trying to scrabble together enough of a living from odd jobs to leave me the freedom to worship the muse when I chose. Fate, in the form of a mandatory company holiday celebration, threw us together. We were an unlikely pair, him with his overstarched shirts and black-rimmed glasses; me with my untamed hair and a skirt rescued from the bottom of my closet that morning. But we were both geeks in our way, resistant to corporate socializing, and inclined to sit in the back of the room making snarky comments about the human resources department and their juvenile addiction to parties.
They say people bond over their dislikes of other people. Well, Hunter and I bonded over our common distaste for the division's vice-president, whose mother had had the foresight to name him Dick. We both agreed he was one--especially after he stopped by our corner to reprimand us for not participating in the gift exchange while rearranging the foil-wrapped hershey's kisses piled on the table in front of us into neat rows like good little soldiers. When he turned his back, our eyes rolled in unison. It was kismet.
For the remainder of the six weeks I worked there, we met daily for lunch and far flung discussions of soundproofing and standing waves and string theory and vibrational healing. It wasn't a big step from there to experimenting with a few vibrations of our own on his waterbed. Yeah, the man owned a waterbed. I said he was a geek. At least he didn't have a blacklight hanging over it. And it wasn't in his parents' garage.
As it happened, it was in quite a luxurious house in a gated community--one of those yuppie places with granite counters and stainless steel appliances and a fountain in one end of the swimming pool. It was sparsely furnished though--it looked like all he had was leftover odds and ends from his college days and the obligatory big screen tv. Until you went in the studio downstairs.
It had probably been the home theatre for the previous owner; or at least part of it had. There was still a screen at one end, but the room was at least twice the size of any home theatre I’d seen. In Hunter’s hands it had become a sonic utopia. Soundproofed, meticulously tweaked, it held both drum and vocal booths, editing bays, racks and racks of high-end effects gear, and an SSL board that would have been the envy of any recording studio in town.
Off to the side was another room I assumed to be an additional booth of some sort, but when I tried the door, it was locked. Hunter made a joke about it being for his “mad scientist experiments.” He said he kept it locked because the equipment he used was really sensitive, and he hated to have to recalibrate it. It all sounded reasonable at the time. It was years later that I finally figured out what kind of experiments he had been conducting in that room, and realized that I had never really known Hunter at all . . .
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