A family walked in for a look around, a little before noon, a man, a woman, and their son. They were the first visitors of the day—for all Alinger knew they would be the only visitors of the day, the museum was never busy—and he was free to give them the tour.
He met them in the coatroom. The woman still stood with one foot out on the front steps, hesitant to come in any further. She was staring over her son's head at her husband, giving him a doubting, uneasy look. The husband frowned back at her. His hands were on the lapels of his shearling overcoat, but he seemed undecided whether to take it off or not. Alinger had seen it a hundred times before. Once people were inside and had looked beyond the foyer into the funeral home gloom of the parlor, they had second thoughts, wondered if they had come to the right place, began to entertain ideas of backing out. Only the little boy seemed at ease, was already stripping off his jacket and hanging it over one of the child-level hooks on the wall.
Before they could get away from him, Alinger cleared his throat to draw their attention. No one ever left once they had been spotted; in the battle between anxiety and social custom, social custom almost always won. He folded his hands together and smiled at them, in a way he hoped was reassuring, grandfatherly. The effect, though, was rather the opposite. Alinger was cadaverous, ten inches over six feet, his temples sunk into shadowed hollows. His teeth (at eighty, still his own) were small and gray and gave the unpleasant impression of having been filed. The father shrank away a little. The woman unconsciously reached for her son's hand.
"Good morning. I'm Dr. Alinger. Please come in."
"Oh—hello," said the father. "Sorry to bother."
"No bother. We're open."
"You are. Good!" he said, with a not quite convincing enthusiasm. "So what do we—" And his voice trailed off and he fell quiet, either had forgotten what he was going to say, or wasn't sure how to put it, or lacked the nerve.
His wife took over. "We were told you have an exhibition here? That this is some kind of scientific museum?"
Alinger showed them the smile again, and the father's right eyelid began to twitch helplessly.
"Ah. You misheard," Alinger said. "You were expecting a museum of science. This is the museum of silence."
"Hmm?" the father said.
The mother frowned. "I think I'm still mishearing."
"Come on, Mom," said the boy, pulling his hand free from her grip. "Come on, Dad. I want to look around. I want to see."
"Please," Alinger said, stepping back from the coatroom, gesturing with one gaunt, long-fingered hand into the parlor. "I would be glad to offer you the guided tour."
The shades were drawn, so the room, with its mahogany paneling, was as dim as a theater in the moment before the curtain is pulled back on the show. The display stands, though, were lit from above by tightly focused spotlights, recessed in the ceiling. On tables and pedestals stood what appeared to be empty glass beakers, polished to a high shine, bulbs glowing so brilliantly they made the darkness around them that much darker.
Each beaker had what appeared to be a stethoscope attached to it, the diaphragm stuck right to the glass, sealed there with a clear adhesive. The earpieces waited for someone to pick them up and listen. The boy led the way, followed by his parents, and then Alinger. They stopped before the first display, a jar on a marble pedestal, located just beyond the parlor entrance, set right in their path.
"There's nothing in it," the boy said. He peered all around, surveying the entire room, the other sealed beakers. "There's nothing in any of them. They're just empty like."
"Ha," said the father, humorlessly.
"Not quite empty," Alinger said. "Each jar is airtight, hermetically sealed. Each one contains someone's dying breath. I have the largest collection of last breaths in the world, over a hundred. Some of these bottles contain the final exhalations of some very famous people."
Now the woman began to laugh; real laughter, not laughter for show. She clapped a hand over her mouth and shivered, but couldn't manage to completely stifle herself. Alinger smiled. He had been showing his collection for years. He was used to every kind of reaction.
The boy, however, had turned back to the beaker directly before him, his eyes rapt. He picked up the earpieces of the device that looked like but was not a stethoscope.
"What's this?" he asked.
"The deathoscope," Alinger said. "Very sensitive. Put it on if you like, and you can hear the last breath of William R. Sied."
"Is he someone famous?" the boy said.
Alinger nodded. "For a while he was a celebrity ... in the way criminals sometimes become celebrities. A source of public outrage and fascination. Forty-two years ago he took a seat in the electric chair. I issued his death certificate myself. He has a place of honor in my museum. His was the first last breath I ever captured."
By now the woman had recovered herself, although she held a wadded-up handkerchief to her lips and looked as if she were only containing a fresh outburst of mirth with great effort.
"What did he do?" the boy asked.
"Strangled children," Alinger said. "He preserved them in a freezer, and took them out now and then to look at them. People will collect anything, I always say." He crouched to the boy's level, and looked into the jar with him. "Go ahead and listen if you want."
The boy lifted the earpieces and put them on, his gaze fixed and unblinking on the vessel brimming with light. He listened intently for a while, and then his brow knotted and he frowned.
"I can't hear anything." He started to reach up to remove the earpieces.
Alinger stopped his hand. "Wait. There are all different kinds of silence. The silence in a seashell. The silence after a gunshot. His last breath is still in there. Your ears need time to acclimate. In a while you'll be able to make it out. His own particular final silence."
The boy bent his head and shut his eyes. The adults watched him together.
Then his eyes sprang open and he looked up, his plump face shining a little with eagerness.
"Did you hear?" Alinger asked him.
The boy pulled off the earphones. "Like a hiccup, only inside-out! You know? Like—" He stopped and sucked in a short, soundless little gasp.
Alinger tousled his hair and stood.
The mother dabbed at her eyes with her kerchief. "And you're a doctor?"
"Retired."
"Don't you think this is a little unscientific? Even if you really did manage to capture the last tiny bit of carbon monoxide someone exhaled—"
"Dioxide," he said.
"It wouldn't make a sound. You can't bottle the sound of someone's last breath."
"No," he agreed. "But it isn't a sound being bottled. Only a certain silence. We all have our different silences. Does your husband have one silence when he's happy and another when he's angry with you, missus? Your ears can discern even between specific kinds of nothing."
She didn't like being called missus, narrowed her eyes at him, and opened her mouth to say something disagreeable, but her husband spoke first, giving Alinger a reason to turn away from her. Her husband had drifted to a jar on a table against the wall, next to a dark, padded loveseat.
"How do you collect these breaths?"
"With an aspirator. A small pump that draws a person's exhalations into a vacuum container. I keep it in my doctor's bag at all times, just in case. It's a device of my own design, although similar equipment has been around since the beginning of the nineteenth century."
"This says Poe," the father said, fingering an ivory card set on the table before the jar.
"Yes," Alinger said. He coughed shyly. "People have been collecting last breaths for as long as the machinery has existed to make my hobby possible. I admit I paid twelve-thousand dollars for that. It was offered to me by the great-grandson of the doctor who watched him die."
The woman began to laugh again.
Alinger continued patiently, "That may sound like a lot of money, but believe me, it was a bargain. Scrimm, in Paris, recently paid three times that for the last breath of Enrico Caruso."
The father fingered the deathoscope attached to the jar marked for Poe.
"Some silences seem to resonate with feeling," Alinger said. "You can almost sense them trying to articulate an idea. Many who listen to Poe's last breath begin in a while to sense a single word not being said, the expression of a very specific want. Listen and see if you sense it too."
The father hunched and put on the earpieces.
"This is ridiculous," the woman said.
The father listened intently. His son crowded him, squeezing himself tight to his leg.
"Can I listen, Dad?" the boy said. "Can I have a turn?"
"Sh," his father said.
They were all silent, except for the woman, who was whispering to herself in a tone of agitated bemusement.
"Whiskey," the father mouthed, just moving his lips.
"Turn over the card with his name on it," said Alinger.
The father turned over the ivory card that said POE on one side. On the other side, it read "WHISKEY."
He removed the earpieces, his face solemn, eyes lowered respectfully to the jar.
"Of course. The alcoholism. Poor man. You know—I memorized 'The Raven,' when I was in sixth grade," the father said. "And recited it before my entire class without a mistake."
"Oh, come on," said the woman. "It's a trick. There's probably a speaker hidden under the jar, and when you listen you can hear a recording, someone whispering whiskey."
"I didn't hear a whisper," the father said. "I just had a thought— like someone's voice in my head—such disappointment—"
"The volume turned low," she said. "So it's all subliminal. Like what they do to you at drive-in movies."
The boy put on the earpieces to not-hear the same thing his father had not-heard.
"Are they all famous people?" the father asked. His features were pale, although there were little spots of red high on his cheeks, as if he had a fever.
"Not at all," Alinger said. "I've bottled the dying sighs of graduate students, bureaucrats, literary critics—any number of assorted nobodies. One of the most exquisite silences in my collection is the last breath of a janitor."
"Carrie Mayfield," said the woman, reading from a card in front of a tall, dusty jar. "Is that one of your nobodies? I'm guessing housewife."
"No," Alinger said. "No housewives in my collection yet. Carrie Mayfield was a young Miss Florida, beautiful in the extreme, on her way to New York City with her parents and fiance, to pose for the cover of a woman's magazine. Her big break. Only her jet crashed in the Everglades. Lots of people died, it was a famous air disaster. Carrie, though, survived. For a time. She splashed through burning jet fuel while escaping the wreck, and over eighty percent of her body was burned. She lost her voice screaming for help. She lasted, in intensive care, just over a week. I was teaching then, and brought my medical students in to see her. As a curiosity. At the time, it was rare to view someone, still alive, who had been burned that way. So comprehensively. Parts of her body fused to other parts and so on. Fortunately I had my aspirator with me, since she died while we were examining her."
"That's the most horrible thing I've ever heard," said the woman. "What about her parents? Her fiance?"
"They died in the crash. Burned to death in front of her. I'm not sure their bodies were ever recovered. The gators—"
"I don't believe you. Not a word. I don't believe a thing about this place. And I don't mind saying I think this is a pretty silly way to scam people out of their money."
"Now, dear—" said her husband.
"You will remember I charged you no admission," Alinger said. "This is a free exhibit."
"Oh, Dad, look!" the boy said, from across the room, reading a name on a card. "It's the man who wrote James and the Giant Peach!"
Alinger turned to him, ready to introduce the display in question, then saw the woman moving from the corner of his eye, and swiveled back to her.
"I would listen to one of the others first," Alinger said. She was lifting the earpieces to her head. "Some people don't care much for what they can't hear in the Carrie Mayfield jar."
She ignored him, put the earpieces on, and listened, her mouth pursed. Alinger clasped his hands together and leaned toward her, watching her expression.
Then, without warning, she took a quick step back. She still had the earpieces on, and the abrupt movement scraped the jar a short distance across the table, which gave Alinger a bad moment. He reached out quickly to keep it from sliding off onto the floor. She twisted the earpieces off her head, suddenly clumsy.
"Roald Dahl," the father said, putting his hand on his son's shoulder and admiring the jar the boy had discovered. "No kidding. Say, you went in big for the literary guys, huh?"
"I don't like it here," the woman said.
Her eyes were unfocused. She stared at the jar that contained Carrie Mayfield's last breath, but without seeing it. She swallowed noisily, a hand at her throat.
"Honey?" her husband said. He crossed the room to her, frowning, concerned. "You want to go? We just got here."
"I don't care," she said. "I want to leave."
"Oh, Mom," the boy complained.
"I hope you'll sign my guest book," Alinger said.
He trailed them to the coatroom.
The father was solicitous, touching his wife's elbow, regarding her with dewy, worried eyes. "Couldn't you wait in the car by yourself? Tom and I wanted to look around a while longer."
"I want to go right now," she said, her voice toneless, distant. "All of us."
The father helped her into her coat. The boy shoved his fists in his pockets and sullenly kicked at an old, worn doctor's bag, sitting beside the umbrella stand. Then he realized what he was kicking. He crouched, and without the slightest show of shame, unbuckled it to look at the aspirator.
The woman drew on her kidskin gloves, very carefully, pulling them tight against her fingers. She seemed a long way off in her own thoughts, so it was a surprise when all at once she roused herself, to turn on her heel and fix her gaze on Alinger.
"You're awful," she said. "Like some kind of grave-robber."
Alinger folded his hands before him, and regarded her sympathetically. He had been showing his collection for years. He was used to every kind of reaction.
"Oh, honey," her husband said. "Have some perspective."
"I'm going to the car now," she said, lowering her head, drawing back into herself. "Catch up."
"Wait," the father said. "Wait for us."
He didn't have his coat on. Neither did the boy, who was on his knees, with the bag open, his fingertips moving slowly over the aspirator, a device that resembled a chrome thermos, with rubber tubes and a plastic face mask attached to one end.
She didn't hear her husband's voice, but turned away and went out, left the door open behind her. She went down the steep granite steps to the sidewalk, her eyes pointed at the ground the whole way. She was swaying when she did her sleepwalker's stroll into the street. She didn't look up, but started straight across for their car on the other side of the road.
Alinger was turning to get the guest book—he thought perhaps the man would still sign—when he heard the shriek of brakes, and a metallic crunch, as if a car had rushed headlong into a tree, only even before he looked he knew it wasn't a tree.
The father screamed and then screamed again. Alinger pivoted back in time to see him falling down the steps. A black Cadillac was turned at an unlikely angle in the street, steam coming up around the edges of the crumpled hood. The driver's side door was open, and the driver stood in the road, a porkpie hat tipped back on his head.
Even over the ringing in his ears, Alinger heard the driver saying, "She didn't even look. Right into traffic. Jesus Christ. What was I supposed to do?"
The father wasn't listening. He was in the street, on his knees, holding her. The boy stood in the coatroom, his jacket half on, staring out. A swollen vein beat in the child's forehead.
"Doctor!" the father screamed. "Please! Doctor!" He was looking back at Alinger.
Alinger paused to pick his overcoat off a hook. It was March, and windy, and he didn't want to get a chill. He hadn't reached the age of eighty by being careless or doing things in haste. He patted the boy on the head as he went by. He had not gone halfway down the steps, though, when the child called out to him.
"Doctor," the boy stammered, and Alinger looked back.
The boy held his bag out to him, still unbuckled.
"Your bag," the boy said. "You might need something in it."
Alinger smiled fondly, went back up the steps, took it from the boy's cold fingers.
"Thank you," he said. "I just might."