Munich Airport by Greg Baxter Page A

She put on a gown and boots as well. Then she gave me some large white headphones. I put them on, over the hood. There was a deep noise in them, something like the sound you get when you submerge yourself in a bath and try to be absolutely still and listen. I lifted them off my ears and asked, Now what? Walk around very slowly, she said. So I walked, very slowly. I would have walked slowly anyway, because the appearance of wetness made me think the floor was slippery, even though it was not. There were, as I walked, tiny fluctuations in the low, underwater sound. These fluctuations at first sounded like pure static, but every once in a while I could hear something distinct, I thought. Music, possibly. A slow disorientation began to come over me, and it seemed the slower I walked, the more thrilling the disorientation became. The glossiness of the room started to blur my sense of depth, and after a while I could not tell where the floor stopped and where the wall began. The black trapezoidal box seemed to absorb the room’s sense of definition, and remarkably, as I slowly made my way around the room, following what felt like a path made by these fluctuations, the box—which evidently housed the transmitter that was sending out the signal that produced the fluctuations—changed shape. At first these changes were very slight. It bulged a little, or shrank, and sometimes it seemed to rise or fall slightly. But then it started to change orientation, so that it seemed upside down, and abruptly right-side-up again. Then it became a square, a circle, a triangle. These shape-changes were confounding. But also obviously not real, because it remained—all I had to do was stop believing the hallucination—trapezoidal. It changed color, too—from black to green to blue, by shades. Meanwhile, the aural fluctuations continued, and the more I tried to make sense of them, the more I could hear the static-y echoes of music. Whatever piece I thought of, I could hear. Anything I thought, I could apply to the noise, and momentarily this thought could grip the noise and make sense of it. I walked all the way to the box and stood under it. The low noise was strongest right underneath it. So were the fluctuations. I could hear high-pitched drilling, but the harmony I faintly recognized—and which became anything I wanted it to be—remained out of reach. Then I took the headphones off, and I pulled the hood down. The woman noticed, and she took her headphones off, too. What do you think? she asked. You’re right, I said, it’s not music you can easily describe. We met in the center of the room and I gave her back her headphones. What is it playing? I asked. What is it ? she asked. I was about to turn around and point to the black trapezoidal box with the transmitter inside, but the tone of her question suggested I’d completely misunderstood what was happening, and I felt so self-conscious for not realizing what was obvious, and maybe even a little irritated, that I just said, If this is in your studio, what will it look like in public? She said, It will be vast. It will be ten times this size, and the trapezoid will be the size of a commercial airliner.
    Ten times? I said.
    Well, maybe just the same size, maybe twice the size.
    Where will you exhibit it?
    She named a large, important-sounding gallery in Barcelona, but not in a way that made her sound pompous. She said it with a shy grin, as though she herself could barely believe it. If I exhibit at Tate Modern, I will make it ten times this size, she said.
    It was really late when we left the studio. We hadn’t been flirting in an obvious way, or touching, but there was something between us, and I think we both had the sense that if anything was going to happen, it would have to happen soon. I felt completely disarmed by the experience I’d just had, and not quite deserving of her, so I did not try to kiss her, even though it seemed like kissing