Stereophonic Hell
The forgotten man was curled up at the foot of enormous oak tree, thirty yards off the asphalt path and sheltered marginally from the wind. The public park provided a welcome shelter for him, even as autumn grew older and winter approached. He wore all of the clothes he owned, and was still cold. His chapped and dry lips moved constantly, although no speech issued from them. The rattling of branches and the occasional acorn falling from the tree above did not disturb him, as they were natural sounds. His dull eyes stared ahead, interrupted only by slow blinks. His hands clutched at the empty air. Human voices made him flinch, and if those sounds invaded his world, his fingers ceased their meaningless twitching, moving instead to plug his ears and mute the sound. Regular speech was not nearly as bad as singing or music, which drove him into a frenzy. He would whine and hunch over, stumbling away as fast as he could. There were plenty of places to find a quiet peace in the park.
That bastard Andreas Pavel took everything. It was Brazil, in 1972. The man was on a long business trip. He was as yet unbroken. There was no need to huddle underneath trees, unshaven and rank. He befriended the treacherous thief Pavel while at a dinner party. The two whiled away a long drunken night while jazz records spun and the party ebbed around them.
Two squirrels chased each other around the oak tree. Their tiny steps sounded much louder as they crashed through the drifts of dead leaves. They leapt over the prone form of the broken man and continued on their way. He scratched at his neck with dirt encrusted finger nails and gave another slow blink.
Pavel and he kept in touch, their conversations a mix of technical shop talk and meandering discussions about their love of music. It was only years later that he learned of Pavel’s patents and then his lawsuit with Sony regarding royalty fees. Pavel claimed his stake on the invention of the walkman, and wanted his reward. The man contacted Pavel, and wanted to know why he had stolen his idea, his desire to add a soundtrack to life, born out of their first drunken conversation in Brazil and raised in their friendship over the years. The arguments began, and the man filed corresponding lawsuits against both Pavel and Sony. Pavel’s patents, filed in many countries throughout the world, made no mention of the man, and Sony and the courts didn’t care at all about his legally baseless claims.
The wind picked up slightly, and the forgotten man pulled the zipper on his coat all the way up. He brought his knees closer to his chest and put his hands in his pockets. The leaping squirrels were nothing but a distant, indistinct sound.
The legal bills piled up, for Pavel, for Sony, and especially for the as of yet unforgotten man. The years passed, ten, then twenty. The man’s pleas in court grew weaker. Music, any music, began to disturb him. It was constant reminder of what he was going through. The forgotten man never learned of Pavel’s eventual out of court settlement with Sony, his place in history as the official inventor of the walkman. There were no fiscal or intellectual rewards for the now forgotten man, as he had long before lost his job, his money, and then his family with his ceaseless pursuit of acknowledgment for an invention used the world over.
The sun was going down, and any other visitors to the park were long gone. Even the squirrels had seemingly disappeared. Silence was now the soundtrack of his life. He curled up as tightly as he could. Dry leaves covered the forgotten man.