Night Passing

“This is a soundscape based off an excerpt from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, excerpted below. As the main character has PTSD from war, there are war sounds as well as generally tense moments we wish to issue a trigger warning for.”

Tayo didn’t sleep well that night. He tossed in the old iron bed, and the coiled springs kept squeaking even after he lay still again, calling up humid dreams of black night and loud voices rolling him over and over again like debris caught in a flood. Tonight the singing had come first, squeaking out of the iron bed, a man singing in Spanish, the melody of a familiar love song, two words again and again, “Y volveré.” Sometimes the Japanese voices came first, angry and loud, pushing the song far away, and then he could hear the shift in his dreaming, like a slight afternoon wind changing its direction, coming less and less from the south, moving into the west, and the voices would become Laguna voices, and he could hear Uncle Josiah calling to him, Josiah bringing him the fever medicine when he had been sick a long time ago. But before Josiah could come, the fever voices would drift and whirl and emerge again—Japanese soldiers shouting orders to him, suffocating damp voices that drifted out in the jungle steam, and he heard the women’s voices then; they faded in and out until he was frantic because he thought the Laguna words were his mother’s, but when he was about to make out the meaning of the words, the voice suddenly broke into a language he could not understand; and it was then that all the voices were drowned by the music—loud, loud music from a big jukebox, its flashing red and blue lights pulling the darkness closer. 

Naveen Bhatia is a rising junior at the University of Southern California, pursuing a B.S. in Economics/Mathematics, and works as a sound designer/composer for theatre and film. Some favorite sound design and composition credits include Spider’s Web by Agatha Christie, The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel, Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori Parks, and Tick, Tick, Boom by Jonathan Larsen, as well as incidental music on Waters of March, a short film produced by The Scribble Room. Naveen recently worked for the Princeton Festival as an A2 for the modern opera Nixon in China. At USC, Naveen has produced several plays with Aeneid Theatre Company, was the associate sound designer on The Secret Garden, and volunteers as a tutor for homeless LAUSD students at School on Wheels.