The Quiet Man
There once was a quiet man who lived in a quiet house on a quiet street with his second wife who was not as quiet, but truth be told, quieter than his first.
This man had always been this way. Always needing quiet.
When he was very small, now so long ago, his parents bought him a puppy, a sleepy little pooch who rarely, if ever, let slip a yip or squeal. For this quiet man, then a quiet boy, this was the perfect pet. But the pet soon transformed from placid pooch into roaring rover, barking loudly and often. So the formerly quiet canine was relieved of dog duty and shown the door.
A few years on, during one typically soft-spoken dinner, his parents asked if he’d be interested in going to summer camp. He laughed soundlessly in response. Swimming pools and baseball diamonds? The cacophony of children yelling, laughing and all manner of carrying on? Thanks but no thanks.
Later, when he graduated high school, he deftly avoided the hoopla and holler of ceremony by receiving his diploma via post. Before he’d even become a man, he was already a master (at averting noise’s reach). Noise, for him, was a plague on the soul; all commotion, clatter and hullabaloo were like disease variants threatening to infect his very being.
Now he was all grown up, with a nice, quiet job in a nice, quiet office pushing paper for the state. But truth be told it wasn’t always quiet. Sometimes people would talk or laugh or argue at the most unacceptable volume. Even those who spoke at the “correct” loudness had things to say that felt noisy in their own intrusive way.
For a man who lived for silence, it was a constant battle to keep a constant quiet. Which was why he wore headphones at all times.
Thanks to one particularly nifty phone app, The Disconnect, his ears were filled with white noise at all hours, caressing him like a silk blanket.
He kept this pseudo-soundlessness at a maximum, a perpetual fortress of ultra-loud anti-racket buttressing him against the world. And even though white noise was, yes, still noise, it didn’t affect him as such. It was close enough to real quiet, an approximation, a virtual voicelessness which was almost as good as the real thing. It was as if he’d been given a mighty aural ax in which to do battle with the clamor and blather of the world; he could turn silence up, way up to its fullest, and fight back against the din that hunted him. He never had to shush anyone again. His headphones did it for him.
So a life of white noise he’d made, blocking out his wife’s snoring, and the screeching rails of his commuter train, and the annoying morning birds, and the honking of horns on the roads, highways and byways.
Which was funny, not ha-ha funny but tragically funny, truth be told, because if he hadn’t been wearing those headphones at 7:17 on a crisp Tuesday evening he’d have heard the frantic beeps of a car careening towards him while he walked his after-dinner constitutional.
He got what he wished for. Silence, a real lasting silence. But not as long-lived as you might think.
At some point, he heard a sound in the dark; his consciousness rising to a familiar beeping. He woke to find himself in a hospital room with an incessant tone repeating in his ear, at regular intervals, stinging him with annoyance. It was a heart monitor… his own. It was… intolerable.
He tried asking his nurse to silence the infernal machine but he physically couldn’t. He could hear the words in his head — he was yelling in his head — but nothing came from his mouth. Nothing but silence.
Medical staff came and went. Their talking, unbearable. They said many things to each other and also to him, but the man could not talk back.
Meanwhile, the beeping of that damn monitor continued.
And that’s how it went for many days, his life turned into water torture made not of water but of sound. Repetitive bleeps, in and out and on and on.
His wife would visit often and speak to him and he, of course, could not speak back. If he could, he would say something like “Please be quiet! Give me my headphones! My white noise app! I need silence! Please help me.”
But, being that he was stuck, powerless in his head railing against ceaseless sound, his mind became a barking jumble of cursing and yelling and the noisiest carrying-on imaginable. His head was a house filled with perpetually screaming children. As you can imagine, it was loud in there.
So loud.
