Someone Has Been Fiddling With The Volume

I noticed it first a week ago, the moment I stepped outside for a walk to try and clear my mind. Something felt off, wrong, despite the beautiful day beginning to dawn.

I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I put it out of my mind, along with my thousand other worries, but whatever was off began to darken my mood. I found myself becoming tense, the very opposite of why I walk in the first place.

I stopped and glanced around.

Everything looked the same - people were still out with their dogs, birds were still flittering from tree to tree. It was then that I realized that though the morning birds were singing, I could barely hear them. I thought it was perhaps because of the oppressive music car blaring from the car beside me, but when at last the driver sped away, his engine growling, I realized that though the birds were singing, it was very low, as if someone had turned their volume down. They were singing as exuberantly as they do every morning, their delicate heads thrown back in song – but the songs themselves were muted.

“Well,” I thought, “maybe they had a rough night - maybe they sang too much yesterday!” and continued on my way.

Just then, though, a group of cheerful schoolchildren passed me, and I noticed that their voices were muted, too. Even on the gloomiest mornings their laughter never fails to lift me, and the clickety-clack of their shiny shoes on the sidewalk never fails to make me smile, but now, as they went, I could hear almost nothing.

I began to grow concerned.

Was I losing my hearing? My mind?

But just then, the madman on the opposite street corner, red-faced and shaking his fist at passing cars, began shouting threats and invectives at me – “Don’t try me!” he shouted, “you’re going to lose, do you understand?” and his shouting was not only not muted, it was extremely loud, louder than any human could possibly shout, as if someone had turned his volume from 1 to 10. So loud was it that I had to cover my ears until he passed, but even that wasn’t enough to quiet the assault. And as I walked away with my hands over my ears, I heard two men behind me arguing about politics, so loud I thought they were just behind me - but when I turned around, they were at least a hundred feet away.

“Someone’s been fiddling with the volume,” I said to my doctor.

“What volume?” she asked.

“The volume,” I said. “I can hear the news on a television two blocks away, but I can’t hear the music coming from the ice cream truck. I can hear the bombs falling in the Middle East, but I can’t hear the sound my little dog’s tiny toenails make when he prances across the wooden living room floor.”

She said I was the third patient that day to be experiencing a “volume issue.” She suggested I go home, get some sleep and it would resolve itself by the morning.

But the next morning, when I went for my walk, the singing birds were making no sound at all. Their beaks were moving, opening and closing, but no song could be heard.

I phoned my wife.

“Are sounds sounding low to you?” I asked her.

“They are,” she said.

“All the sounds?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “The bad sounds are loud, but the good sounds are disappearing.”

“Me, too.” I said.

“Speak up,” she said. “I can barely hear you.”      

That was when I began to panic, and so I went to see the governor.

“What’s the problem?” the governor asked.

I pointed to his open office window. It was raining, but the raindrops made no sound as they landed on the pavement and the roof and the leaves of the trees.

“That,” I said. “Do you hear the rainfall?”

“No,” he said.

“What do you hear?”

“I hear politicians arguing three miles away.”

He immediately gathered some experts, who listened to the non-rain rain, and who phoned their children, but whose voices they couldn’t hear.

It was, they determined, a sort of aural evolution - that sounds evolve in this world the way bodies do, and like the appendix or vestigial tail of the coccyx, the sounds we don’t listen to soon fade away while those we do listen to grow louder.

There was nothing to be done, they said, but be more careful with what we listen to, and with the sounds we ourselves make. They said we should listen to the birds and to the ice cream trucks and to the passing schoolchildren and to your dog’s nails on the wooden floor, and to your wife and to your children and to laughter and to crickets and to frogs and to wind in the trees, or one day soon, the rain would fall and make no sound at all.

I wasn’t sure that I bought their explanation. I wondered if there wasn’t some dark room somewhere, in the basement of a nondescript building, that contains all the knobs for all the sounds in all the world, and that someone has been creeping in at night and fiddling with them – turning up the sounds he wants us to hear, and to turning down the sounds he doesn’t.

I decided to take their advice, though, and I left the governor’s office and went to the nearby beach, but the ocean was silent. There were seagulls, but no seagull calls. There were waves, but no sound of them breaking. There was surf, but it made no sound when it crashing upon the shore. I wanted to leave, because it was making me sad, but I imagined sitting in a car one day in the distant future, in the middle of a pouring rain, with my granddaughter sitting beside me and the rain ping-ping-pinging on the roof, and she looks up at me and says, “I love that sound, don’t you?” So instead of leaving, I sat very still, and I tried very hard, and I listened and I listened and I listened, and after a few moments I heard the faintest crash of a wave, or at least I think I did, I’m almost sure, maybe I didn’t, but I’ll return and try and listen for it again tomorrow.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

Illustrations by Orli Auslander