From the novel, The Dark Album
October
“Your heads are so full of water,” I said to my two stupid little things, eight and six years old.
They remember. I know they do.
We were hovering over the pooling creek a few yards from our campsite. The thunder nearing us sounded as if that liquid spiraling mirror was its source.
“Pea!” called out the one, swaying in order to swirl in that mirror. My name, Samantha Peabody, a perfectly acceptable name, was not good enough for this one.
“Pea!” she called again, a wintering white-throated sparrow, not very much like a child of eight.
The other swirl-swayed. The other always imitated her sister. She said, “We’re lost!” which she had been saying all morning – because the other had been saying it. Her delight about being lost was only a slight rekeying of her sister’s delight and worry.
It was, after all, what I did. I lost child-things. The parents agreed in advance that I would lose them. Their things agreed that I would lose them. It was understood the children would be lost for a week each month. One can agree to be lost even if it is pretend-lost and even if it is on a deadline, and still there is fear. With the use of escalating fear inside disorienting pleasure, one can hold the attention of suggestible fledgling things.
These were my lost things, these two.
I was there making a face on the face where their faces were. “I’m here,” I said, shifting my position. “I’m there. I’m here.” I swayed over them and I made chewing noises. Since I could chew on the swirling bills of their red baseball caps, I loudly chewed with the maternal instinct of species in which the natal season is cannibal snack-time. Like a praying mantis, I chewed at the ears and necks of the two things reflected on the surface of the water. They were my found things, these two, and though I was the same womankind as their mother, I was at a higher place on the food chain.
These children were my responsibility now. I made a living from them. It would not be inaccurate for me to say that such children were my primary diet.
I shall explain.
Once a month, I took female children between the age of five and nine into the Dreaming Pines Campground of the Pisgah National Forest where I offered them an expedition through the unique soundscape of upper Desnos Creek.
“Lose Your Female Children,” was the motto of my enterprise. The parents signed up their little things for a thirteen-month contract that covered a sonic adventure on the first week of every month. It was extremely expensive tuition. It separated parent and thing for thirteen weeks a year. It was, in all regards, questionable. What male in the United States, in the Twenty-first century could ever take up this lucrative enterprise and not have the very idea hunted down and killed? I, a sixty-seven-year-old female, on the other hand, could corner this market, could make a glass ceiling males could not break. The things that sincerely wished for this and the parents of the things that paid up front were my customers. (The contract fee was non-negotiable; the full fee, paid in advance, was non-refundable; if the thing failed my expectations in the first week or on any of the subsequent expedition weeks, the contract was void, the full fee mine to keep.) (I pre-emptively rejected the parents and the things who had doubts of any kind about me; I rejected the ones who gave me doubts about them.) (I did not sign repeat contracts with customers who had doubts of any kind following a sonic adventure.)
Before I was in business I had lost many things.
At the time of this particular sonic expedition I had been in business for six years and had lost many, many things that I would never again find. Some of the things that were nine years old had gotten lost with me for four years running.
I had hired forceful female executives of accounting agencies to assist me. I had hired influential female doctors and therapists and moneyed female ministers to endorse me. I had hired powerful female attorneys to prevent me from risk of liability. Female attorneys, therapists, ministers, and doctors made up a considerable percentage of my customer base, including the subspecies of attorney who was mother to the one and the other with me that day on the creek.
It was the first week in October when all the forest crown-limbs clatter and fallen pine needles broom the surface roots. We could hear one crisp leaf falling a hundred and fifty feet through skeletal tulip tree branches and one bit of bluff-stone grumbling and crunching down leaf-strewn paths: it was, as I had wished, a threatening time to be lost. I had explained to the two things that this was the time of the orographic phenomena of thunder without rain. (For their edification, I talked up to children. I talked down to them only rarely, aware that I was doing so for my personal satisfaction.)
When the other insisted, and the one supported her in her questioning about the word “orographic,” I explained that I knew their mother quite well, and, I said, “You know how it feels to hear a cruel word with no words of mercy following?” I said, “You know how it sounds when your mother calls you Stupid Thing only for the sake of being right about you? This is an orographic phenomenon.”
They nodded yes.
Rain, which is more cruel by far than thunder, does not sound as unkind as thunder. Thunder is the mean master’s mean servant. Thunder is the warning you doubt. You should not doubt it.
“Have you heard?” I asked. There is no question more important, and so I asked it often.
I did not allow the things to take field notes; I trained them in the attentiveness that required they clear and refresh and newly sensitize their hearing. They had the materials I provided for live specimen collection; each had a hand-lens magnifier (a Coddington 20) in order to examine the barely visible and invisible creatures making sound. They had binoculars and a strict set of rules for ignoring them while always carrying them. They had Samantha Peabody, unrelenting teacher, methodological, indifferent to their puny defenses against learning: exacting acoustician taking her mandate from Emerson who wrote, “I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give, I give myself.”
We had enjoyed playing before the mirroring river. They had let their guards down.
“Put your heads in,” I said.
The idea instantly appealed to the other. It did not appeal to the one, and, needless to say, that influenced the other.
“You will not hear unless your ears go in for no less than three seconds,” I said. “At this particular location the creek is not cold – it might seem cold at first but it is not,” and I put my hand in the water, and felt, very secretly felt it turn blue.
I had made approximations. I said, “In twelve seconds there will be thunder. I can allow you six seconds to deliberate.”
They bowed close to the surface. They breathed upon it, blew upon it. The bills of their caps tapped it. They nosed it. They lipped it.
The necks of the things were slender. I took the necks in my hands and, without forcing, assisted the things into the water up to their shoulders. I pulsed my fingers on their necks.
One.
Two.
Three.
I pulled them out and pressed their heads against my chest.
The soaked things shivered, the things’ girl-cherry faces turned ghosty.
“Have you heard?” I asked. I knew they had: the monstering, the deviling, the whispering in-breath echo of the thunder’s out-breath.
The astounded things thumpingly hugged me, muttered and whimpered against me. I listened. I heard. They sounded like the river they had sounded.
At the camp I gave them dry towels. I took away their wet caps. I made it clear they could not yet enter the tent.
“Pea?” said the one, “that isn’t fair.”
“Pea?” said the one. “Pea?” and that made the other ask it.
“I do not hear whimpering,” I said. “Children’s whimpering, which occurs almost exclusively in the subsonic range, is not audible to Samantha Peabody.”
They were hugging me still. Dampening my chest.
“Some music when we go in there?” asked the one, and “when can we go in? – “ and the other interrupted, “When? When?” and the one asked, “—will there be some music?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “You will drip not at all in our tent? You will groom yourselves? You will neaten your assigned tent space? You will not request feeding until after naptime?” The rules had all been meticulously explained in the contract. In the presence of their mother, we reviewed every rule.
The other made a feeble moaning that certain spring peepers make when they are still under the mud but are restlessly practicing. I adjusted their towel turbans, pulled them down over their ears, their brows. When they entered the tent I helped them draw their sleeping bags over their bodies. I frowned at their shivering, grubbing sounds. Chagrined, they attached themselves to my legs. One could think of them as appealing things if one had such weakness.
“All right, then,” I said and brought out my harp sling with the eight major keys of Hohner Special 20s. They were my choice.
There is a kind of self-deliverance that involves killing yourself, and there is a kind that involves retreating from the company of others, and a kind that involves retreating from yourself into the place where all sound reaches you through the chambers you have left. There is a kind that involves never traveling back out through those chambers again. The possibility of all the choices: one can hear it in one’s own sounds. Put the key of A to your mouth. Blow. Draw. Pull down the first note you play on the draw. You are asking yourself the question, Have you heard?
Huge, my harmonica teacher, taught me you get only Ugly if you bend a note toward Beauty, you get Beauty only if you bend it toward Ugly. I bent the turnaround note for them, which caused a smile. A smile on the one thing. A smile on the other.
They sang “Rye Whiskey” with me after I explained that it would be permissible for us to sing this song if we were lost, that ordinarily young things should neither sing this kind of song as nestlings nor fledglings, but that it was permissible if we were lost and would never be found.
“When you will never be found,” I said, “when you will be lost and I have told you not to worry, to take your naps, and then I go to get help and I never return – that is a good time for music.” I could not imagine that they would ever grow to be older things with mates they had not warned off, had not used, abandoned, killed, eaten.
I said that one was assigned mandolin-like sounds and the other must draw the bow across an imaginary fiddle, and together they must sing this part by yi-yi-ing, “Sometimes I drink whiskey – sometimes I drink wi-yi-yi-yiiiiiine.”
I did not allow laughter, for “Rye Whiskey” was a sad song of exulting self-disgust. Instead, I asked that they close their eyes. Close them. Do as I say. Sing after me, I said. “If the women don’t kill me I’ll live til I di-yi-yi-yiiiie-ee-ee-eeeee.”
It was about fifteen minutes past one o’clock, a dark afternoon. We were being drummed on and howled at, our tentskin tatted by tree seeds. The nutting trees were in a mast season; they were flinging down their fruit in superabundant pleasure; the barking and spitting sounds came from the red squirrels almost mad with gluttony. I sang, “’Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey,’ I cry, ‘if I don’t get rye whiskey I surely will di-yi-yi-yiiiiiiii!’” Eyes closed, they had stopped plunking and bowing, and now they only faintly sang after me and fought only a little the intimations of sleep and lostness, and death.
I made a wish. I wished that the remaining family and friends I had left would give up on me once and for all.
I practiced my split four-note chords in order to attain a Hammond-organ-drunken-accordion-hummingbird effect. While the two things napped, I tried more vibrato, put the harp deeper into my mouth. Quieter and quieter, as Huge had instructed, I pulled the notes into my windpipe where I could choke them, and down to my solar plexus where I could choke them harder.
He was ninety-one years old, and his name was actually Eugene Meadows. He told me that in the service people had shortened it from Eugene to Eug, which they pronounced “Yewg.” And it was shortened yet again to “Huge.” He had been Huge since he was twenty-six. A tough teacher. At exactly the time you were least and most ready, he would back up to something you should have learned, or he would move on to something you could learn immediately and properly learn in the far distant future. He taught me for seven years.
In the tent, late afternoon, pretending to be lost in the forest with these two, I missed Huge. I had gone to his home to play really awfully for him (his wife asked me) on the last days, to play and sing “She Could Work that Stuff,” which was a ribald tune he liked. When I finished, I said, “You understand? – I’m going to miss you for awhile, Huge.” He couldn’t answer. He was at the end.
“I’m not exactly sorry to be more alone,” I said, “but for awhile I’m going to miss you bad.” It was in that part of September when you can hear the difference in how the crickets chirp on the warm days from the cold days. He died while I was there, and quiet came, the freezing and the thawing quiet for which I was thankful.
I knocked spit out of the middle octave of the harp. I remembered: freezing, thawing cycles of quiet in which his body’s sounds lifted out of him the way small stones surface when they are lifted by frost and imperceptibly fall away from their warming cradles into cool air and sunlight.
I asked the stupid things, “Have you heard?” but they were asleep, turbans ajar, faces twitching, yipping.
In that area of the watershed where there are black bears actively hunting in October, one must store food in tightly sealed containers, and one must keep the containers far from the campsite. Stowing food high in a tree is advisable, even in a mast season in which there is a hundredfold more food than all the nut-hunting woodland creatures can possibly gather. A mast season is the strategy of trees that have detected a critical point of forest stress. A stand of trees is an intelligence; it retreats, advances, conserves, produces, and overproduces according to the sempiternal impulses of relenting and survival, about which humanity is ignorant.
We ate our morning and late afternoon meal – (I did not believe in an expedition dinner hour for small things) – about eight-hundred yards downriver from our campsite. We ate there. We washed our food kits there. We did not spill upon ourselves. We did not permit particles of food or oily smears upon our faces, hands, and arms. We sealed our remaining food and drink. We sealed the 3 X 56 inch Tupperware container inside a larger latched tin box, which we hung on one of the park’s bear cables. Any respectable bear could climb to the cable and tear through our food container with ease. But the bear would have to smell the food first and would have to prefer it over the feast the woods provided.
We did not eat preferable food.
After their naptime, as the two things and I partook, they talked. They were discussing their mother and her “problem.” She seemed different than the person I knew: a divorce attorney prominent in Buncombe County because of her methods, expensive because of the viciousness of them. She was an important endorser of Sonic Adventures With Samantha Peabody.
I found her repugnant.
I found her beneficial.
That was what I told the two things, explaining the natural phenomenon of commensalism: Samantha Peabody was an organism that benefitted from their mother, and their mother was not adversely affected by the association; similarly, the two things benefitted from Samantha Peabody, but Samantha Peabody was not affected by the two things.
It was clear from their conversation that they were having trouble adjusting to their mother’s newest boyfriend Warren whom they referred to as War. Three weeks earlier, I had encountered War and Carla at the Ingles grocery store checkout. Without compunction, I had told the pair the lie that they threw off sparks of happiness. My cart parked right behind them, I had listened to them making accommodating vocalizations. I took advantage of the proximity, and I observed that only upon very close examination could one distinguish between Warren’s rectum sounds and his mouthpart sounds. He was a Chief District Court Judge.
The other said, “She’s un-nicer,” referring to her mother.
The one said, “Mmmmhmmm.”
The other said, “War’s like everywhere.”
The one said, “War goes to church sometimes.”
“But then –“ said the other, and the one said, “—he’s everywhere.”
And the one said, “Have you heard?” She bowed her head slightly as a person must do who bends to the world’s sonic current.
“I heard,” said the other.
What they specifically, accurately described to each other were mating sounds. When I noted that the male cry was probably longer than the female cry and of more emphatic pitch than their description indicated, we practiced the sounds together in order to reinforce habits of calibrating.
This practice was enjoyable.
They talked more about Warren and their mother’s brute mating episodes. I did not prevent the things from talking during our mealtimes, since their noises constituted a warning to harmful creatures who might wish to approach: We are human children in your woods. Our excruciatingly inane talk will repel you more the closer you come.
We washed our hands and arms and faces in the stream. “Cold,” said the one. “Cold,” said the other. “Quite cold,” said the one, mocking Samantha Peabody who was fascinated by coldness in all of its forms. It was the first week of their first sonic adventure, and already their ears were attentive.
As we pulleyed our food up toward the cable, I asked them to give me their conclusions about the Mother-War sounds.
They required my assistance to help them understand. And so I explained that in certain cases the alpha female spider, without regard for her young, will choose fuck-buddies and will forage with them and fight over food sources and will lose limbs to them but will regenerate the limbs and will fuck with and fight with the strong male until almost every limb is torn off but will grow strong limbs, stronger in some cases than the first limbs. I explained that eventually she will wrap the male in a swathing band while fucking him, and will fit the swathing band tightly while whispering kindnesses to the silken package, and these kindnesses which come from the abdomen are called “spinto.” I explained that we do not really hear these sounds that come from her while she is eating his creamy contents in thousands upon thousands of draining bites.
“We don’t hear them?” the other asked.
“They are imagined sounds,” I answered. “You must not discount them from the sonic dimension of the present moment.”
The one gave me the look, and the other a similar look.
I explained: “We hear a spoon knock against the sides of the cup when we’re stirring something; and we believe we hear the liquid in the cup burbling. We do not hear the liquid in the cup burbling. We definitely do not hear that with our ears. But the spoon has been stirred by the burbling we do not hear. And we have been stirred by the spoon.”
I wanted to say that spoon by spoon we experience the system, the totum, and the quantum of a boundless sonic contour. I am, often, quite often, tempted to plagiarize Pierre Teilhard de Chardin since I believe in the concept of the noosphere as others believe in God, and I own no bibles more important than these six: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man; R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape; Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature; Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees; and The Autobiography of Maria Martin, Watercolor Painter for John James Audubon. I hope that at the moment in time when they are perusing this album the two will consider this list as proper citation. It is my belief that inadequate in-text citation is undignified.
I have self-delivered now, and I have lived in my four seasonal camps in almost absolute isolation for twelve years. I acknowledge that it has made me eccentric. The more important thing for intruders to understand about me is that I am incautious. I am an incautious seventy-nine-year-old as I write these pages about my long-ago adventures with the one and the other. These pages are my children’s book. They are my private journal, a witch-fire. They are my field notes and my after-the-fact added commentary – they are my dark album — of my thirteen months with the two. It was my final expedition before I exiled myself absolutely.
I am aware that the pages into which I am pouring these rememberings are pointless: I was a forgetful and forgettable person. I was an unintelligent and unintelligible teacher. The writing, which I cannot stop – I wish I could stop – I wish I could – the writing started when they sent me a letter.
As they know, I share a mailbox with Drummer Wilner, my nun-musician-jamming-friend-mycologist-ex-smuggler-escaped-convict-lover at Mansour Cove over a mile of difficult trail away.
My self-deliverance has not been perfect.
Twice a year – in early March and in September – I have sexual contact, nocturnal and diurnal, with Drummer. She was named for her great-great grandmother who was a woods-to-woods itinerant saleswoman (a “drummer,” hill folk called such a person) of “Woman’s Goods & Formulas” from about 1896 to 1938.
A year ago, the two sent me a long, warm and loving letter, which I have not answered. I have discerned that the first half is in the voice of the one; the second half, the other. They warn that they are coming to visit me on my 80th birthday, October 13, 2014.
The one is 22. The other is 20. They ended their letter in this manner:
Have you heard?
Betty
Have you heard?
Janet
November
Only the one and the other were with me again at the campsite. It was two days after Thanksgiving, and we had left to hike up-creek somewhere between Little Char Knob and Jacob Mountain. I had been talking about the raccoon and heron vocalizations we heard at the stream bank. And we had stopped too long to hear leaves, twigs, berries, and wormed-through chips of bark hit the water.
With only an hour of daylight left and the sky swelling with rain, we were hiking down at a pace. Our reception of sound was affected by the micropulses of moist air in the canopy and the understory. I explained that the rain sound we thought we heard was plastic sonic material; that is, it reached us in a form between solid and liquid. “Pea?” asked the one, but instantly forgot the question.
Starlings turned a page of the sky.
The one asked the other whether it wasn’t all a fake: the brunching with War at the Biltmore Inn where everything was not so right, where it was all only pretend-right. “You could tell,” she said.
I did not hesitate to be intrusive. I asked for them to itemize, and they did. I asked about the phatic communications of the wait-staff.
The one said that sometimes there was a sucking-through-teeth sound that came from a white-breasted male waitstaff, and, with my assistance, she demonstrated its volume and endurance.
The one said that sometimes there was a cough-chuckle at the time of order-taking, and I was able to identify it as being not unlike the cuck-cuck calls of chipmunks.
The other said that the really old waitstaff looked like old opossums (“You can tell if they’re old by their frost-bit ears,” I explained). The other also reported that these opossums had a call: “Andyouhoney? Andyouhoney?”
The one said firmly to the other. “It’s not what Pea was asking about.”
That was true: I was asking about the sounds that did not take the shape of words.
The one said that sometimes stridulations came from the waitstaff. Together, we discerned that these stridulations were the rubbing-together of crisp pants or pantyhose that occurred during delivery of food. After compensating for frequency, one would assign it a relative loudness of 4 (approximately 0.25 sones).
“And of what temperature were the sounds?” I asked as we came within a hundred feet of our familiar campsite.
The other froze in place. “Pea,” she said. She had been the first to hear. “Pea!” she shouted.
A bear yawned and grunted, “Gaaaaooohhh!” within a few yards of us. We could not see it. We could hear it huff, stamp, make the bowel-guttering sounds a large female will make to keep the attention of its young.
We could not smell it. It was near – it warned, “Gggggaahoah-hoah-ggkkkaa!” – but it was downwind of us.
“She can smell us!” I shouted.
They knew what to do. Though they were frightened, they knew they must slowly back away from the origin of the sound. They must make noises, but not the mewling noises that might make a mother bear murderous. They must become big and unappetizing, human but on a superhuman scale. The first part involved holding hands, and raising their four arms over them, and standing on their toes. The challenge of being unappetizing involved disco dance movements in which they imitated my raised right knee, my raised left, my forward-and-back shoulder-swagger.
Then came the quiet.
I did my railroad-crossing move with my arms. They did it with me. Needless to say, we had practiced all of these evasive maneuvers.
There was a snort far inside the quiet.
The other trembled, and the one.
“Pea?” asked the other.
“Pea?” asked the one.
The light step sound. Another. Another light step. She was still not visible, but she was coming, and at about the time of late afternoon she said she would. She was laughing, though she was ashamed of her laughing and was trying to stop.
She was in our path.
“This,” I said, “is my disowned sister Elaine.”
Elaine held out her arms as if the one or the other would be foolish enough to hug her. She held them out longer, and I stepped into them and closed my arms around her in order to lightly crunch her ribs and say, “I didn’t believe you would really show up only so I could tell you in person to leave me alone.” She made an eeking pained sound I appreciated because as a child she had often caused me to eek in the same way.
“You should be more careful of bears,” said Elaine to the children as she shrugged me off.
I said, “You found our campsite.”
“Found it.”
“My sister,” I said, “believes she has come to visit us. She believes we will welcome her visit.”
“Yes,” said Elaine with mechanical formality, “I am your visitor.” She did not yet again hold her arms out pointlessly, but she bent down to the children, and she asked, “Will you tell me your names?”
The one said, “Betty,” and the other said, “Janet.” They did not sound kindly. The tone of the one was the turning-aside tone, and the tone of the other was the scornful echo. Inside me I made a field recording of it. Inside me were so many field recordings made through the Novembers I have lost children in these mountains. I did not and do not now lie to myself that I objectively evaluated what I collected; what I collected is poetry that degenerated to science under my successful scrutiny and reverted to song under my failing love.
“They are here to hear,” I said to Elaine. “Elaine,” I said to the two, “has closed earlids.”
When they looked at her, I could see through their eyes how my salt-and-pepper hair was like my sister’s: rasped and short, sealed close to our heads, oily as if coated against moisture and cold.
The alert silence of the two and my own precisionist silence caused Elaine to ask, “What?”
I staked her to the ground with my stare. She wouldn’t hear the sound, of course, but we did: threading through the chirping of the field crickets, and through the seed-falling and seed-sailing sounds, through the almost noiseless breeze-shiftings of frass and fecula under leaves and twigs: the commentary.
“Three,” said the one.
“Two,” said the other, and she was right, she knew it.
During that time of year on Desnos Creek whippoorwills sang, These old hills – these old hills – these old – these old. And from a different perch of longing, other whippoorwills sang, Sold hills – sold hills – sold – sold – sold.
Elaine said, “Samantha, I’m –“
She had spooked the whippoorwills, had ruined the transmission. The children and I gave her our ass-wipe looks. It was a serious infraction of our code to ruin the transmission.
“— pretty hungry, to be honest.”
As if she had caused it with her noise, the clouds burst. There are moments in these woods when one element that totally withheld its response to another suddenly releases it like a train screaming out of a tunnel. Freezing rain whirled through the shrubs and trees: instead of coming down it was coming through.
The one huddled so tightly over the other that they were bent at the waist and low to the ground when they came to the tent entrance.
As soon as they had frisked each other in order to avoid introducing foreign matter into our tent, the children went in. Elaine reacted poorly to me frisking her and to my insistence that she frisk me.
In the most intimidating voice I could muster, I said, “You’re leaving in the morning, do you understand?”
The rain ended abruptly. It had been less than eighty seconds of rain. I was still standing very close to Elaine. She said, “You have to be such a bitch?” and slap-frisked my hips, and lifted her palms and forearms toward me, and said, “Huh?”
I picked the golden stars from her palms and her damp sweater sleeves. “Witch hazel blossoms,” I said. “And watch your mouth with these two. I mean it.”
“Do you?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
Inside the tent, she asked, “They bloom? This time of year?”
“And they uncork like popguns,” I said.
“Tell her about witch hazel,” I asked the two.
Instead of talking about it, we opened the large thermos of hot water, taking sips, offering it last to Elaine. She wanted to know why we did not make tea, and she told us about the various kinds of tea she liked most; she wanted to know why we did not have pretzels or crackers, and she told us about how the simple generic Laura-Lynn-brand saltines were her favorite; she said it was a small tent, wasn’t it; she said it sure got dark fast this time of year; she asked the two if the dark bothered them, and answered for them that they needed better light inside the tent, better light would make it less scary so she said; she said that a bigger tent would be a good thing, wouldn’t it; she supposed it would not be as cozy, though; she went on, a more and more curious expression on her face, the evidence of an unanswerable question burying itself. She said, “I’m hungry.”
“We ate,” said the other.
“We only eat in the middle of the day,” said the one.
“And dinner?” my sister asked, “What about dinner?”
My sister’s nature led her to hear neither the voices in the world around her nor those farther away. Though she had perfect hearing, though she was fluent in her speech, she could not hear her own voice, her own words, the unvarying tone. Elaine continually made up a version of her own and others’ past and present discourse, and so she did not feel she must make more effort to hear. She was unaware that many of her own extraordinary sensitivities to others instinctively developed from compensation for her unique forms of absolute virtual deafness.
My assessment of her is unfair. Her many longtime friends and her two adult children received loving connection from her that was inspiring to witness. In a time of momentary or, for that matter, monumental difficulty, she was the one person you would want at your side, unless you needed dialogue, unless you wished for the giving sounds and the offering sounds, for the listening.
Why was it so impossible for me to forgive her for that? I was human. I was awfully human. I would never insult animal and vegetal life by calling myself “inhuman.” In one-hundred-thousand years of existence as their mother earth’s brute demi-human hoard, humans have committed matricide, have transformed the clay of them to shit.
I was human. I was shit. I am.
“You need food,” said the one to Elaine who did not hear her.
I knew Elaine did not have rain gear, and I offered her mine, the pants and hooded jacket, so the two of us could walk downstream to the food.
The one and the other insisted on coming along.
When we left the tent, I said firmly, “Complete quiet, Elaine.”
Rime ice glistened all around us. It slipped from the warming chitinous branch sleeves with a false-teeth-clicking sound. We could hear a few crows, a few woodpeckers. Their sounds deepened and their bodies darkened the darkness. These friends without primary consciousness made no effort – for our sake – to be conscious. At night when my love for them was purest, it was easier for me to recognize that they had none of the burdens of a sense of self.
A raccoon hissed at us from outside our bright cones of rain-struck light, and Elaine said, “Jesus!” and said I should give her a flashlight, that she might trip, that we should have an extra, and said she wondered if Betty and Janet had ever heard of the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared,” which reminded her that she could never remember the Girl Scout motto, but she felt it must be “Keep Your Boy Scout Prepared,” and she said she was just joking, but that Samantha knew the motto, those were the kinds of things Samantha knew, that you never got anything out of Samantha unless you asked, and…and…
As soon as there was at last a slight pause, I asked the two if they would retrieve Elaine some crackers and turkey-jerky from our food cache. They gladly left. We followed from a distance, catching up with them at a place where we sometimes heard whippoorwills.
The two gave her small portions. Already, the two did not like her. I reinforced their negative attitude by asking Elaine in their hearing whether her new husband had fallen silent yet. I did not say aloud that the natural outcome of her virtual deafness was that the people around her experienced tampening and, next, diminishing attentiveness, then successive forms of canceling out, and silent, distant communion. It did not take long. She had silenced her first husband within the first year of her thirty-year marriage. He moved inward. And deeper inward. Like all of us who loved Elaine, he found he truly loved her in that deepest place to which his silence led him. And I believe he found he loved the person he himself was in that silent, silent instar stage of development; in any case, that was my own experience of knowing Elaine. And it was my experience – I thought it must have been his, too – that as time passed he loved her more intensely but loved her more profoundly from afar; and it was absurdly true that he eventually loved himself more – but from afar.
Elaine had a brilliant mind. The textbook materials she could memorize – all the materials she could never hear a teacher present or interpret – were inexhaustible. Teachers, of course, were repulsed by her, but remember that this was still the era of teaching as an art and a science though it was rapidly becoming the corporate era of teaching to the test. Academic testers and technicians were astounded by her. Yes, I was jealous of my brilliant sister to whom the golden slipper was perennially affixed by the school principal, by the genius peer, by the prince, by the fellowship committee, the loan officer, the executive board, the baby-making angel.
Needless to say, the three of us did not talk with Elaine about the whippoorwills. The two led us back to camp. Occasionally, one or the other would glance back at Elaine and give her the ass-wipe look since Elaine’s nonstop vocalizations meant we would hear nothing in the woods during this walk or, for that matter, until she left.
We reorganized our tent space so that Elaine could be in the center. She could not understand how she would fit. We explained to her that she would have to curl on her side. She could not understand why Samantha Peabody decided the sleep time; could not understand how she would get up in the night if she needed; she could not comprehend why people believed camping was at all enjoyable. Because she had not heard one word of her own words, she asked, “How will I get up in the night and go out of the tent and ‘water the garden’ and come back in?”
“Slowly. And silently,” said the one. The other said it with her, though louder than the one: “Slowly. And silently.”
They asked for music.
I asked Elaine if she could be quiet for one full measure of music.
She asked if I would freak out if she did not.
The one said, “Samantha Peabody will definitely freak out.”
“She will,” said the other.
The one said, “We could hear a ghost story.”
“You brought books?” asked Elaine. They explained that Samantha Peabody did not allow books on the sonic expedition. (There was an exchange of glances between the one and the other. Of course, as in October, the stupid things had brought books about which they believed I was unaware. I thwarted their efforts to read, which does not mean I prevented them from reading at times they were not in my company. I allowed them to preserve their sense that they held a secret from Samantha Peabody.)
Elaine said, “Children who love books –“
“It’s all right,” said the one, wishing not to be exposed.
Elaine asked me, “But you have your books here?”
“An entire box of them,” I said. “I couldn’t live a day without them.” And in response to her glaring, I answered, “I am a self-disciplined adult. A trained bio-acoustician. The children, who naturally see-hear, must go without books of any kind in their thirteen weeks with me or they will not hear-see, and they will not hear.”
The two curled around me the way they did at the first part of the night. When it was time to wear them like two parts of a casing, I wore the two things.
“No ghost story tonight,” I said. “Elaine frightens easily.”
“It’s true,” said Elaine. “Samantha told me The White Crocus Story when we were little, really little, littler than you two, and I still – it was a horrible story, and it gave me nightmares.”
“I love my sister,” I said.
“And it still does,” she said.
“You do?” asked the one.
“You do,” said the other.
I told it badly in those days. A good hainting story takes practice because one must perfect the moans, screams, creaks, the sighing parts, the scraping parts. The thumps. The shovelings and buryings and the gruntings of the gravedigger. The actual ghost narrative is of the smallest value, but when one is trying with all her might to silence her yapping sister in any way possible, one will lean on affective creation of timbre, of lifts and breaks in voice, while postponing learning effective narrative construction.
“I love my sister,” said Elaine.
I said to the two things, “It will be a long night,” and I recommended that they use the earplugs I had issued them in October. These ear condoms were ribbed, able to block sound according to their depth of insertion.
“No music?” asked the other. She had a grip on my right knee, and I do not know why I did not request that she loosen her vice-grip small hands. Cold hands.
Samantha Peabody, I explained, did not offer music that is interruptible. I knew this insult to my sister would not register with Elaine, and I am confident the two recognized that I was merely reasserting the rules of sonic exploration.
Elaine said, “They like me. You should let them like me. And then they would like me more. People say I’m good with them, with children, with the ones that are out of diapers, with the –“
The P-A (Phon-Aid) device, developed in 1981 by Dr. Chu Tsai-Yu, helps one regain the lost sense of the measure of sound intensity, and it is useful in training the ear of the sonic adventurer. There are few circumstances in which it is necessary to use the 0.02 depth setting.
With the convenient use of their P-A devices, the two continued to look at Elaine’s constantly moving mouth. They eventually looked away, looked at each other, entered silence’s mutualities as only good monks and certain lucky sonic initiates might.
For half an hour, Elaine plunged into the issue between her and me: I wished to separate myself from her; impossibly, I wished for her to know that I loved her and would always love her, but that I wanted for the next part of my life to be separate from all human contact. I wished for her to forgive me for this choice. I wished for her to forgive me if I failed at this self-deliverance and at a later time wanted entry again into her life. I was grateful, I told her, that she came to me here in the mountains, here at the threshold of my own choices, and did not make me come to her in the city. In late September, I had written all of this to her. I knew that she would only half-read the letter because the half-hearer is always an erasing reader taking in the vague contexts but never the subtexts and the codes of language.
She said, “You are unnaturally depressed. The longer you go with no one telling you you are depressed the more you are depressive, Sam.”
“I cannot disagree,” I said, six syllables wasted on her.
She rambled on in cleft sentences, almost all of them beginning with the word “What.”
“What you need is to let me start over, and you need to start over yourself, people do that, you can do that, what you did was you just went away, you were a goer-away from the time you were a kid, and when I – what I did was I did the best I could at everything – what is the crime in it? – and you went away pretty far like our parents went away from each other and couldn’t come back but stayed in to the bitter end – and what I do is to make good – and when your – when your.”
She was softly crying as she said, “When your Robert died what you did was to go away from everybody and everything. What I did was try to say things that might help.”
“You are correct,” I said. “You said things.”
“I said things. What I do is say things, God help me. My heart is –“
I did not say, You could have just shut up so I could find you. I did not say, If I could have found you through your blizzard of words, you could have been some refuge to me. And when you divorced, I could have been some refuge to you.
“You’ve never said what exactly went wrong between me and you, Samantha. I don’t know what went wrong. When Mom & Dad used to ask and when other people, too, used to ask: I didn’t know what to say.”
Not a chance. There was not a chance to say and to be heard.
After the two fell asleep, and through the night I listened to Elaine, tried to console her, listened, listened, listened, tried to hear her and what her swarm of words sought. I tried not to allow my brain to simply select the wished-for words.
An hour before sunrise, she curled up on the center of the tent floor. She slept. I watched her sleep. I helped her get up. Slowly. Silently. The two had not woken up yet when I held Elaine’s hand a little while down the trail away from the campsite. They had missed the chance to explain to her about the golden stars of the witch hazel in which are large black seeds that feel like bits of bone. When the stars explode – with a croupy spitting sound – the seeds bullet trees forty feet away.
She mumbled aloud to herself. About what was worse: was it worse to…was it worse to… the worst thing was…the worst thing was…
I listened. As she went out of sight she was still talking to herself. Twelve years have passed and I have not seen Elaine. In March and September at the place called Drummer’s Goods, I receive Elaine’s letters. Like a fool, I respond to them.
Bio:
Kevin McIlvoy has published new prose poems and short stories in Waxwing, The Collagist, r.kv.r.y, Pif, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Kenyon Review Online. His most recent books are The Complete History of New Mexico, Hyssop, and Little Peg. He mentors individual writers and edits book manuscripts through ww.mcthebookmechanic.com.
from Shadowgraph Magazine Two, Summer 2014