UNFOLDING
“Get out!”
You don’t hear it as much as sense it. It’s the movement, a shadow somewhere behind you, a fracture, and a puncturing of your world from that of a parallel and adjacent one.
You are coasting down a sidewalk.
You are filled with a kind of joy, contentment.
Work is done.
Freedom beckons.
The unknown, the night, still unfolding ahead of you.
You are not present or in the moment; you are everywhere but here or in the now.
Is that bad?
This not being present at all times, headphones in, Frankie Knuckles thumping, reading texts, checking scores, scanning news in real time, lost in it, stories permeating everything, everywhere, immersed in your thoughts, collecting them, following flights of fancy, and fantasy, who you may fuck, and where you’ll go when you go back out, if you go back out at all, because maybe you’ll choose to write or read and drink coffee instead.
You’re allowed this, right?
This sense of anything being possible, no concerns, no worries?
It’s dependent on the world and your place in it, your privilege, because what does it mean to never worry about where you are or question whether you belong there?
You’ve been handed all of this at birth and it’s yours to lose.
Until all that’s punctured.
What’s important is the not hearing it.
Because you know that someone is sidling up alongside you, but you don’t know this based on any particular sense.
You just know.
Just as you know the person is placing you in a headlock, that you’re slipping away, backing-up, but not running, the first punch catching you in the nose, the shock, little explosions in your brain, the second punch catching the temple of your glasses, shattering them, jarring you, your brow, your sense of balance and equilibrium as you drop to one knee and try to get your bearings.
“Get out!”
He says this, and it’s the only thing you hear, everything else silent, a series of soundless actions, air passing all around you, a steady flow of movement, as this figure moves on from one world to the next, stepping through a veil that’s now all ripped-up.
***
“Get out.”
This is your wife’s reaction as you sit in the doctor’s office together, and there is a small, stunned smile and a crinkling around her eyes, almost a tear, but mostly it’s a weird kind of rupture that comes from being with someone and having seen them one way for all of time and now having to see them in another.
She was there after the assault, though you don’t know where she came from. One moment you’re on your knee, the next you’re talking to the police. “He was wearing orange, or rust,” you tell them. It’s all you know, you think, getting stitched-up in the ER in some hospital you’ve never seen before. “OK, hold still,” someone in scrubs and goggles says, and then your wife was standing there, breathless, sad. “What the fuck,” she says as she looks at you, briefly shattered, and not of this world, with the noise, tinny announcements crackling overhead, code this or that, and a million little conversations, loud, whispered, desperate, staff, all hustle, urging and flow, the blinding white walls, rustling curtains, and bright lights from every direction, a cacophony of disruption, and her, thrust into role of healer and gatherer of pieces.
She doesn’t know that, in your head, for months, years, for all time, every unexpected sound, every person coming up behind you, every bump in a bar or train, every person, movement passing between worlds, causes a small hiccup in your brain, causes your heart to constrict, adrenaline to surge, hands to form into fists, unconscious, immediate, ready for the violence that doesn’t come.
You don’t share that.
You live in a kind of silence, self-imposed, a bubble. You draw a wall around that, let it fester, but not ooze. It’s your thing and you have to heal yourself.
Is it shame? Some of it.
You didn’t run or fight when you had to, and now you always want to run and fight.
Is this any way to live?
No, but it fades, that fear, being freaked-out by unknowns, cursing the world, all heightened all the time, the shouts in your head quieting to near nothing.
Time happens – and age – the psychic bruises fade because they have to. That’s how it works.
And now you’re a father to sons, human boys in the world. And what’s your responsibility to any of that?
Some of it is making room for your children and less for others, less stimulation, less distraction, not sharing the space in your brain for things such as more friends, more culture, more work, more day-to-day engagement, all of it suddenly feeling so much less important.
Though not politics, that’s different. Your attention to justice only increases. It has to. They’re all your children now.
And so the youth in cages cannot go uncommented on. Guns. The climate. Anti-Vaxxers. Violence. Sexual assault. You will rage against all of that. You will quote facts, and you will not budge. Not when there is actual science available and not when it all feels so important.
You will also suffer in a kind of silence though as the world passes you by. The world exists by and for the young; there’s no place for the aging and no use for you, the less fresh and less interesting, and you want to feel useful, but you get it, and you seek to find a kind of peace with that.
The rub is that this stance isn’t merely figurative, things are getting passed you, things you can’t make sense of.
And so when you find yourself struggling on a new job unsure of what’s happening or why it’s happening, and you feel so confused, you wonder if you should you say something to someone, anyone, your wife, maybe, anyway?
Not that it’s entirely accurate to say that you don’t know where your troubles lie at work. You hate the job, the people in charge, the insularity of the team, the lack of freedom and creativity, but it’s your inability to punch through it, something you’ve never experienced before that is most paralyzing for you.
You’re an ill fit. You’ve lost your way.
It’s shameful, and it’s somehow more than that, too. You can’t always figure how to follow instructions any more, execute, it all feels so jumbled and impossible.
You are not present.
You are lacking confidence.
You are unhappy.
You are broken.
How does that happen?
You don’t know, so you go home, where it’s safe, to figure something out, and your wife seems alarmed, but OK. It’s going to be OK.
***
“Get out?”
You say this to yourself. There is no right place to be any more, not even home, not now.
“What?”
“What?”
“You completely ignored me,” your wife says.
“When?”
“Now.”
“What?”
This takes place in your living room.
Home is now work, which is to say, both where you work and where your problems are now nestled, the veil between worlds merging, pressing together.
It’s all confusion now.
“You need to let me make some calls,” she says.
***
“Let me know when you hear a beep.”
You are sitting in a booth like a child, your child, who was once plagued with earaches, infections, fluid, a loss of sound, words, a connection to the larger world, and the person asking you to listen for a beep is barely older than a child herself, with her blonde hair, flawless skin, and chunky Buddy Holly glasses.
When your son was in this space, he sat on your wife’s lap like a doll, raising his little finger every time one of the mechanical monkeys to the left or right behind him, smacked the cymbals in their toy hands.
Crash.
Crash.
Crash.
Louder, fainter, smaller, slamming, coming from all directions.
He was fine.
You are not.
You are losing your hearing. You have been losing your hearing. A series of moments in which a missed word becomes a missed sentence, becomes a lost conversation, all compiling into a rush of nothing and collapsing onto itself.
You don’t know how long has this been going on, but when you place the sample hearing aids in your ear, it is clear to you that there is a world of sound that has eluded you: air conditioners, floor boards, car horns, so many conversations, and so many words, and so many moments where you nodded your head knowingly unaware that you were doing so at all.
You have been in a world of your own making, and now you’ve been handed a bridge out of it.
So where are you now?
You don’t know.
Are you ashamed.
No.
Your body is failing you, but you didn’t fail you, and that means something.
“Get out.”
Your wife says this. She is there to learn what’s up. She squeezes your hand, but there is nothing to heal or fix this time as you walk out in a world that will no longer be quite so confusing to navigate.
***
You go out, you want to be out of the house, your head, the endless conversations you can now translate again, so many words that still somehow wind around to the fact that you can no longer hear as you once did.
You get it, its humorous, scary, weird, annoying, whatever, to your wife and the boys, and it’s cool, but you need a break from all that, and from them.
You want to breathe and you want to be feel in control of something, anything, even if it’s only yourself.
You put in your new hearing aids and you go to a bar, bathing yourself in the dissonance, the beats of music, the spikes in conversations, the clink of the glasses, the thrum of the heat ducts, the shoosh of clothes, coats coming off, denim on skin, skin on skin, until its overload and you push outside and into a snowfall so thick there’s a curtain cutting off one world from the next.
You wait for the bus, and a woman walks up next to you, just having left the bar as well. She is stumbling, drunk, talking to herself, her coat unbuttoned, her face flush and red from the conditions. She sits across from you after the bus arrives, her head lolling onto her chest, eyelids heavy, her dress bunched awkwardly around her knees.
“Are you alright?” you ask.
You say this out loud, but she doesn’t respond.
You realize you have no idea how loud you actually sounded and whether you can even trust yourself to hear your own voice.
You touch the hearing aids with your index fingers, seeking the scratch and static that allows you test whether they’re working, but they’re dead, the batteries and their beep, beep, beep warnings lost to the sounds of the bar, and needing to be replaced.
You have no replacements though, you left the house without them and you are in the dark.
The woman dozes off. You reach your stop and want to lean across the aisle, touch her arm, ask if she can get home safely, but then your children’s voices ring in your ear.
“Creepster.”
You head out into the snow. It’s late now, no people, no traffic, no sound, the world blanketed in a crisp white sheet.
You trudge toward your building.
Across the street there is a flash of movement under the streetlight, a shadow, and a yell, was that a yell, or maybe just the wind now whipping around you?
You peer into the blustery din of silence and walk into the middle of the empty street.
You inch closer, swallow.
The snow shifts direction and there are three people facing one another under the lamp post.
Where did they come from and why?
There are two men and a woman.
Young, well-dressed, their clothes a burst of purples and golds, well-fitting, statements.
Beautiful.
Their brown skin and dark black hair a striking contrast to the whiteness around them. Your children would hate this too, you identifying these figures by their skin color. And they would be right. But you are struck by how vivid it all is, and how outside of your sight, no other senses are at work.
The woman, her long hair whipping in the wind is screaming at one of the men.
You have no idea what she’s saying, you know they’re words, but they have no shape.
The man reaches out to calm her.
She recoils and slips in the snow.
That was a slip, right?
His movement was sudden, but was it violent?
The second man steps in.
You finish crossing the street.
“Are you alright?” you say looking at the woman who is now down on one knee, her pants blurring into the sidewalk.
“We’re fine,” the second man says, low, but not so low you can’t make it out.
Your mind is racing, a small surge in adrenaline creeping up your neck, your fingers closing into fists, your desire to run overwhelmed by your desire to punch someone in the face.
The second man is slighter than you and you think you could take him out if you had to. The other guy is beefier, but soft, and backing off, not looking to be involved.
“Are you alright?” you say, ignoring the second man, directing your attention to the woman who is standing up now, brushing the snow from her silky black pants.
“Give me your fucking phone,” she says. “Or call 9-1-1 for me.”
You pause, unsure even if you heard her correctly. Not that you don’t know what she said, it was clear enough, but you’re unsure of what to do, and whether you can bring yourself to do anything if that’s required of you.
The snow picks up, changes direction. They disappear, reappear.
“What?” you ask, wanting clarification, time, an impetus to act.
The beefy guy steps forward, his arms open wide.
“Get out,” she says to him, less fierce.
He hugs her, pulls her close, whispers things in her ear that you will never hear and never know.
The snow picks up.
It is silent.
The adrenaline is no longer coursing quite like it was moments ago.
That’s how it is now.
“Thank you,” the second man says to you as they head toward a car that has been there the whole time. They get in and disappear into the storm. The tire tracks and the glare from the headlights quickly covered in a new wave of snow. The evidence of their presence on the sidewalk is long gone and you’re unsure if this even happened. The curtain between worlds, briefly open, is shut again and you’re engulfed in silence with nowhere to go but home.
