ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DONALD HUCKS lives in Arlington, Texas. He has fiction forthcoming in Baker's Dozen Review.
Ubiquitous
By Don Hucks
About 3 a.m., a rhythm began to emerge from the white noise. At first simple, primordial, naive, it began to move, slowly and with purpose, in the deep, breathing faint ripples onto the surface above. Three octaves above middle C.
As a boy, he had assumed everyone heard the phantom tone. It was only as a young man, home from college for winter break, that he had been compelled to give it a name more lyrical than tinnitus, which had an ugly, diseased quality about it. It was three octaves above middle C, he had discovered late one evening, in a meandering staccato interrogation of the family piano he had never learned to play. It was like there was someone in the attic with a portable keyboard, forever holding down that single key. A whole army of them, in fact, lurking in the crawlspace over every room he’d ever entered. Sometimes he didn’t notice. Often he didn’t notice. They played softly. But they were always there, just the same, and they were louder at night.
She leaned over her salad and stroked the white linen with her free hand, her right hand pinning the fork to the chilled plate. “It must drive you nuts. It must be like, I don’t know, water torture or something. Doesn’t it drive you insane?”
“Only once, a couple of years ago, when the pitch changed. It was like this strange, muffled new sound I didn’t recognize. I got out of bed and walked all over my apartment trying to figure out where it was coming from.”
She adored the mock accusation. Her fingers abandoned the fork where it lay and gently curled around the stem of a glass. She leaned a little closer still and smiled, her eyes gleaming. “No, you didn’t,” she said.
“I finally tracked it to the kitchen, to a wall behind the stove. And then to the living room and to a wall over the couch,” he said. “Then to the opposite wall. And then I realized it was coming from all the walls, which meant it was coming from somewhere inside my head.”
She rotated the glass, rolling the stem between her fingertips and thumb, then slowly reversed the motion and rotated it back.
“Which was a relief, because it meant I didn’t have to move,” he said.
She shook her head, laughed, and took a sip of red wine. She asked him if those had been padded walls.
That was the way he remembered it, lying in the dark at a quarter to four. It was a long time ago and, as he lay reconstructing the past in layers, he knew that the moment had not been like that at all. Not the details. Not the throwaway textures of everyday things that provided the tactile surfaces for memory to grasp. He knew that the table cloth might have been striped, not white. The salad may have been soup. He couldn’t be sure there had been wine. It was long ago. No one remembers these things, really. They are the sleight of hand and bricolage the brain uses to patch together our decaying memories, so that we may patch together our decaying selves and reconstruct our identities. It may be that who we think we are in the present, and who we behave as if we are, is some odd, mosaic continuum of the various selves we remember having been through the past, intimately woven through the tapestry of all the experiences we remember having experienced. How different might any of us be, he wondered, rolling onto his side and tucking the sheet beneath his shoulder, if cursed with flawless memory? If we were incapable of reshaping the past in the image of the present, of re-calibrating our trajectories into the future, with no way of diminishing the volume and scope of our iniquities?
All the same, he was sure that the moment had been real, and that his own subjective experience of that moment, of the essence of that moment, was the same now, in his memory, as it had been that evening, long ago. The way she had laughed. The way she had smiled. The way she had looked at him, over the white linen, which may or may not have existed, that somehow said she knew him. That somehow she was capable of looking back through the prism of the present to see, in it, the tattered fabric of his past, and to recognize the patches as patches and to smile in a way that absolved him of old crimes, granted permission to forgive. Forgive, he thought, the creed of the patchwork past.
This texture gently woven three octaves above middle C was something new and it demanded his attention. Listening in the dark at four in the morning, he heard the rhythm move, as he followed, and elude his grasp. Adding secondary and tertiary rhythms on expanding time scales, syncopated overlapping layers of rhythm began to emerge.
At a quarter past he climbed out of bed. He rolled onto his feet, doing his best to keep the squeaking of the mattress springs to a minimum, as not to awaken her. He lowered the sheet onto the bed. He watched her for a second. She was curled in her blanket, on her side, her back toward him. She did not move. He walked to the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. Kneeling, he pulled out a drawer as slowly and quietly as he could. He took a pair of sweat pants from the drawer and socks from another and carried them downstairs to dress. Without untying the laces, he slipped into his tennis shoes, which were under the coffee table. He took a baseball cap from the doorknob in the entryway and pulled it down over his hair as he stepped through the door.
On the street it was muggy and damp, the asphalt shimmering under the streetlights. A warm breeze blew steadily from the west and the live oaks and red oaks and cottonwoods and maples writhed and hissed, nodding to the east. The sound was loud and similar enough to obscure the rhythmic monotone in his ears. He turned at the end of the driveway and walked down the road. He hadn’t been out walking like this, alone, while everyone slept, in years. It satisfied him to drift through the world, invisible, silent, anonymous. Like a ghost, he thought. Like the shadow of a ghost. Like the shadow of a breath of a ghost.
It had been a wet late spring. It had rained all weekend, so the grass was tall nearly everywhere. Spring, here, was always gone before you noticed it, turning overnight into an oppressive kind of heat.
A dog crossed the road beneath a streetlight. Some kind of terrier, he guessed. It watched him watching it, cocking its head farther and farther back as it loped, keeping him fixed securely in sight, until it vanished. He wasn’t invisible, after all. And the world would be waking soon.
A blue Camaro rolled slowly up the street, bagged newspapers flying from the windows, falling on driveways, thud, thud.
There was a rumble, like distant thunder. It seemed to last too long, though, for thunder. Then, with a long whistle blast, it asserted its identity, clambering over the tracks.
At the corner he turned left, following the dog’s path. His own shadow passed him, growing ahead of him on the asphalt. As the puddle of light grew more diffuse, the shadow grew fainter until it melted into the night. Or rather, he imagined, freed from its form, it expanded to cover the entire sleeping side of the world. The dog was nowhere. Another long blast of the train whistle. It was darker on this street. There was no streetlight for two blocks, where the side street dead-ended into the main cross-town artery and storefronts and car lots replaced the houses. The darkness made space expand around him. The rows of houses were longer than in daylight. The treetops, black against the gray, were higher. He felt isolated, solitary, his anonymity restored.
He was sure he hadn’t thought of her in years and now, as he walked, he found a series of moments drifting, like wisps of smoke, through his thoughts then diffusing. A simple bout of nostalgia, nothing more. A momentary indulgence. Dubious reflections of a handful of moments that never existed, built of scraps from ten thousand memories long ago vanished.
What had become of her? Marriage? Two children, a boy and a girl? Now, nearly grown? Or perhaps younger, like his own, delayed while meandering, skipping a generation, like the bald spot under his cap. What had her tragedies been like? Had they been the standard varieties, aches and pains that fade over time? Or had they been the exotics that never stop bleeding? At once redefining the whole procession of former selves and severing all ties to whatever might have been?
At the corner he turned and started back the way he’d come. The rumble of the train was fading in the distance, vanishing beneath the trees.
Published October 2007