FICTION
Listen
He awoke suddenly in a strange room. But “awoke” is a misleading term; he just came to his senses, realizing that he had been lying there, with his eyes wide open, for a while. He had no idea how long that was, what he was doing here, or where “here” was. There was no sound.
How did I get here? he thought. The last thing he remembered was going to bed last night. He tried to turn his head and couldn’t. There weren’t any restrictions — at least he couldn’t feel any — but he simply was unable to move his head. The fact alarmed him, so he tried to move his head with his hands to see whether there was something restricting his movements or not. This attempt did not even get off the ground, as he quickly discovered he couldn’t move his hands either.
His alarm level increased greatly at this point, and he tried to move any and every part of his body. Nothing worked. He was just lying there, staring at the ceiling, unable to look away. He tried to close his eyes, and found he wasn’t even capable of that. He wasn’t blinking. He was completely immobile. There was no sound.
As alarm transitioned to fear, he realized that something was missing. Analyzing himself, he found that he wasn’t experiencing the bodily reactions that accompany fear. He should be hyperventilating. But he wasn’t hyperventilating for the simple reason that he wasn’t breathing. His eyes would have gotten wider at this if they could have, but they didn’t.
Am I dead? he thought. His brain still seemed to be working. But how could he be alive if he wasn’t breathing? He tried to force some air out of his lungs, to force himself to make some kind of noise, but nothing happened. And he realized that, as terrified as he was by his paralysis, he was even more terrified by the complete absence of any sound. He couldn’t hear, or even feel, his heart beating. In such an utter silence as this, he should have been able to; it should have been very obvious in fact. But it wasn’t. He wasn’t breathing and his heart wasn’t beating and he couldn’t make any noise to end this fast from all sound that had somehow been forced upon him.
He panicked and would have thrashed his body had he been able. It was like being a claustrophobic in an enclosed space. But nothing made any difference. If he could just hear something, he would be all right. It would be a balm on his psyche. But there was nothing to hear. Just the featureless ceiling to look at, endlessly, for all eternity as far as he knew. He would have wept if he could.
Then the noise stopped.
A sense of horror enveloped him. There had been a noise, all that time, there had been a sound. But he hadn’t noticed it because it had just been there in the background. He had been desperate to hear any kind of noise, and there had been one all along. He had been a blind man dying of thirst while surrounded by unseen water. And now, now, he was totally without any kind of sound. He wanted to scream, Bring it back! Bring back the noise! I’ll do anything, just let me hear something!
Then the second noise stopped.
He would have cried out if he could. There had been another noise, but in his desperation brought on by the loss of the first, he hadn’t noticed it either. But then … that might mean that there was a third noise going on right now. If he just listened, he might be able to hear it.
He strained desperately, trying to hear whatever sound might still be there. But he couldn’t hear anything. And yet he hadn’t heard anything before when there were two sounds. If the sound is just always there, how can you notice it? It was like the music of the spheres. Some ancient and medieval natural philosophers claimed that the heavens made music, but others asked, if that were the case, why can we not hear it? The answer was that the noise was always there, so we weren’t aware of it. But if it stopped, then we would; and it would be cataclysmic. It would be like someone who never noticed that he was breathing, suddenly being placed in a vacuum.
He thought he was going insane. He didn’t care what it was, he just wanted to hear something. Anything.
Anyone.
And then he heard a voice. It wasn’t a sound, though; he just heard a voice in his mind that he was very familiar with but had never noticed before. It had been there with him his whole life, but never imposing itself on him. Just waiting for him to be open or desperate or crazy enough (or all three) to hear it. It said something very brief and to the point: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
***
“Yes, can I help you?”
“Yeah, I heard that you guys were doing an experiment, some kind of psychological experiment. And that you would pay $500 for an afternoon?
“Yes, that’s right. We’re testing people’s responses to paralysis and silence. We’ll give you something that will cause a complete paralysis of your muscles and most of your bodily organs — not the brain, of course — and put you in a soundproof room. We’ll also give you a drug which causes temporary short-term memory loss, so you won’t remember signing up for the experiment.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the drug will erase your memory for about twelve hours, so the last thing you’ll remember is going to sleep last night. But as I say, it’s temporary. Your memory will come back completely within about one week. You hadn’t heard about this before today, had you?”
“No, I just saw the flyer in the history building. About fifteen minutes ago.”
“OK, good. If you had, you might be able to figure out what’s happened to you, and we need you to be completely disoriented.”
“And paralyzing most of my bodily organs? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Oh no. I’m sure it sounds like it, but with contemporary drugs and medical technology, there is virtually no physical danger to you. They wouldn’t allow us to do this test otherwise. What we’ll do is run your blood through a heart-lung machine that will oxygenate your blood and circulate it in place of your lungs and heart. The machine will actually be in another room so you can’t hear it; your blood will be brought to it and back to you through tubes. Again, I know it sounds dangerous, but it really is no problem.”
“Right.”
“No, really. We have several medical techs you can talk to you if you want to verify it.”
“Well … are there any side effects? I mean, what’s happened to the people who’ve done this already?”
“They’ve had no medical problems.”
“OK, any other kinds of problems?”
“No, no. It’s not a pleasant experience, of course. Most people are a little shell-shocked for a week, but it seems to fade as their memory returns.”
“That’s it?”
“Mostly. The only really odd thing is that many people come out of the experiment believing in God. But we expect that will fade along with everything else.”
Jack Denning is a teacher in Portlandia, where he lives with his family and his piano.
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Image: The Flying Officer Kingi Tahiwi (circa 1940) by H Farmer McDonald, Public domain. Modified by Veronica McDonald.
Heart of Flesh Literary Journal 
Oh, if we just stopped to listen for and to the Divine! Excellent story!
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