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Soundscape

Daniel Webre

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Ted was no more interested in the sound of his own voice than construction noise or babies crying. So when Eleanor suggested recording him for posterity’s sake, he was literally dumbstruck, unable to utter more than a faint croak.

To his dismay, Eleanor was not the least bit deterred by this new development. She found the new sound fascinating. Not only did she record it, but she analyzed it on her computer, amplified it, looped it, and then played it back for him at high decibels until their once urbane apartment sounded somewhere remote in the middle of the swamps.

Once he realized all the creatures he was hearing were a chorus of him, he felt waylaid, confused. Self-loathing set in, urging him into hiding, but the mounting pressure of his own unrelenting soundscape at last drove him from their home and into the night.

He walked the dark streets, aimlessly. When he tired of that, he rode the St. Charles streetcar from one end of the line to the other. The mercy of it all was there was no one to talk to, no one interested in the sound of his voice in any case. He could keep his fellow passengers company without offering a single syllable of his own, and all the ambient noises he heard originated from somewhere outside of him.

From time to time, if he concentrated too much on himself, he could feel his anxiety rising—he could even hear his pulse beating somewhere deep inside his own ear, but that was somehow different. After a while, even this was no longer audible to him once he’d been absorbed again into the atmosphere of New Orleans.

He thought about his wife. Eleanor remained something of a mystery to him. He knew she was an artist when he married her, and he loved her for this. But he hadn’t anticipated becoming her subject.

When he let himself back into the apartment after midnight, the noise had stopped, but Eleanor was still happily working on her computer. He wondered if she’d even noticed he’d been out.

Ted washed his face and got ready for bed. He decided not to bother her. She sat absorbed in the glow of the computer screen, wearing headphones that made her look like a studio musician, and Ted supposed she was, in a sense. He could see a jagged pattern of lines flowing across the screen that reminded him of his pulse again, and he wondered if she was still listening to him.

Ted fell asleep quickly and thought he must have been dreaming. When he started coming to, he recognized the dark form hovering over him was Eleanor. She held a mask in her hand, that called to mind something that might drop from the ceiling of an airplane during an emergency.

She had a look of intense concentration on her face until she realized he was awake and alarmed. Then her expression changed to a happy face, like one used to comfort a colicky baby.

“You’re awake!” she said, as though this were a surprise and a great delight.

Ted still could not speak, but even Eleanor in the thrall of her work understood he required an explanation.

She switched on the lamp on the nightstand and held up the mask so he could get a better look at it. It had several wires extending from the back of it. At its center, where the oxygen would have flowed, he recognized the head of a tiny microphone.

“I designed this,” she said. “I wanted to listen to you sleeping. I got some good tape, I think.”

Eleanor pulled her laptop over to the bed, stretched out on her stomach, and began processing something—presumably the sounds of his sleep. Ted made the effort to raise himself to a seated position. According to the clock, he’d been sleeping just under two hours.

Eleanor clicked a button and smiled at him. If earlier that evening they’d been immersed in a swamp of himself, she’d now transported them to a barren tundra. The howls and rasps of Ted’s lungs scoured every surface of their bedroom. There was no escape. For a moment he feared he might die of exposure.

Eleanor, now lying on her back, continued to smile and stared mesmerized at the ceiling. “It’s wonderful,” she said, slowly, as though held in a trance. Ted wasn’t even sure she was talking to him. But despite his complicated feelings about what he was hearing, part of him swelled with satisfaction, knowing that somehow even in this weird, oblique way, he could assume some credit for making his wife happy.

He lay back down and pulled the covers a little higher so as not to catch cold. Then, realizing there was little danger of this, he slipped out of his shell entirely and rolled, scooted his way over to Eleanor, and in her embrace, they huddled together awaiting posterity.

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Daniel Webre is an alumnus of McNeese State University graduate program in creative writing, where he earned an MA/MFA in fiction under the direction of Neil Connelly. He also holds a doctorate in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His stories have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Valley Voices, Kestrel, Front Range Review, I-70 Review, Interim, and other places.

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