| |
 |
 |
hat damned Marge Temple was taking up another collection in the office. Marks dodged her all day, but she finally cornered him when he was getting his afternoon coffee in the break room.
“There you are, Ron. We’re getting flowers and a sympathy card for Phil Bueller. His nine-year-old is in the hospital with leukemia. The prognosis isn’t good. I’m sure you’d like to contribute.”
Marks was annoyed at getting trapped again. He adjusted his rimless glasses and was as blunt as possible. “Can’t help you out? I’m short on cash at the moment.”
The wrinkle lines around the woman’s mouth drew in. “You said that last time, I recall. You never join in to help. Phil and his family are in a lot of pain right now.”
“So some factory-grown bunch of flowers is going to cure that?”
“It’s the gesture of caring that’s important, to show our support in a family crisis. We won’t be ordering the flowers until tomorrow. Can we count on you to chip in then?”
Marks ground his teeth. He wondered why she never got the message to not bother to solicit him anymore. He made sure he got through to her this time. “I’m not really interested today or tomorrow.”
The woman sucked in a breath and stared at him a moment before hurrying her bony figure out of the room.
Marks took his coffee mug and returned to his familiar fabric-walled cubicle to do his cost accounting work in peace. That was what the workday was for, in his opinion. He enjoyed the sterile isolation that the cubicle provided. Keep the boundaries up.
He avoided wasting time socializing with his co-workers or getting involved in their personal lives. Someone in the office who he barely knew was always going through some stressful ordeal that Marks didn’t want to hear about. Why did people always need to unburden their own troubles that way to whoever would listen? Why did an office grandma like that Temple woman continually concern herself with the agonies of others? Didn’t she have enough problems of her own to worry about?
None of that sticky involvement for Ron Marks. He kept his distance from letting himself get drawn into the emotional turmoil of other people. He took care of the burdens in his own life, let the rest of them take care of theirs. He asked for sympathy from no one else and didn’t expect to have to offer any either. The kind of token shows of condolence that the Marge Temple types always came up with accomplished nothing useful anyway.
If people faced personal crises because of bad breaks or their own poor decisions, that was just part of life in a hard world, in his opinion.
After work, Marks walked the four blocks from his building to the transit mall to catch his bus home. The late September sky was an ashy soup of restless clouds and a scratchy wind brushed along the pavement.
As usual, the redbrick sidewalk of the bus mall was cluttered with a haphazard mix of street vendors, petition solicitors, and ragged vagrants slumped against the wrought iron fence around the Post Office lawn.
Marks always ignored the whole seamy line of them as he passed by, but today something new and outlandish caught his eye. It was a cardboard sign put up by one of the street hucksters:
The sign was taped to the front of a folding table. Sitting on the table was a plastic barrel among a tangle of electronic equipment and colored wiring. A college age kid wearing a rainbow rock band t-shirt stood next to the table.
The sign offer was so bizarre that Marks couldn’t imagine what it meant. He had some time to kill before his bus arrived. He stopped in front of the table.
The kid saw him coming. “Like to sell your scream, sir? I can give you five
dollars cash for it right now.”
Marks was scornful. “I get five bucks and all I have to do is scream? There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“Nope, all you need to do is just scream into that sound receiver barrel there on the table. Like to give it a try?”
The barrel was mounted on a swivel stand so that the open top was tilted toward the sidewalk. Wires connected the barrel to what looked like a complicated audio engineering unit.
Marks frowned at the equipment. “What’s the point of all this?”
The kid tossed his shaggy, dirty-blonde hair. “It’s a sound mixing project that I’m doing for my Audio Art class at the university. The barrel collects your scream and blends it into the screams of lots of other people. The concept of my work is to capture a synthetic mass scream that represents the undercurrent of anxiety beneath our oppressive techno-economic society.”
What the kid said was gibberish, but if Marks got five bucks for doing practically nothing, that was fine with him.
He said, “How long will it take? I don’t want to miss my bus.”
“You can scream anyway you want to for as long as you choose. Whatever
feels personally right to you.”
“So I stick my head into that barrel thing?”
The kid extended a clipboard with a printed form on it. “I just need to have you sign this waiver form first. It’s only a formality. The barrel itself is harmless.”
Marks scanned over the form and scribbled his signature. The kid handed him a crisp five dollar bill. The equipment was connected to a heavy black cable that ran to a battery bank below the table. The kid switched on the sound mixing unit and the barrel receiver. The barrel vibrated with a growling hum as it sat waiting.
He said, “When you put your head inside the barrel, you’re going to hear some noise. It might sound pretty strange. That’s the mixture of screams of all the previous people who have contributed to my project. Just go ahead and add your own scream to the rest of them.”
Marks bent forward and stuck his head inside the barrel. A furious storm of noise struck his ears immediately. The sound was monstrous, the jagged cacophony of an untold number of individual screams clawing over the top of each other. Marks was startled for an instant. The raw, terrible noise was faintly sickening somehow. He suddenly wanted to get this over with. He took a breath and added his own jeering scream to all the others. His scream came out surprisingly high pitched and agitated before he jerked his head back out of the barrel.
When he straightened up, he was momentarily dizzy and slightly nauseous. He put a hand on the table to steady himself.
The kid said, “That’s a normal reaction, don’t worry about it. All that noise in
the barrel is a little disorienting. It only lasts a few seconds.”
Marks scowled and walked away. The kid was right. The dizziness faded quickly, but as Marks boarded his bus, his ears still seemed to have a dull buzz in them.
At home after dinner that night, Marks tried to watch a television show, but he had trouble making out the dialogue. The words blurred and ran together even when he ran up the volume. He began to worry that it was still a hangover from that barrel thing. That damned kid had probably lied to him about the aftereffects.
Marks finally shut off the TV and tried to read one of the business magazines that he subscribed to. He was in the middle of an article on the credit markets when he heard a sudden frantic, desperate scream cut through the night.
He jumped in his recliner chair. The scream sounded close, like it was right outside. Marks hurried to the front window and parted the drapes to look out. The neighborhood street was empty and still beneath arching tree limbs and yellow streetlight pools. No porch lights had switched on at nearby houses.
Marks was still shaken by the echo of the scream he thought he heard. It was the scream of a woman, he was sure of that, a woman screaming in panicked terror. He listened intently for a while, but he didn’t hear anything further. It could have been something else that he heard, like car brakes or the screech of a cat, but he didn’t think so. When he finally went back to his chair, he had trouble getting settled down again.
He was glad to get to bed that night. His hearing was still fuzzy. Maybe it would
clear up by the next morning. He tossed restlessly until he finally dropped off to sleep, but he was awakened abruptly in the middle of the night by the sound of another scream.
Marks jerked upright in bed in fresh alarm. The scream was real, he knew he hadn’t dreamed it. But what truly frightened him was that it wasn’t the same scream that he had heard earlier. This one was a different kind of scream. It was a man’s voice this time, the scream of someone in agony and torment from horrible pain.
He listened tensely, but the scream wasn’t repeated. He lay awake staring into the cold darkness the rest of the night, too disturbed to even try to get back to sleep again.
When Marks got up the next morning, the same cottony buzz was still in his ears. He switched on the TV on the kitchen counter as usual to hear the local morning news while he had breakfast. He wanted to know if the weather forecast had rain in it.
The lead news item was about a woman being brutally beaten and raped by an attacker as she walked home past a wooded park early the previous evening. She was in serious condition at a hospital.
In the next story, a man had been burned to death in a fiery freeway crash at two a.m. that morning. The driver swerved into a concrete support pillar and was left pinned in the seat as flames engulfed vehicle before emergency crews could arrive.
The oatmeal that Marks was eating turned to cardboard in his mouth as he heard the news reports. The two awful screams he had heard were still fresh in his mind. One
was a woman screaming in terror. The other was a man screaming in agony. The times of the incidents reported on the TV news matched the times that Marks had heard the screams. But the locations were nowhere near where he lived. He couldn’t possibly have heard those two victims scream out in their moments of torment.
But in the souring pit of his stomach, Marks began to fear that somehow, by some horrible means, those screams were exactly the ones that he had heard.
He went to work in a hollow daze, hardly aware of his rote steps until he found himself in his familiar cubicle at his office. He attempted to start on a stack of expense accounting reports, but he couldn’t keep his concentration. He began to hear in his head a succession of new, more frequent human screams.
The rest of the office continued with its placid everyday routine. No one else was hearing the awful sounds that Marks alone heard. As each new scream startled him, he became even more shaken. He went unsteadily into the break room and splashed water on his clammy face at the sink.
Phil Bueller came into the room and stared at him. “Are you feeling alright, Ron? You don’t look so good. I’ve got some aspirin in my desk if you need it.” Bueller’s drawn, long-jawed face showed concern.
Marks only shook his head in rebuff. There was no way he could possibly explain what was wrong with him. He couldn’t understand how Bueller, the guy with all the
heartbreak of his own leukemia kid, could even bother to notice or care whether Marks
himself was sick.
But as he looked at Bueller, something else happened. Marks heard a tiny, imperceptible scream leaking from the other man, this one a moaning, unending wail of futile despair. A repressed sound from somewhere inside Bueller that he himself didn’t even know he was making.
Marks gaped in horror at the other man. He stumbled backwards and hurried to get far away from him.
There was no way Marks could remain at the office. He left a note for his boss that he was taking a sick day to go home. But there was someplace else where he needed to go first. Whatever was wrong with him had started yesterday after he put his head into that damned sound mixing barrel.
Marks couldn’t conceive how, but he had a gnawing certainty that the squatting barrel thing had done something monstrous to him.
At the bus mall, the kid was there in the same spot on the brick sidewalk next to his table of equipment. Marks rushed up to confront him. “You said that barrel was harmless! That thing did something to me, I tell you! You’ve got to fix it!”
The kid was startled. “Any aftereffects to your hearing should have worn off. Nobody else has made a complaint. You did sign the waiver form, remember?”
“I’m not talking about hearing damage. I mean those other terrible sounds that I keep hearing all the time now.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Marks seized his shoulders and shook him. “You’ve got to fix what’s wrong with me! You have to make the screams go away!”
The kid struggled and broke free. He ran off, his face turned back toward Marks in alarm. Marks chased him off the sidewalk into the street. Neither of them saw the Thirty-third Avenue bus lumbering heavily up the mall.
The kid ran straight in front of the bus and was struck immediately. Before the bus could brake, its front wheels rolled over his prone body on the pavement, leaving tire marks across the rainbow t-shirt. Marks flinched back in shock at the sound of excruciating pain in the kid’s dying scream.
Witnesses rushed forward to the accident scene. Some of them were pointing over toward Marks. He turned and left the vicinity hurriedly before the shrill approaching sirens arrived.
Marks wandered vacantly along the city sidewalks. The screams he heard in his head continued to come in a growing flood. Some of them might be the private internal screams of anonymous pedestrian faces that brushed past him. Others could be coming from distant places where someone else was suffering, as they had last night.
The torrent of misery was unending. The kinds of screaming voices he heard
were all different. Some were in physical pain, some fearful, some grief stricken, others were despairing. Many of the screams were issued aloud, while others were the silent, hidden wails of suffering that people carried bunched deep within themselves through every day of their own lives.
Whatever the source, the screams kept coming and Marks had begun to hear every one of them. They showed no sign of stopping and they weren’t going to because he had come to realize a horrible truth by then: at any given moment in the world, someone somewhere was always screaming.
The now-constant din in his mind was unbearable. Marks was desperate for help. He tried to think where the closest hospital was. Maybe they could do something for him, sedate him, anything to shut off the hideous sounds inside his head.
He stumbled to a bus shelter farther down the mall to wait for a bus headed near a hospital. A waiting crowd of riders clustered around the stop. A bedraggled mother tugged the arm of a tired, cranky child who didn’t want to go any farther. The small girl set her heels and began to shriek in protest.
Marks felt his stomach lurch in nausea at the piercing sound. He clapped his hands over his ears in horror. He heard himself shouting for someone to stop the child’s awful noise. Nearby faces swung toward him. The red-faced child continued to scream
defiantly, adding hers to the torrent of others that Marks was already drowning in.
Marks reeled backward against a building wall, all of them staring at him now. The monstrous rush of sound in his head was overwhelming, more than he could stand any longer. The pressure to find release built until finally, he had to scream himself.
He parted his lips and tried to scream out his agony, but no sound came from his mouth. He sucked in a breath and tried again, but nothing happened. His lungs worked in mute futility. Panicked, he tried even harder to force something out, but still nothing came. Muscles inside him began to clench in pain with the effort. His body spasmed and drummed against the building wall.
“Hey, there’s something wrong with that guy! He looks sick!”
“He’s having a seizure! Call 911!”
Marks barely heard the shouted voices near him as he kept trying to bring up the scream that wouldn’t come. The pressure in his head hurt badly and a warm trickle of fluid began to seep out of his right ear. He still struggled to get out his own desperate cry of terrible suffering.
As he strained even harder, a tearing pain started to zig-zag upward from inside him. He saw the circle of watching faces through a red haze. Something thick burst up into the back of his throat and he felt his whole insides began to rip jaggedly apart.
Then the faces around him were all screaming too. |
|
|
