Silent Things

He should have said something.

He wished so badly that he said something.

Instead he’d just walked out. Instead he stood dumbly as his brain scrambled for a single word to say, and when he couldn’t find the words he’d just walked away - though, he knew it wasn’t walking, it was running. Yet, whenever he took a moment to stop running, and look at where he’d come from, that gaping silence swallowed his gaze and sent him running once more. Perhaps if he had said something, then he would have been able to face it. At least then it would have had some substance, his words transforming the situation into something tangible.

Silence has no form, nothing to hold onto or to orient yourself against. It is the crack beneath a basement door. It is the void of a gaping mouth with nothing to say and the night sky empty of stars. Silence is a ghost, and because it was all that Sam had summoned, it now haunted him as such.

With every step further away from that emptiness, he could feel the staring eyes of those who had delivered the news. He saw them waiting hungrily for his response, and when he could not muster a morsel of sound to feed them, those wanting eyes had sent him fleeing.

In truth, the eyes were not the bounty hunters which Sam believed them to be. In truth, those eyes had watched Sam with sadness and pity, and their hungry staring was the mere hoping of that bond which sorrow creates. They did not think poorly of Sam for his silence, and in fact they heard his speechless tongue and the gentle closing door of his exit like wartime cannons. While Sam’s silence ceaselessly pursued him, those who had witnessed it found themselves trapped beneath it like a sunken ship beneath the sea. In truth, they understood that quiet all too well, no word in the world can provide solace in such a moment . . . but Sam could not have known this.

He sat in the airport terminal awaiting his connecting flight. He knew the gate and he knew the departure time, but for some reason he could not remember where he was headed. He knew that it was one of those old, romantic cities; one of those cities where nomads and wanderers first set down their burdens and decided to settle. He could picture the worn, marble facades of ancient buildings intermingled seamlessly with liquor stores and ice-cream shops; he saw statues of gods and prophets seated amongst posters of movie stars and fast food ads. He saw these things, but they summoned no names to his fraying mind.

Frankly, it didn’t matter where he wound up, only that he wound up somewhere else. Somewhere filled with people and traffic and clubs bumping deafening music until the crack of dawn when the people and the traffic returned. Somewhere loud, he thought to himself, that was all that mattered.

He hadn’t yet realized that the silence had eaten a hole into his very core, nor did he know that once one has been initiated into the world of the soundless, the silence will find them in the loudest of places.

As he sat waiting for his flight, he listened to the conversations of strangers - college boys discussing drinking strategies, old couples reminiscing over their last time abroad, and families cracking jokes that only they understood and which Sam wanted desperately to be a part of.

It was strange, but since that silence had escaped from him, it seemed as though it had taken all of his words away with it. He had not spoken a single word in roughly four days, but the strangest part was that he had taken to the silence quite comfortably. In fact, he found it all too easy - as though, once he had fallen into it, all of the words which he had once found so pleasurable as they slipped through his lips, were suddenly unneeded. They had become useless for any task but that of breaking the silence, and at this moment in time, to do so seemed a criminal act.

The silence terrified him, yes, but in the way which he imagined medieval man was terrified by his beloved God. It was an awful thing and it was an awe-full thing.

The next few hours passed him by in the same absentee blur of every hour since he’d fled, until suddenly, he passed the last signpost on his path and he was left sitting in a hotel room with a backpack of clothes, a service-less cellphone, and the noise of a city in a language he did not understand. He opened the window of his room and tried to focus in on specific sounds. He heard the conversation between a street vendor and a tourist as they tried to get the best of one another. He heard the shriek of a distant siren broadcasting a stranger’s misfortune. He heard the barks of stray dogs and the laughter of foreign children - wait that wasn’t right - he, the foreigner, heard the barks of stray dogs and the laughter of children.

He let these sounds and hundreds of others wash over him. Sam was sure that this cacophony would be too much for the silence to swallow. But as he sat listening, each sound began to bleed into one another, the orchestra was no longer hundreds of different instruments playing different songs, but one song played by a single-minded musician. It was a beautiful song; but in the same way that a smell ever-present cannot be smelled or a hand resting on your shoulder for hours becomes forgotten until moved, a single song left playing ceaselessly becomes indistinguishable from silence.

Goosebumps rose on his flesh, and he slammed the window closed just to hear something new. He grabbed his jacket and fled once more with the same familiar latch of a door gently closed.

The sun showed brightly in the sky, but the air was thick with the haze of a big city and the warmth failed to cut through it. Sam did not bother to chart a destination and instead simply fell into the current of the city - another cell traveling through the veins.

He followed that rhythm as it pulled him towards the center, and then as it dragged him back out into the extremities, until that natural flow had deposited him into a narrow backstreet entirely alone - alone from all but the silence.

It swarmed upon him like morning fog on a mountaintop, and he felt it as a heaviness inside of his ears. He spun on his heels ready to flee, but where he expected the falling of footsteps on cobblestone, no sounds arose. He felt his heart begin to race and prepared himself for the sound of short, sharp, anxious breaths, but the world remained mute. He closed his eyes and placed all of his awareness in his ears, scrambling desperately for a single sound - the honk of some car a few streets away, the hum of machinery within a nearby building, a lover’s quarrel or a child’s tantrum, anything . . . only silence.

The world seemed so quiet that he was sure he was dead. Only death could be so utterly empty of noise. He collapsed upon the cold brick of a nearby wall, and thought he might be weeping, but without the sound of sobs he could not tell.

If only he had said something.

He buried his face in his hands, but without the din of time, its passing took on the elusiveness of smoke. He may have been there for mere seconds or for hours, until the world produced a single sound which would wind up being Sam’s savior.

“Poor lad,” the world said.

Sam pulled his hands away from his face, and scoured the street with feral eyes to find the source of the words, but he remained alone.

“What tragedy has befallen you to leave you weeping alone on my narrow street?”

Sam craned his neck and in the place of the suspected speaker he found the empty eyes of a stone cherub looking down at him.

“A broken heart, no doubt. It is always a broken heart. What a truly sorry sight. I shall have to ask the walls to ask the cobblestones what news they have of him,” the cherub said.

Sam felt sure that he had lost his mind. He cleared his throat, but no sound was produced. He tapped against the wall with a finger and held his ear close - quiet. He clapped his hands and they landed against one another producing a muffled nothing.

He stared up at the cherub waiting for it to continue, but it had nothing more to say, instead behaving as stone cherubs have done for as long as men have carved them into cornices. Yet, with those words the silence had taken form, and suddenly its very substance was full of the strange hum of unseen speakers.

He began to walk through the narrow street, and with each footfall, in the place of the patter of footsteps, he heard the whispers of the cobblestones beneath his feet.

“The man walks . . .” one stone whispered.
“Broken heart . . .” said a neighbor.
“His path, his path, his path . . .” Said a third.

Sam listened eagerly to the mutterings of the stones. He heard them talk of other broken-hearted men and women who had walked this way throughout the years; some told stories, some asked questions, some echoed the sound of footsteps and horse hooves clopping upon their faces.

Sam wandered the streets and heard the silent things speak.

He heard the walls speak of the conversations which they had bared witness to and of the fingers dragged across them or of the murals painted upon them.

He listened to marble arches discuss all that had passed beneath. They spoke of lofty things and carrying the sky on their backs so that the world beneath could be.

He listened to pillars complain of their heavy burdens.

He heard benches talk of the seats they had provided - the tired legs of wanderers and the old.

The statues were the most disconcerting, for they talked like men and women. The walls and the cobblestones, the arches and pillars all spoke of strange things in strange ways, speaking only to each other and to the air. The statues spoke of him.

“Ah, there goes the cherub’s broken-hearted man,” they would say.
“What ghost haunts you?” they would ask.

Word of his strangeness had spread quickly through the city, and the silent things had taken a particular interest in his story - perhaps they recognized him as one of their own.

He stumbled upon two naked soldiers who faced one another from their distant alcoves discussing his plight.

“They say he doesn’t speak,” said the naked soldier with a spear in his hand.

“Interesting indeed. He makes me think of the soldiers who had seen terrible things. He has that empty, frightened stare, does he not?” said the one with a helmet.

“Ah yes, I certainly see that. Running from something, ya think? He looks like a man on the run from something. He has that shame of cowardice in his steps.”

“Cowards have always been the same, haven’t they? Too frightened to fight and too dumb to ask for help. Run and hide, coward!” They called after him.
He wanted to yell back. He wanted to tell them that he was no coward. He had made a mistake, that was all - but when he went to contest their claims he found that the silence still swallowed up his voice, so instead he skulked away from the statues and muttered empty curses to the air.

He wandered through the city and listened, and then as the sun sank beneath an unseen horizon, a terrible voice arose with the falling darkness. It had the harshness of age and overuse, as though it had spent too much of its youth screaming. It hit the ear as a whisper, but carried none of the gentleness; where the other voices felt like the things which made up the silence, this voice was the thing which left it empty. It was a drain at the bottom of the ocean, swallowing up the darkness of the depths.

The other voices disappeared beneath it, and where the air had previously been full of silence, it was now a vacuum of it. The voice slithered into the folds of his mind like a centipede in bedsheets, and when all Sam had wanted to do was scream, it snatched the sound away before it ever existed.

And then he ran.

He ran, but his footsteps did not pound against the ground and the air did not whip past his ears, and without those sounds to tell him he was running it felt more like he was falling. Or perhaps drowning.

He knew the voice spoke, he knew that it was whispering dark secrets for those who spoke its language, but to him it was indecipherable. It was a language, but a language that was not meant for living ears. It was spoken by a monster with twelve tongues and four throats, or perhaps a god with a dozen mouths.

He crashed into his hotel room door, and scrambled for his keys. He slammed the door behind him without a sound, but the voice was already inside. It crawled in the shadows and hid in the walls, and when Sam collapsed onto his bed and buried his head beneath his pillow, it laughed cruelly from the holes of his ears.

He did not know what the voice said, but its message was clear. It was nothing more than a simple reminder of the grandiose nothing which he had said when they had told him of his sister’s passing.

There he lay, curled into a ball, tears welling in his eyes, enduring the constant ridicule for endless hours, until finally, the light of dawn, in all of its glory, spilled in through the windows, and the voice crept back to those out of sight places where empty things lurk.

He gasped a ragged, noiseless breath, and the sounds of the walls returned.

“There are some things we cannot keep out,” they explained. “A strange fate to doom himself to, isn’t it. It would be so easy to return to the world of sound. So easy. A strange fate for a strange man,” they whispered amongst themselves.

Sam tried to shout. He tried to ask them how he could do so, but he was still trapped in the silence. He knew he would be unable to endure another night of that voice. He knew that he had until sundown to escape that fate, and so he left his room as the world outside awoke, and he wandered the city, desperate for answers.

After traipsing the streets for a few hours, Sam found his salvation in a broken-headed statue whose voice was split in two. Half of the statue’s mouth spoke from the ground beneath its plinth, the other half remained at the top of its neck, and it had been this strange double-voice which had grabbed Sam’s attention.

“It was marvelous!” it shouted. “You should have heard it! Marvelous, I tell you. The crack splitting, the critical juncture, the top of my head crashing into the ground. Marvelous! A group of pigeons were startled into flight. An old woman gasped and clutched at her chest. Heads turned in my direction. You should have heard it!”

It stopped as if in reminiscence.

“CRASH!” it yelled, but no heads were turned. “Ha, ah what I wouldn’t give for another chance to make a sound like that.”

Sam listened for another moment, but the ramblings continued on in that way, so instead he began to hunt out broken things.

Many of them talked about the sounds they had made. It seemed to be their pride and joy. Crumbled walls and collapsed arches spoke of the echo which spread after they met the ground. Columns spoke of the way the air whistled and tore as they fell from great heights.

They talked of their sounds, but they also talked of the changes these sounds had brought about. Walls talked of things once separated now brought together, and bridges talked of things once joined now forced apart. Columns talked of things once lifted on high now trapped in the dirt, and statues spoke of the things they had once been - soldiers and lions and wise men and prophets - and how the sounds had allowed them to be something new. How they had become something that they had previously been blind to. They had thought themselves immutable, but through a simple sound they had been granted a chance at change.

The sun sat low in the sky, the horizon bleeding with the reds of a dying day. Sam tried to shout. He stomped his feet. He slammed his hands into the ground in a fit of desperation. Nothing made a sound.

Dark descended once more upon the city, and with it the voice, in all of its horror, dragged itself over the eastern horizon. Sam begged for an answer. He recognized his self-delivered sentence to the silence. He understood that even silence held a fullness, he felt its presence. He felt it when the air was pregnant with it. He felt its pieces when a sound had broken it. He felt its weight when sitting in it.

He sat on a bench beneath windows alight with life, and he thought of silence and he thought of sound, and then, for the first time since he had learned of her passing, he allowed himself to think of his sister. He thought of the light, lilting ring of her voice and how her laugh would always finish with wanting gasps of air, and he wondered what became of the sounds of her life. He weeped gently, oblivious to the passersby who stared at the noise, and he knew, as the broken things knew, that those simple sounds had left him changed.