Oliver headed back toward the El station, now assailed by all the noises of the city, somehow amplified to a deafening roar that filled his head: the tinny sounds of passing car stereos, the blare of car horns, the grinding thrum of heavy trucks, the piercing shrieks of crying babies, the savage yowls of barking dogs, faraway police sirens with their eerie doppler echoes. Passersby eyed him warily as he continued his way to the station, hands pressed tightly to his ears in a futile effort to block out the excruciating din around him.
Things got worse once he got on the El. The rumble of the train’s wheels and the shrill metal-on-metal squeals as it navigated its tracks filled Oliver’s head with jagged migraine pain. He held his hands to his ears with all his might, but nothing could stop the racket of the train filling his head like the insistent pounding of a piledriver.
He finally made it to his apartment building, where he thought he would be safe from the sonic onslaught. But the creak of the outside door as he opened it, the pounding of his own footsteps on the aging wooden stairs, the slam of the door of his apartment as it closed behind him – all pulsed maddeningly against his eardrums.
He found no reprieve inside his apartment. His ears were assaulted by the shrieking whistle and malevolent gurgle of his radiator register, the rattling wheeze of his aging refrigerator’s compressor, the sinister ambient hum of his darkened television. He ran to his bed and threw himself onto it, covering his head with his pillows to try to drown out the ceaseless noise. But the sounds of his apartment continued to fill his head, and soon were joined by the ambient sounds of the city outside, which seemed to have been turned up to intolerable levels. The maddening pop, pop, pop from the pickleball court down the street; the gravelly scrape of concrete being sheared by a bulldozer’s alloyed blade; the deafening scream of jet engines far above him on their flight path to O’Hare.
After about an hour of the agonizing clatter that filled his head, he threw off the pillow and ran into the kitchen, hands clasped ineffectually against the sides of his head, which continued to be assailed by a blistering cacophony of noises. He took his hands from is ears, screaming in agony as the inescapable noise filled his head in a blinding torrent. He rummaged in his silverware drawer, wincing at the agonizing clanging of the cutlery within, the inside of his skull feeling as if it was being scraped raw by the merciless din.
He finally found what he was looking for – a pair of cheap wooden chopsticks that had come with some long-ago eaten Chinese takeout. He pulled them out of the decorative sheath festooned with Chinese characters, the sound of the chopsticks against the thin paper wrapper causing another spasm of pain to rocket through his head. Then he snapped them apart, the dry crack of the wood like some infernal bomb detonating in his cerebral cortex.
He took one chopstick in each hand, then thrust each of them toward his ears with all of his might. He braced for the pain but at the same time felt an overpowering sense of relief as he imagined the eternal silence that would soon be his.
#
The police came to Oliver’s apartment a few weeks later, after neighbors complained about the smell. After they pounded on the door and received no response, the landlord unlocked the door.
They soon found him on the floor of his kitchen. Oliver’s corpse lay facedown in a pool of blood, chopsticks still protruding from his ears, his face still contorted in agony. A bloody kitchen knife lay nearby. It appeared to have been the instrument by which he had savagely, desperately opened up his left forearm. The wound had cleaved almost entirely through the meat of his arm, exposing yellow layers of subcutaneous fat, violet muscle, and white tendons.
The police advanced past the counter and found a cryptic message, smeared on the linoleum kitchen floor in blood. From the gore that covered Oliver’s right fingers and the fingerprints that were discernable in the writing, they deduced it had been scrawled by Oliver himself in his dying throes. The two officers puzzled over its meaning as they waited for the coroner to arrive.
It read, “I can still hear.”
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