The Listeners

by Jordan Tannahill

  When it came to jogging, I was a creature of habit. I wore the same pair of leggings, the same top, the same sunglasses. I always set out at six, on the dot. If I set out a few minutes later, I felt behind the entire day. I called that feeling ‘dragging my ass.’ I liked to avoid it. I stuck to the same route because I knew better—I was hopeless with directions, and the streets in my neighbourhood twist and loop back on themselves, such that even after six years I still found myself getting turned around.

  Ashley and I made shared, customized Spotify playlists and gave them names like Death to Incels (Bikini Kill, Hole, M.I.A.), Hold My Drink (Lizzo, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion), Sad White Boys Anonymous (Sufjan Stevens, Sam Smith, Bob Dylan). The morning after the first sleepless night, I put on Ashley’s playlist masterwork, Impeach President Krump, turned up the volume a notch higher than usual, and set out at a pace. It felt good to move, even if I was exhausted. I passed all the familiar homes on my route, a copy-and-paste combination of bungalows and two-storey houses of tan-painted stucco with faux shutters and red clay roof tiles, pebbled front yards filled with yucca, chubby succulents, and curving stone walkways that led to front doors hiding below blocky archways. A few streets over, I began to pass the upper-income homes aspiring towards a kind of Disney-esque royalty with medieval turrets, New England dormers, and Edwardian gables, an architecture unmoored from time and taste.

  I’m still not quite sure how I let myself become suburbanized. It had always been a goal of Paul’s to own a ‘proper’ house, the kind of house that he had spent years building. I guess there was a sort of poetry to that. We each wanted things for Ashley that we never had as kids. He wanted her to have quiet, space, bike paths. I got her a vibrator for her fourteenth birthday. I allowed Paul to persuade me that I’d reached the age where I required proximity to nature. Small birds disembowelling rodents in my backyard. Large expanses of sky. I told myself—life is more vivid out here than in the city. I’ve come to realize that isn’t the case. It’s more like how even a whisper sounds loud in a silent room.

  As I rounded the corner back onto Cascadia Drive, I came across a crew of workmen in high-vis vests. They were standing around and assessing a forty-foot black pole they had just installed, a few paces back from the road. I found something about the tall pole disquieting. Unearthly, even. Like an alien monolith. As I stood there, my neighbour Linda appeared, walking her ghost dog. I’m not sure what breed of dog it was, but it was very stark and very grey. In the morning mist, it seemed almost spectral. I don’t know what would possess someone to buy such a haunted-looking animal. Linda wandered over to me, arms crossed, and eyes fixed on the pole. She groaned and shook her head.

  Well there she is.

  I assumed she was referring to the pole, and not to me. What is it? I asked.

  That’s the cell tower they were telling us about, she said, turning to me. She widened her eyes, as if the tower was a friend of ours who’d just shown up in a particularly ugly dress, and we didn’t have the heart to tell her.

  Who was telling us about it? I asked.

  They stuck those notices about it in our mailboxes last week, remember? I told her I didn’t. Linda explained how the tower was supposed to improve cell and data service in the neighbourhood. I guess we’ll see, she said.

  They must’ve started installing last night, I said.

  What is it? She addressed this question to the dog, who was whimpering.

  I debated for a moment whether to bring up the hum, and decided I had nothing to lose. I asked Linda if she had noticed it. A kind of droning sound, I said, that started sometime last night.

  She looked back up at me, cocking her head to the side. You mean from the tower? she asked.

  Well I don’t know, that’s what I’m wondering, I replied.

  She glanced around and shrugged. I doubt they’ve turned it on yet, she said. They’ve only just installed it. Her dog pulled on its leash and began to lead her onward. But then what do I know about these things, she called back.

  I’m sure what Linda didn’t know about these things could fill a book.

  Over the next few days I managed to speak with a few other neighbours, as they were tending to their yards, or putting out the trash, but no one else seemed to hear the sound. Paul continued to insist that he believed me. I knew he didn’t, but I appreciated his support. Every passing day he grew more and more worried. I wasn’t sleeping at night. I started developing migraines, which I had never really had before. Whether they were from the sound itself or the lack of sleep, it’s hard to say, but holy mother of god were they intense. The nosebleeds continued, periodically. The thing was, the sound wasn’t at all loud or abrasive. It was just there, all the time, constantly wearing me down, eroding me. And yet, at times, even I began to doubt whether it existed.

  I kept going into school because that’s me—I power through. In class, I popped Tylenol and kept the blinds drawn. One afternoon, during a lesson on Beloved, I had to devolve things into a class discussion just so I could sit down and gather myself for a few moments. While I was doing so, a student asked me a question which I didn’t hear; I only realized when I looked up and noticed the entire class staring at me. Another student asked if I was all right. At that point I thought it was probably more alarming to pretend that I was than to simply address the problem, so I asked the class if they could hear it as well.

  Like a deep, vibrating … hum, I said. Just somewhere there, in the background. I searched their puzzled faces. No one said a word. Or is it … Or is it just in my head? I stammered. I suddenly felt ridiculous. I noticed two boys smirking and whispering in the back row. I probably should have avoided the word ‘vibrating.’ I heard more whispers, followed by titters, followed by uncomfortable, muffled laughter. Never mind, I said, and apologized. I assigned some reading and ended class early. I’m sure that gave them plenty to talk about that lunch hour.

  Generally I couldn’t care less what students thought of me, though I sensed I was well-liked. They laughed at my jokes. They knew they could speak their minds in my class. I was always encouraging them to question received wisdom and authority. There was a certain group of boys who referred to me as ‘Miss,’ even though I was ‘Ms. Devon’ to all the other staff and students. Miss, can I open the window? Miss, can I use the washroom? I noticed these boys didn’t use this epithet for other teachers. It used to affront my feminism, but I grew to find it vaguely endearing, as if it communicated a kind of familiarity. I suspected it also signalled some unconscious, or perhaps conscious, sexualization of me amongst these boys that I felt ambivalent but probably not altogether unhappy about. If I ever gave any serious thought to my currency among my students it was for Ashley’s sake. I couldn’t imagine it was easy to go to the same school where your mother taught.

  Over the lunch hour, after my little episode, I ate leftover curry out of a Tupperware container in the staff lounge as Cass recapped last night’s episode of Drag Race for me. I didn’t watch the show but I followed it closely through her enthusiastic and detailed retellings. Like an ancient bard, she could hold the entire mythology of the series in her head, referencing the exploits of drag queens from past seasons as if they were demigods in a grand, cosmic pantheon. At some point she noticed that I wasn’t following her monologue with my usual focus.

  Hun, are you all right?

  Yeah, I’m … Sorry.

  You still not sleeping?

  I was really not on my usual form. I apologized again, and she told me cut it out with the sorrys. She leaned over, placed a hand on my knee, and told me I looked like crap. I told her I felt like it. I always trusted Cass to tell me how it was. A lot of the other staff found her loud and abrasive, and she was, but I was drawn to women who took up space; I came from a prodigious line of them. Cass lived bigger. Why wear two colours when you can wear five; why smile when you can laugh; why diet when you’re going to die. We first met working together on a production of Into the Woods in my second year at the sc
hool. I was the director, and she, being the school’s music teacher, was the musical director. It almost killed us. We had big blowouts, even in front of the students. We had creative differences over everything—casting, blocking, costumes, lighting; things that had nothing to do with her remit. She had seen the show ‘done in New York’ and wanted to remain ‘faithful to its original spirit,’ whereas I wanted to gender-swap some of the roles, and have a very minimal set, which she claimed was ‘too arty by half.’ But I simply refused to give all the juicy roles to half-committed, tone-deaf boys when there were a legion of more capable girls, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to fill the stage with a papier-mâché forest, or whatever aesthetic horror she was advocating, I can’t even remember now. At any rate, we survived the collaboration and emerged out of it as friends, and have proceeded to subject ourselves to staging four more musicals since then including one that Cass herself wrote about Amelia Earhart, which we do not speak of.

  Together with our friend Nadia, we were each other’s emotional pit crew. Nadia worked in the special education department at our school before she moved across town. When Cass was going through chemo, Nadia and I kept her fridge stocked with casseroles, soups, pies. After Nadia’s mother died, Cass and I took her to a Janelle Monáe concert on edibles. They were my big sisters, both a decade older. They had survived abusive childhoods, abusive first marriages, remarried Christian guys with goatees, and now drew a lot of strength from their faith, especially Cass.

  Listen, she told me, as we walked out of the staff lounge at the end of the lunch hour, I’ll cover your afternoon class.

  No, what?

  I have a spare now. Go home. Sleep. I’m serious.

  That’s—

  Shush. Woman. Get your little Fjällräven Kånken and go.

  You just wanted to say that.

  I’ll walk you to your class; you can fill me in on the lesson plan.

  No, no, it’s fine. Really, love. Ashley has a game after school anyway.

  Oh come on, you’re not staying for that.

  I am, I want to.

  She gripped my shoulder and looked into my eyes as the afternoon bell rang. Don’t be a martyr, yeah? If you need to take a couple of days, just talk to Valeria.

  After school, I found a quiet place in the bleachers on the back field. It was just a friendly match with the nearby Catholic school, not part of the regional tournament or anything, but I still tried to catch as many of Ashley’s games as I could. It was usually when I did my marking, and when I didn’t have marking, I brought a book. I got through all of Anna Karenina last season. I liked the cadences of a game: the shouting, the whistle trills, the colliding storm fronts of colour. I couldn’t care less about sports. It still confounded me that my daughter, who shared a part of my soul, somehow ended up a jock—and yet with none of the compensatory pleasures of being a lesbian.

  I was pretty sure she saw me sitting in the stands, but she didn’t acknowledge me. She usually waved or stuck out her tongue. I wondered if word had reached her about my little episode in class. Surely she wouldn’t hold that against me. As the game went on, I really did get the sense that she was ignoring me. I began to get in my head about it. I was probably just exhausted and out of sorts. I stayed a little longer until I decided not to make her any more awkward by lingering around, looking so haggard, and I slipped out. I had never left a game of hers early before. As I walked to my car, I wasn’t sure if she would be hurt or relieved when she noticed, and I wasn’t sure which pained me more.

  Paul and Ashley basically took opposite approaches to dealing with my ‘condition,’ as they started calling it. Paul became increasingly doting and protective, cooking meals, arranging medical appointments, buying noise-cancelling headphones. Ashley pulled right away. Her selective acknowledgement of my existence continued days after the game until the point where she began completely blanking me as she passed in the school halls. The first time she did it, it felt like she’d stabbed me with a steak knife. My behaviour in class and around the school was evidently becoming a topic of conversation, and she was punishing me. I began going to significant lengths to engineer my movements through the building to avoid encounters with her. It became completely untenable.

  I finally walked into her room one night to confront her about it. She was lying on her bed watching a video on her phone. I lay down beside her, our hair touching. She was watching a documentary about whale hunting in Japan. I lay there beside her, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the video. After a couple of minutes she reached out and laid the top of her hand across my forehead.

  You’re like fuckin’ Night of the Walking Dead, Mom.

  I exhaled. I know.

  You look hollowed out.

  Hmm. Thanks.

  She turned her head to look at me, her eyes right beside mine. Honest, she said. Have you even looked at yourself in the mirror?

  I own one, yes.

  Well it’s a bad scene, wench.

  I’m aware.

  You’re burnt out.

  I nodded, and she lightly gripped the top of my head while still looking into my eyes. Stop coming to school, she said. Please. I’m literally begging you.

  I’m embarrassing you.

  Yes. You are. I’m sorry, but yes.

  My eyes stung and I closed them. I remembered my mother once showing up smelling of liquor to a parent-teacher meeting and wishing I could evaporate into thin air. I remembered feeling how desperately I never wanted my daughter to be embarrassed by me. I swallowed and mumbled a promise to Ashley that I would speak to Valeria in the morning about taking some stress leave.

  Valeria Moreno, my school’s principal, allowed me to use the entire allotment of my year’s paid sick leave. I hadn’t intended to be off for so long, but it soon became clear that I was not getting better. On my GP’s advice, I took an additional two weeks of unpaid leave, but even then, I wasn’t sleeping. I spent my days home alone, medicating, meditating, masturbating. I’m not sure you realize just how unhinged you can get if you haven’t really slept for weeks on end. Your brain is not nearly as robust as you’d like to think it is. Throughout this time, Paul accompanied me to my appointments with the audiologist, Dr. Sandra Heard (I kid you not), who ran a gamut of tests and ruled out tinnitus, spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, and basically all other medical explanations. She believed I might be hypersensitive to white noise in my environment, and that I was becoming fixated on a tone that would normally go unnoticed; something she had occasionally seen in patients who were dealing with acute stress. I told her I hadn’t felt particularly stressed before all of this began. I wasn’t directing the school musical that year, I liked my students, I had good colleagues, things were fine with Paul, we had some debt but who didn’t? Dr. Heard said that was all beyond her pay grade but encouraged me to consider speaking to a therapist.

  So I started seeing Dr. Humberto Gompf, who proposed using cognitive behavioural therapy to train my brain to essentially just relax and ignore the noise. He didn’t seem to place much stock in my suggestion that the sound might have had a real-life origin in my neighbourhood—like the electromagnetic waves from the new cell tower, for instance, or perhaps a rumble from the industrial park over in Ranchlands. Was I supposed to take medication and do therapy just so I could cope with noise pollution? Was I supposed to train myself to be less sensitive? When did being too perceptive become a liability, a deficit, and who did it serve for that to be the case?

  When trying to describe the sound to my doctors, or my neighbours, or to Paul, I came to realize that I could only ever talk about it through analogy. How else could you articulate a sensation that another couldn’t perceive? It was like describing a colour to a blind person; it could only ever be like another sense. Grey like the smell of streets after a rainstorm. Yellow like the heat of bedsheets in morning sunlight. At night, as I lay in bed, it sounded like someone was idling their engine in the driveway. Or like an airplane flying overhead, that low atmospheric
roar; except it never got further away, it just kept going for hours and hours. Or like being in a tenth-floor apartment and hearing jackhammering in the basement, reverberating up through the concrete walls. Or the deep rumble of a bass note at a concert, sustained for days.

  One night, I couldn’t lie still a second longer. The hum was peeling my skin like a potato. I imagined Paul waking up to find just one long skin-curl beside him. I slipped out of bed and went for a walk. It was a clear night. The hum was the only sound. I had never heard it so intensely. I walked with no particular destination in mind, and yet it felt purposeful. Was I in a dissociative state? It’s quite probable. I began imagining I was in a movie. In the movie, I got to the end of the street, rounded the corner, and I saw it. A tall, dark shadow, like a scar on the night. The cell tower. A shiver ricocheted through me. I stared at the tower for a long while, and then started walking towards it. As I walked towards it, I asked it, in my mind: Is it you? Are you doing this to me? I stopped at the curb, bent down, picked up a palm-sized stone—and chucked it at the tower. At first I missed, so I picked up two more stones, and I threw one, then the other, and the third one hit the tower bang on, and made a loud, metallic clang. It was shockingly loud. It surprised me. I mean, I was surprised at myself—a grown woman, a high school teacher, a mother—throwing stones at a tower like some preteen neighbourhood delinquent. But I think I was most surprised by the tangibility of everything. The tower was really there. It existed. And my body existed. They weren’t just things that I had also imagined.