by Mike Ramon
PAPER THIN WALLS
When it came, it came quick and loud. He had known it would come, could see the signs and portents, like a dark cloud in the west. An ugly thing tracking closer, promising nothing good, promising noise and flash, and the threat of floods. He had seen it in the way they looked at each other, and then in the way they didn’t look at each other. He had seen it in the way they moved around each other, never quite touching, as if they were both generating their own opposing magnetic fields. He saw it in the way his mother clasped her hands together in that nervous way she had when they weren’t occupied with any specific task, and in the way his father drank his one beer, greedily, like a man who just walked parched and dry out of the desert. He saw it in the way Nicky followed their parents around the house with his eyes, Nicky who was always the canary in the coalmine that was their household. He felt it like a vibration in the back of his teeth.
That’s why when it came, he was still awake, waiting for it and hoping it wouldn’t come, listening for it while trying not to listen. From the distance and direction of their voices, he knew that it started downstairs, in the kitchen, where his mother was washing the dinner dishes. Since he was not a direct witness to it, or to its prelude, he did not know exactly how it had begun, and he didn’t care to imagine. They sang together in an unlovely melody, call and response, the line and the refrain, the verse and the chorus. The lyrics had been written over the period of their thirteen years of marriage, a secret song that only they really knew, giving their children only aural glimpses, but never the whole song, leaving the kids to fill in the gaps, to try to work out the structure and the correct pitch.
Shortly after the song began, there came the first instrument, the crashing dinner plate. Then the voices shifted as the man and the woman left the kitchen and ascended the stairs. The voices came closer, and then took up positions in their bedroom, which shared a wall with his own room. He closed his eyes and listened to them sing with each other, to each other, at each other. He opened his eyes and saw only the darkness of his room. One voice momentarily rose above the other, and then they fall back into the old familiar rhythm.
He closed his eyes again, trading the darkness of the room for another kind of darkness. He searched the interior of his eyelids, but found nothing there. He could feel the blood flowing through his veins, could hear its soft susurration. And still the song went on in the next room, and he waited for the outro, for the fade out, for the last jangly chord to be struck, for the hiss that would pass for silence. He waited, in short, for the record to end. And he hoped never to hear this song again, though he had a feeling, half-formed and not completely understood, that he would, and that someday he himself would sing a similar song with a woman he felt something for, even if that something couldn’t quite be called love.