It is during the second show of our town musical, waiting backstage for my solo in my red polyester dress, that I can’t ignore it anymore. It hurts, no, breaks my neck to keep my head upright. Shatter—shatter—scream the bones—are there even bones there?
The chorus is on the stage, holding up their construction paper posters over their bonneted and scarved heads, not singing yet, and I hope they don’t for a few seconds at least because if they do my head will break. The sophomore girl at the piano is playing the same note over and over. It crashes, collapses into my ears. Shatter—shatter—scream. The chorus begins and—crack of pain, and I think my neck might be ripping itself apart.
I wonder who I should call. Mom, maybe. It hurts to even look at my phone. I squint my eyes shut and call her so she can call 911 for me. I forget my backstage voice and bark into the phone, “Mom. Mom.” But she doesn’t pick up, and I remember vaguely telling her to shut it off before the show, because I didn’t want it to ring in front of all the other moms and little siblings out there.
I move the cold cell phone off of my ear and everything feels over-warm, hot, wrong.
Don. If he’s here, my brother will be on his phone, tucked neatly into a balled-up sweatshirt on his lap so that Dad can’t see the light off the screen. I tell myself that I have to tell Don.
I am a young Beethoven and a Tennyson too—I have loved and lost my hearing at the age of seventeen. Not lost to poor people’s pewter like him, but lost after I had a two-week headache and woke up halfway through with fuzziness in my ears instead of sound. Used to hear. Sounds gone. Screen in front of me. Can’t play songs. Just movies, with subtitles.
I watch movies most days. Silent movies, like it’s the 1920s. I am stuck a century in the past.
I have not left home since I got back (the ride home silent, oddly bumpy, but quiet. Perfectly quiet.)
Thoughts don’t come complete anymore. Don’t have to. No one will hear unless I write.
I think I remember the last sound I heard. It was the tapping on the hospital ceiling. I’d grabbed my pillow viciously and prayed it would go away, because whoever was walking above was irritating me with their rhythm. I wondered if they walked loud on purpose to make themselves seem bigger. God, the arrogance.
I want that moment back now. Right now it is painless, but it is also everything-less.
I, unlike Beethoven, cannot imagine notes and pitches inside my head, but my family has suddenly become very musical. I want everyone else to stop. My brother, my twin, smiles at the keyboard while he practices for the first time in probably three weeks. I tell him to stop playing, feeling the air start and stop through my mouth instead of hearing my voice probably over-loud (but I don’t care if it is.) He looks at me weird and shakes his head, but he stops. He sits there, looking down at his music. There is no sound to stop, no change in anything I hear.
I walk away. I wonder if he starts playing again. I can’t tell if he does or not.
I wish I could hear, and not just feel my feet stamping up the stairs.
My mother comes into my room holding my Algebra II textbook and a pencil, three weeks after the day it all stopped. My mother works for an accountant’s office. She hates math. She used to do imitations of her boss and his voice, which sounded like it had been through a deep fryer—greasy, crackly.
I open the math textbook so fast that I rumple the previously clean-cut corners. I scribble on page 122—exercises in exponential functions—and hold it up so that she can see.
Could you get me my guitar.
She sits in the chair in the corner of my room while I sit on the bed, place my hands on my guitar and try to shift from chord to chord. My mother does not even have good pitch, but she will not look at me.
I pluck, harder. She looks away, harder—stares down my stuffed tiger, Stripey, who has been deaf and mute for seven years, since my tenth birthday, when I stopped singing Mary Poppins duets with him.
Stripey knows what it’s like, I think. He’s getting older, dustier, limper. More invisible. His voice suddenly shut up, just like my singing.
I can’t tell what I’m playing. I feel the slight rumble of the guitar against my stomach but it’s useless because I can’t tell. I can’t hear.
“Damn it!” I yell, enunciating the “n” carefully, projecting it clearly. I think I yell, at least. I feel myself talking again, just a buzzing feeling somewhere in my face.
I rip the strap off of my shoulder.
It would have been better if I had been born with this, I think. I wouldn’t have known anything different.