Amplification

H has a childhood memory of lying in bed at the farm listening to a soft, high pitch cut into the slow quiet. It’s a little like feedback but purer, like feedback’s crystalline cousin, and it gets louder until it’s directly behind her eyes. She lies still but begins to panic as it gets louder; the stillness seems important because she’s realized that the panic is the sound and the sound is her panic. The sound is clearly somewhere inside her skull and not in the world, which she senses is continuing in its drowsy way. Perhaps she began making up elaborate stories in her head around this time, to keep the crystalline feedback at bay.

Recently she is trying to remember what makes her interesting, as a character. What sorts of details would make her well-rounded. The time in the fourth grade when she ran away and up a mountain? The time she got hit by a car and thought, “Is this because I don’t want to take the GRE tomorrow?” as she flew through the air? Stories from her farm childhood? Stories from the farm tend to be what people want to hear: The time she chocked the wrong wheel on the hay cart and the whole thing threatened to roll backward and down the hill, her father screaming, “Wrong wheel, damnit!” as she scuttled over to the next wheel, the next.

Or the drunken escapades? The time she impressed her brothers by falling down a flight of stairs and keeping her beer upright. The time she scaled a wrought iron fence to get into her apartment building and tore a hole in her thigh. But none of these are, she thinks, what she would like to show her new friends to convince them that she is interesting. She wishes they could see the look of bemused pride her partner used to wear when she told a funny story at a dinner party. Now at faculty happy hour her mouth opens and something unremarkable about toddlerkid or toddlerbaby slips out. She doesn’t want to talk about schools, or online learning, or poop, or even cute or perceptive or creepy things toddlerkid has recently said, but she’s too tired to find other topics of conversation.

The crystalline feedback sometimes recurs, though not with quite the same volume she remembers from the first time. It continues to feel like the encroachment of a widening breach from elsewhere, a shock wave sent to still her, amplifying until it finally flattens and falls off anticlimactically.

Her father is fond of saying everyone has a hook, and the lucky ones never encounter it. H’s hooks have always been less like hooks, sharply tearing, and more like undercurrents, habits she navigates but which occasionally take her far astray. She has a weakness for anything that will temper her conviction that all her best efforts end in belly flops.

Many of her “interesting” stories are about drugs and/or a couple very dramatic years in her early 20s. There was the time her ex was tripping at a party and saw her crying blood. The time they did salvia and she disappeared into the couch, which was an oddly bold floral pattern, giant orange petals and green leaves caked over with years of college decadence; she began to realize she was not part of this two-dimensional space but could not figure out why not or what she was, and several beats later, as she zoomed out into the room and saw that she was animate, she found herself unable to move as she figured out that what distinguished her from the chair was her humanness, and humans had memories, and she had none. She told that one at dinner parties for years; it made her feel supremely interesting. She usually didn’t mention how large and terrifying her ex’s face loomed, when she had no idea who he was but knew in some sort of primal way that he was not a threat.

“He’s inherited your monstrous sensitivity,” her partner says of toddlerbaby, joking-not-joking. The phrase is accurate, though H likes to believe that her impulse to repeat it to others is done with a quirky wink-wink and not a self-pitying woundedness. Her attunement to others, to environments, is, she supposes, monstrous. The way she can’t contain her feelings.

Why does she think the drug stories make her more interesting? It’s not just her; she loves hearing other people’s drug stories as well: the fleeting insights and absurdities of sensory derangement, the elasticity of time and perception. Once she told her salvia story and a new acquaintance reciprocated with his salvia story, in which he desperately needed to hold up the wall of the apartment. That story is now as much hers as the time she watched the ground unspool into insects and the constant motion of mulch and realized with shocking clarity that she needed to figure out a way to love herself – that her inability to do so was causing her physical harm.

Having an idea and not being able to pursue it because of work or domestic obligations also makes H monstrous. Sometimes she wants to be alone so badly she has several showers a day. A spider has taken up residence in a corner of the bathroom and every evening H notices a quantity of small black pellets increase under its domain. Clearly spider feces are not half the size of the sider, H thinks. It is not a large spider. She wants the black bits to be the exoskeletal abdomens of ants. She stopped killing the bathroom ants, under the assumption that the spider is doing so. But the ants don’t seem to be decreasing; in fact, it seems like the ecosystem of the bathroom is spiraling out of control. She googles spider poop and discovers that the black bits are indeed poop.

The tinnitus started as a low buzzing one summer after college, an auditory manifestation of her imposter syndrome at a beach house, and she would sit on the floor rocking, trying to shake it out of her ear. It was like something asking to be released. She hated it. She went to a doctor, then to another doctor. It’s an ear infection, they said, or a fungal infection, or a strange crust of hard wax in your ear. That should do it.

She thought, I cannot live like this. She paced dark rooms, did yoga before meals, never again ventured into the kelpy shallow water at the bottom of the beach house stairs. The sound only came at night and it was like a jet engine getting closer. After some months it either quieted or she got used to it. She still hears it, during the daytime now too, but it’s less like a jet engine and more like a cat’s purr. She speaks to it when it comes. “Hello,” she says. “I hear you.”

Some years before the tinnitus, on the night after he died, she and his friends went to the lake and threw pieces of ice onto the ice. They listened for the crack, the dull slabs numbing their hands as they brushed off snow and cast them away, the crack always coming a second later and louder than anticipated. She thought she could feel tiny reverberations coming back through the ice.

Of the group, a couple were H’s good friends but most were acquaintances; they were somehow both younger and older seeming than herself. That night they’d sat on floors and beds they had lofted with cinderblocks. They crouched on tiny crumbling cement balconies to smoke cigarettes and stayed inside to smoke spliffs to which they’d added coke. She had never done coke before but she didn’t say anything.

No one said much of anything, at least not about the one who had died, and she didn’t feel it as an absence but instead as a way her friends had been wounded. She’d only known him peripherally: he’d been to her apartment a couple times with her ex, had casually made honey blunts with the microwave, as if he wasn’t teaching them, though of course a major component of drug culture is learning how to be a good teacher and a good student, and he smoked Kamel Reds on the balcony, which she occasionally smoked for years after, wondering if they were the same brand as Camels. Now she can’t remember his name.

The gathering was implicitly understood as a memorial event or wake. She does remember a lot of legs hanging over the sides of the lofted beds. It wasn’t like doing coke later would be, in another city, everyone sort of flailing about and talking and the mood always sparkling but also anticipatory, like, what will happen next? That night it was just everyone inward. To distract themselves they watched Requiem for a Dream, a choice that would later appear fucking nuts, and she didn’t want to watch it but thought that maybe this is what they needed, to aestheticize it, or maybe they were trying to draw a distinction between what was on the screen and their newly personal experience with death and drugs and things falling apart.

In the witching hours they got up and walked to the lake in the cold dark. She was wearing an oversized coat from the ’70s; for many years she only wore such coats. She was also wearing a brown knit cap she’d found on the bus or that her ex had found in a classroom and given her. After tossing the ice they sat on the cement rectangles that could be generously called benches, though they looked like you could make them with a Play-Doh kit. They all sat apart, looking at the expanse of ice and the sky lightening. You could hear the ice splintering, pushing against the shore, like the world talking to itself.

And then they got up and left. She’d like to know what they talked about, if they were kind to each other, if they made plans to see each other later. It had gotten too light to ignore the fact that they were no longer in the event of the night. Her ex walked her partway back to her apartment, turning off a few streets earlier to go to his dorm, and he paused briefly at the turn and showed her his graceful hands, and she felt vulnerable like a too-ripe nectarine.

Actually, he probably kept his hands in his pockets, because it was February, but she wants to tell you about his hands and how much their elegance was to blame for the whole fucking thing.

After several days of thinking about that night, she remembers his name, the one who died in the closet. She didn’t think about his death at the time but now she thinks about death more often, and imagining his brings on the crystalline feedback: The belt and the closet, the small rectangles, the broken lightbulb. What walls couldn’t he hold up, that he had to fold into such a small space? What were they listening for at the lake? Anyway, his name, she realizes, is the same as the middle name she has given her son.