The Nix(51)

“It’s not only static,” she said. “There’s something else.”

“Says you.”

Samuel could not see them—the darkness in here was total. They were more like impressions in space, lighter shapes against the blackness. He tried to place himself in the geography of her room, constructing a map from memory: the bed, the dresser, the flowers on the wall. There were glow-in-the-dark stars dotting the ceiling, Samuel noticed, suddenly, for the first time. Then the sounds of fabric and footsteps and the bed’s quick squeak as Bethany probably sat down on it, near where Bishop seemed to be, near the cassette player, which she often listened to at night, alone, playing and rewinding and playing again the same few moments from some symphony, which Samuel knew because of all his spying.

“Come up here,” Bethany said. “You have to be close.” So he got up on the bed and moved slowly toward them and felt around clumsily and grabbed something cold and bony that was definitely a leg belonging to one of them, he didn’t know which.

“Listen,” she said. “Very closely.”

A click of the tape player, Bethany leaning back into the bed, the fabric folding around her, then static as that brief dead space at the beginning of the tape ended and the recording actually began.

“See?” Bishop said. “Nothing.”

“Wait for it.”

The sound was distant and muffled, like when a faucet is turned on somewhere in the house and there’s that rushing sound from hidden, far-off pipes.

“There,” Bethany said. “Do you hear it?”

Samuel shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “No,” he said.

“There it is,” she said. “Listen. It’s under the sound. You have to listen below it.”

“You are making no sense,” Bishop said.

“Ignore what you can hear and listen to the other stuff.”

“Listen to what?”

“To them,” she said. “The people, the audience, the room. You can hear them.”

Samuel strained to listen. He cocked his head toward the stereo and squinted—as if that would help—trying to pick out any kind of organized sound within the static: talking, coughing, breathing.

“I don’t hear anything,” Bishop said.

“You’re not concentrating.”

“Oh right. That’s the problem.”

“You have to focus.”

“Fine. I will now attempt to focus.”

They all listened to the hiss coming out of the speakers, Samuel feeling disappointed in himself that he also had not yet heard anything.

Bishop said, “This is me totally focused.”

“Will you shut up?”

“I have never been so focused as I am at this moment.”

“Please. Shut. Up.”

“Concentrate, you must,” he said. “Feel the force, you must.”

“You can go away, you know. Like, leave?”

“Happily,” Bishop said, scrambling away and leaping off the bed. “You two enjoy your nothing.”

The bedroom door opened and closed and they were alone, Samuel and Bethany, alone together, finally, terribly. He sat rock-still.

“Now listen,” she said.

“Okay.”

He pointed his face in the direction of the noise and leaned in. The static was not a high-pitched trebly noise but a deeper kind. It was like a microphone had been suspended above an empty stadium—the silence had a fullness to it, a roundness. It was a substantial quiet. It wasn’t just the sound of an empty room but rather like someone had gone to great lengths to manufacture nothingness. It had a created quality to it. It felt made.

“There they are,” Bethany whispered. “Listen.”

“The people?”

“They’re like ghosts in a graveyard,” she said. “You can’t hear them the normal way.”

“Describe it.”

“They sound worried. And confused. They think they’re being tricked.”

“You can hear all that?”

“Sure. It’s the stiffness of the sound. It’s like those really short, tight strings at the top of the piano. The ones that don’t vibrate. The white sounds. That’s what these people sound like. They’re like ice.”

Samuel tried to listen for something like that, some high-pitched buzz inside the droning, persistent static.

“But it changes,” she said. “Listen for the change.”

He kept listening, but all he could hear was how the sound sounded like other sounds: escaping air from a bicycle tire, the whir of a small fan, water running behind a closed door. He heard nothing original. Only his own mental library bouncing back at him.

“There,” she said. “The sound gets warmer. Do you hear it? Warmer and fuller. The sound gets bigger and blooms. They are beginning to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Maybe they’re not being tricked. Maybe they’re not being mocked. Maybe they’re not outsiders. They’re beginning to get it. That maybe they’re part of something. They’re beginning to realize they haven’t come here to listen to music. They’re beginning to realize that they are the music. They are themselves what they’ve come here to find. The thought is exhilarating to them. Can you hear it?”