The View From the Seventh Layer

  When two full weeks went by without another incident, our interest in the matter threatened to shrivel away, and might actually have done so had the next episode not occurred the following Sunday, surprising us all in the middle of our church services.

  There was another silence, more than ten seconds long, just a couple of days later, and a much shorter silence, like a hiccup, the day after that.

  Every time one of the silences came to an end we felt as though we had passed through a long transparent passageway, a tunnel of sorts, one that made the world into which we had emerged appear brighter and cleaner than it had before, less troubled, more humane. The silence had been siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

  7.

  The truth was that we enjoyed the silence, and more than that, we hungered for it. Sometimes we found ourselves poised in the doorways of our homes in the morning, or on the edges of our car seats as we drove to work, trying to hear something very faint beneath the clatter of sirens and engines. Slowly we realized that we were waiting for another incident to take place.

  There were weeks when we experienced an episode of silence almost every day. One particular Wednesday saw three of them in the span of a single hour. But there were others when what the papers took to calling a “silence drought” descended upon the city, and all our hopes for a cessation went in vain. If more than a few days passed without some minor lull to interrupt the cacophony, we would become irritable and overtender, quick to gnash at one another and then to rebuke ourselves for our failures of sympathy. On the other hand, a single interlude of silence might generate an aura of fellow feeling that could last for the better part of a day.

  The police blotters were nearly empty in the hours following a silence. The drunks in the bars turned amiable and mild. The jails were unusually tranquil. The men who ran the cockfights in the warehouses down by the docks said that their birds lost much of their viciousness after the great roar of the city had stopped, becoming as useless as pigeons, virtually impossible to provoke to violence.

  And there was another effect that was just as impressive: the doctors at several hospitals reported that their mortality rates showed a pronounced decline after each incident, and their recovery rates a marked increase. No, the lame did not walk, and the blind did not see, but patients who were on the verge of recuperating from an injury often seemed to turn the corner during an episode, as if the soundlessness had triggered a decision somewhere deep in the cells of their bodies.

  Surely the most dramatic example was the woman at Mercy General who came out of a prolonged coma in the space of a five-second silence. First her hand moved, then her face opened up behind her eyes, and soon after the noise of the hospital reemerged, she moistened her lips and said that everything sounded exactly the same to her.

  The doctors had a hard time convincing her that she was, in fact, awake.

  8.

  The silence proved so beneficial to us that we began to wish it would last forever. We envisioned a city where everyone was healthy and thoughtful, radiant with satisfaction, and the sound of so much as a leaf lighting down on the sidewalk was as rare and startling as a gunshot.

  9.

  Who was the first person to suggest that we try generating such a silence ourselves, one that would endure until we chose to end it? No one could remember. But the idea took hold with an astonishing tenacity.

  Local magazines published laudatory cover stories on the Silence Movement. Leaflets with headings like PROMOTE SILENCE and SILENCE = LIFE appeared in our mailboxes. The politicians of both major parties began to champion the cause, and it wasn't long before a measure was passed decreeing that the city would take every possible effort “to muffle all sources of noise within its borders, so as to ensure a continuing silence for its citizens and their families.”

  The first step, and the most difficult, was the dampening of the street traffic. We were encouraged first of all to ride the subway trains, which were appointed with all the latest noise alleviation devices, including soft-fiber pressure pads and magnetic levitation rails. Most of the cars that were left on the road were equipped with silently running electric engines, while the others had their motors fitted with mineral wool shells that allowed them to operate below the threshold of hearing. The roads themselves were surfaced with a reinforced open-cell foam that absorbed all but the lowest-frequency sounds, a material that we also adapted for use on our sidewalks and in our parking garages.

  Once the street traffic was taken care of, we turned our attention to the city's other sources of noise. We sealed the electrical generators behind thick layers of concrete. We placed the air-conditioning equipment in nonresonant chambers. We redesigned the elevators and cargo lifts, replacing their metal components with a clear durable plastic originally developed by zoos as a display barrier to prevent the roars of the lions from reaching the exhibits of the prey animals. Certain noises that weren't essential to either the basic operations or the general aesthetic texture of the city were simply banned outright: canned music, church bells, fireworks, ring tones.

  10.

  We were exultant when the roads fell silent and pleased when the elevators stopped crying out on their cables, but by the time the cell phones and the pagers ceased to chirp, we were faced with a problem of diminishing returns. The greater the number of sounds we extinguished, the more we noticed the ones that remained, until even the slightest tap or ripple began to seem like an assault against the silence.

  A clock ticking inside a plastic casing.

  Water replenishing itself in a toilet tank.

  A rope slapping languidly against a flagpole.

  A garbage disposal chopping at a stream of running water.

  The flat buzzing of a fluorescent light.

  A modem squealing its broken tune.

  A deodorizer releasing its vapor into the air.

  An ice maker's slow cascade of thumps.

  One by one, perhaps, these sounds were of little account, but added together they grew into a single vast sonority, and no matter how many of them we were able to root out, we kept discovering others. Now and then, while we were working to eliminate the noise of a match taking light or a soda can popping open, another episode of true silence would occur, a bubble of total peace and calm enwrapping the city in its invisible walls, and we would be reminded of the magnitude of what we were striving for.

  How inexcusably flimsy, we realized, was the quiet we had managed to create.

  We redoubled our efforts.

  11.

  We were more resourceful than we had imagined. It seemed that for every noise that cropped up, there was at least one person in the city who was prepared to counteract it. An engineer bothered by the medical helicopter that beat by his office a dozen times a day drew up plans for a special kind of rotor blade, one that would slice through the air as smoothly as a pin sliding into a pincushion. He handed the plans over to the hospital, and within a few weeks the helicopter drifted so quietly past his window that he was surprised each time he saw it there.

  A single mother raising an autistic son who was provoked to fits of punching by the tone of her doorbell devised an instrument that replaced the sound with a pulsing light. She said that her son liked to sit on the floor watching now as she pressed the button again and again, a wobbly grin spreading over his face like a pool of molasses.

  A carpenter designed a nail gun that would soak up the noise of its own thud. A schoolteacher created a frictionless pencil sharpener. An antiques dealer who liked to dabble in acoustic engineering invented a sonic filter that could comb the air of all its sounds before releasing it into a room.

  Eventually every noise but the muffled sigh of our breathing and the ticking of our teeth in our mouths had been
removed from inside our buildings. The wind continued to blow, and the rain continued to fall, and no one had yet proposed a method to keep the birds from singing, but as long as we did not venture outside, we remained sealed in a cocoon of silence.

  12.

  There were times when the silence was close to perfect. Whole minutes went by after the early morning light breached the sky when the surging, twisting world of sound left us completely alone and we could lie there in our beds simply following our ruminations. We came to know ourselves better than we had before—or, if not better, then at least in greater stillness. It was easier for us to see the shapes we wished our lives to take. People changed their jobs, took up chess or poker, began new courses of exercise. A great many couples made their marriage vows, and not a few others filed for divorce.

  One boy, an eight-year-old who attended the Holy Souls Parochial Academy, left school as the rest of his class was walking to the lunchroom, rode the subway to the natural history museum, and found his way to the dinosaur exhibit. He waited until the room had emptied out and then stole beneath the tyrannosaurus, using the giant ribs of the skeleton to climb up to the skull. He was found there late that evening by a security guard, sitting hungry but uninjured on the smoothly curving floor of the jaw. The boy had left a note in his teacher's paper tray explaining himself. He had dreamed that the dinosaur was still roaring, the note said, but so weakly that the sound could be heard only from directly inside its head. He wanted to find out if it was true.

  13.

  The boy who climbed the tyrannosaurus was not the first of us to feel that his dreams were blending together with his reality. There was something about the luxuriousness of our situation that made it tempting to imagine that the space outside our heads was conforming to the space inside. Yet we did not really believe that this was so. It was just that we were seeing everything with a greater clarity now, both our minds and our surroundings, and the clarity had become more important to us than the division.

  14.

  The silence was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured. Every so often another natural episode would take place, and for a few seconds the character of the silence would change slightly, the way the brightness of a room might alter as some distant roller in the current surged through a lightbulb. But the quiet we had generated was so encompassing by now that only the most sensitive among us could be sure that something had truly happened.

  15.

  In the abundant silence we proceeded into ourselves. We fell asleep each night, woke each morning, and went about our routines each day, doing the shopping and preparing our tax returns, making love and cooking dinner, filing papers and cupping our palms to our mouths to check the smell of our breaths, all in the beautiful hush of the city. Everywhere we could see the signs of lives in fluctuation.

  A librarian who had worked in the periodicals room for almost three decades began displaying her oil paintings at an art gallery—hundreds of them, all on lending slips she had scavenged from the library's in/out tray, each tiny piece of paper flexed with the weight of the paint that had hardened onto it. The flyers at the gallery door proclaimed that the woman had never had the nerve to show her work before the silence was established.

  The bursar at the university was caught skimming money from the school's pension fund. In her letter of resignation, she said she was ashamed only that she had been found out. If there was one thing the silence had taught her, she wrote, it was that any grief that befell a professor emeritus could never be more than a fraction of what he deserved.

  A visiting gymnast giving an exhibition on the pommel horse at the midtown sports club fractured his wrist while he was doing a routine scissor movement. But up until the moment of the accident, he reported, the audience in the city was the most respectful he had ever seen, barely a cough or a rustle among them.

  16.

  Gradually, as we grew used to the stillness, the episodes of spontaneous and absolute silence came less frequently. There might be a three-second burst one week, followed by a one-second flicker a few weeks later, and then, if the episodes were running exceptionally heavy, another one-second echo a week or two after that.

  One of the physicists at the city's Lakes and Streams Commission came up with what he called a “skipping-rock model” to describe the pattern. The distribution of the silences, he suggested, was like that of a rock skipping over the water and then, if one could imagine such a thing, doubling back and returning to shore. At first such a rock would land only rarely, but as it continued along its path, it would strike down more and more rapidly, until eventually the water would seize it and it would sink. But then, according to the paradigm, the rock would be ejected spontaneously through the surface to repeat its journey in reverse, hitting the water with increasing rarity until it landed back in the hand of the man who had thrown it.

  The physicist could not explain why the silence had adopted this behavior, he said—or who, if anyone, had thrown it—he could only observe that it had.

  17.

  A time came some eight months after the first incident took place when it had been so long since anyone had noticed one of the episodes that it seemed safe to presume they were finished.

  The city was facing an early winter. Every afternoon a snow of soft fat flakes would drift gently down from the sky, covering the trees and the pavilions, the mailboxes and the parking meters. Recalling the way the snow used to soften the noise of the traffic made us experience a flutter of helpless nostalgia. Everything was different now. The sound of our footsteps creaking over the fresh accumulation was like a horde of crickets scraping their wings together in an empty room.

  Not until we walked through the snow did we really discover how accustomed we had grown to the silence.

  18.

  We might have been content to go on as we were forever, whole generations of us being born into the noiseless world, learning to crawl and stand and tie our shoes, growing up and then apart, setting our pasts aside, and then our futures, and finally dying and becoming as quiet in our minds as we had been in our bodies, had it not been for another event that came to pass.

  It was shortly after nine a.m., on Tuesday, January the twenty-sixth, when a few seconds of sound overtook the city. There was a short circuit in the system of sonic filters we had installed in the buildings, and for a moment the walls were transparent to every noise. The engine of a garbage truck suddeny backfired. A cat began to yowl. A rotten limb dropped from a tree and shattered the veneer of ice that lay over a pond. Ten thousand people struck their knees on the corner of a desk or remembered a loss they had forgotten or slid into an orgasm beneath the bodies of their lovers and cried out in pain or grief or sexual ecstasy.

  The period of noise was abrupt and explosive, cleanly defined at both its borders. Instinctively we found ourselves twisting around to look for its source. Then the situation corrected itself, and just like that we were reabsorbed in the silence.

  It seemed that the city had been opened like a tin can. So much time had gone by since we had heard our lives in their full commotion that we barely recognized the sound for what it was. The ground might have fallen in. The world might have ended.

  19.

  Four days later another such incident occurred, this one almost eight seconds long. It was followed the next week by a considerably shorter episode, as brief as a coal popping in a fire, which was itself followed a few days later by a fourth episode, and immediately after by a fifth and a sixth, and early the next afternoon by a seventh.

  We were at a loss to account for the phenomenon.

  A cryptographer employed by the police force announced his belief that both the episodes of silence and the episodes of clamor resembled communications taking the form of Morse code, though from whom or what he could not say. A higher intelligence? The city itself ? Any answer he might give wou
ld be no more than speculation. His hunch was that the sender, whoever it was, had resorted to using noise because we had ceased to take note of the silence. He said that he was keeping a record of the dots and dashes and hoped to be able to decipher the message very soon.

  20.

  The cryptographer's theory bore all the earmarks of lunacy, and few of us pretended to accept it, but it was, at least, a theory. Every so often another event would transpire, interrupting the stillness with a burst of shouts and rumbles, and we would stop whatever we were doing, our arms and shoulders braced as if against some invisible blow, and wonder what was going on. Many of us began to look forward to these eruptions of sound. We dreamed about them at night, awaiting them with a feeling of great thirst. The head of the city's Notary Public Department, for instance, missed the noise of the Newton's Cradle he kept in his office, the hanging metal balls clicking tac-tac-tac against one another as they swayed back and forth. The cabdriver who began his circuit outside the central subway terminal every morning wished that he was still able to punch his horn at the couriers who skimmed so close to his bumper on their bicycles. The woman who ran the Christian gift store in the shopping mall designed a greeting card with an illustration of a trio of kittens playing cymbals, bagpipes, and a tuba on the front. The interior caption read MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE UNTO THE LORD. She printed out a hundred copies to stock by the cash register, along with twenty-three more to mail to the members of her Sunday school class.

  21.

  It turned out that in spite of everything the silence had brought us, there was a hidden longing for sound in the city. So many of us shared in this desire that a noise club began operating, tucked away in the depths of an abandoned recording studio. The people who went to the club did so for the pure excitement of it, for the way the din set their hearts to beating. Who needed serenity? they wanted to know. Who had ever asked for it? They stood in groups listening to the club's switchboard operator laying sound upon sound in the small enclosed space of the room. The slanting note of a violin. The pulse of an ambulance siren. A few thousand football fans cheering at a stadium. Gallons of water geysering from an open hydrant.