This morning the sun arrived in earnest. It fell obliquely on the roof, filtered through my skylight, via the sheets printed with my history, those same sheets I taped over the glass and which at one time functioned like a shade, snuffing out the sun. Now the sun has bleached the paper, erased the ink, and the attic gleams with spidered light. I woke earlier than usual. It was early afternoon. My habit is to sleep during the day and work — if I am able to work — by night. I remained there on my mattress, hoping to doze off, to rest until dusk. But the light, together with the trees knocking on the roof, as well as the gulls, not to mention the ringing in my ears, made sleep impossible. I lay with my eyes closed, wondering if today I would manage to write, until I felt the first poison of a headache coming on. I got up and performed my waking rituals. Then I sat down at my desk and opened my computer. It was no use, the sun fell down on me like a shower of coins, and I found myself unable to compose a single sentence. I said to myself, Perhaps, if I can shut out the sun, I will be able to work. I climbed over the heap of junk to my wardrobe, grabbed a sheaf of papers, climbed back, then on to my chair. In a kind of animal frenzy, like some nocturnal creature woken in the day, I taped them up, darkening with those black lies the confusing light of the sun. I continued to travel back and forth between my wardrobe and chair, pasting layer upon layer, and not only over the skylight, for now I noticed cracks of light between the wooden boards of the roof. I taped my history over these too, avoiding the mappa mundi, which imperfectly covers one-third of the south-facing wall. As I did I found that my anguish began to fade, and the ringing in my ears became faint, light and remote, and my head stopped hurting, and I began to laugh, first under my breath, then louder and louder.
I did not know if it was day or night. Even now I am not certain. The attic was dark, as now, and quiet, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea. I stopped taping, went over to my computer and woke it from its own kind of sleep. Without any preparation — no deep breaths or questions — I started to type, and in no time I had related the foregoing. ‘Yes!’ I cried, happy at last. That was a moment ago. Now I am waiting for the sounds of my past to declare themselves … and here they come, in fragments it is true, and yet the important thing is that they arrive, now in wretched torn shreds, now musical and precise, now as a kind of unconscious ringing in my head. And all is quiet outside my head. And the sun does not shine in my attic. From now on, whenever I grow frustrated with my history, whenever I curse these words perhaps better left unwritten, I shall comfort myself with the thought that each page I turn out will give me an opportunity to subdue the sun. That more words mean less light.
…
After Damaris left I took the plane to Scotland. My father had died while I was in America, and on returning to Gullane I found the house boarded up. The birds had taken over. The walls and furniture, everything, was covered in their filth. The attic was the only room they had not managed to enter. I climbed the ladder, opened the trap door and lay there at the top of the house, eyes closed, trying to ignore their screeching. After a while even the birds didn’t bother me. My mind was on Damaris. I thought a great deal about what she had whispered to me on the bus leaving Nashville: that I did not have a remarkable sense of hearing, that I was just a freak with large ears.
After that, every morning for a week I smashed bottles on the beach, then returned to my retreat at the top of the house and ate beans with my coffee. In time I came down from the attic. I threw open the windows and doors and chased the birds away with a broom. I should have got a cat, but I couldn’t bear the sight of one. I sat on the sofa and stared at the wall. For weeks I hardly left the sofa. I felt empty, an emptiness which left me feeling totally inert, or furious, or helplessly bored, a sickening kind of refined boredom which provoked in me the desire to destroy things, all things, objects, texts, animals, friendships, property.
Instead, I fought with Damaris in my mind. If, I reasoned, she had loved me she would have stayed with me in spite of my distractedness, my obsessions. I knew she had suffered because of my plan to record the sounds. Perhaps she had amused herself with Zed, the make-up girl? Perhaps, like me with the sounds, she had found pleasure in other things. Yes, I thought — sure of it now — she was already with Zed, and if not Zed then certainly another. Hadn’t she told me that she couldn’t bear to be alone? And when I thought this, and imagined her touching someone else in the places she had touched me, and her wandering naked in front of that person, who would lean over to kiss her on the mouth, wild with tenderness, I felt like I was splitting in two. I packed a bag and rushed to Edinburgh airport. As soon as I arrived, however, my thoughts turned, and I wouldn’t board the flight. If Damaris had loved me, I reasoned now, why had she tried to hurt or destroy me? She had blindfolded me and taken me to the anechoic chamber, that graveyard of sounds.
I have often spoken of the noises in my head. It was in that terrifying chamber I became aware of them for the first time. I recall the powerful heat, and the air — the weight of it — which did not transmit sound, and I felt like I was suffocating. I took my blindfold off. Damaris was watching me intensely. I fell back into her arms, frightened. She was studying me, smiling, but without the least bit of humour in her face. She spoke, and her words sank or perhaps rose — they seemed to do both — and were swallowed up in that strange, heavy air. I leaned back, my head in her lap, and it was then I heard it: a kind of slow sighing that came and went. I thought, which is to say listened, for a while, and then I understood: the sighing was not the sound of Damaris breathing, as I had believed, but — how shall I say? — the noise of myself. It grew louder and deeper, and I sat upright. Soon I heard fluting and whistling noises, and a soft kind of whirring busyness, together with a low thunder, and smacking little clicks, uneven and stabbing, and burbling as of water falling and flowing in the gutter. I sat there listening to the humming of the little world of my own body. Its wild resonance disgusted me.
We returned to our hotel and that uneven, braying, coruscating tone continued to haunt me. I had the bitter revelation it was not entirely new; I had heard it before, in the pits, immediately after the accident involving my left ear. Then the noise had gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now it — I — continued … dinning through my final days with Damaris, rising in pitch after she left me in the hotel, unchangingly loud as I packed my bag and travelled to the airport in New York, terrorizing me on the plane, maddening me when I reached Gullane — and really, ever since, no matter how hard I have tried to block it out, it has never ceased.
Yes, my experience in that room has affected everything in my life. I have told no one about it; perhaps because I myself do not understand its essential aspects, perhaps out of a sense of embarrassment at being so unnerved by something so ordinary, by hearing what doctors hear every day and for which there is a dedicated instrument, the stethoscope. What I heard in the anechoic chamber was merely the healthy functioning of my body: the air passing through my lungs, my heartbeat, the rush of my blood, the creaking and trickling of my empty stomach. Later, in my forties, I would read about a composer’s own experience in an anechoic chamber; he noted two sounds: a low thunder, which was his blood in circulation, and a high-pitched humming, which was his nervous system in operation. Later still, through my research, I would understand that silence may achieve significance only in relation to what it denies, displaces or disavows, just as there is no up without down, or left without right. And even later, when I began to write these stories, in the process of attempting to speak about silence, the true subject of my history, I would realize that one may do so only by breaking it. At the time, however, in that room without echo, I merely held my stomach and wept. I felt sickened, appalled. I felt too the stirrings of a kind of resignation or shame to which I could not give a name, but which would continue to haunt me to this very day. What was so disturbing for me that afternoon in 1972? Quite simply I realized that to be alive is to emit sound. The sensation marked me so deeply that I wonder if it does not in fact expose a more disturbing revelation: not fear of the noise of myself, but the loss of the silence it for ever crowded out. Yes, in the anechoic chamber I understood for the first time that silence does not exist.