Just as he was settling in, the lights went out. Now this was quite an annoyance for Exhibit ‘B’, because after a long, tiring day at wherever it was that he spent it at, the prospect of a quiet T.V. dinner was indispensable. Well, in all honesty, it wasn’t really a very quiet T.V dinner. You see, ‘B’ was ever so slightly deaf in one ear (I can never remember which one and very often end up yelling down the wrong orifice, much to his irritation) and he needed his beat-up telly to blare at volumes found otherwise only at election rallies and band practice at Uncle Ethan’s suffocatingly small garage.
But B’s condition was deep-rooted in his childhood, and he wasn’t entirely to blame for his hearing disability. Ever since B was very little, he hated the sound of silence. He didn’t like Simon and Garfunkel very much either. But most of all, he hated memories of being sent to bed early because “Mommy and Daddy had grown up stuff to talk about”. In a desperate attempt to overpower the rather violent ‘grown-up conversation’, B would force his beat-up radio to its maximum capacity, wrenching the volume knob harder with the appearance of every swear word that managed to stray away from the living room and past his door. Even through high school, B refused to sit through the sepulchral silence that suffused his examination halls. He was almost kicked out on several occasions when he inadvertently started tapping his pencil to kill the calm. The generous use of the volume dial in his car stereo would even make Bach sound discordant and unsettling.
So at age 21, B subconsciously made every effort to just make some noise. It was almost as if he feared, on some subliminal level, that Silence would wrap its tentacles around his neck and strangle every last breath out of body, given the chance. Conversations with B would almost never have awkward pauses, even if appalling jokes or inappropriate references were involved. This phobia made B an obnoxiously loud individual whose incessant chatter at the top of his voice often left people wishing he would just go away.
“Damn Government! Wish they’d sort these power cuts out! If they only used some of our taxes on REAL problems…” A string of expletives, addressed to the powers that be, adorned the next few sentences. B groped about in the dark, desperately looking for a table to place his unfinished dinner. Finding a little tea-table to stick his plate on, he bravely ventured towards the kitchen to find some candles. These attempts only resulted in him knocking down a glass of water and some heavy contact with the leg of his sofa.
And then it happened. Like a scene straight out of a Laurel and Hardy classic. We should blame it on the abandoned banana peel that lay not-so-innocently on the floor. B wasn’t particularly agile and the second he stepped on that peel, he tasted the cold, hard marble floor of Apartment 46 in his budget accommodation colony. He fell rather funnily, face first—I still can’t work out how he managed that. People who slip on banana peels (you’ll be surprised at the frequency of this much-caricatured freak accident) almost always land on their backs. I guess it’s a little like how toast always falls buttered-side up. He didn’t really cause a big crash, probably because of the absence of cutlery in his hands at the time. B did register a respectably audible thud, though. Not that it mattered very much, because when you live in a budget accommodation, chances are that your neighbours aren’t Mr. Good Samaritan and his missus. You could be pulling a Jack-the-Ripper for all they cared.
It took B a few minutes to snap out of the initial whiplash. He was just about managing to navigate past the celestial bodies that revolved around his head and was starting to hear himself think. But that’s when the worst happens. The immediate shock acts as an anesthetic, but the second it passes, the terrible pain kicks in. Like a sharp jab to the lower back, crippling you in several places. It felt like someone thrown on their finest tap dancing shoes and done an elaborate number on B’s spinal chord, with an encore and everything.
B groaned in pain and then wondered immediately if he had actually emitted any sound at all. He could barely see anything, except for the diffused moon rays that sneaked in through a tiny crevice his landlord called a window. Any attempts to move, or even breathe heavily set in motion an excruciating jabbing motion across the length of his spine. Suddenly, B noticed some movement in his lower body. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that his leg was starting to involuntarily tremble. The awareness of this physiological reaction came with a terrible revelation. All around him, it was perfectly quiet. Not a sound from anywhere. And B was completely trapped in this prison of deathly silence.
The calm was suffocating. B wondered if the silence had caused the air in the room to thin out. No, let’s distract the mind, he thought. If he just waited a little longer the lights would be back on and then he could drag himself to the telephone. But even in his state, he knew that it would be a while before this badly drawn plan materialized. A solitary fly buzzed around his leg, brushing against it very lightly but in strokes of rapid succession. Damn fly, he thought, it’s almost as if it knows exactly how to torture me. Oh well, maybe playing a song in one’s head would help? A little singing might ease this tension, it certainly helped those kids in that movie about Nazis and nannies… what was it called again? Mary Poppins? No, of course not, that’s the one with the flying woman, right? It was quite ironic how A.W.O.L lyrics would be in desperate situations like these. The only song he could think of—and its randomness took him by surprise—was ‘Something Stupid.’
‘…And then I go and spoil it all by saying—!’ B froze. The couch had almost certainly made a sound. Like almost as if it has just taken a step forward. Oh, stop being such a baby, he said to himself. It’s just this darn silence that’s accentuating every little creak. Probably termites… bloody loud termites! Do termites have ears, he wondered. Probably not, and that’s why they make such a racquet, those inconsiderate little vermin.
As his mind meandered through rivulets of incoherency and random thought, B was swiftly returned to reality, courtesy a sharp pain that shot down his back. It took him a few seconds to react with a muffled whimper. B wondered if this would ever end. Maybe he’d just lie here for days and days and then a neighbor with a keen olfactory sense would detect the smell of a rotting corpse. B began to build newspaper headlines in the air: ‘Man found dead in apartment after a week.’ Naaaah, he wasn’t headline material. He estimated that he’d probably find a mention somewhere between ‘Woman sells child on e-Bay’ and some other great tragedy that people actually cared about.
Maybe prayer would ease my situation, he wondered. But I’ve never prayed, is now a good time to begin? Seems rather selfish, really! Or maybe this is one of those situations that God creates to reveal himself to me. As he pondered this big theological question, B felt the ground below him vibrate. It began to rumble, like a vacuum cleaner adorned with war paint. It sent a sudden shiver down spine, which seemed perforated in several places. It felt as if the ground was opening up to swallow him in. A few seconds later, the movement ceased. Probably some scientific explanation that I could get from Physics class, he reassured himself. Resonance and all that jazz.
Silence continued to prevail over the room. Its partner in crime was the all-engulfing Darkness, who twisted the dim light to make all the objects in the room look like angry gargoyles. B began to realize that he was sweating profusely. He felt a new sound, steadily pounding at the back of his head. It was the ticking of the clock. Tick…tock…tick…tock…, its rhythmic patterns strongly reminiscent of nursery rhymes.
B tried to block out these sounds, but feared that any attempts to do that would only make him feel even more panicky. And then, he had the closest thing to an epiphany (without the inspiring background score, of course). He wondered why his ear was so tuned in to picking up on the slightest sound. Was his mind actually making a constant effort to latch onto every little noise just to kill the silence? Like the montage at the end of a ‘Who-Dunnit’ film, where the lead character traces his steps backwards, B’s watched scenes from his life flicker at rapid speed. All along, the ticking of the clock got louder and louder…
He couldn’t take this anymore. He had to do something.
Yes, I’ll scream, he thought. Why hadn’t this occurred to him before?
B felt a choking grip on wrap itself firmly around his throat. He began to breathe loudly and heavily, causing more pain to his back.
No, this couldn’t go on.
He had to do SOMETHING.
B mustered every last breath in his body. His muscles tensed as they prepared themselves.
The loudest scream ever to escape his tonsils.
To compete with the finest war-cry.
Initiated before the bloodiest of tribal wars.
B opened his mouth and was ready to let go. This was the most pre-meditated vocal noise ever. Here goes—
B opened his mouth but all that came out was a frightened whimper. This was because just then, with a flash of brilliance, the tube light flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
A familiar rumble from his telly followed, like the thunder that succeeds a flash of lightning.
The power was back on. The night was over. Let there be light.
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