I.
Snow, 12:47 a.m. and a plow clears our driveway. As the blade scrapes the pavement outside, the windows of my second floor apartment rattle in their casements, and I wake in my bed, get up, walk around the bedroom feeling startled and confused. I am looking at my ceiling again for this new terrible sound, but what lives and moves in the attic of this house is quiet now, if not sleeping.
Kitchen window: the truck’s red taillights, stacks of delicate dust on the black branches of the trees. The walks are lined with shovels left standing in drifts. All is silent, paused, waiting to exhale and blow cover, or wake slowly, melting. I see myself, my reflection on the pane watching the plow move off: woman spying on a plow truck. She wakes all night at sounds in the house and walks her circles below the attic listening for telltale reverberations. A spatula bangs against a pan on the stove, routine, familiar. Months ago, late morning and evenings, the electronic song of a child’s toy over and over, chiming. I remember the tune, but it is missing now, and I’ve imagined what became of it. The fascination wore off and the toy was abandoned, it was lost, left behind at a friend’s house, it was taken away after I continued to complain about noise.
The fascination did not wear off, this I know. Some action was involved, something infinitely repeatable—the squeezing of a plush giraffe who has a button mechanism in his neck, say—the consequence of which is song. Choke the giraffe: music, and precisely the same line of notes we heard the last time. The allure of recurring sounds is their narrative resonance, the never-ending recognizable story: they stir at
But the allure of a replicable sound, that song doubles as the dream of the unified self, the dream of the knowable, because repeatable, world. Because I am a bit of god in the act of replication. A song turns on repeat in my disc player because it's the only song I want to listen to. My cell intones my landlord’s number. Ask them to stop banging around up there, to stop yelling. Put the squeeze on, make shit happen. I can hear the bristles of her broom on my ceiling as she sweeps, can hear her shouting what do you want? What do you want? And him: I want you to shut the fuck up.
Nevertheless, it is relentless. Sobbing one night, hers, late and in the dark, and I wake to listen in on what I’ve already expected to be true. I have seen her on the back stairs in the entry way with her baby and in the driveway as she gets him in and out of the car seat. He is two going on three, she mentions when they first move in. And he throws a hissy sometimes—her way of saying there will be some crying. I guess her at eighteen, maybe twenty, but not older. The crying is paralyzing, amplified by the crawl space between us, her ceiling, my floor, and we are alone in the house this once, and only this once, within the lacerating sounds of her choking and sobbing. Beneath my listening in, inwardly, I hear my own small fisted hysteria whining on about this one stupid trivial incidental excessive accident, this crude and tyrannical intimacy brought on by overhearing everything the people in the attic of this house I love but do not own impose on me because the man who used to live above me got happily married and moved out and this sad three-headed creature happened to moved in, boy, mother, and an occasional father. The right conditions clapped together and it fell upon me.
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