Tuning Forks by Dolan Morgan It started as a humming. Charles didn't hear it that morning, though, because he was late and couldn't be bothered. Also, he at first hadn't turned off all twenty seven alarm clocks in his house. Charles didn't like to be late, not at all, because, "it's not something that suits my personality," but he nonetheless made a habit of it. Not that he didn't do his best not to be late—by setting alarms throughout his bedroom and living room and bathroom and car, or by drinking a lot of water and not going to the bathroom before bed—but however punctual he might manage to be throughout the course of waking hours, he still couldn't control what he termed "morning-me" any more than he could control his neighbors or his mother or taxes or the sun. "Morning-me," he told Sarah on numerous occasions, "is not me at all. I'm a completely different person, you know that, you have to know that. Don't you know that? I mean, who is this guy, I wonder, really. Think about it, Sarah, I don't want to be late, right? Why would I? I could lose my job, you don't think I'm aware of this, Sarah? Jesus, I'm this close to losing it, really. But as much as I'd like to say morning-me is the one who faces embarrassment in front of his peers? Well, no, he's really not: it's me. Because by the time I get to work, late, I'm not even him anymore, but me, regular me, instead. Morning-me slips out quietly when I'm not looking, while I'm finding my slippers or cursing something close by. I don't know where he hides the rest of the day, Sarah, I really don't." But wherever morning-me "slipped of to" that particular morning, Charles was not late for work because of him or because of a missed alarm clock. No, he was late—and therefore too preoccupied to hear the humming—because he'd just the night before slept with another woman. He had a small but vivid hickey on his throat and was unsure what to do about it. Sarah had been out of town, a rare occasion, and would be coming back that afternoon. Charles opted to take his razor and cut clear across the purple bruise, hoping it might look like a rough shaving accident. He spent the early morning cleaning up their place and erasing what had happened both from the house and his mind. He'd never cheated before and maintained that he actually still hadn't, that another part of him—a part he detested, really, and would hurt if he could get his hands on—had done the sleeping and the sex and all that, leaving the real him, the innocent him, to clean up the mess. And Charles loved Sarah, he harbored no doubts about that, just as much as he felt that "people who love each other don't sleep around on each other." If he loved her, then he couldn't have slept with that woman, Alicia, he knew. Someone else must have. It's logic, simple. But in the end that meant someone who didn't love Sarah lived inside his body—which Charles did not like at all. He felt that only he should live there, that he alone crowded up the place enough as it is. On his way to work, in a cab stuck in traffic, when he finally had pause enough to notice the hum, by then a kind of gentle thumping, he thought only of "The Tell Tale Heart"—was this his guilt taking physical form? Or, worse, someone else's guilt? At his work, the humming had become a kind of buzzing and a whistle and a low grating all mixed up into a continuous pulse, unmistakably coming from outside of him, though he could still feel it in his chest. But Charles looked around the office, and everyone, for the most part, was doing their regular thing. No big deal. It was annoying, the volume of the sound, but that's about it. It was normal in that part of the city for planes to fly pretty low overhead, the enormous sound of their turbines lasting and audible for minutes at a time, sometimes disturbing meetings or bringing chatter to a sudden halt—so even when the noise became more of a steady razor shaped rumble all around? It was easy to pass it off to the background, just more white noise amongst the regular cacophony of the city. These things happen, Charles thought, and took out the folder for his current assignment. He'd been commissioned to increase efficiency and morale through ergonomic and atmospheric redesign of company floor-plans and office layouts. He originally felt like a glorified interior designer, but his research had been surprisingly compelling. Red wall paint increased accuracy in computation, blue bolstered creativity. Somewhere, he expected, was the perfect shade of purple to meet company needs. His managers had given him quotas, abstract ideas that could be fudged if need be, but he kept in his head an idealistic goal of finding all the right design nuances to maximize productivity. A desk here, a light there, a rug across this section and a series of paintings and bulletin boards throughout—there must be a way to make everyone do the right thing at the right time without feeling any different. In the coffee lounge around 10, Charles asked David, a nice data manager with too much debt and too many children, "Hey, do you hear that? I mean, what is that?" just as easily as he might have tossed out, "Well, how was your weekend?" David's reply, "I know, right? Always an adventure in public service," was an answer to hundreds of questions asked thousands of times before. He barely even looked up from his celery. Throughout the morning, they would suddenly notice it for a moment here and there, but then the sound would slip back down into the undergrowth of the day, a kind of weed in the office that only reinforced Charles's belief that his work in company atmosphere had merit. "Hey, get this," David said around noon, actually having to yell a bit. "I'm talking to a friend of mine online here, she works downtown—they've got the sound, too. It's all over the news." Charles didn't know what to make of that—a few times, there had been mystery smells that wafted through the city, thousands inexplicably sniffing maple syrup or kool-aid at the same time, but he had no reference for an omnipresent sound. David returned to his celery, of which he apparently had a never ending supply. Charles imagined David standing outside of himself, a body double handing him stalk after stalk. An hour or so later, Meredith approached them and passed a note onto Charles' desk. He read it and showed it to David: "I think they are going to evacuate the building." It was only a few seconds later, though, that Liana, the new proofreader, soiled herself. She just lost it while making copies. A line of brown liquid slid out of her skirt and down her leg and she kind of buckled over. David and Charles both stood up, but she ran from the room toward the bathroom. In the hallway, a few people they didn't recognize were running to the bathrooms as well, holding their bellies. One guy, an intern or temp, vomited in the water fountain. David said something to Charles, but he couldn't hear him. When had it gotten so loud? Charles knew it was louder than earlier, but he couldn't place when it had happened. Through the noise, they heard a screeching, a shrill line cutting its way up to their ears, struggling to be heard. Across the hall, in the conference area, a woman looked down at herself, having dropped a ream of paper, shit running down her legs, and she screamed, her mouth open wide, but it barely amounted to a whisper inside the suddenly huge sound. The sprinklers came on and the Exit lights started flashing. Everyone reacted simultaneously in a flurry of jackets and phones and bumping elbows. Almost instantly, the whole company was moving down the concrete stairwell en masse as EMTs ran up against the flow. Outside, the sound remained unchanged. It wasn't louder or quieter as they all stepped into the streets and sunlight, but exactly the same. A few people held their hands over their ears. Others were standing face to face, screaming at one another to be heard. The other buildings on the block were emptying as well, a constant stream of people flowing into 3rd Ave. A fire truck pulled up, most of the men heading straight inside Charles' building, but there were other trucks for other buildings. One fireman stood on a crate, and readied a megaphone. He spoke into it, but no one could hear him. He dropped back down into the crowd of people, and reappeared minutes later, now holding a large white board and a marker. He scrawled out the words, "Go home," and waved it around, gesturing stiffly with his hands. No one reacted right away, as if the sign was meant for everyone else except themselves, or perhaps because they didn't really know how to react to the authority of black marker on poster board. It took a minute to settle in, but eventually they realized they needed to listen to these hastily printed words. David managed to convey that he needed a ride, and when he and Charles reached the car, the head and tail lights were flashing. In fact, so were the lights on most cars. Alarms had been tripped by the vibration, but they couldn't hear any of them in the sound. Throughout the city, there must have been thousands of alarms that no one took notice of—what once would have made people jump to action now lost in a sea of hisses and bleeps and drones. By the time Charles and David got going, the traffic had clogged up on every street and they were moving about ten feet a minute—but if people were honking, they couldn't tell. Charles honked for the sport of it. David appeared to laugh, then turned on the radio, the volume way up. He pretended to browse and pick a good station, but what he landed on might as well have been static or silence. The sirens of ambulances and fire trucks were completely useless. They came so often and so quickly that everyone pretty much kept to the side of the road, a third lane created in the middle of the street. The sound had an increasingly metallic quality, Charles felt. As they finally started up the on-ramp of the Queensboro Bridge, Charles picked out hints of twanging cables, taught saw blades or steel whips. The wait was long, monotonous—thousands were leaving Manhattan over this bridge—and Charles began to sort of tune in to the sound. There certainly wasn't anything else to listen to. As it started to silently rain, he noticed nuances in it. There were no discernible patterns other than its endlessness, but within there were nooks and crannies of pitches, waves and breaks of rhythm. Charles remembered hearing from someone or reading somewhere that perception can warp white noise into almost any sound, a running shower to be confused for a cell phone or loud music mistaken for the doorbell, but nothing in particular stuck out to him now. As the car slowly plugged along over the bridge, drops silently pounding the windshield, the radio blaring unheard, all he could find were random screeches and the unending rumble. In Queens, police were directing traffic, which struck Charles and David as strange. It's not as if the street lights were obstructed by the noise, but there was a lot of confusion. Charles wondered how the cops were communicating with each other. Those walkie-talkies were just hunks of metal now. He imagined officers standing at their posts, never knowing when to move to the next place, waving cars along into eternity. When Charles dropped David off, David waved and jokingly made a "call me" gesture. They laughed, but it was also a moment of uncertainty or finality or both. It took another hour to get home, normally a ten minute drive, and when Charles got there, Sarah wasn't in yet. She had texted him earlier letting him know she was on her way from the bridge, though she no doubt had been slowed by the thick traffic. Who knows how long it would take. On the armchair by the window, he found a long black hair. Alicia. He scoured the house and found three more, then looked at his puffy red neck and felt stupid. The cut stood out like a forgotten prune—he'd made it more obvious, he knew it. Sarah would know immediately. Charles sent Sarah another message asking how far she had gotten. Still on the Brooklyn Bridge, she said. There's time, he thought and settled into the house as best he could. Plates and papers had been jostled to the floor by the subtle vibrations of the sound. Everything was slowly moving, he realized, millimeter by millimeter, ready to come off the table or counter. It all looked normal in the house, just shaking lightly and quickly, too fast to see. For a moment, it made him a little dizzy. Charles sat down on the couch and instinctively turned on the TV. The news on every channel covered the sound from every angle. The anchors just sat there not moving, the words they would normally have been speaking displayed in marquee beneath them. At first Charles didn't understand why they had the anchors there at all if they weren't going to speak, but when he imagined the news stated in Helvetica on a black screen, it made him nervous and uncomfortable. Seeing the people there gave some sense of things holding together, shaken but still on the table. They explained, or wrote out, the concept of the "brown note"—a frequency at which some people become incontinent—and they explained, or someone did as the news anchors looked on blankly, that this noise was happening all over the country and some parts of Canada and Mexico. It appeared to have arrived with the dawn, quieter now in California but getting louder. "Experts" made guesses about its origin, but most were just floundering around, tossing facts in to see if they'd swim, and nothing held any water. The waves were too big. No one mentioned the rest of the world, and terrorism was an option but an unlikely one given the scale. In contrast to what the news portrayed as a major catastrophe, the president didn't issue a state of emergency, but instead made a statement that nothing merited alarm—technicians were handling things smoothly across the nation. People were flustered but largely fine. Charles was surprised that things were holding together so well, but then again it was only noise. While he waited, his mind drifted back to the sound again, almost as if it were a separate place he had tentatively approached but still hadn't built up the courage to completely enter yet—he would step through the door, peak around tentatively, and then head back out to more familiar things like couches, TV, and self loathing. He ventured a little further into the sound, felt his way around in the darkness of its pitches and harmonies. Really exploring the sound required a type of blindness—or at least a complete re-centering of the senses—and trying to discover what was hidden in it felt like walking with hands on the wall, eyes closed. In many ways, Charles felt he was swimming through it, not knowing where to go next in its cavernous timbres, but just as much it also swam through him, he felt, a droning diesel-engine stuttering out bass notes through his gut, exploring and trying equally to find what's next, something fleshy, visceral or vulnerable. If it were a race between him and the sound toward a soft center, the sound would definitely win, Charles felt. For one, it had definitely gotten louder, which Charles read as increased power to explore him. And he felt confident that he had more to hide than the sound. Besides the fact that it was enormous and seemingly unmappable in his mind, the sound stood naked in front of the entire country, projecting itself completely and proudly into the ears of everyone, while Charles, on the other hand, had a pile of secrets under his skin that he hadn't bared to anyone but the mirrors in the bathroom, and even to them only rarely and a piece at a time. Yet Charles believed there was a version of himself that was exactly who he believed he was, somewhere. He texted Alicia, the girl from the night before, and looking around the room, saw that a few books and plates had crashed to the floor, unheard. Or rather, of course he had heard them, but Charles was hearing so much that he hadn't noticed. He was sweeping up the glass when he felt a hand on his back. He whipped around, jumping, to find Sarah almost crying. Charles only briefly thought of Alicia, at first expecting to see a pair of forgotten underwear in Sarah's hand or even a series of condemning pictures taken by a hired PI. But her hands were empty and trembling. He let Sarah rest her face on his chest, his chin on her head. Sarah's hair was thin and light and smelled the way Charles often thought of her, clean, comfortable and sweet. He resolved, like a thousand times that day, to kill the him that had cheated on her, to not let him answer Alicia's text if she sent one back. The sound mocked his decision by staying the same, just louder and more profoundly the same, just as Charles suspected he couldn't change, whatever he wanted to say he'd do or not do. You can't control other people, he thought. Charles smelled Sarah's hair and ran his fingers over her cheek and felt a sense of comfort because right now, at least, he was exactly who he wanted to be, if he just closed his mind to everything else, no matter what came before or after. In this moment, Charles felt, the sound was wrong. Things were normal that night. He'd done a good job cleaning up his other his's mess. Sarah showered, Charles made dinner. She kissed the cut on his neck to make it better. They passed notes to talk, and read next to each other on the couch. They watched a movie with subtitles. He fell asleep watching her drift off. They both woke up in the middle of the night, the sound now much louder, but they fell back to sleep in each other's arms, Charles still watching her chest rise and fall. He felt better when she was there, he realized and tried to hold onto the feeling. In the morning, the news reports were strangely vague. They seemed to be talking in abstractions. "The sound is taking its time," they said, or "Some children have gotten lost in the sound and parents have formed a search party," or "While riding on the sound, a car crashed on Highway 1." Charles wasn't sure he knew what any of that meant or if the anchors did either. Yet, it was news and it was still there, which the president, in another statement, reminded all was a good thing, not to be forgotten. He told the country, always in subtitles as he looked assuringly at the camera, gesturing with his hands, to take some time to recuperate, but to return to work the next day, to not let this impede the progress of the nation. "We are stronger than this sound," he said. It occurred to Charles that, despite his good intentions, that sentiment literally was not true. The energy needed to sustain this sound spoke to enormous power, much more strength than anything he could imagine. Sarah suggested that, if it were to last, they could generate electricity from the sound. Charles wondered if the sound would let them. Over the course of the next few days, the sound got slowly and steadily louder, though never as quickly as on the first day. The news suggested ear plugs and told of a sort of sound-related-irritability syndrome. The distracting and annoying sound enveloping everyone was apparently too much for some, and its effects varied from complete angry break downs to mere snappy comments or overly callous gestures. People were inexplicably not themselves, they reported. Sound-irritability-syndrome, or SIS, was in full effect. Charles spent only one day back at work, but there, people were constantly lashing out and apologizing afterwards, or screwing up their work and having to fix it later. Suddenly, everything was excusable. The things people did were not their own actions, they felt, but a mix of them and the sound together, and since everyone already accepted the malice of the sound, it made sense that people were behaving badly. The context of their situation was at the root of the bad choices. As he attempted to push forward with redesigning the office, Charles wondered if, before the sound, it had been just the same—that is, was there an atmosphere, a tone, separate from the one people were used to, that would have been more conducive to better choices, that would have made everyone a better person without even trying? Maybe there was a sound, he wondered, that would make us do everything right, every time. And of course, maybe there were sounds for everything—ones that could make us love or hate or garden or embroider or play shuffleboard. Charles stopped going in to work because a building in midtown had collapsed, falling into two others, luckily killing only hundreds instead of thousands due to heavy absenteeism. The sound was suspected as the cause, and structural integrity became questionable everywhere, especially in large buildings standing tall like enormous tuning forks in the sky. There was a mass exodus out of Manhattan, but it happened slowly and, of course, quietly. The news anchors stopped coming in, and the updates became increasingly vague: "The sound watches us listen to it, reports scientist," and "Millions of dollars floating in the sound wait to be constructed," and then later things like, "Water is available for consumption in cubes and angles," or "Listening to ourselves, the animals reacting, camouflage," and finally, "The sound is somewhere here or there but quietly louder." The president stopped making appearances. After a week, the news stopped altogether as well. At first, commercials kept playing in an hour long cycle, but eventually that stopped, too, leaving only static to match the noise. Alicia sent Charles a message saying, in a long and rambling text, that she may have forgotten a hairbrush at his house. He searched for it, but found only that it was too hard to concentrate. The sound gave everything the air of an old photograph, of stillness and quiet. Out the window of Charles' apartment, the street was just a still-shot of a neighborhood, the homes and hedges over-exposed like sudden cuts in a cheap film. Everything stared back, the buildings and roads and lights and hydrants and trash, through a roaring fire no one could see. Even when a car drove by, which was rare, all movement appeared in flashes or juts or stutters, as if the sound had flooded the world in a thick, invisible sludge. By that time, too, it had gotten so loud as to defy logic. They were hearing things in it, distinct things, messages and memories and music and lies. Its ups and downs transformed into any number of things they didn't want to hear and everything they did. At first, it scared them to think they'd never hear anything again, but really, they could hear—they had the sound and they were hearing more than ever before. Charles even felt that it had some therapeutic properties, that it helped him to enter a sort of meditation or even mediation, wherein he might face off with his other selves, meet them and excise them with the sound's blades. He threw out his phone, and Alicia and others along with it, and Sarah tossed the television from the roof and they held hands. From there they could see fires and looting. Charles heard gun shots, but they couldn't have been real gun shots, he realized, just ideas floating through the vapor. Sarah was getting pretty good at reading lips, or at least she thought she was. She could have been wrong, but it felt like talking. They spent their afternoons tanning themselves in the pounding volume, their skin rippling under the weight of the waves as if beneath a powerful hand dryer. An old man would run through the streets with a shovel, swatting at all of the birds that had fallen to the streets or digging through the trash that blanketed the sidewalks. Sarah stopped washing after a while, they both did, because the pipes weren't pumping. This happened on the same day the sound became so loud that they needed to close their eyes to exist. It took just about all they had to maintain focus, such that the complexity of seeing things was too much to bear, as if the intensity of hearing had now overtaken the limits of one sense and invaded the province of another. They had to navigate the abstract corridors of the sound to keep themselves grounded in something resembling reality, and they couldn't envision the sound's pathways correctly while looking at actual things, so they kept their eyes clamped shut. And they each on their own began a secret relationship with the sound, sexual mostly. It had started while Sarah and Charles slept together, but when it happened, they imagined themselves like separate hands twirling about the clock face of its curves and undulations. Charles felt disgusting cheating on Sarah while he was right there inside of her, but he was undoubtedly more in the sound than in her, and the noise was certainly deeper within her than he ever could be. Neither of them had a chance against that kind of intimacy. How could they get closer to each other than the things that were already inside them? Their sex life went on like that for some time. They crawled around the house with eyes closed, finding food here and there, cereal and bread, and would reach out to each other in the darkness, using one another's bodies as conduits for the sound to rumble through themselves, to get closer to the noise through each other. When the sound briefly and suddenly stopped—dropping away, gone without any warning while they fucked each other to be in the sound—there in the vacuous and hammering silence were Charles' forgotten and ignored alarm clocks, all of them blaring loudly and arhythmically, each one fighting the other for attention. Charles wondered which one of him was about to wake up. When his eyes opened for the first time in days or weeks, he found he wasn't fucking Sarah at all, but just a pile of coats by the wall. He looked around the room through bleached light and saw Sarah holding all the blankets on the bed, blindly rubbing her cheeks against the sheets, moaning. What had we ever been to each other, he wondered. And then the sound came back and they kept fucking themselves. Dolan Morgan has been published in Armchair/Shotgun, The Apocalypse Anthology and Other Rooms Press. Morgan works undercover for Brooklyn newspapers and his story Cells received an honorary mention for 2008's Italo Calvino Prize. For fun, he makes elaborate PowerPoint presentations about you, among others. | home |

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