Darryl and I used to have the Magneto vs. Professor X conversation all the time. Aang vs. Zuko. Donatello vs. Raphael. Darryl was always siding with the pacifists. He even loved Superman, who bores me to tears, because what could be less interesting than someone who is mostly invincible?
The strongest people aren’t the ones who are born strong. They’re the ones who know what it’s like to be weak, and have a reason to get stronger. The ones who’ve been hurt. Who’ve had things they love taken from them. The ones with something to fight for.
The ones who want revenge.
I shut my eyes, sat down in the noisy hallway fifteen minutes before the morning bell rang, and listened. I embraced my hunger and tilted my head in one direction and then another. I had studied up, the night before, on the biology and the physics of hearing.
Sounds are like smells. They carry so much information that most people simply don’t know what to listen for.
High school hallways were actually a pretty good laboratory for finding the extra information hidden inside human speech. Teenagers are dramatic; they exaggerate; they try too hard. Turning my head slightly I could shift from someone lying about a fight she almost got into (“And she is so lucky he was there, because I had people with me, and she would not be breathing right now—”) to someone spreading false gossip (“His brother got arrested at college because he beat up a black guy—”) to someone spreading true gossip (“She told her mom she’s pregnant, and her mom agreed to send her to a different school. But she’s not really pregnant. Not even a little bit . . .”)
Careful listening will tell you precisely where a sound is coming from. Careful listening will let you hear sound waves passing through solid barriers. The sound waves of speech are shaped by the emotions of the speaker, and a listener with abilities can hear those emotions. He can know when someone is lying or sad or about to do something terrible.
Or rather, I can know.
The training montage is a cinematic staple in a whole bunch of film genres—an easy way to say, “A bunch of time passed, our hero did a lot of really boring stuff over and over again until he or she ceased to be useless.” Clips of the main character doing stuff repeatedly, usually getting hit over the head or punched in the face a bunch, usually to weird synthesizer music. You know what I’m talking about. The Bride and Pai Mei. Yoda and Luke in the swamp. Most of Kung Fu Panda. Every X-Men movie. Etc.
So just imagine a training montage here. Me, researching how hearing works, trying out different methods of auditory perception that are . . . above normal human margins, proceeding with stubborn thick-headed persistence, wrong and wrong and wrong . . .
And then, incredibly, right.
Me with my ear to a wall, listening until I could make out the words being said in the next room over and then two rooms away.
Me, moving through the school during the chaos of lunch period, listening for the songs playing in my locker far away and then quizzing myself after—sort of an auditory eye chart.
Me, putting my ear to the cold exposed pipes in the physics room, listening to how effortlessly the metal tubes transmitted sound waves from the other side of the building.
Me, shifting my focus to follow the architecture of the building to selectively listen in on any one of a dozen different rooms.
Me, clapping in the dark at home, trying—and failing—to use echolocation, listening to how the sound waves bounce off objects and thereby “see” in the total absence of light.
Me, on the internet, looking up the phone numbers for every single recording studio in or near Providence, Rhode Island. Calling every single one. None could confirm or deny whether a band named Destroy All Monsters! was currently recording there.
Me, experimenting with food. Going a whole day and only eating a sandwich, to see how much more clearly I could hear. Me, going a whole day eating only half a sandwich. Feeling the difference.
Movie montages end in success and enlightenment, or at least a grudging smile from the hard-ass master, a tiny acknowledgment that progress has been made. This is not a movie montage. It ends with me, sitting in the woods behind my house at dawn, freezing, scared shitless.
Focus and patience were still where I needed to work. I had to learn to let go of my desires, my needs and wants. I needed to simply be. Listen. Hear. Wait. Learn. Absorb as much information as I could from my senses, while turning off the information from my brain.
Hearing meant pulling meaning from chaos. Tuning out the static and taking what I needed. To truly hear the innumerable sounds of the universe, I needed to quiet my mind.
So I decided to meditate. Focus on erasing my sense of self. Become a vessel for the sounds of the universe. Listen. Hear. I went out back and sat down on the ground and shut my eyes.
I’d been to some pages on the internet about it. Buddhist sites and Hindu texts, all about mindful meditation. How to quiet the mind. Except quieting the mind was really really hard. “Mastering the mind is as difficult as controlling the winds,” said Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, and he had a really good point. Sages and monks spent a lifetime learning to meditate.
So I started with simply breathing. And listening.
I heard my stomach. I heard wind. I heard it shush through the grass, whistle over the roof of my house, sing in the branches of the trees. I followed the sound of the wind into the scattered trailer parks and ramshackle cottages nearby, heard screen doors bang and televisions squawk. I heard dishonest men making promises from a thousand television sets, babies crying, liquor sloshing over ice, and dogs dreaming. . . .
But the wind was moving too fast, speeding through space and taking me with it, spreading me out, turning me into a massive net, sucking up sounds, miles and miles of laughter and tears and plates smashing and doors slamming. It felt like this time when I was a little kid, swimming in the sea, suddenly realizing I had waded too far, couldn’t touch the bottom, and knowing how much deep dark water was waiting to swallow me up.
I gasped, gulped, tried, and flailed.
I heard Ott. I heard his father, his voice thick and hairy and terrifying, the sound of a man made miserable and determined to take it out on the people he had power over—
They’re not your friends, you stupid fuck. You’ll see—you’ll see how they abandon you when you get out in the real world. Live it up now because come graduation you won’t have nothing except a shit job, if you’re lucky.
Ott only whimpered. I pulled away, desperate not to feel pity for him.
I heard Bastien’s dad, my mother’s boss, tell her she wasn’t making quota for the week, wouldn’t qualify for overtime. I heard the soulless calm to his voice, the rational These are the rules, my hands are tied tone with which he explained why she might not be able to pay this month’s rent, and it made me want to rip the skin from his bones like they did with so many pigs.
Furious, I tore myself away again, losing what little bit of control I still had—
And I heard the cries of the animals at the slaughterhouse. And hearing their cries I instantly, profoundly, felt a fraction of their pain.