“No.”
“Why not?”
“She’s busy.”
And indeed she was busy: surrounded by well-wishers, friends, family, her parents, various musicians congratulating her.
“You should at least tell her she did a good job,” Faye said. “Thank her for the invitation. It’s polite.”
“Plenty of people are telling her good job,” Samuel said. “Can we go?”
His mother shrugged. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”
And they were on their way out of the hall, and they were moving slowly with the surge of people also leaving, Samuel brushing against hips and sport coats, when from behind him he heard his name. Bethany was calling his name. He turned and found her wrestling through the crowd to catch up to him, and when she finally did she leaned into him, her cheek to his, and he thought he was supposed to give her one of those fake-kiss things he saw all the adult men doing, until she brought her lips all the way to his ear and whispered, “Come over tonight. Sneak out.”
“Okay,” he said. That warmth on his face. He would have agreed to do anything she asked.
“There’s something I have to show you.”
“What is it?”
“The cassette you gave me? It’s not just silence. There’s something else.”
She pulled away. She no longer looked, as she had onstage, small. She had regained her normal Bethany proportions: elegant, sophisticated, womanly. She held his stare and smiled.
“You have to hear it,” she said. Then she dashed away, back to her parents and her throng of giddy admirers.
His mother looked at him suspiciously, but he ignored her. He walked right past her, out of the church and into the night, limping slightly in his rock-hard shoes.
That night he lay in bed waiting for the sounds of the house to disappear—his mother rattling around in the kitchen, his father watching television downstairs, then eventually the whoosh of his parents’ door opening as his mother went to bed. Then the television turning off with an electric chunk. The sound of water running, a toilet flushing. Then nothing. Waiting another twenty minutes to be sure, then opening his door, twisting and untwisting the knob slowly and tightly to avoid unwanted metallic clicks, walking lightly down the hall, stepping over the squeaky part of the hallway floor that Samuel could avoid even in total darkness, then down the stairs, placing his feet as close to the wall as he could, where there was less creaking danger, then taking a full ten minutes to open the front door—a small pull, a small tic, then silence, then another: tic—the door opening in fractions of an inch until the gap was finally wide enough to pass through.
And finally, once liberated, running! In the clean air, running down the block, toward the creek, into the woods that separated Venetian Village from everything else. His foot clomps and breathing were the only sounds in the whole big world, and when he felt afraid—of getting caught, of dangerous forest animals, of mad ax murderers, kidnappers, trolls, ghosts—he steeled his mind with the memory of Bethany’s warm, wet breath on his ear.
Her bedroom was dark when he arrived, her window closed. Samuel sat outside for several long minutes panting and sweating and watching, reassuring himself that all relevant parents were asleep and that no neighbors would see him creep through the backyard, which, when he finally did, he did so quickly, running on the tips of his shoes to avoid all ground sounds, then crouching below Bethany’s window and lightly tapping it with the pad of his index finger until, from out of the darkness, she appeared.
He could see only bits of her in the murky nighttime light: the angle of her nose, a toss of hair, collarbone, eye socket. She was a collection of parts floating in ink. She opened the window and he climbed in, rolling over the frame and wincing where the metal bit into his chest.
“Be quiet,” said someone who was not Bethany, who was elsewhere in the darkness. It was Bishop, Samuel realized after a moment of disequilibrium. Bishop was here, in the room, and Samuel was both disheartened and grateful for this. Because he didn’t know what he would do if he were alone with Bethany, but also he knew he wanted to do it, whatever it was. To be alone with her—he wanted it very badly.
“Hi, Bish,” Samuel said.
“We’re playing a game,” Bishop said. “It’s called Listen to Silence Until You’re Bored out of Your Mind.”
“Shut up,” Bethany said.
“It’s called Be Put to Sleep by Cassette-Tape Static.”
“It’s not static.”
“It’s all static.”
“It’s not only static,” she said. “There’s something else.”
“Says you.”
Samuel could not see them—the darkness in here was total. They were more like impressions in space, lighter shapes against the blackness. He tried to place himself in the geography of her room, constructing a map from memory: the bed, the dresser, the flowers on the wall. There were glow-in-the-dark stars dotting the ceiling, Samuel noticed, suddenly, for the first time. Then the sounds of fabric and footsteps and the bed’s quick squeak as Bethany probably sat down on it, near where Bishop seemed to be, near the cassette player, which she often listened to at night, alone, playing and rewinding and playing again the same few moments from some symphony, which Samuel knew because of all his spying.
“Come up here,” Bethany said. “You have to be close.” So he got up on the bed and moved slowly toward them and felt around clumsily and grabbed something cold and bony that was definitely a leg belonging to one of them, he didn’t know which.
“Listen,” she said. “Very closely.”
A click of the tape player, Bethany leaning back into the bed, the fabric folding around her, then static as that brief dead space at the beginning of the tape ended and the recording actually began.
“See?” Bishop said. “Nothing.”
“Wait for it.”
The sound was distant and muffled, like when a faucet is turned on somewhere in the house and there’s that rushing sound from hidden, far-off pipes.
“There,” Bethany said. “Do you hear it?”
Samuel shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “No,” he said.
“There it is,” she said. “Listen. It’s under the sound. You have to listen below it.”
“You are making no sense,” Bishop said.
“Ignore what you can hear and listen to the other stuff.”
“Listen to what?”
“To them,” she said. “The people, the audience, the room. You can hear them.”
Samuel strained to listen. He cocked his head toward the stereo and squinted—as if that would help—trying to pick out any kind of organized sound within the static: talking, coughing, breathing.
“I don’t hear anything,” Bishop said.
“You’re not concentrating.”
“Oh right. That’s the problem.”
“You have to focus.”
“Fine. I will now attempt to focus.”
They all listened to the hiss coming out of the speakers, Samuel feeling disappointed in himself that he also had not yet heard anything.
Bishop said, “This is me totally focused.”
“Will you shut up?”
“I have never been so focused as I am at this moment.”
“Please. Shut. Up.”
“Concentrate, you must,” he said. “Feel the force, you must.”
“You can go away, you know. Like, leave?”
“Happily,” Bishop said, scrambling away and leaping off the bed. “You two enjoy your nothing.”
The bedroom door opened and closed and they were alone, Samuel and Bethany, alone together, finally, terribly. He sat rock-still.
“Now listen,” she said.
“Okay.”
He pointed his face in the direction of the noise and leaned in. The static was not a high-pitched trebly noise but a deeper kind. It was like a microphone had been suspended above an empty stadium—the silence had a fullness to it, a roundness. It was a substantial quiet. It wasn’t just the sound of an empty room but rather like someone had gone to great lengths to manufacture nothingness. It had a created quality to it. It felt made.
“There they are,” Bethany whispered. “Listen.”
“The people?”
“They’re like ghosts in a graveyard,” she said. “You can’t hear them the normal way.”
“Describe it.”
“They sound worried. And confused. They think they’re being tricked.”
“You can hear all that?”
“Sure. It’s the stiffness of the sound. It’s like those really short, tight strings at the top of the piano. The ones that don’t vibrate. The white sounds. That’s what these people sound like. They’re like ice.”
Samuel tried to listen for something like that, some high-pitched buzz inside the droning, persistent static.
“But it changes,” she said. “Listen for the change.”
He kept listening, but all he could hear was how the sound sounded like other sounds: escaping air from a bicycle tire, the whir of a small fan, water running behind a closed door. He heard nothing original. Only his own mental library bouncing back at him.
“There,” she said. “The sound gets warmer. Do you hear it? Warmer and fuller. The sound gets bigger and blooms. They are beginning to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Maybe they’re not being tricked. Maybe they’re not being mocked. Maybe they’re not outsiders. They’re beginning to get it. That maybe they’re part of something. They’re beginning to realize they haven’t come here to listen to music. They’re beginning to realize that they are the music. They are themselves what they’ve come here to find. The thought is exhilarating to them. Can you hear it?”
“Yes,” Samuel lied. “They’re happy.”
“They are happy.”
And Samuel felt himself believing he really could hear this. The same kind of voluntary self-hallucination he felt when he convinced himself, at night, in bed, that there were intruders in the house, or ghosts, and every sound the house made validated this delusion. Or on those days he couldn’t bear to go to school and told himself he was sick until he really became sick, felt actually physically ill, and he would wonder how the nausea could be real if he created it in his mind. It was like that, this thing he was hearing. The sound of static really did get warmer the more he thought about it; it really did become a happy static. The sound seemed to broaden in his mind, open up, and burn.
Was this her secret, he wondered. That she simply wanted to hear what no one else could?
“I can hear it now,” he said. “You just have to chase it.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
He felt her hand grasp his shoulder and squeeze, then felt her move closer to him, felt the vibrations and swells in the mattress, the slight creaks of the bed frame as she swiveled around and came into him. She was close. He could hear her breathing, smell her toothpastey breath. But more than that he could feel her nearby, how she seemed to displace the air, had some kind of electricity around her, how you can sense the closeness of another body, the presence of some kind of magnetism, her heartbeat throttled up, all this coming at him as an impression in space, a map his mind made, an intuition, and then finally as actual solid matter, the flesh of her face now close enough to comprehend.
They were, he realized, going to kiss.
Or, rather, she was going to kiss him. This was going to happen. All he had to do was not screw it up. But in that moment, in those few seconds between realizing she was going to kiss him and the actual kiss, there seemed to be so many ways to screw it up. He felt the pressing and unexpected need to clear his throat. And scratch the back of his neck, at that spot where his neck joined to the shoulder, which always itched when he was nervous. And he did not want to move into the kiss, as it was dark and he could accidentally knock teeth with Bethany. But then in his desire to avoid knocking teeth he felt himself maybe leaning back and overcompensating and he worried that Bethany might mistake his leaning away from her as a desire not to kiss and she might stop. And then there was the matter of breathing. As in: Do it? His first impulse was to hold his breath, but then he realized if she approached slowly enough or if they kissed long enough, he would eventually run out of air and be forced to breathe mid-kiss and expel his lungs in a big poof right into her face or mouth. All of these thoughts happening roughly simultaneously in that brief moment before the kiss, Samuel’s most rudimentary actions, his body’s most automatic functions—sitting straight, being still, breathing—now turned crazily difficult by the prospect of the kiss, which is why when the kiss actually did successfully commence, it felt like a miracle.
Mostly what Samuel felt during the kiss was relief that the kiss was happening. And also that Bethany’s lips felt dry and chapped. This odd detail. That Bethany had chapped lips. It surprised him. In his imagination of her, Bethany seemed elevated beyond stupid earthly concerns. She did not seem to be the kind of girl whose lips ever chapped.
On the way home that night, he was surprised that everything looked exactly the same as it did before, with absolutely no signs that the world had fundamentally, radically changed.