Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

  Still, I was cautious. Perhaps too cautious. More than two months into the online conversation, she asked if I’d like to go see a roller derby bout with her. I wasn’t sure if it was a date and was too nervous to ask straight up, but I said yes, from loneliness and at least partly out of interest.

  It was impossible not to be curious. Her fringe was pink back then, bright and in-your-face, not at all like she smells. She wore straightforward black tights and untucked white shirts, occasionally black jeans and suspenders, if she was meeting friends afterwards. (That stopped pretty quickly. Maintaining hearing friendships is hard work for both sides.) On the inside of her right forearm is a tattoo of a skull. Later, beneath it, she would add the word Deaf in bold Gothic script, daring people to think it a typo. Her square face and broad jaw with a surprisingly small mouth makes her look at times like a young Helena Bonham Carter—​not my type at all, I would once have said. I always went for skinny girls in tight jeans, the kind who thought being with a too-tall, long-haired guitarist was a good look. G is nothing like them. Her ears have never once been pierced, an idiosyncrasy she maintains as though it’s some kind of revolutionary distinction. Me, I have enough metal in my ears for both of us.

  When you’re talking in sign, you’re supposed to focus on someone’s face rather than what the rest of them is doing, but that’s hard for beginners. On those few occasions our Auslan teacher did manage to coax us into hesitant conversation (Is there a bus stop near here? I really want to know. Why is this so difficult?), I found myself staring at her hands rather than what she was saying. (No. So? Because!) Her fingers were short and tapering, her nails tidy and unpolished, her palms unexpectedly narrow with wrists to match. The scars were what I couldn’t take my eyes off, once I noticed them. Waxy and lumpy, like a wrestler’s ear, they weren’t the work of a cutter—​too public, too thick—​and they didn’t look like a suicide attempt, either. They were so thick she would’ve bled out in seconds. I was curious to know their origins but never got around to finding the right way to ask, and she didn’t volunteer anything, at first.

  Instead, over Messenger, we chatted about usual stuff. Our families (struggling to deal with our new way of being), the shitty lag of closed-captioning on TV (no one likes being last in the room to get the joke), what we were thinking about taking at university next year. She had applied to study social work, while I had intended to pursue a degree in music performance at Adelaide Uni. I was still playing guitar solos at night while everyone slept, and playing well, inasmuch as I could tell, but the question of whether I would be allowed to study music at all was still horribly open. Nowhere in the fine print did the uni say that hearing was a prerequisite, but it had to be, surely?

  Small talk, in other words, albeit revealing. I was pleased I hadn’t done anything specific to piss G off but understood that it remained a possibility. She was prickly, ending conversations without warning or making sharp remarks that I wasn’t entirely sure were entirely jokes.

  I didn’t learn the source of her enigmatic scars until the roller derby maybe-date, the first time we used our phones to talk to each other face-to-face. (Sign language gave me a headache when I stuck at it too long, plus we were aware of whole vocabularies we hadn’t learned yet. The only thing we’d become truly proficient at was swearing.) I wore a T-shirt for a band called The Ubiquitous Pig, and Stanley, their starred-and-striped mascot, looked right at home next to G’s animated rockabilly look. She had dyed her hair purple and wore sky-blue lipstick.

  Here’s our first proper conversation, transcribed by my phone’s voice recognition system and saved for posterity. I’ve added punctuation and fixed typos because the raw file is all this is cheating why we have the technology that doesn’t mean its right, and no one wants to read that.

  She asked, You ever seen a bout before?

  No. You?

  Heaps. My team’s on tonight. We were junior champs three years in a row.

  You skated?

  Hell yes. I was the jammer.

  The what?

  Simon, Simon, Simon. Tell me, why did I bring you again?

  So you can show off, I’m guessing. Which team was yours?

  The Doom Kitteh Brawlers.

  Wow, my phone did not like that.

  Wait until it hears my derby name: Arya Ghostclown.

  Seriously?

  AKA the Diva Hammer.

  L.

  What?

  That’s LOL without the OL.

  See my face? That’s LOL without the OL or the L.

  I bet you were a mean skater.

  The meanest and the best.

  Can you still do it since you-know-what?

  Sure, but I fell last year and broke my wrists. Had to have reconstructive surgery. You noticed the scars, right? Everyone does.

  Yes. And ouch.

  The pain was the easy part. Imagine trying to wipe your bum with both hands in plaster.

  TMI!

  Wait till I start flirting.

  Yay?

  Anyway, my hands are okay now, and I’ve still got my strength. Could skate if I wanted to. Totally. Be like getting on a bike—​but if I ever fall on my hands again, how do I talk? What happens when our voices change? I don’t think Siri has a language setting for deaf as fuck.

  Doesn’t matter what your voice sounds like to me. It’s the best voice I never heard.

  Now who’s flirting?

  I was a bit, but mainly I was trying to change the subject. I knew all about the “deaf voice.” My sister, Maeve, loved to tell me when I was talking too quietly or too loudly, and that wasn’t the worst of it. People who can’t hear themselves talk steadily lose all the subtlety of intonation that hearing people are used to. One day, I knew, my voice would be flat and monotonous, perhaps even unpleasantly robotic to listen to, and that worried me more than I liked to admit. I could only avoid it by using my guitar tuner to check my pitch—​and Maeve would get a real kick out of that.

  The skate derby provided a welcome distraction on a highly visceral level. I could feel the crowd like a herd of wild creatures stampeding all around me. I kept my hands flat on the chair beside my thighs, relishing the vibrations of the skaters as they went by, the crunch of collisions between flesh and bone and the thud of impacts on the track. Maybe I was fooling myself, but it seemed as though I could actually differentiate each class of sound. It was like being at a gig, searching for the lead and vocals through the mud of bass and drums. Searching and failing, usually.

  The Doom Kitteh Brawlers won decisively and bloodily, with the majority of injuries accrued by the opposing team. G stood and clapped like a hearing person, and her mouth opened and closed in what I assumed were shouts of delight and encouragement. No one could tell that she was different. I could see why she liked that.

  On the way back to my car, she asked me, So what do you do for kicks when you’re not watching girls in skates beat each other up?

  Play guitar, I told her.

  But you can’t hear it.

  So? I still like to play. Not being able to hear didn’t stop Beethoven playing the piano.

  You think you’re as good as Beethoven?

  Maybe just as pig-headed. If he didn’t give up, why should I?

  G laughed with her eyes and her lips like I’d never seen her laugh before. She was beautiful in an entirely new way, and I was glad when she put her phone in her pocket in order to take my hand. I smiled at her as we walked through a tunnel of silence, feeling genuinely happy for the first time in a long while. We’d spent the night cheating on Auslan by using dictation apps, but this was real. This was real communication.

  The Brown Note

  September 2

  My high school music teacher was a short, round, bald man called Ian Mackereth. Stick him in a wig and fake beard and he’d look at home in The Hobbit, but with an acoustic guitar in his hands he becomes a true wizard. He can play anything—​and I mean anything. Folk, classical, rock, metal, jazz . . . His ear
is so good you can play him a track once and he’ll be able to reproduce it afterwards. The important bits, anyway. He can do this, he told me way back when, because he studied theory as well as practice: he can sense what’s under the surface of the music, which makes recreating the bits most people notice that much easier. The waves tripping over submerged mountains, where the waves are melody and the theory is that which lies beneath.

  I wasn’t so sure about this at school. All I wanted to do was ape my favorite solos. But I guess some of his lessons sank in because I aced the midyear exams he’d helped me prepare for, and suddenly the thought of studying music at university didn’t seem so unlikely. I had always wanted to play guitar after high school. With a degree, I could teach if my rock god career failed to deliver.

  I found out later that Mr. Mackereth moonlighted as a busker, something my school frowned upon. He went up in my estimation a notch right then. Screw the alma mater. You could be short, round, and bald, and still kick some kind of ass.

  Also, it amused me to walk past him playing flamenco Beatles covers in Rundle Mall, collecting gold coins in the hat at his feet. Rock on, Mr. Mackereth, you sellout.

  Professor Dorn, who taught the seven-day winter school I attended at Adelaide Uni, could not be more different. Grace Dorn is a tall, stiff-backed woman who wears her white hair super short, barely there at all. I can’t say I warmed to her immediately: everything in her tone betrayed that she had better things to do than talk to a bunch of students who didn’t know a sus2 from a sostenuto.

  She also teaches an advanced composition program for students handpicked from each year’s applicants, and I guess the winter school is a way of meeting some of these applicants ahead of their exams. It became clear over the winter school week that she and I shared an interest in music that went deeper than notes and theory. A philosophical kinship, if you like. Already I was of the opinion that the click and hum you heard when you plugged your guitar into an amp was as valid a musical statement as the opening notes of the song you went on to play. There’s no such thing as unmusical sound, I liked to say, and except for when Maeve played her crappy music too loud, I even meant it.

  Professor Dorn touched lightly on noise music during one winter school class. Afterwards, I asked her about it. She suggested I read some of John Cage’s lectures on the relationship between music and noise—​which were mind-blowing—​and listen to other pioneering noise composers on YouTube. I did everything she said and then looked up her own compositions online. One called “The Grand Kenotaphion” consisted of all the two-minute silences held on Remembrance Sunday, as recorded by the BBC over a century-plus, mashed together into something that is very far from silence, a melange of crowd noises, radio announcers, birds, and the echoes of bells dispersing out across the crowd.

  Silence as noise . . . I loved it as a concept, never for a moment imagining that one day I would grapple with it for real.

  * * *

  If there is such thing as an unmusical sound, it would surely be the legendary brown note, a tone pitched very, very low, at exactly the right frequency to relax the bowels of anyone exposed to it. Boom: they instantly shit themselves. Some people deny that the brown note exists. Dad thinks the military is just itching for the chance to test it on protestors.

  That first day in Selwyn Floyd’s office, reading the words the specialists had typed out for me, I felt as though someone had hit me with the brown note, volume turned right up to eleven.

  . . . extremely rare form of sensorineural hearing loss . . . inability to perceive words, music, or environmental sounds . . . no apparent injury to the inner ear function . . . brainstem auditory responses normal, but cortical evoked potentials appear impaired . . .

  “You can fix this, right?”

  Everyone in the room stopped talking and turned to look at me. They could hear me perfectly well, even if I couldn’t hear myself or them. The sound of my voice seemed to shut them up, as though they’d forgotten I was there—​written me off as deaf, disabled, absent, gone. Nonparticipant in the conversation and therefore nonparticipant in life. Reminding them that I existed silenced them for real.

  I saw a look of something that might have been shame cross Prameela’s face as Selwyn reached for a notepad and began to scribble.

  “Right?” I repeated.

  Mum’s face crumpled, and suddenly she was holding me, pressing me to her, her hands wrapped tightly around my head, as though she could possibly protect me from a harm that had already occurred.

  Through that tangle of maternal limbs came Selwyn’s note. Scrawled in barely decipherable doctor’s script, he had written:

  We’ll do everything we can.

  I wanted to say, Don’t bullshit me, I can take it. But I wasn’t sure I could take it. And he wasn’t bullshitting, not really.

  The mind is a complex and plastic thing, he explained to me via a subsequent series of notes. Sometimes people recover from strokes so well you’d never know they’d been injured at all. Undamaged parts of the brain take over from where the dead parts leave off, like runners in a relay or the pianists in Erik Satie’s marathon eighteen-hour work Vexations. Given time, Selwyn was thinking, I might completely recover.

  He had hope. Therefore, I should have hope too. It was allowed. Perhaps, I told myself, it wouldn’t matter if I lost a few notes of my personal symphony if I could pick it up again later.

  Perhaps this brief interlude of silence could even be part of it. A rest that had already lasted entirely too long for my liking.

  * * *

  How it happened (returning to G’s big question, because there’s absolutely no small answer) is that I woke up and couldn’t hear. I didn’t know that I had suffered a stroke while I slept. I had no headache, misbehaving pupils, or malfunctioning limbs. Neither had I lost the ability to speak, although that was difficult to tell at the time because, well, the obvious.

  This was in September, two months after winter school and Professor Dorn and John Cage. My first thought was nothing profound: It’s so quiet. Meaning the house, not the inside of my head. It was dark, as well. My phone said 4:03 a.m. Something must have woken me, but what? Maybe Maeve sneaking back in after an unusually late midnight smoke. Maybe the neighbor’s dog. Maybe nothing. The nothing of silence.

  Silence has pressure and weight. It grinds you down, and I suppose that could have been what woke me. As my inability to hear unusual sounds was matched by an equally strange inability to hear usual sounds, I woke up a bit more and sleepily stuck my fingers in my ears, thinking I’d fallen asleep with my headphones in, or maybe my auditory canals had gotten stopped up with an improbable amount of wax. All felt normal in there . . . except that I couldn’t hear the scrape and swirl of my probing finger.

  I said something—​That’s fucking weird, or words to that effect—​and I couldn’t hear this either. The silence was complete. All sound had fled.

  By that time, I was wide awake, sitting upright in bed with the light on and crushing a pillow with both hands into my lap. My heart was pounding—​I could feel it but not hear it—​and the desperate thought, This has to be a nightmare, was on a loop in my mind. I detected no sign of waking up, though. What happened next? How did I make it end?

  At some point I must have called for Mum because I remember her bursting into the room, mouth forming shapes that might have meant “what’s wrong?” or “what’s going on?” or “where’s Obi-Wan?” for all I could tell. She was as noiseless as her footsteps and the door handle.

  The fright she gave me when she appeared only compounded my growing panic.

  “I can’t hear,” I told her. “I can’t hear!”

  I must’ve shouted more loudly than I intended to. Next, Maeve was in my room, looking annoyed in her Taylor Swift squirrel pajamas and at the same time curious to know why I was the one causing a late-night fuss for a change. Curiosity turned to concern as Mum enlisted her in testing the boundaries of my symptoms: clapping hands, clicking fingers,
yelling. None of their attempts elicited a flicker of a response. It was as though my ears had suddenly turned off.

  Mum found a pen and some paper—​not easy in the tangled web of cables, guitars, and amps in my room—​and wrote me a note. It said:

  Get dressed. I’ll take you to the hospital. Don’t worry. We’ll fix it, promise. XX

  Judd Nelson Overdrive

  December 10

  There was an upside to not being able to talk to each other like G and I might have if we’d met, well, before. How to tell a girl that sports never interested me much, on roller skates or otherwise? Better not to try, I decided, this early in a potential relationship, because it could make people regard you skeptically, like saying you didn’t like kids or kittens.

  Nothing against sports personally. It’s just that I didn’t get it when I was a kid, and now I’m too far behind to catch up. When I’m dragged along by my mates, I find myself swept up in a thing that’s bigger than me, a thing that has its own opinions on what will happen at any random moment. It’s disconcerting.

  Not hearing makes that feeling worse. It’s harder to sense the mood of a crowd if you can’t hear it. A crowd is just a bunch of people opening and closing their mouths and waving their arms in the air. Unless you have someone explaining it to you.

  People who don’t like music must feel the same way about concerts.

  The knowledge that I had different tastes from a lot of my friends didn’t sink in until I learned to play music. My dad was the one who got me started. I was twelve and came home from school to find a guitar leaning against my bed, a Post-it note stuck to it saying Happy belated birthday. Dad had dropped it off that day, with Mum’s permission. Things were tense between them then. He was only allowed in the house while she was there and we weren’t. I didn’t know that until Maeve told me much later. Maeve is younger than me, but not by much, and despite their constant bickering, shares more with Mum than I’ll ever know about, hopefully.