The Listeners

by Jordan Tannahill

  Shawn, in particular, was wickedly funny and really livened up our sessions, which, if you ask me, risked getting a little self-serious at times. He was an incredible baker, and had actually won a reality television show for amateur cooks a couple of years earlier. I never watched it, but Leslie did, and was evidently a bit starstruck. He was constantly bringing in homemade confections like gluten-free carrot cake with cinnamon cream cheese icing, and vegan white chocolate fudge brownies. His true gift, though, was the exacting comic dissection of everyone and everything. Nothing eluded his notice. He would pick up on people’s little habits and foibles and tease them about it, though always in a way that made them laugh hardest of all, and always in a way that somehow highlighted his own shortcomings and neuroses. I also noticed that he had the ability to seem incredibly forthcoming, and yet somehow he never ended up revealing that much about himself. I never worked out, for instance, if he had a partner. I was never even particularly clear what he did for a living, other than ‘work in retail.’ And yet I always knew, in hilarious and intricate detail, the story of his last, ill-fated haircut, or visit to the dentist.

  Mia, on the other hand, had a millennial righteousness that I found both admirable and intimidating. At her first meeting, she introduced herself and her gender pronouns—My name is Mia. I go by she, her, her. Emily and Nora had no idea what she was talking about, so she explained. And then everyone else, I suppose feeling a bit put on the spot, went around and introduced themselves the same way—Howard. He, him, his, and so on. Everyone except Damian. And to be honest, I was a little indignant at first too. I thought: take a look at this group, is this really necessary? But then I caught myself and thought—is this what it is to grow old? To become defensive and resentful when confronted by my own assumptions and biases? By new modes, new sensitivities? I couldn’t help but wonder what Ashley would make of this exercise. She and Mia would probably get on very well. Either way, Mia’s presence engendered a new self-consciousness around language and conduct within the group; which, for men as prone to micro-aggressions as Damian and Howard, was probably no bad thing. That’s not to say she stilted our dynamic, though. She made it more thoughtful and humane.

  Damian continued to say very little during meetings. Sometimes his silence felt like a black hole sucking energy and light out of the room. But he was never disengaged. His eyes would flit from face to face, as if sizing up everyone’s comments against his own internal value system. He also did this thing where, while keeping his mouth closed, he seemed to clean his teeth with his tongue. I couldn’t tell if it was some kind of macho affect, like a cowboy with a toothpick, or a nervous tick, but either way I had to avoid looking at him while he did it. That said, he was always very gentlemanly, he would make a specific point of saying hello and goodbye to me, and nodding when he agreed with something I said. I could tell on some level he respected me. And I have to say, a part of me was slowly warming to him.

  We had a covenant of privacy within the group, in which deeply personal details could be shared with the full knowledge that nothing would leave the room. Trust and honest communication were essential. While Howard and Jo led our meetings, we agreed to make decisions by consensus, and tried to share speaking time as much as possible. We knew we were stronger together than any of us would have been individually in seeking the truth about The Hum, and that our success would hinge on our ability to stick together and overcome our differences. And so we each pledged to do so.

  By June of that year, we were meeting five times a week. On nights we weren’t, I would miss the others so much I would spend most of the night messaging them on our group chat. I couldn’t bear rambling around the house alone. Some nights Ashley would reply to my WhatsApp messages, but mostly all I could hope for were the two blue ticks indicating she’d read them. Kyle and I used to message most often, sometimes twenty or thirty times a night, mostly processing things that had come up in the meetings, or sending each other dumb memes—but that all stopped abruptly after the prom after-party. The only messages Paul sent me were angry missives about my living off our joint savings, but what choice did I have? I was still fighting the teachers’ union about severance pay, and considering my options for an unlawful dismissal case, all the while carrying the bills for the house.

  I found myself calling Jo a lot, when I was lonely. I never used to be a phone person. But I found I began to rely on her guidance and insights—about Ashley and Paul, about feeling like a pariah among my friends and colleagues, about feeling adrift without purpose, about my fears around future employment, and what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. She sometimes just led me through breathing exercises. Kyle once joked that she had become my spiritual guru. He said that to irritate me, as he knew my aversion to anything New Agey.

  He then told me that I had something of a secular Western arrogance about me. That I was too closed off to the possibility of wonder. He kept sending me Simone Weil quotes about making space inside myself for the divine to enter. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. I told him that I found Weil’s mystic Christian koans slightly insufferable. I preferred my voids empty, thank you; I didn’t need God cramming himself in there. I was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, a pragmatist, and I took pride in that. I felt it was actually an important position to defend in an age when reason, logic, and facts felt so assailed and devalued. That said, when Jo led us through guided meditations, and said that we were approaching a great mystery, I could tangibly feel this, even if I might not have fully understood it. It did feel as if we were collectively scaling a mountain towards something. Perhaps a shared catharsis, or some greater understanding of The Hum and its potential.

  Because Jo seemed to rise with such grace above the daily drudgeries and degradations of life, she could sometimes feel a little remote, particularly when presiding over our meetings. As if she had ascended to a higher plane, just out of reach. But in those phone calls, she made herself completely open and available to me. We spoke very candidly about my situation with Kyle. Her early relationship with Howard was also a fraught educator-student scenario, though of course quite different than ours. It meant a lot to me that we were able to open up to one another about it, and sort of fascinating that we were coming at it from opposite sides of the dynamic. Jo said she had been dazzled by Howard when she first met him. He commanded a great deal of respect at the university at the time, and in their field.

  He looked a lot younger back then too, she said to me one night over the phone, with an apologetic laugh. I pictured her sitting somewhere secluded in their house, perhaps upstairs in their bedroom, or maybe in her studio, perhaps wrapped in that turquoise Mexican blanket she sometimes draped over herself during meetings. She confided in me that Howard had had a bit of a reputation for sleeping with students.

  Not necessarily his own, she clarified, but just … other students at the university.

  I heard her take a sip of tea, from her favourite fired-clay mug. She said she was always aware of the power imbalance between them, and that bothered her. She also began to feel alienated and judged by the other graduate students.

  Eventually it became a really oppressive working environment, really toxic, she said. And then Howard started getting all this flak from the school for his research. All kinds of people were trying to tear him down. And he just said you know what, I don’t need this, and he quit. And I sort of felt like I had to quit with him. We’d become a unit. The thought of staying there and completing my studies without him felt, just, impossible.

  For some reason her voice, isolated on the phone, reminded me of that surrealist Méret Oppenheim sculpture of the teacup, saucer, and spoon wrapped in fur. A hard thing wrapped in unlikely softness. I couldn’t remember what the piece was called, but I made a note to find the image and send it to her. I was sure she’d get a kick out of my mental association. She always seemed interested in how the mind worked and dr
ew connections, in slips of the tongue, and what our dreams revealed about us. I suppose rather like the surrealists, she was invested in the world of the subconscious. How, in an instant, the mundane could become extraordinary.

  I heard her take another sip of tea and hold it in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. She admitted to struggling, for years, with living under Howard’s shadow. For years, their friends would be his colleagues, or doctoral students from other countries making pilgrimages to their home to meet with him.

  I began to feel like his personal assistant, she said. Sorting out his calendar, booking his travel, even answering his emails sometimes. It really got to me.

  Her voice was quiet on the other end of the line. She then said that for years she felt she was just a kind of appendage. I asked her if she regretted how things had unfolded, and she said no, she was much happier and fulfilled doing what she did now. She said she was not a fatalist, but believed, with regard to her career, that things had taken the course they did for a reason.

  If you look at it one way, she said, what we’re exploring now with the group sort of combines both of my worlds. The scientific and the spiritual. Not that you want to call it that, I know.

  As a group, we mostly avoided speaking about spiritual matters, as it was clear we were all coming at things with very different frames of reference. One afternoon, a week after the prom party, Nora mentioned how she felt God was communicating with her through The Hum.

  I don’t mean like I’m Teresa of Ávila or anything, she said, with a self-conscious laugh.

  Saint Nora! Shawn proclaimed.

  I mean in the way He communicates with us all the time, she continued. Through sunlight, through the wind, through the smile of a stranger. I really do feel this.

  Damian nodded, and said he felt the same way. I know this is something holy, he said, surveying the group as if challenging us to suggest otherwise. Howard said he thought it was important that we treat The Hum as a phenomenon to be explored, and not to try to fit it into our own preexisting belief systems.

  But of course we’re going to try to, Nora countered. That’s like when some Christians tell me not to fit evolution into my belief system. Well I’m sorry, you don’t get to choose what you put in, and what you don’t.

  Howard pointed out that this was, in fact, the exact opposite scenario. It’s not religion saying disregard science, he said, it’s saying let’s not turn this science, or whatever it is, into religion.

  Well as someone with faith, everything is God’s doing, Nora said.

  Usually I stayed quiet whenever the conversation veered in that direction. My feeling was: let people make of this what they will, as long as they don’t begin to circumscribe my ability to do the same. So it’s science for some, and divine for others. And industrial white noise for yet others. Whatever it was, it still kept me up at night. My migraines persisted, as did the nosebleeds, though much less frequently. That hadn’t deterred me, though, from welcoming the mystery of The Hum into my life. I had chosen to be the one in control of this new condition, this new awareness, and I wanted to understand it fully. Because if I was not in possession of it, then it was in possession of me.

  I would say that I was about eighty-five percent certain that what we were doing on Sequoia Crescent didn’t constitute a cult. It didn’t have a dogma. No one was seeking to extract money from me, or force me to pledge myself to anything or anyone. There was no hierarchy, no talk of the end times, no mythology or holy book. But Ashley’s and Paul’s words lodged like splinters that I couldn’t quite pull out. In my dark hours, I sometimes wondered if what we were engaged in was more akin to a conspiracy theory. A theory that a group of us had bought into in isolation, and could no longer see the forest for the trees. Science seemed to be on our side, but maybe I was only paying attention to the articles that were. I was having profound encounters with The Hum, sensations that I knew beyond any doubt were real, but what if I was self-inducing them, or they were the result of some other phenomenon?

  I began reflecting on this during a conversation one meeting, led primarily by Damian, Leslie, and Mia, about government surveillance and the Deep State. Damian had gradually become more and more fixated on the idea that the Deep State—which, when pressed, he loosely defined as the military, the government, and Wall Street—had been aware of the Resonance for some time and had intentionally kept it secret. During this conversation, which the others entertained for far longer than I expected, there were some very strongly held sentiments about the NSA and metadata and Facebook, but it didn’t seem like there was an awful lot of nuance or detail. It felt more like a kind of collective purging of anxiety. Their sources always seemed vague—something read on a blog, or in a tweet, or mentioned by a friend. I found Damian and Mia, in particular, connecting dots where there weren’t any necessarily to connect, and drawing conclusions which required more than a few leaps of logic. The few times I pointed this out, I was accused of thinking ‘what they want’ me to think—though whoever ‘they’ were was never quite defined. So eventually I just submitted myself to the chaotic flow of conversation, like a kayaker plunging through cataracts without a paddle.

  What I found most amusing, though, was that it gradually emerged that Damian and the women were approaching their paranoias from completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. For instance, Mia and Leslie both loathed Trump, whereas Damian refused to outright dismiss the QAnon conspiracy. I had heard about this QAnon stuff in the news but had only the vaguest understanding of what it was all about. As Damian explained it, the conspiracy (not that he called it that) alleged that numerous liberal Hollywood actors and high-ranking Democrats had been running an international child sex trafficking ring, and that Trump feigned collusion with the Russians in order to enlist special counsel Robert Mueller in an effort to expose the ring and thus prevent a coup led by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and liberal philanthropist George Soros. That’s the essence of it at least, as far as I understood it. I could barely keep a straight face as Damian explained all of the shadowy saga’s numerous subplots, twists, and pseudonymous online players. He suggested that parts of it had ‘maybe been blown out of proportion’ but seemed to otherwise believe it was true.

  There were a few other points of conspiratorial divergence amongst the three of them. Leslie, for instance, believed the measles vaccine led to autism, whereas Mia said the anti-vaxxer movement ‘melted her face off,’ especially given her line of work. All three of them, however, agreed that September 11 was an inside job, as did Nora. Damian arrived at this belief only after his two tours in Iraq. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their backgrounds in science, Howard and Jo both seemed wholly unconvinced by these alt-narratives. Shawn, being Jewish, also had no time for conspiracy theories, as he found most of them anti-Semitic at their root, in some form or another. He had a gorgeous way of sort of staccato hissing with laughter to himself, not quite loud enough to interrupt, but just enough to register his complete disdain for what was being theorized. Emily, meanwhile, remained mostly silent; though I couldn’t tell whether out of polite opposition, because she was being gradually persuaded, or because, frankly, she just couldn’t follow the conversation.

  When, in my adult life, in my own free time, of my own free will, had I sat in a room talking with someone like Damian or Emily? When had any of us, for that matter, spent time making friends on the other side of the ideological chasm of our country in the last four years? Though it shouldn’t have come as any surprise, I was nevertheless struck, when looking at Emily, with her immaculate white-blond bob, and collared blouse under her country club cardigan, and her talk of garden parties and canasta clubs, that she and Damian—who seemed to me to be the personification of a comments-thread troll, with tinted aviators, tinted pickup-truck windows, a sum total of ten minutes a week spent on personal hygiene—shared an identical vision of who should be leading our country.

  The old me would have cut anti-vaxxers and truthers out of my lif
e like Kevin Spacey was cut from that Ridley Scott movie. I think it says a lot about the patience and compassion I was cultivating through the sessions that I could still feel a kinship with people with whom I so fundamentally disagreed. Howard and Jo had created a space where that was possible; where radically divergent ideas could be shared without anyone feeling assailed or invalid. That said, despite the tangents, Howard invariably steered the conversation back towards the sensible and productive, which was critical. I would never have stuck with the meetings otherwise.

  I would bet that you could have assembled, at random, ten Americans in 2019, and found the same level of conspiratorial thinking as existed in our discussions on Sequoia Crescent. I sincerely believe that it wasn’t anything unique to this particular group of individuals. It was simply the new register society was operating in. I told Kyle one night, after the meeting where the QAnon stuff first came up, that I remembered a time when conspiracy theories were niche and a little shameful, like kinky porn, not public camps of identification like religions or political parties, to respectfully ‘agree to disagree’ with. As we walked to my car, I said that it felt like the result of a society losing trust in itself and its institutions. Kyle didn’t seem nearly as unsettled by it as I was. He pointed out that there were insidious cabals and secret societies of elite, privileged men in this country that exerted untold influence over government and global finance.

  I don’t blame the Damians of this world for feeling like they’re being conned, he once said. Why should someone like him trust the government or Wall Street or Silicon Valley?