One
“This noise is going to be the death of me,” Viny Harmer thought for the umpteenth time that week.
It had been days since he had had a proper night’s sleep. It was not that he suffered from insomnia or that anything in particular was worrying him.
It was just the terrible, endless, intolerable noise.
From dawn to dusk, it seemed as if, lately at least, noise was the only constant in his life. He woke up to the relentless assault of the aerobics class from the gym opposite his apartment, its instructor’s voice amplified by microphone, bossing his willing victims around with storm trooper intensity.
All this, of course, over the “music”.
The “music”, Viny was well aware, would not bother most people (as, in fact, it didn’t, despite its sonic-boom-like volume.) But he was a music critic. He had devoted most of his adult life to the discovery and promotion of alternative bands and artists, the quieter the better. To have this onslaught of Reggaeton, Teen Pop, and EDM-hits invading his own house was an affront to the deepest essence of his soul.
The sheer volume at which they played it was such that, even if he played an Ambient Music album with headphones on, he still heard the intruding noise. Add to this the almost constant backing track of bleaching car horns, staccato jackhammers and vicious “human” screaming and it would be enough to drive a person insane – not any person perhaps, but certainly Viny Harmer.
But that was not the end of it.
There was also the biggest problem of all: his next-door-neighbor.
Right now he could hear, much to his dismay, the thumping beat and throbbing bass sound (not a bassline, Viny thought, just bass) of a hideous Reggaeton track coming from her apartment, at a volume that even a discotheque owner would consider outrageous. There was nowhere in his apartment he could escape from the noise, its pervasive influence reaching him anywhere he tried to retreat to.
Worst of all, it was 1 AM in the morning. He knew this would go on for at least five more hours, perhaps seven, getting progressively worse as Hannah and her guests got progressively drunker and higher.
Viny sat on his bed and contemplated his options.
He could knock on Hanna’s door, before she got too far gone to be able to hold a coherent conversation (if there ever was such a moment,) and tell her to turn the volume down. But he knew how this would go. One possibility was that she would turn it relatively down, which would still be high by his standards, and then simply turn it up again later on when she got too drunk to remember her promise to her nagging neighbor. The other possibility, equally likely (for he had witnessed both already, several times) was that she would snap and start yelling uncontrollably, unleashing a bottled-up rage that he had rarely seen in someone so young (she couldn’t be older than 23, Viny surmised), screaming her right as a single woman to meet with her friends all she wanted, and then even proceed to insult him. Last time she accused him of being envious of not having been invited to her party, claiming that a 90-year old must have more of a social life than him.
That, strangely, had hurt Viny in a kind of distant, detached way. Regardless of the fact that, bizarrely enough, she had invited him to her party, to which he hadn’t even bothered to refuse. He always found it strange that people assumed he wanted to be part of the noise up close.
Viny, not surprisingly, discarded the option of talking to Hannah Bannannah (his most affectionate nickname for her.) He had gone through the ordeal too many times already, always with results either null or disastrous, and he just didn’t have the energy that night.
Option number two was to go out, or spend the night somewhere else. But where to? And with whom? Bannannah, unstable as she was, hadn’t been too far from the truth when she accused him of having no social life. Certainly, if he thought it through, there would be at least some place where he could go to, maybe catch a movie or something, and perhaps he could even convince one of his few remaining friends to join him, but he was simply too tired to go out. Although he was well aware that this had been a common excuse to remain indoors lately.
Since he knew he would simply not fall asleep if he just went to bed again, only one option was still viable: Rock Music. If he put on a Rock album at enough volume, although he would not sleep, he would at least be able to stop listening to the “music” and screams from Gomorrah next door. It was not that he wanted to do it. Much as he loved listening to music, he had had a difficult, particularly busy week and just wanted to, needed to get some rest. But, things being what they were, it was his only alternative to going insane.
He carefully, but quickly (for the noise kept taunting him, teasing him), selected a handful of CDs to play, some he already knew and loved and some new ones that he had to review for work, as keeping his mind busy would help distract him from his predicament.
He put the first album on his stereo, anxious for the blissful escape to come out of the speakers, but nothing happened. What the hell was wrong? The display showed that the album was indeed playing, but no matter how high he turned the volume, nothing could be heard. Nothing except the Godforsaken Reggaeton, of course. Could anything be wrong with the CD? Weird, as he had heard this one several times already. Still, stranger things had happened, and this was why he was slowly leaning towards MP3s when purchasing music. He tried with another CD, this time one of the brand new ones. Again, the display showed everything was all right but not a sound came out.
The chances of two CDs coming up with the exact same problem were dismal. The problem must lie in the stereo, Viny concluded. He knew it was foolish to feel betrayed by an inanimate object, but he could not help it. What a time to break down!
Deciding to worry about the stereo later, he quickly took out his old but still faithful discman, put on his headphones and once again got ready to become lost in the soul-saving sound of real music. He certainly wasn’t expecting this repeat performance: the record was apparently running, but again, he couldn’t hear a single note.
Perplexed but not yet desperate, Viny tried every available source of sound in his apartment: his cellphone, his computer, his television, DVD player. Everything seemed to work just fine until the moment he tried to play some music. Nothing could be heard. Nothing at all.
And the Raggaeton next door went on and on and on.
Two
The blank page refused to be written on.
Doctor Allen Vomisan was, of course, well aware of the phenomenon of writer’s block – but, at age 65, having written and published 108 books without the slightest period of non-productivity, he had just assumed that he still had many years ahead of him, at least.
Maybe it was the topic? The task he had set for himself this time certainly wasn’t easy. About two decades before, he had written a set of song lyrics which, unexpectedly, turned out to be quite successful. Allen had never played any musical instrument himself, and disliked his singing voice, but he had been tired of listening to the radio and thinking that he could write lyrics so much better than any of the top 40 hits if he only devoted some time to it.
So in the end he just did. Why not? Though it was definitely unconventional to publish a book of song lyrics that had never been sung, nor written specifically for any particular tune or artist, Allen was at his peak by then: his Back in the Day had been one of the most commercially successful series of novels in recent memory, and his textbooks had, for a while at least, breathed some new life into the almost obsolete field of primary and secondary education. At that point in his career, David Bellcamp, his beloved editor, was willing to publish just anything that he came up with, as it was likely to sell.
In the end, not only did The Lone and Level Sands and Other Songs sell well enough, but it also became a cult classic when The Tape Recorders, an up-and-coming Alternative Rock band fronted by an intense young man with the unlikely name of Nicolas Cuevas, set the lyrics to music in an album with the same name. Though Allen had considered it a possibility that someone would eventually musicalize his words, this had never been his main motivation or goal when writing them, so the delight for him was doublefold: he found Cuevas’ passionate delivery and delicate instrumentation extremely appealing and true to the spirit of the words, and the album’s success established Vomisan as a “father figure” of a new generation of sensitive, artistically-minded young people.
Not being his chief field of interest (as if there ever was a single one,) it had been more than twenty years since Allen had written any song lyrics since then, and he had felt the time was right to attempt it again.
But, for the first time ever in his life, not a single word would come out of his hands once he sat down to write.
This was made even more unusual by the fact that he had already thought many lines over in his head, to considerable detail. But he just couldn’t remember any, no matter how hard he tried.
Unused as he was to experiencing difficulties, and much less to forgetting any bit of information he was interested in, Allen started feeling a twinge of despair, which quickly turned to rage. Intelligent as he was, he had often considered the fact that, sooner or later, a day would come when his writing would not come as easily to him. When it happened, he had thought, he would not press it any further – just accept it as a fact of life and finally relax. He had written more than most people would achieve in several lifetimes, and though his commercial success had waned a little over the last years, the royalties for the Back in the Day books alone would be more than enough to provide for his secluded, humble lifestyle even if he never wrote a single further word again.
But, damn, he had never thought it could come this fast. And this unexpectedly. Only yesterday he had finished his latest nonfiction work – none other than a biography of the Tape Recorders, which had helped spark his interest for writing more lyrics. He had had no difficulty whatsoever finishing it, and had been anxious and full of ideas about his upcoming project.
What had happened?
Allen told himself to quiet down. Plenty of writers experienced frequent blocks and came out of them. He was behaving like the pampered kids he so frequently derided. What would his many admirers think if they knew he had been on the verge of collapse just for experiencing a single difficulty once?
I’ll switch to something else, he decided. Something easier. An essay. Some piece of literary criticism. That’s it. He set out to write a review of the latest novel he’d read – a plodding, pathetic excuse for “fiction” by Fred Austere called The Sons of Our Mothers, which exemplified everything that was wrong about “intellectual” literature today. As was often the case, most of the review had already been written in his head while he was reading the book. Putting it down to paper would pose no major difficulty and would help him overcome his brief block, which already seemed to be less serious than he had originally thought in his childlike fit of panic.
But again, nothing came.
He just couldn’t believe it. He had just gone over the opening line just before putting his fingers on the keyboard – and now nothing.
The blank page stared at him, mockingly.
Just out of spite, he set out to write some gibberish on the screen – just to prove to himself that he could as least do that. But yet again he found himself unable to do it. He seemed to be at a loss as regards which keys to press, to such an extent that he couldn’t press any at all. There seemed to be so many options!
Now, Doctor Allen Vomisan felt that his panic was perhaps a little bit justified.
Piercing screams took his mind way from his predicament.
Allen had never been one to nose into his neighbors’ problems (he hardly ever left his apartment, in fact,) but the intensity of the argument urged him to try to help and calm these people down before anybody got hurt. In the back of his mind he knew that he had a less altruistic purpose to intervene –it would distract him from his own ordeal, at least for a little while.
He closed his apartment door. The corridor was empty except for the shouts coming from upstairs, which filled it in their own particular way.
“TURN IT OFF!!!!” a man bellowed from the 8th floor. It was not an altogether unkind voice, but at this point it seemed to be on the verge of madness. He seemed to be having a heated argument with a girl younger than him, whose voice nevertheless showed cold command and determination.
“This is my house and I’m free to do whatever I want with it on a Saturday night! I’m single and young and if you want to go to bed at 10 like a toddler it’s none of my…”
“TURN IT OFF!!!! TURN IT OFF!!! TURN IT OFF!!!!” The man seemed to have lost his capacity for holding a rational conversation – the girl, angry as she was, was much more in control of her voice and her words.
“TURN IT OFFFFF!!!!” he went on and on, interrupting the girl every time she tried to get a word out. This could easily turn to violence, Allen thought. He decided to go upstairs and check it out, if only to have a clear conscience later on.
As he went up the stairs, he noticed the volume the music was on and felt immediately glad that he lived on the opposite side of the 7th floor and the sound didn’t reach his apartment. Perhaps the bellowing man’s fit of rage wasn’t so unjustified after all?
So engrossed were they in their argument that they hardly noticed Allen’s arrival. The man looked about 30 and had the slightly untidy demeanor and thin physique of an indie Rock musician. He reminded Allen of Nicolas Cueva a bit, though this one was much plainer looking. The red-haired girl seemed to be in her early twenties, and though the man was almost twice her height and obviously older, she didn’t seem to be intimidated by him in the least – in fact, in spite of the stinging venom and anger of her words, Allen assumed she was actually enjoying the quarrel.
“Hey, people, pardon my intrusion, but you need to calm down. At this rate you’re going to wake up the whole building!” Allen said with a hint of friendly humor in his tone, which he had always found out helped make the truth a bit more tolerable to people.
It didn’t work this time – his words enraged the man even further. “The whole building! What do I care about the whole building? She has been having these high-volume… orgies… whole year long and I’m always the only one to complain! Some neighbors you are!”
From his position next to the door, Allen could catch a brief peek inside the girl’s apartment. The word orgy hadn’t been as exaggerated as it might have seemed. If Allen had been familiar with the format of an average Hip Hop music video, he would have found the resemblance striking. Shirtless youngsters dancing next to girls in skimpy outfits in a way that looked more sexual than sex itself, wasted bodies lying on the floor, even somebody vomiting in the balcony while the people around him kept laughing and teasing him (as well as drinking and smoking, of course.) Everybody seemed oblivious to the argument that their hostess was having at the door. Between the thunderous volume of the music, the raunchiness, the drinks and the drugs, it couldn’t be otherwise.
Still, the girl’s response took Allen momentarily by surprise: “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. If the music is bothering you, I’ll turn it down a bit.” Nothing about what she said seemed genuine, though. She was obviously playing nice girl in order to have a potential new ally in Allen, and to piss off the other nervous wreck of a man just for the sheer fun of it.
Nevertheless she did enter the apartment and started approaching the stereo (which was not easy, as she had to skip several guests sprawling on the floor.) Allen took advantage of the situation to try to ease the atmosphere with his neighbor.
“I regret that we meet for the first time in these circumstances, young man, but anyway, it’s a pleasure. I’m Allen.” He stretched out his hand, which seemed to shake the man out of his mad trance, at least temporarily. He shook Allen’s hand.
“Viny,” he said, before turning back to the problem that was clearly his obsession. “She thinks that if she turns the volume down a little, it’ll be alright, but how can it be? How can it be with this?” he blurted out as he pointed at the scene inside the apartment, with the disgust of a liberal talking about the free market.
Before Allen could think of an answer, they both noticed that the girl was having problems with the stereo.
“I can’t turn the volume down. How weird.” Despite her natural treacherousness, the concern seemed genuine. “I can’t even change the track. Maybe if I turn it off and back again…” They could see that she did so, to no avail. “What’s wrong with this?” Not having the equipment do what she wanted, when she wanted it, clearly upset her. Allen could see now that Ms. Nice Girl had the capacity to turn into an irascible monster as soon as she experienced the smallest inconvenience. Violently, she unplugged the stereo.
To the astonishment of everyone who was looking, the music kept coming at full volume from the unplugged appliance.
This seemed to be too much for Viny to bear, and the last vestige of sanity gave way to absolute despair.
“TURN IT OFF!!! TURN IT OFF!!! TURN IT OFF!!!” His screams were so loud that they could be heard even on top of the avalanching music. Before Allen or anyone else could stop him, Viny rushed to the stereo and started to stomp on it, all the fury he had been barely containing coming out in a frenzy of pure, unadulterated violence.
“No! Stop!!!!” the girl shouted, angry but visibly scared for the first time.
But the stereo wouldn’t break. The music kept coming out of it as if nothing had happened. Viny, as if possessed, kicked it around, and finally hauled it over his arms and flung it with full force towards the wall. He almost hurt some of the drunks standing there, who managed to dive it just in time.
Not even a scratch. The music went on and on, now to everyone’s terror.
Viny crumpled down to the floor in tears. “Turn it off…” he kept saying, each time more weakly and stupidly. “Turn it off…”
Three
After much difficulty, Allen was able to get Viny to the terrace to get some air. He needed to calm him down, he decided, before they could investigate the bizarre incidents that had just taken place.
“Do you hear it?” Viny asked him, clearly distressed. “How can it be so LOUD that we can hear it even here?”
“… I don’t hear anything, Viny.”
Viny crouched down on the floor, defeated. “Nobody ever does. Nobody hears anything. Everybody’s so used to the noise that it’s become part of their lives. They wake with it, live with it, sleep with it. I tried to but I can’t. It’s horrible. I can’t.” He seemed to be ranting to himself, not really caring to have a conversation with Allen.
Dr. Vomisan was moved by the kid’s plight. He tried his best to hear the noise he was talking about, at least a faint echo of the music lingering from downstairs, so that he could comfort him by telling him something true. But try as he might, he couldn’t hear anything.
“You must think I’m insane,” Viny went on, now clearly addressing Allen, “that I’m a crackpot. But I’m not like this, I swear. I have never attempted to physically hurt anybody. I don’t even tend to talk back, to confront people. “Living well is the best revenge” had always been my motto. But the noise, the city in general has this effect on me… it builds up this rage, you know? A terrible rage sometimes swells up inside me, and in those moments I feel I could be capable of the most terrible things.” He paused for a minute, apparently gaining some control of himself. “… It seems silly when you say it out loud. That I would flip like that just because somebody’s playing some music that I don’t like.”
Vomisan sat down next to the boy. “It’s the small things that poison us, little by little.” The writer (or should he consider himself “ex-writer” now? He pushed the thought out of his mind as soon as it came) had experienced a very similar feeling, he recalled. “Would you be so kind as to indulge an old man and hear one of his stories?” he asked warmly.
“Certainly,” Viny answered, actually willing to do it, “don’t have much else to do.”
“Some years ago mi ex-wife and I lived in a beautiful, spacious house two blocks from a prestigious secondary school. Every morning a procession of teenagers would walk towards the school, without making much trouble because they tended to wake up rather late and were always in a hurry to get there in time. When they came back in the afternoon, it was a whole different story. Apparently they weren’t too eager to return to their houses and study or be with their parents. So they started fooling around, shouting obscenities, fighting each other, the stuff teenagers do, I guess. But it was so unbearably LOUD.”
“Were they on drugs or alcohol?”
“Not visibly, and there certainly wasn’t any vandalism or serious violence. These were respectable middle-class kids, after all. Still, the sheer volume of it drove me crazy. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to write anything during those hours. My wife got so upset that she couldn’t get any work done nor even indulge in any kind of relaxing activity like watching TV or reading. As soon as the faintest whisper started, we knew that the horde was coming and couldn’t concentrate on anything else anymore. It started poisoning our lives. Such a silly, little thing. Some teenagers talking loudly.”
“Did you try talking to them?”
“Definitely. Both of us, but my wife specially. She yelled at them every day, which only made them more defiant and loudspoken.”
“So what did you do?” Viny asked, strangely fascinated by the story.
“This went on for quite some time, until, one afternoon, at exactly 5 PM, the time when the kids always came, I received a phone call with a fantastic piece of news. I had written a book of song lyrics, a project I was very proud of, and my editor had agreed to publish it, though neither of us had thought it would sell much. Well, it was David, my editor, who called that afternoon, telling me the first sale figures had arrived and they had surpassed even the most hopeful expectations. Furthermore, the book was becoming a critical success, loved by my usual readers and by people from the music field alike. And on top of it all, a well-known Rock band had announced plans to record the lyrics as songs!”
Something started to click inside Viny’s head. “A book of song lyrics by an established writer, then recorded by a Rock band? Allen… you wouldn’t happen to be Allen Vomisan, right?”
“In the flesh,” Allen said, beaming from ear to ear. He had always loved recognition and was not ashamed to revel in it.
“Wow. Allen Vomisan, living in my building! I’m a big fan of yours. The effect your lyrics, as sung by the Tape Recorders, have had in my life… well, I could spend the whole night telling you about it!”
“Maybe we could,” Allen said sincerely.
“But not until you tell me the end of your story.” Somehow, the excitement of meeting one of his idols was not a match for the anticipation he felt for reaching the end of Allen’s anecdote.
“Deal. Well, I was so proud, so happy for what I had achieved, that I went out of the house to tell my wife. And there she was, scolding the students again. I was so elated that I just couldn’t feel any anger towards them, not that day. So I did something unexpected. I didn’t think it over, I just did what I felt. I told Doris to get inside the house and try to relax, that I would deal with the kids. When she did, I introduced myself to them in the kindest possible way. It turned out that many of them knew me, mostly because they were fans of the Tape Recorders and had heard their announcement about singing my lyrics on their next album. A few had even read some of my Back in the Day novels. I then asked them if any of them liked writing or had ever tried writing a story. Two or three, rather shyly, raised their hands.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Not really. Most people are not that awful if you just give them a chance.” Viny was about to argue, but Allen kindly gestured him to remain silent until he finished. “Anyway, I explained as warmly as possible that it was really difficult for me to write if they made all this noise every afternoon, and asked them if they could try to behave a little more quietly at least while they were passing my house. They complained that my wife was always yelling at them. Thankfully she was not there, so I winked at them and said “I guess you should sympathize with me even more then! You don’t like her yelling at you a few minutes per day, imagine what it’s like living with her!” That was not entirely fair to my wife, for sure, but it achieved my purpose. The kids burst into laughter. I had bonded with them. After that, I would wave at them from my window when they passed by, and they would wave back and ask me how my writing was coming along. Some even bought my book and brought it over to be signed, delighted that they could read the lyrics from the new Tape Recorders album before it came out. And when it did, they came to have the album signed, as well.”
They fell silent. Allen could tell that Viny was rather disappointed by the ending of the story, but wasn’t this always the case?
“I guess you were expecting something different?”
“You bet. I used to be like you, Mr. Vomisan. Thinking that kindness would always win in the end.”
“But the end is a long time coming, isn’t it? And life gets in the way. It doesn’t hurt to try, though.”
“Oh, but I have tried. Those kids you talked about were different, Mr. Vomisan. They were just fooling around in a manner acceptable to their age, they were not vicious, they were not cruel.”
“I’m sure they must have been both vicious and cruel in some circumstances.”
“But she’s different! She’s unstable, she’s irascible, she… she doesn’t respond to kindness. She doesn’t deserve it.”
Allen sighed. “From what I’ve seen about her, maybe you’re right. Your mistake is to think that you should be kind to her out of a sense of justice. When I think you should just do it because it will work out better for you.”
Viny nodded, clearly going over some ideas in his mind. Allen gave him something to think about. He was certainly anxious to hear his new friend’s stories about his beloved book, but the night was young and they were sure to get to it eventually.
Four
The bell rang.
Hannah Michelle just couldn’t wake up.
Her apartment was in shambles, the stench of vomit and urine was nauseating – and the damn stereo just kept on and on. There was no way to shut it down. It was driving her insane.
The bell kept ringing.
After considerable effort, Hannah managed to answer. It was the mailman. This irritated her for a moment as she wasn’t expecting any mail, until she reasoned out that going downstairs would give her a momentary respite from the unbreakable stereo.
She had dressed as decently as she could, but still the mailman eyed her over as if amused.
“Rough night, eh?” the idiot mumbled.
Hannah was about to retort when she noticed the bulky package he was handling her. “What’s this?”
“How would I know?” the mailman answered, helpful as ever.
“Who’s sending it, then?”
“Anonymous. Must be a present from a lover,” he chuckled.
Normally Hannah Michelle would have felt an urge to strangle him, and on a bad day she would have even tried. But now she was simply too perplexed by the package. She rushed upstairs to open it and found, to her continuous bafflement, that it contained about 20 brand-new music CDs, sealed and in perfect condition. She had never heard of any of the artists, but the covers looked interesting enough.
Since the damn stereo will keep playing no matter what, she thought, I might as well try some of these. She grabbed one at random (The Lone and Level Sands, by a band with the retarded name of The Tape Recorders) and put it on the Highlander of CD players. The music was certainly different – it was Rock, for sure, but it was a bit less strident and soothing than what she was used to. She welcomed the change.
“This is not so bad at all. Might as well play it through,” she said to herself.
“Somebody next door rejoiced with this decision,” Allen Vomisan typed into his laptop, and he knew then that his latest story was ready.