IT WAS one of those humming summer nights, right at the crumbling end of the tourist season. Buses and cars blotted at the air with their smoke and steam, their zippy metallic presences like giant mutant dragonflies disrupting her trajectory, the seemingly magnetic pull that attracted her day after day back to the bistro. How trapped she was there! She could never get away. She would take out the trash into the slimy back alley after midnight, with the scent of leftover rinds of brie and unwanted foie gras fermenting in the trash cans which surrounded her like soldiers, and she would scream and cry until she couldn't breathe, until she lapsed again into inevitable silence. She wondered why she even made noise in the first place--it wasn't as if it changed anything. It wasn't as if anyone ever noticed.
The beautiful day had become a being of sound as she walked--she rarely saw things anymore, half expected to go blind. She heard rather than saw a child skinning his knee, wailing towards his mother like a punctured balloon. She heard ten couples kissing in the short mile from her empty one-bedroom flat, darling, my love, my one and only, greatest love. She heard crickets in the park almost loud enough to drown out the furious cars.
The door slammed behind her. She put on an apron and became a smiling Iris, delivering the messages of the demanding mortals to the steaming gods of food and wine. It was a night of sound so blindingly loud she could barely stand it. Everyone was contributing to the furious cacophony.
"What's this mean?!" and "I'll have the ratatouille." and "Which wine would you recommend with the escargot?" and "Joey! Put that down right now! This is a nice restaurant." and "But I haven't heard from him in two weeks, Margot!" and she filled their glasses with wine.
"Send him a letter--"
"an e-mail--"
"a kick in the ass." Anonymous voices chastened and urged and surged around her. No, no, she thought, you've all got it wrong. There was nothing he could do. He's disappeared like me, that's all. No one can hear us anymore.
"Call him, Penelope. You're pregnant, for heaven's sake. What are you supposed to do?" and "Could we have some more wine, please?" and "How's the leg of lamb here? Do you think I'd like it?"
Their question marks taunted her--it was almost as if they wanted to hear her, as if they thought they would somehow be able to make out her response over the voice of the all-important world. Heading towards the cornucopia of the kitchen, she heard a brief scuffle at the distant front of the bistro, where Pregnant Penelope had been cooling her heels. Perhaps she, as a waitress, should have been concerned by the gaping gasps that reached her, the following cacophony of sobs and laughter. But then again, as a waitress, she wasn't supposed to care. This was her worthless job, to tide her over. This was her worthless life.
"Thank you tho much, I thwear, I think you thaved my life!" Did choking give you a lisp? she wondered as she pushed past two shaking walls of flesh, both thtammering and thlobbering. The universe took care of itself, see? The universe will take care of you like a mother or a god. Remember your voice? Remember ten thousand light years and the night of the million stars? Remember letting your vocal chords caress each splinter of light? Maybe once upon a many-spiraled nebula, a parallel production of this drama of the dumb, she would have rushed to the front of the stage, shoved her slim, fading body against the plump patron and wrestled with his girth until he could breathe again. Maybe she would have solidified from mere contact with his mass. He wasn't going to be ignored. Even with his throat stopped like the bottle of wine which she clutched at, he had been acknowledged. Maybe Pregnant Penelope or Martyr Margot had expelled the offending object from this trembling lump of diner, whose similarly-sized wife was gazing at him in teary-eyed adoration and relief. But she was a waitress. She wasn't eating and she certainly wasn't choking--she'd already swallowed. Swallowed her tongue.
She heard the taunting echoes of millions of mouths around her as they chewed and digested, chewed and digested. She heard the scraping of fifteen hundred forks and the submersion of some thousands of spoons. She heard the metropolis breathe. She heard Choking Charlie take a tentative bite. She heard Pregnant Penelope being cooed over by her three attendants as she wiped a tear from beneath her overwrought eye. All of her senses were getting swallowed, chewed, digested, chomped, chewed, swallowed by sound. She heard the swoop of the wine bottle dropping from her hand, the crack as it hit the wood floor, the spread of the bruised fuchsia liquid as it flooded over the ground. She did not hear a single head turn in her direction. She did not hear a single sudden gasp. She did not hear Margot or Penelope, Charlie or The World coming to her rescue.
She had become little more than an ear that bled wine.
