*New story—the first in quite a while. I’ve struggled to end this tale… mostly because it doesn’t feel like it really has an ending. As it stands, I worry the finale is a bit too “rah, rah, human strength and spirituality, yeah!” so I’d appreciate any and all commentary.
***
Clara lost control. She was furious, words rolling off her tongue with a snake’s staccato hiss—a costly mistake. It happened right in front of me. I could’ve reached out and cupped my hand over her face. I could’ve told her to save herself for a better fight, to hold onto what language she had left. I could’ve, but I didn’t.
The argument left her breathless, gasping. She stopped mid-expense, her lips pressed together on a hard consonant. I could see it—she wanted to tell me to fuck off. To have the balls to walk away. To leave her alone and never come back. She was on a roll, on fire, ready to cook. Instead, realizing what she had done, how far she had taken things, she closed her eyes and forced the air from her lungs. Her chest heaved, slowing as her pulse gradually steadied. When she opened her eyes again, I saw clarity of thought, which she had lacked moments earlier. She’d weighed both ends of the transaction and found what she needed to say, how she needed this to end. The growing rasp of her vocal folds told me she’d spent more than intended, but she’d already invested too much to leave without having her last word.
“You are…”
Worthless? Irritating? A festering corpse of a human being? Don’t hold back on me, Clara. Not now, when we’ve come so far.
“… disappointing.”
If we’d only had a drum roll.
***
It seemed excessive—to forfeit seconds, minutes, and hours of one’s life to carve a pound from another’s sense of self worth. For my part in our grand exhibition, I said nothing. It wasn’t my time, and I wasn’t going to do anything to speed up the process.
When Clara saw the resolve in the hard line of my jaw—rigid, unmoving—she shook her head as if to say, “Of course you’d say nothing, you selfish son of a bitch. Of course you’d take every word of that without a fight. You’re not some fucking Buddhist monk—you haven’t taken your vows. Say something! Show me you give a damn!”
She’d expected more from me. More fight. More fuck-me-no-fuck-you resilience. That had been her way—never the bit player, always the soloist.
***
Mother liked to crochet her teachings. I think she thought it would be easier to remember things that way. Lessons stitched in gothic script, adorning every inch of free space on the walls in our home: “Homework Before Playtime”, “Clean Up After Yourself”, and “Don’t Forget to Brush Your Teeth Before Bed” were positioned deliberately between biblical proverbs, daily affirmations, and world events she’d clipped from newspapers and stapled to the walls in crossword-puzzle serpents. Some days she would stand in front of her Tetris-block teachings for hours, rethinking the organizational impact of her hierarchy. Our conversations were punctuated by directorial salutes—hand-signed questions or those written on whiteboards would get sharp thrusts in specific directions, her answers all around.
She favoured one piece of art above all others. White stitching on a black rectangle of loose weave canvas:
“He who guards his mouth keeps his life,
but he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.”
—Proverbs 13:3
It followed me from room to room growing up. Mother’s most treasured teaching was never out of sight. She believed in it, to her very end.
“He got tired,” she said one day. It was the first time she’d said anything to anyone in months. She’d been drinking—her awareness was dulled. “God got tired of hearing what we had to say. All those prayers, all those people thanking him, praising him, and for what? For this? It’s the sinners,” she said. “Those who broke oaths in his name. Who lied and cheated and stole. Who shouted his name during intercourse with their… their whores. They’re to blame for this. Not us, sweetheart. Never the good. Never the fearful.”
She was shaking. Her forehead was sticky with fever sweat. I threw a blanket over of her and put a cold compress to her face.
“He isn’t listening anymore,” she continued. Her voice trailed into delirium. “He took our voices away and we won’t ever get them back.”
***
Clara left while I was sleeping. Less exposure meant less opportunity for further inspiration. She’d been heaving like an asthmatic by the end of her invective. She couldn’t have had much more in her to say. A few sentences, maybe, if she was lucky. Sentences I’m glad were not wasted on me.
Commotion was no longer commonplace—shouts and cries drew infrequent attention. I watched the next morning as a pair of government-ordained Echoes attempted to hold down and muzzle a homeless man in the alleyway behind my building. He fought them, screaming ear-candy expletives. The pair of white clothed brick walls pantomimed his capture, their arms outstretched, moving in on the vagrant as one might a lost puppy. I thought back to the previous night, picturing my neighbours huddled up in their beds and on couches with overturned drinking glasses pressed against their walls, enraptured by Clara’s one-sided lashing. The bum in the alley was not the draw than we had been, of this I was positive. He was out of his mind, drugged or senile, with a sudden insatiable urgency for noise and attention.
Clara had had no such excuse. Her outburst had not been driven by drugs or instability—futility, yes, and impatience, but nothing more.
She had not been raised on the proverb.
She had not been trained to value her words.
The Echoes managed, after a long struggle, to fasten a thick leather strap over the man’s face before piercing his wiry upper arm with a syringe. In seconds, his eyes glazed over and he collapsed into their arms, into a dream, where his voice was no longer a threat.
The homeless man was quietly loaded into the back of a white van and taken from the alley by the Echoes. They would decide whether or not he could be re-introduced to society under his own volition. More than likely, depending on the cause of his outburst or the depth of his mania, he’d need attentive muzzling and vocal repressives until the day he whispers himself to death in a single shit-stained corner of his padded cell.
How wonderful that would have been, I thought to myself, had the Echoes broken into our apartment and taken Clara away to safety. Before she’d wasted her words on us.
***
I remembered the last time I’d heard the sound of someone singing without feeling my stomach turning over in protest. I’d discovered an Aretha Franklin vinyl amongst the items on the bookshelf in father’s study. I placed it on the turntable and was immediately lost to the sounds; her voice was rich and full, strong in ways I’d never thought a voice could be. I turned up the volume at the beginning of each new verse, drinking her words like wine.
Before I had finished the album’s second song, mother freight-trained into the study, took the record from the player, and snapped it in half. She looked at me for several seconds, holding the broken pieces of vinyl in both hands, carefully selecting her admonishment.
“No one needs to hear that,” she said. Her syllables trembled. “It isn’t fair.”
“To whom?” I said.
She slapped me across the face with one hand and immediately cupped my mouth with the other. “Don’t. Speak. Don’t say anything unless you have to.”
I stopped my next question before it reached my lips. She caught its remains in my pleading stare.
“Because,” she said, “you won’t know you’ve said too much until it’s too late.”
I didn’t know it then, but it wasn’t just me she was concerned about. It was our neighbours. Our friends and family, anyone who might wander up to our front door, curious, taken by the sounds coming from within. The music was a cruel temptation, and she had already seen it take one life.
***
Father liked to drink. When he drank, he liked to sing.
“It’s horse shit,” I heard him shout one night. “You hear me? Are you up there, you fucking twat? You want to silence me, you go right ahead and try it!” Mother tried to take the bottle from him, but he wouldn’t have it. He didn’t want to be sober in a world of silence.
He refused to believe the news, the warnings we’d been given. They taught us sign language in school, so we wouldn’t have to stop learning, stop participating. When I signed to him at dinner one night—our last together—he grabbed me by the wrists and lowered himself to my level. His breath was toxic, of menace and whisky:
“Don’t you believe it, Allan. Words won’t kill you. Bottling them up will. Hiding what you have to say, that’s how you’ll lose yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Mother tried to pull him away. She cried. They were doing what was best for us, she mouthed. They were only trying to do what was right.
He pushed her away. “Talk to me, damn it! Say something! This… this pandemic they’re talking about… it’s a lie. I’ll say what I want to say, when I want to say it. There is no limit. None of us are going to die from this. They just want to keep us under thumb. They want us quiet. Cooperative. It’s their plan for us… the start of something big. Something new. Watch—you’ll see,” he said, stabbing his finger at mother’s nose. “I’m right about this.”
We were powerless in the face of total resolve, forced to watch as he locked himself in his study. He played music—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Stealers Wheel—and sang along, as loud as he could. He did this for days, unending, as if to prove to him self that the warnings we’d heard on television and read in the paper were fabrications, half-cocked attempts to wrestle away our first amendment rights, to remove from us our sacred duty to question our leaders.
By the fourth day, his voice was sandpaper against the grain. He dropped in and out of consciousness—from alcohol or illness we couldn’t have known. He would disappear in the middle of one track and rebound by the chorus of another.
By day five, he could only gasp halftones and broken lyrics between hacking fits, heavy with wetness.
On the sixth day, his study soundless and rank, mother forced her way in.
Her scream was the last sound I would hear from lips her for two years—until the day I discovered his record collection.
***
A barbershop quartet was arrested today on charges of mischief and intention to publicly incite suicide. They sang even as they were forced to their knees and handcuffed behind their backs. They stopped only when a police officer pulled out his nightstick and struck one of the singers in the mouth, forcing several bloody teeth down the young man’s throat.
Many things had changed in the decades that had passed since we first discovered this new set of limitations. Certain words and phrases took on entirely new levels of vice: the sting of a curse word or racist slur, the intent such venom carried, had been gifted pain beyond measure; the weight of a lie, of personal sacrifice for the purposes of creating hurt and misdirection, was like no other.
To the other end of things, the life of an opera singer had become more perilous than that of an athlete. Their sacrifices were not unnoticed; heralded by musicians, playwrights and composers, opera singers were paid sums never before seen by those in their field. As a short-term career option, it was not without its own unique set of challenges—most operatic and theatrical performances had been banned from North American soil. Think of the children, our leaders wrote in long, fiercely worded press releases across the nation. Our young must not be exposed to needless sacrifice. They don’t need to grow up witnessing death and suicide, mistaking it for art.
But art is self-sacrifice, begged the singers and the performers and the artisans clinging to their own invention of immortality.
Singing, in private, to bring comfort and joy to a loved one, that was self-sacrifice. Singing for the sake of it, that was frivolous—a waste of one’s life, and an embarrassment to this test of restraint that humanity had been given.
It was wrong, they cried. So they sang and performed on shores far from our own, to audiences dressed as if attending a funeral—and just as reverent.
***
Clara had tried to sing for me. Once.
It was my birthday. She wanted to give me something no one else could. A piece of me, she said, that no one had ever known before. Her voice was almost inaudible, barely more than a whisper. It had atrophied like any muscle would.
Clara had always wanted to sing. She’d spent her early twenties sifting through trash bins for records and CDs, stockpiling them in her apartment, spending entire days and nights with her headphones on, mouthing the words to a thousand songs no one wanted to remember.
“Let me do this for you,” she said as she lay on top of me in bed. It was the first time she’d spoken with me. She opened her mouth, held it there, unsure of what to do, how to form a note.
I placed one hand over her mouth and put a finger to my lips.
“Tell me no and I won’t,” she said.
I shook my head.
“I want to hear you say it, Allan. I want to hear your voice.” She started to cry, her body pumping, heaving dry, soundless sickness.
***
I wasn’t anyone special, she said. The world wouldn’t know my name were I to stand on top of the Hollywood sign and scream my life story to the valley below. But I mattered to her. I was everything to her—everything but a voice.
She didn’t want much, in the end. A mouse-squeak to know that I cared, that I would forgo an hour, or a day, or a week to the end of my life to tell her, just once, with my own voice, that I loved her. That I wanted her to be with me, in silence, in the absence of song, until we reached the limit of our expression.
It wasn’t much, but it was more than I was willing.
The cadence of conversation had changed—in situations where language remained essential, a scarcity of dialogue was employed. Industries had changed—silent films had re-emerged as an expanding circle of celebrities adopted vows of their own, embracing total silence as a means of achieving immortality. United en-vogue, the vows taught language as the font of life: depleted of it, one’s purpose would be expunged, wiped clean from humanity’s slate; contained, one became important, their language an asset to the future of our world.
They were selfish, said many. Imbalanced, crying fowl over fervour. There was no illness of language, claimed their most ardent fans, who longed to hear their idols speak again.
Their immortal ambitions were ludicrous—an insult.
The truly doubtful staged protests—performing “suicide monologues” in public venues: groups of writers and poets would give spontaneous readings of their work; stage actors would spend entire days reciting Shakespeare in parks and on the steps of art galleries and public offices. They’d shout their words until their voices abandoned them, not for death but exhaustion and trauma, vocal folds scraped raw from temerity.
They were conspiratorial inspirationalists. They want to shred our numbers, signalled the head of the political opposition, his signed gestures manic, without restraint.
The protestors refused to yield, their rights to speech, to sound, to conversation must rise above all others. When one of their own died, it was cause for celebration, not consternation. They had died doing what they loved.
Our leaders wrote bills.
They made laws.
They hunted the inspired, the performance hungry, the musical elite, and removed them from sight.
The suicide monologues survived through guerrilla tactics: social media feeds and code words and phrases that changed every few hours, signalling the where, the when, the what. Flash mobs: they rose from anonymity and daily routine and came together at specific points, like dust particles drawn to glass.
***
I witnessed a suicide monologue one afternoon. It happened as I was sitting quietly on a bench in the centre of the park, near the fountain, reading a newspaper. Two women—one black, one white, each dressed to counter the other—linked arm in arm and climbed onto the base of a fountain. They began to sing:
“Sull’aria”
“Che soave zeffiretto…”
“Zeffiretto…”
“Questa sera spirerà…”
“Questa sera spirerà…”
“Sotto i pini del boschetto.”
“Sotto i pini…
“Sotto i pini del boschetto.”
“Sotto i pini… del boschetto…”
“Ei già il resto capirà.”
“Certo, cert oil capirà.”
They repeated the final line in unison. Again. And again, louder with each repetition. They held onto the final note of their fifth repeat until their faces were blue and the crowd that had gathered didn’t know whether they would collapse from language death or lack of oxygen to the brain.
Beneath the cacophony of their final, elongated note and the spontaneous applause that followed, another voice could be heard. Small at first, like the sound of a wren, a single word quickly broke through the din:
“Elly?”
When it was over, when the clapping receded and the performers had taken their bows, I heard it again—more crisply this time.
“Elly?”
We—the crowd and I—looked around for the source of the word. The two women atop the fountain pointed to the other end of the park, where a young woman with ginger hair and dressed in a sunflower yellow dress was nervously wringing a small spotted scarf between her hands.
“Elly?” she said again. Her long hair whipped across her face with every turn, flashing danger, fear.
“Elly!”
This was something different. Something new. It wasn’t a performance. The grief in her eyes, it was not manufactured. Each time she shouted that name, I looked around, half-expecting the Echoes to spring from a crack in the pavement, to take this frightened woman by the arms and muzzle her. As the crowd focused their attention on her, away from the performance just moments prior, the threat of her capture and detainment only increased.
“Elly!”
But it did not happen. She continued to shout for—her daughter? her sister? her dog? She paced the park’s pathways, past the gathering of Figaro at the fountain, through the crowd, most of them with their hands still pressed together as if expecting this person’s anguish to be another part of the act. Her flushed face and erratic gait removed all doubt.
Again: “Elly?”
Then, an echo of a different sort: “Elly!” This time, it was a man’s voice. Gruff, weathered. His vocal folds were scratched, from years of smoking or a youthful abuse of language I could not be sure. He called out again: “Elly! Where are you?”
The two performers standing on the concrete lip of fountain: “Elly! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Men and women in the crowd looked to their neighbours, as if seeking approval or a cautionary shake of the head. Others glanced over their shoulders, peering into the bushes, wondering if malevolent Echoes were lying in wait—if they would be arrested for participating in this unexpected event. Some stayed, their voices joining the growing chorus, while others bowed their heads and slunk away to the perimeter of the park. Some glanced back, curious, wondering if the misplaced Elly would appear and quell their guilt.
A ring of bodies surrounded the fountain, eyes to the edges of the park and beyond. Out of sync at first, it was not long before their voices linked, the word “Elly” a chant that had grown amongst them—a drawn-out first beat and a percussive second.
The ginger-haired woman continued to call out for Elly. Her mannerisms were strained, disquieting: her head bobbed above and dropped below the gathered chorus. She wasn’t listening to their chant, rhythmic, droning, and deadly. She wasn’t paying attention to the event that she had unintentionally spawned. She looked everywhere, searching only for Elly as the two Figaro performers took lead of their sudden choir and guided their voices in this impromptu act of defiance.
***
I had loved Clara. Make no mistake about that. I had wanted to hear her sing. For months I wanted nothing more than to give her what she wanted more than anything else in this world, to tell her that I loved her. I wasn’t able—wasn’t willing to, because I didn’t believe. Not in her, or us, but in this fate we’d been challenged with. Father didn’t believe, either. He knew, deep down, that it didn’t matter why we’d been struck silent, or if it was true in the first place. I will never know if he understood the threat of words and chose to ignore it, out of anger or spite it did not matter. What did matter was the difference between us: he was unafraid. Whatever the consequences, it was silence he could not condone. But where he had seen a fight, mother saw only defeat. Ruin—not possibility, not providence, but an act of judgement.
To open wide one’s lips and find ruin and death and the end of all things.
I said nothing to Clara because I had nothing to share. I had no mistaken ambition to live forever. It was futility, you see. Not hubris. Not arrogance.
I had loved Clara, but I did not know how to say it.
I had not known where to start.
***
Two by two they appeared: Echoes surrounded the park’s perimeter, muzzles in hand, their eyes to the choir that had taken over the fountain. The ginger-haired woman had not seen the Echoes, or she did not care. She called for Elly, over and over again. A rasp had developed, her tones scratching her vocal folds with every life credit depleted. Still, she hollered for Elly. She cried that name until her face was as red as her hair.
And I did something I had not thought of before. I went over to the ginger-haired woman and put a hand to her shoulder. She shook beneath my touch, as if my hand had given her a slight tremor. I smiled, I looked into her eyes, and I signed to her, telling her it would be all right. When she opened her mouth again to speak, I shook my head and gently cupped her mouth. She was frightened.
The chanting continued behind us. “Elly” wasn’t a name for them. It was a word signifying unity—a reason to bask in the threat of beautiful sound, the strength of others a placebo, an illusion of strength—of immortal desires in a mortally limited world. I pulled her from the crowd as the Echoes descended upon them.
“Let me try,” I said.
