By Ben Greenman
from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled
Amplification is still the dominant element in this lonely afternoon. A passionate desire for both company and significance pressures even the smallest sound into service, and so a cat purring atop a hardback copy of “Blood in Bad Bederkesa” is heard as the roar of a nearby ocean, though land is all around for miles. The young boy on the street outside the window probably had no object except to test the accuracy of his arm by throwing acorns at a mailbox, and would have been more surprised by anybody that he was experienced as an enemy army. A report on the radio that morning is recalled as vastly satirical, though the tone was subdued and dead earnest. Equally exaggerated is the sole inhabitant of the house himself. When he lived in the city, he was measured enough in word and act. He was a slow-pulse worker at the office, and then walked home through a welter of noise and color that did not dislodge him from his calm. But he moved away from the city, to this land of lawns and houses, a change that has done more than anything to inflame his mind against itself. He now wakes in terror of the silence that surrounds him, and grasps greedily at the first noise he hears, determined not just to have it reverberate within his mind all day long, but to make it matter, and he repeats the process with the second, third, fourth, all too aware that the sounds will taper off, that the terrifying silence will once again descend and the day will settle down into it. Now there is nothing to hear, and he is afraid. He counts the seconds, the minutes, his heart beginning to race. Is that the faint squeak of a pipe from somewhere within the torso of the house? He treasures it beyond all compare.
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