switch, and almost sighed with relief when the machine whirred to life; its hard drive spun at just the right rpm to whine a sympathetic tone to the one frying Wes’s brain right now. The effect was that he didn’t notice the buzz in his head as much, since the same sound was sawing away outside of his head as well.
He did his best to ignore the steady drone in his ears that first day, but when it kept him awake again that night, and was no better the next morning, Wes began to seriously worry. He knew the story of Pete Townshend and how he had to live with tinnitus, a constant ringing in his head from loud shows. His stomach turned cold and hard at the thought of permanent hearing damage, and he did searches on tinnitus on the Internet, praying that he just had gotten what one Web site called “temporary threshold shift (TTS)” from the overexposure to the Eardrum Buzz’s amplified guitars. His life had become a fuzz of constant humming distortion.
“Often TTS dissipates within hours or days, as the ear re-acclimates itself,” one page read. “But in full-blown tinnitus, the patient can suffer the constant ringing and buzzing sound in the brain for the rest of his or her life. This can often lead to depression and, sometimes, suicidal impulses.”
Wes thought about the latter idea as he tugged hard on the skin of his earlobe, trying to open his ear canal wider, and perhaps “pop” it so that the sound would go away. Nothing happened, except for the feeling of a bruised pinch on his already sore-from-pulling lobe.
“I can’t live with this,” he whispered, staring at the words on his computer screen and not comprehending them. “I can’t concentrate.”
He put both palms against his ears and pushed, toilet plunger style. Maybe he could push air into the ear to stop the buzz.
The result was a pressure pain in the bowels of his brain and he reluctantly gave up. Placing both palms on the desk, Wes took a deep breath and forced himself to stop focusing on the problem. He needed to forget the locust hum and read the words on the screen.
“Fly with the swarm,” he read, and shook his head to clear his vision. That couldn’t be right. He stared harder at the lease paperwork. “Fryer with warming console,” it read. Wes put his head on the desk and closed his eyes. He needed sleep.
And silence.
* * *
On the fourth day after the concert, Wes yawned ceaselessly. His eyes were shot through with red and his head lolled periodically, as his body tried to shut down, regardless of its position.
“You need sleep, man,” Trent observed. “Tried taking any sleeping pills?”
“No, but that’s a good idea.”
“Remember, if the dose looks like it reads 22, that’s just because you’re seeing double.”
“Thanks. I think 22 might be the only thing that could put me out.”
After work, he stopped at the supermarket to pick up a frozen dinner and some sleeping pills. The buzz had subsided some, but it was still there, coiled and hissing in his brain. It had snaked into his consciousness like a viper and it would not leave its lair.
“I can’t live with this,” he mumbled in the analgesics aisle, and his eyes welled up. He was at his end. “I don’t
When he looked up, the piercing icy eyes of the skank who’d blown him off at the Eardrum Buzz party were staring back at his over the low aisle shelf.
She looked startled when he caught her glance over the top of the Bufferin boxes and turned away.
“Wait,” he said. “You can do that to me once, but not twice. I’m Wes.”
“Jen,” she said. Her voice was brittle, with a melting point that Wes wasn’t likely to reach.
“Sorry I spooked ya, Jen,” he said. “But I saw you recognized me.”
“We’re both part of the swarm,” she nodded. He noticed that her eyes looked as bloodshot around the edges as his own. And her perfect gloss hair from a few nights ago had a frizzy, static-cling look to it now. She was windblown, or buzz-blown, around the edges.
“How are your ears?” he asked, not knowing quite what to say.
She jerked. “What do you mean?”
“Mine are still buzzing from that show last weekend,” he complained.
“I’m fine,” she breathed and pulled something from the shelf to throw in her cart. “Spread the word.”
And she walked away.
* * *
The next day, Wes saw the grizzled, mutton chop Metallica guy from the Eardrum Buzz party standing around the newsstand he stopped at each morning. As Wes paid for his paper, he saw the guy staring at him from over the top of a newspaper he was pretending to read.
Normally Wes did all he could to avoid trouble. But over the course of this week, his patience had grown thin. He didn’t care about consequence anymore.
“Why are you spying on me?” he asked, walking up to the older man. From where he stood, the man sidled backwards, as if trying to be unseen.
“I know you from the concert,” Wes said, unconsciously pulling on the edge of his earlobe. The sound seemed to be growing as he remembered the night he’d first seen this loser. And now the guy was spying on him.
“You know nothing,” the man hissed. As he approached, the man threw down his newspaper on the pile and darted away, melding into the crowd of briefcase-toters and disappearing into the glass door of an office building.
In his head, Wes heard the buzz grow like the keening call of a locust swarm on a hot August night. He grabbed the light pole at the curb and held on as if he were on a ship in hurricane season. When he pulled his face away from the cold gray steel, its surface was wet and the locusts laughed and buzzed behind his eyes.
Wes did not want to live like this.
He pulled out the bottle of pills and read its contents again. He could swallow the whole thing with a couple glasses of water, and then the buzzing would go away. Everything would go away. He closed his eyes, and thought about going to the top of an office building instead, and jumping. He would fly for just a moment, like the bugs he swore he heard, before the sound would be gone for good.
He shook both thoughts away, and walked on.
* * *
On Friday, Wes couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down his face. He cried as he bought his newspaper, and cried again as he tripped and fell over a crack in the pavement, scattering his pages to the wind and the trample of commuter feet.
“I can’t stand it,” he moaned, writhing on the ground as if he were being bitten by a thousand fire ants. He shivered and jittered, and put both hands to his ears. “No more.”
Hands grabbed at his arms, and pulled, tugging under his armpits until he had staggered to his feet. His eyes were swollen and blurry, but he could still make out the faces of his rescuers.
Goth-skank Jen. And the scraggly guy.
“Can you hear them?” he whispered.
Jen nodded. “You’re the vessel of the swarm to come,” she said. “And this is their time.”
She reached a hand then to her own ear, and tugged hard on her lobe. When she poked a long, black-painted fingernail into her ear to itch and clear the channel, Wes swore he saw a winged thing fly out, as if a beetle or a fly had been feasting on the wax inside.
“Where are we going?” he asked feebly, as they escorted him to a beat-up Volkswagen, and shoved him into the back seat.
“For help,” the man answered.
* * *
The car followed a winding road out of the city and past the docks and the warehouse district. Then, it shivered off onto a gravel road that led to a small shack within spitting distance of the bay. As the woman helped him from the car, Wes complained, “I haven’t slept, it’s so loud.”
She nodded and pointed up at the trees around them. “They never sleep.”
It was then that Wes realized the trees all around them were alive with the sound in his head.
