Afterward, when the club's patrons arrived home, they lay on their pillows unable to fall asleep, their minds spinning with joy and exhilaration.
22.
The episodes continued into the spring, falling over the city at intervals none of us could predict. Whenever we became most used to the silence, it seemed, the fundamental turmoil of the world would break through the tranquillity and present itself to us again. More and more people began to prefer these times of disruption. They made us feel like athletes facing a game, like soldiers who had finished their training, capable of accomplishing great things in battle.
A consensus slowly gathered among us. We had given up something important, we believed: the fire, the vigor, that came with a lack of ease. We had lost some of the difficulty of our lives, and we wanted it back.
23.
The city council drafted a measure to abolish the silence initiative. After a preliminary period of debate and consideration, it was adopted by common consent. The work of breaking the city's silence was not nearly as painstaking as the work of establishing it had been. With the flip of a few switches and the snip of a few wires, the sonic filters that had sheltered our buildings were disabled, opening our walls up to every birdcall and thunderclap. Scrapers and bulldozers tore up the roads, and spreading machines laid down fresh black asphalt. The cloth was unwound from the clappers of the church bells. The old city buses were rolled out of the warehouses. A fireworks stand was erected by the docks, and a gun club opened behind the outlet mall. A man in a black suit carried an orange crate into the park one evening to preach about the dangers of premarital sex. A man with a tattoo of a teardrop on his cheek set three crisply folded playing cards on a table and began shuffling them in intersecting circles, calling out to the people who walked by that he would offer two dollars, two clean new, green new, George Washington dollar bills, to anyone who could find that lovely lady, that lady in red, the beautiful queen of hearts.
24.
In a matter of weeks, we could hear cell phones ringing in restaurants again, basketballs slapping the pavement, car stereos pouring their music into the air. Everywhere we went we felt a pleasurable sense of agitation. And if our interactions with one another no longer seemed like the still depths of secluded pools, where enormous fish stared up at the light sifting down through the water—well, the noise offered other compensations.
We became more headstrong, more passionate. Our sentiments were closer to the surface. Our lives seemed no less purposeful than they had during the silence, but it was as if that purpose were waiting several corners away from us now, rather than hovering in front of our eyes.
For a while the outbreaks of sound continued to make themselves heard over the noise of the city, just as the outbreaks of silence had, but soon it became hard to distinguish them from the ongoing rumble of the traffic. There were a few quick flashes of noise during the last week of May, but if they carried on into the summer, we failed to notice them. In their place were dogs tipping over garbage cans, flatbed trucks beeping as they backed out of alleys, and fountains spilling into themselves again and again.
The quiet that sometimes fell over us in movie theaters began to seem as deep as any we had ever known. We had a vague inkling that we had once experienced our minds with a greater intimacy, but we could not quite recover the way it had felt.
25.
Every day the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behind, like the imprints of vanished shells in the crust of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation. That and a short item published in the Thursday, July the eighth, edition of the morning newspaper, a letter detailing the results of the log the police department's cryptographer had been keeping, a repeating series of dots and dashes whose meaning was explicit, he said, but whose import he could not fathom. Dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot. Dash. Dot. Dash, dot. Dot, dash, dash. Dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot.
A FABLE WITH A PHOTOGRAPH OF A GLASS MOBILE ON THE WALL
Once there was a cabinetmaker who had lived all his life in the same small town. There was a workshop along the western wall of his house, and in the afternoon, when the sun came pouring through the windows, he could be found there planing and turning and sanding pieces of walnut or cherry wood, coaxing himself along with phrases like “Take care it doesn't split along the grain” and “A little bit narrower at the base, I think.” Eventually the light would become peculiar, its edges softening into shadow, and he would step back from his bench and survey the work he had done: a half-finished wardrobe or a dresser waiting to be stained. The bands of pale and dark wood seemed to pulse like waves in the fading light. When he heard the clink of silverware in the kitchen, he would give his equipment a quick wipe down, wash the sawdust from his hands, and sit down to dinner with his wife and boy.
The cabinetmaker enjoyed his trade so much that he rarely gave himself a day off. Sometimes, though, when the sky was gray and he could not make out the contours of the sun, he would put his boots on and take a long afternoon walk. There was a high school with a football field and a set of metal bleachers, a courthouse with a galvanized tin cupola, and a dance hall that stood empty in the middle of the week, haloed by gnats and moths, but that filled with music every weekend. Birds passed in and out of the hardwood forest on the far side of the meadow, and the stream that ran past the little stone church smelled like the snow from the fold of the mountains, a wonderful fresh smell of nothing living and nothing dying. The cabinetmaker's wife might come with him if the bank was closed, and his boy, too, if the schools were on holiday. A tremendous feeling of pride and satisfaction would wash over him whenever the three of them walked through the town together. It was the one place in the world where he truly felt familiar to himself.
The cabinetmaker had never considered himself an artist, only a craftsman, but as he approached middle age, he developed a richer intuitive sense of the woods he used: which knots would weaken a board and which would lend it distinction, how dark a particular piece would become after he applied the stain, how much a joint would expand and along which plane when the humidity rose. His reputation spread, and he began to take orders from other nearby communities and occasionally even from the big cities on the coast. He was a rarity, apparently—a joiner who did all his own work, using only local timber.
Then someone wrote a profile of his cabinetry for a magazine called Fine Furniture, and suddenly everything changed.
It started with the letters, which began arriving a few days after the article was published, forwarded to him in bundles of twenty or thirty by the magazine's managing editor.
I recently read the feature story about you entitled “Artisan of the Sticks,” and I was wondering, do you also do sofas?
Do you have a web address? You really ought to have a web address.
We at Design Expressions wish to distribute your furniture directly to discriminating consumers from each of our more than one hundred stores nationwide.
Then came the second wave. Every afternoon, from the shelter of his workshop, the cabinetmaker was interrupted by dozens of phone calls from journalists and retailers, carpentry societies and parents looking for wedding gifts. It became harder and harder for him to find the time and the silence he needed to understand the wood he was trying to shape, the secrets it held in its rings and fibers. It would not be long, he thought, before cars and minivans started nosing up to his yard, coughing blue smoke into the air as they disgorged round after round of passengers.
One evening at dinner, listening to him complain about how little work he had gotten done that day, his wife said, “You know, you don't have to answer every single phone call that comes in.”
But he did have to answer every single pho
ne call: there was a conscientiousness about him that could not stand to ignore them.
“Well, then maybe you should think about taking a little break,” she said as he sat stirring his peas together with his mashed potatoes. And although he had never before considered such a thing, the idea must have appealed to him, for a few days later, when he received a call from a small Northeastern college asking him if he would like to serve as a visiting professor in their woodworking program that fall, he surprised himself by accepting.
He had grown so accustomed to his town that it was hard for him to imagine living anywhere else, even for only a few months. What would he do without his wife and son? he wondered. What would he do without his workshop, with its fine clear sunlight and its smell of walnut and cherry? And then there were the little things: the sight of the radio tower winking above the hills at night, the sound of the trees rattling after an ice storm, the rhythm of the automatic doors at the grocery store, the grasshoppers that sprang up from the fields like sparks from a bonfire—what would he do without those?
Yet he had agreed to take the job, and the day soon came when he had to say good-bye to his family, squeezing the back of his son's neck and tucking a lock of hair behind his wife's ear, and climb aboard the plane that would carry him to a city he had never seen before, a city of asphalt and washed yellow brick, so that he could move into the house he had arranged to sublet for the semester.
There is something innately sad about other people's homes. The rooms are crowded with the thousand-odd belongings that mark the presence of someone else's daily life: lamps and rugs, books and dishes, all of them gathered together in a process as slow and unthinking as the one by which a stream carves its way into the earth and dries up. You can walk along the bed of such a stream, you can trace the tooling lines left by the current, but you will never taste so much as a single drop of water. Other people's homes present you with the same ornate sense of emptiness. This is never so obvious as when the people who live there have gone away.
The couple who owned the house where the cabinetmaker was staying were spending the fall in Italy, and their son had just left for his freshman year of college. The cabinetmaker felt as though he drifted over the floors of their home almost weightlessly, sleeping in their bed and drinking from their glasses without leaving the slightest trace of himself. He was always surprised when he found one of his fingerprints on the bathroom faucet or one of his stray hairs on the pillow. The Atlantic was only a few blocks away, and he could smell the salt in the air whenever he cracked open a window. Much of the furniture the couple owned was brushed steel and glass, though he was pleased to see that their two or three wood pieces—a dresser in the guest room, a sideboard in the dining room—were neatly constructed of Norway maple. The classes he taught were all in the morning, and on those afternoons when he would ordinarily have been shut away in his workshop with his thicknesser and his trying plane, he wandered around the house reflecting upon the various possessions he found. An oven timer in the shape of a pear. A hanging display of herb sachets. A Ping-Pong table with a loose net.
Most of all there were the photographs that decorated the walls, small clusters of them in every room, capturing the child of the family at every phase of his life. Here he stood propped in the fork of a willow, tilting his head to look at the camera. There he occupied the stage in front of his high-school orchestra, grimacing slightly as he drew a bow across his cello. And over there he sat in a terry-cloth shirt with a frog and a bee stitched onto the front, dreamily poking his finger into his belly button.
Anyone could see how much his parents loved the boy, and as the cabinetmaker looked at the pictures, he thought with some small pensiveness of his own son, wondering how he was getting along with his new teacher and whether his wife had been able to convince him to give his bicycle another try.
The photos the cabinetmaker found the most puzzling were massed together in the front hallway: eighteen of them, of any subject or none at all, including a blurred image of somebody's sneaker, a closeup of a pretty girl in a woollen hat, a picture of what appeared to be the band of light along the bottom of a closed door, and a shot of a stained-glass mobile made up of five red, blue, and yellow fish, taken from directly underneath. It looked as if someone had fired off the pictures without even bothering to glance through the eyepiece.
There was no way the cabinetmaker could have known that this was exactly what had happened, that the images had all been captured by the same boy he could see perching in the willow tree and playing his cello, one on each of his eighteen birthdays, a tradition that began the day his parents left the camera in his crib and he accidentally released the shutter, taking the picture of the glass mobile.
Nor could he have known that while he was lying awake in bed at night, unable to fall asleep without the slowly swaying whisper of his wife's breathing beside him, the boy in the pictures was lying awake, too, staring at his dorm-room ceiling and wishing he were back home.
Nor, finally, could he have known that as he passed from one end of the house to the other, listening to his footsteps and gazing at the photographs on the walls, the photographs were gazing back at him.
It is no easy thing to wrest yourself away from a place where you have grown into your habits, and no matter how hard you try, some part of you is bound to remain behind. There was a fragment of the boy that had never left the house at all, just as there was a fragment of the cabinetmaker that was still tending the machines in his workshop and sitting down to dinner with sawdust all over his clothes. This fragment of the boy watched the cabinetmaker from out of the flat blue eyes of the photographs, following his movements with great curiosity. Why did he sleep so long in the morning? What did it mean when he laced his hands together and sighed through his nose? What did it mean when he started laughing, suddenly, out of a dead quiet?
The boy in the pictures did not always understand the man, but the more he watched him, the more he grew to like him. Every day, for instance, in plain view of the photo magnets on the refrigerator, the cabinetmaker made a sandwich for himself out of luncheon meat and Swiss cheese, and every day his face gave a pucker of revulsion as he ate it. The boy in the superhero pajamas thought this expression of distaste was the funniest sight he had ever seen, the boy in the Cub Scout uniform showed a curling little smile as he looked on, and even the boy in the graduation gown found the phenomenon strange but somehow endearing: What was the story here? Was it the only sandwich the man knew how to make?
The boy in the framed portrait that stood on the desk in the study learned that he could listen to the cabinetmaker as he spoke on the phone at night. He said things like “No, the classes are going fairly well, actually. I don't know how I'm doing it, but they really seem to be learning something,” and “That makes only the second call this week, doesn't it? It looks like all the fuss is finally dying down,” and “I'm just so exhausted by the end of the day,” and “I miss you, too, honey,” and “Give him a kiss from his dad, will you?
And tell him he'd better not forget me.” Afterward, when the cabinetmaker hunched over to rest his forehead on the desk, the boy wished he could reach out of the picture frame and pat him on the back, as his parents had always done for him whenever he had a bad day at school.
The boys on the wall of the family room, their faces dimmed by more than a decade of sunlight, watched the cabinetmaker from their swing sets and their bumper cars, eavesdropping as he practiced his lectures. They did not always follow the meaning of his words, but they liked the way he paced back and forth between the stereo and the television, flinging his hands around like someone conducting a symphony. “You can't just fit a few boards together and expect to have a lasting piece of furniture,” he said. “You have to pay attention to the direction of the grain and the features of the particular wood you're using. Personally, I've always felt that it's best to choose a wood that's native to the landscape where you're working. Wood isn't like steel or plastic, after all. It comes
from life, and even after you cut the roots and drain the sap, it continues to live in some way. It shrinks and expands with the seasons. It weighs more on a rainy day than it does on a dry one—did you know that? My point is that when you remove a piece of wood from the environment in which it has grown, it's much more likely to warp or break on you.”
The cascade of words came to a stop every so often as the cabinetmaker stood before the wall of photographs thinking through some idea that had occurred to him. Once, he reached out and brushed the cheek of the boy sitting behind the wheel of a tractor. The boy felt the touch as a soft wind blowing from the direction of the stables.
The cabinetmaker lived in the house for four months. The individual days seemed long and slow to pass, but the weeks went by more quickly than he would have imagined possible. The leaves turned colors, and the frost took the vines, and soon he was folding his clothes and finishing off the food he had bought and filling the giant filing cabinet in his head with the last time for this and the last time for that. It was the last time he would wash this glass. It was the last time he would empty this drawer. It was the last time he would open a window and breathe in the ocean air, with its great bold pinching smell of everything living and everything dying. The cabinetmaker had spent so many hours in the presence of the boy in the pictures that he barely noticed him anymore, but he could have seen him walking down the street at any stage of his life, and instantly he would have recognized him.