SHORT STORY - The Silent Treatment

From the warm haven of silence, Henry’s mind began to be prised open by the crowbar of consciousness as though bailiffs were intent on breaking through his slumberous citadel to wrench him from sleep. Gradually, the aural pressures of the external world began to widen the cracks until involuntarily he surrendered himself to waking. His apartment being situated on the fringe of a major road junction, the tumult of traffic oscillated in a sine wave of sound that failed ever to be tempered by the rising and falling of the hours.

For Henry, the steady carousel of noise served as a cradle that massaged him to sleep and provided the reassuring blanket draped around the shoulders of his reality. Unlike many, Henry did not resent this intrusion from his anaemic dreams, he seldom clung to his pillow trying to squeeze out a few more minutes of repose; in fact he rather relished it and the work that hauled him from bed.

Granted, as an Information Marketing Facilitator for a data harvesting organisation, he rarely felt intellectually stimulated or creatively challenged; these discrepancies were offset by the fact of his proximity to colleagues on which he thrived. Although not on particularly friendly terms with any of them, the sense that he was one constituent part among many that engineered the robust apparatus was satisfaction enough.

As he submitted himself to the scrum of bodies moving through the passageways leading beneath the junction towards the underground station, out of habit he surveyed the ash-grey sky to marvel at the regiment of high rises that thrust upwards into its belly, a new recruit seemingly being added to their ranks almost by the week. Very often, digital projection of the completed structures would shimmer in the empty air like ghosts; premonitions of the physical forms soon to fill the space. It never failed to give Henry the impression of a truly dynamic city reaching ever forwards, renewing itself almost organically with scarcely any evidence of human coalition.

Henry was still speculating on the invigorating pace of the city as a stimulant to one’s own progression through time, as he crossed the platform and boarded his regular 7:24 tube heading four stops north towards his office building. He sat down and sighed in harmony with the train moving away from the station; becoming shrink-wrapped by the symphony of motion, the clunk and grind of wheels on rails, the squeal as brakes were applied and eased, the low panting and wheezing of subterranean infrastructure flexing and tensing its muscles as they unfolded across the city.

Underscoring this and pitched at an almost ultrasonic level, Henry recognised the white noise burble and tingle of the train passengers locked into the digital ether that susurrated through their forebrains, rifling off scattergun messages and consuming swathes of information with the minimal expended effort of basking sharks allowing plankton to float into their gaping mouths.

Henry began to ponder the minor tasks allotted for him to complete upon arriving at work. He had put off completing a strategic sample review the day before and knew he would be required to exert some extra energy later in the day to be able to complete to the deadline. Not that he much minded; a working day without some pressure to corral you on was unfulfilling and tedious. He looked about him at the crush of people heading in to the city, predominantly middle-ranking data engineers and exponents just like him, each one’s eyes flickering in alternate directions to the whims of their informational overlays. No one ever speaks on the tube.

Despite this being so, the sense of community to be experienced on these brief journeys foisted together was something Henry valued; the notion that they were bound together to a homogenous end point serving as a simplification of the progression of life itself to a place where the atomisation of individuals would be dissolved away into an inevitably unifying collective. Like most, Henry contemplated his impending death enthusiastically, almost as a hobby of sorts, seeing it as a necessary arbiter to steady his mind against the ceaseless streams of ephemeral information that burst and died so many firework displays.

His shuffling gaze paused on a girl sat diagonally across from him; her blonde fringe, inwardly mouth and ever so slightly upturned nose, the distinguishing features of a pleasant but not especially attractive face. As he scanned her face for some ambiguous signifier, she turned and met his eyes in a catalysing instance of connectivity that, in its intensity and suddenness, seemed to relegate all the attendant disunion and fragmentation of his life to the borderlands of concern. In the stare that was held for perhaps only a smattering of seconds, he felt the dissociative quiddity of human relations dissolving into irrelevancy.

For some reason, today his determination appeared to be imbued with a sturdier and more profound resolve, but just at the point where he was convinced that against his better judgement he was about to try and say something to her, she rose from her seat and made her way to the doors opening onto the waiting station. He sat back and relaxed his tensing muscles, at once relieved that the decision to break the void had been removed from his remit, and yet disheartened by this failure. This gave way to the sense of paranoia that she had somehow telepathically discerned his burgeoning intent and sought to remove herself from the situation, avoiding any awkward contact that might possibly have been alchemised from the silence.

On her empty seat he saw she had left a possession of some kind. Before being cognisant of his own motives, he rose from his sedentary pose, snatched it up and leapt from the carriage before the doors sealed the passengers in. He was so preoccupied scouring the platform for her direction that it wasn’t until he was leapfrogging the exit steps that he glanced at what it was he had liberated from its forgotten fate. An old paperback book, he hadn’t seen one for a long while. The cover was scored with stress lines and tainted by fading, but he could still make out the title – ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ by Thomas de Quincey.

Perhaps this was some kind of clue she had bestowed on him, imbued with an ambiguous significance the meaning of which was as archaic as the artefact. Either way he wrestled his way through the people encroaching in silent waves onto the station entrance and began jogging as he spotted the girl’s blonde hair a little way ahead of him up the street.

Catching up with her, the surplus adrenaline that had thrust him first from his seat and then out of the station in this, he conceded to himself, a bizarre pursuit, sluiced through his characteristic restraint and he reached out a hand to lightly grasp her arm. She stopped in her tracks as though pre-empting his approach and pivoted around to face him with a vacant expression that gave nothing of her displeasure at having the sanctuary of her own purpose breached so brusquely by a complete stranger.

Slightly flustered from the energetic trail he had blazed to reach the girl, for a moment or two Henry could only gesture vaguely at the book clutched in one hand as though he were a politician gesticulating with his speech notes. Then he was able to blurt out some words, “Sorry about this, you left your book… you left your book on the tube just now…”

As his words registered, the girl’s ambivalence bled away into an expression of shock and dismay, as though he were a long-lost acquaintance suddenly returned before her. She began to back away from Henry, eyes engorged with alarm, her pursued shut mouth exuding a startled “mnhh … mnhh … mnhh”.

Baffled by this reaction, Henry tried to close the void that had been opened by her retreat, but his protestations to the effect of “I just wanted to give you think back. What’s the matter?! Don’t be scared!”, only served to enflame her aggravation and she set off away from him at a fraught pace, looking back in disgust once, and then twice, before being immersed in the pedestrian traffic.

Overcome with confusion as to the nature of her reaction, Henry decided he could do little more than trudge on in the direction of his workplace. Perhaps, he thought, she had been caught in a moment of online saturation in which her web filters became temporarily paralyzed by the sudden focus on physical reality that brought on some kind of fracturing imbalance.

As Henry approached the entrance to his office building, he remained in a state of bewildered despondency at the morning’s events. He couldn’t help pondering over the girl’s guttural monosyllabic moaning when he had tried remonstrating with her, and kept flickering through the yellowed and stiff pages of the paperback as though the words within might offer forth some measure of elucidation.

Passing colleagues in the main foyer, he nodded in mutual vague acknowledgement, the gravitational forces of compulsion bobbing their heads in accordance with the laws of etiquette, and took the elevator to his office on the third floor. Open-plan and spacious, with an arrangement of red-cushioned seats shipwrecked in a cove of deep blue carpet, the office was already at full capacity Henry noted as he shuffled as inconspicuously as possible (a futile gesture since his late arrival was automatically noted) to his work terminal. As he locked into the network and fired up his personal settings, he found his mind skittering nervously over perceived oddities.

The tinnitus of the air-conditioning system appeared to be accentuated in his mind, as though the vents and flues were grinding and whirring their way into the back of his skull like a slow bolt gun in an abattoir. Try as he might, he couldn’t help but sweep around the recesses of his temporality in an attempt to isolate the uncertain itch that plagued him. A couple of his colleagues strolled past his terminal one behind the other, whilst a middle-aged woman stood at a water fountain with a detached expression as she raised the paper cone to her sunken mouth. A younger man approached and hovered by the fountain beside her as she finished drinking, her head titled back but eyes focussed forwards on him, before she smiled awkwardly and moved away from obstructing the fountain.

It was this apparently innocuous and blasé interaction that suddenly froze Henry’s attention on the crux of his abstract confusion. No one, so far over the course of that morning, had said a word to anyone else. It was quite clear to him now that he thought back over the day. Whilst it wasn’t extraordinary to not witness conversation on the tube, given that most endure it as a container vessel to tunnel through their own silent introspections, there had been no one on the street or in the office talking. No organic vocalisation had been sounded amongst the haze of inorganic murmuration.

Now that his attention was attuned to this aberration, there was nothing he could do expect register it in incremental degrees of alarm. He disengaged himself from his work station and began striding along the cleavage between terminals, throwing stares from left to right at each silent inhabitant that sat alone within, cocooned like grubs inside their host.

As he reached the perimeter wall of the office he skirted back around, by now his agitation levels were winched upwards at a steadily steepening incline. In so doing of course, his fraught and uneasy demeanour had begun to arouse some attention, and as he hurried past his colleagues began to break off from their data duties to follow him past, almost trying to pin him against the wall with their intriguing stares, some rising from their seats as though ready to restrain him were it become necessary.

He was soon at the front of the office again, and made for the water fountain where a male colleague stood fumbling with the spout, quite clearly eager not be become singled out by this frantic miscreant. Upon reaching him, Henry grabbed him firmly by the arm causing his water cone to spill to the carpet.

“What’s the matter with everyone? Can’t you speak? Huh?!”

The man’s casual concern at Henry’s approach broadened into shock at his words, and he recoiled away as though his arm had been charged by Henry’s grip.

Panic now firing in shoots around his nervous system, Henry staggered to the staircase and plunged down them, uncertain of anything except seeking some kind of explanation for this nightmarish development. He barrelled past several startled colleagues on his way down who shrivelled back against walls and into alcoves to be clear of his path.

And then he was out on the street again, the stentorian sound of traffic and infrastructure engulfing him at once like a riptide current. He opened his eyes from having clenched them closed with momentary relief at being outside, and spotted across the street the blonde girl from the tube pointing with an accusatory zeal at him for the benefit of two dark-suited men each with thick black-framed glasses.

Something in the manner of her behaviour seemed to impel Henry to run from the men, but it was too late, they were already halfway across the road towards him, cars yielding to let them pass.

When they reached him, both clasped a hand on his arms with the grip only attributable to authority; it belied a multitude of similar interceptions, an expertise of constraint and coercion. Their faces too were almost identical, pallid and wrinkled, their mouths pulled taut in scowls like knots of rope. The girl approached with tentative steps behind them.

“What’s happening? Who are you people? Why will no one speak to me?!” he cried out in desperation.

At his outburst, pedestrians moved away wide past them in an exaggerated berth, and the girl suddenly became animated, staring at him fixedly as though condemning him for some perceived assault on her person.

Her slightly inverted mouth began to open very slowly and as she drew nearer to Henry he could see the full horror of her condition. Her jaw began to hang down as though detached and inside her mouth he could see the scar tissue and raw cavity where a tongue should have lain. It was like staring into a horrendous wound, the mottled grey hollow revealing the rows of teeth roots sunk tight into tender gums.

Wrenching his eyes away, he looked up into the faces of his two mysterious captors and was horrified to see the same reptilian cleft mouths hanging open to reveal the severed frenulum left like a thick ridge on the valley floor of their mouths. He began to thrash wildly, unable to break free from their anchored grip, and as they began to move him away towards a waiting vehicle, he threw back his head to propel his manic screams into the suffocating noise of the sky.