For the first in his adult life, Gabriel heard a shout.

Like us all, of course, he had heard his televised cries. But he had never been the one on the ground, responding and responsible. It had been so long, indeed, since he had heard a human wail, that the mere fact of Gabriel’s registering the sound was miraculous–how the chord of his neural pathways, that sudden anxious tick, could still be struck after decades of disuse. Against his wiser spirits, perhaps almost instinctively, he ran towards the source of the sound. His choice was all the stranger because, if you were to have told Gabriel, as he prepared his daily dose of eggs, that he were to encounter a shout on his morning walk to campus, then our dear, neurotic Gabriel would likely have never mustered a single foot out the door.

Gabriel was one of the few remaining humanities professors, and he had never been fully convinced by the age-old adage about the pen being mightier than the sword, nor would he have been willing to test it. In a time where tragedies had become blasé, where Shakespeare was never staged, where humanities professors were only ever permitted to ask and answer the impossible question “how did we get here?”, Gabriel was among a class of well-educated miscreants whose practical knowledge hardly sufficed to tie his shoes. And yet he ran headlong into the alleyway.

Gabriel himself had never shouted since the incontinent era of his first, tottering years. Perhaps he could deeply empathize with this unknown stranger, imagining unspeakable horrors, the kind it would require to make anyone shout. Perhaps that was why Gabriel was racing breathlessly to the epicenter of some awful event where he would no doubt prove himself of little use. Or perhaps it was mere brain chemistry: an inevitable reaction to this tectonic event measuring several dozen decibels, when most other voices were confined to a whisper.

Like most of his generation, he had donated readily and substantially to the relief efforts of nationally-televised disasters whenever they arose, had proudly and happily considered such acts as his civic duty rather than mere charity. Evenings spent holding his wife’s hand, drinking tea–would be disturbed sharply and suddenly by the bright, flashing apparition of the television screen, which the Hernandez family placed discretely and fashionably upon the hearth. (He could even remember one compliance officer complimenting the TV’s placement.) Taught effective reporting strategies at Yale, and now a widely trusted journalist, Danny Kaufman tilted the microphone to screaming survivors more often than he mumbled his own words into it.

Gabriel himself had taught a seminar on the historical shift from ocular to auditory metaphors, in describing the governmental apparatus. Big Brother had become Big Ears. The panopticon was replaced with a messy entanglement of neurons. The male, penetrative gaze had been replaced with feminine, receptive hearing. The all-seeing eye exchanged its convex curves for a deep concavity; it became a satellite-dish, receiving messages from far and wide. But, for all this, Gabriel was no first responder, no bureaucrat, no Dumbo; neither a heightened auditory sense nor a lack of common sense could fully explain his decision.

If interviewed, Gabriel’s mother would have said that her son is, was, and always had been “a good boy.” His wife could have showed you a trunk filled with loving notes scrawled on post-its, which, besides touch, was their primary communicative medium. In short, he was not an unkind or unfeeling man. But this went above and beyond the usual call to service.

The world underwent a drastic shift as he rounded the corner. At 10:15am, well after the morning rush, the vertical path, down the main road, was empty. However, this new, burgeoning horizontal lane revealed what would have been a rather troubling sight for anyone, let alone a mere classroom attendant. Her bloodshot eyes spoke either to her deep, intolerable pain, or to a recent bout of drug usage. In either case, she was overflowing rage; her prior victims began piling the alley. In her left, clutching hand, almost resembling a claw, she brandished a makeshift pike so hazardous that no compliance officer would have permitted its presence at a work site. Immediately upon Gabriel’s arrival, she stopped her screaming–briefly–to introduce herself by name, even offering him her free hand. Dumbstruck, he could not respond, nor make sense of her sounds. She cackled, before hurling a crusty bolt of tetanus at his head.

Gabriel would later have a rather hard time explaining himself, especially to his concerned wife: why did he chose to go to the alleyway that day? But he felt, in that moment, an understanding of himself and of others that he was not to find again. Those lifeless bodies were companions. They were bonded by no mere coincidence of fate, no genetic lineage, no mere neighborly locale, no shared tastes, mannerisms or predilections. They were bonded because, in a world of choices, they had each made the same; they had betrayed, at the cost of all dignity and secrecy, their most deeply held beliefs about the world, and had found them shared, which mattered more, perhaps, than the fact that they were wrong–that they had proven themselves more gullible than heroic.

Gabriel’s pride remained attached, steadfastly, to the heaped corpses in the alleyway; however, Gabriel himself departed at a rather brisk trot (his own attempt at a sprint), before the devil could even make up her mind to chase him. While, better than Orpheus, he did not check to see if she was following him, her hefty boots announced their presence upon the concrete, and far more loudly than he would have liked. She had, in fact, decided to give chase.

Were it not for the strange sensation of strain and warmth, timed consistently and coincidentally with the noise in the street, Gabriel would have suspected that another man was screaming. But, to his surprise, and without much conscious effort, the sound was coming from his own body–this fleshly possession, whose returns on investment, in the foreseeable future, promised only great torment.

In the minutes before what was liable to be a gruesome murder, he did not feel death come over him as he had once expected it. It was not a dark, cold blanket, swaddling him. It was an openness, an exposure. The nothingness of death appeared before him as a great revelation, as if every surface had been flayed, laying bare the maw that had consumed his every moment. It was as if he had suddenly realized that he was alone in this great expanse. It was as if a friendly shroud had been covering his eyes, only to be torn, now, asunder. The sounds of his footsteps–the dialogue between sole and pavement–comprised his only remaining communication with the great big universe. These wordless echoes spoke to him, their cryptic language reminding him once again that he had not made the Earth nor Heavens. The ground had preceded his presence upon it; he had not chosen these feet. He was suspended, as ever, in media res. To the last, throughout every moment of his confounded and inquisitive being, this callous world remained woefully unresponsive.

To put it simply, and use a rather banal expression: he felt alone. In these final moments he did not think of his wife, his parents, his schoolteachers, his students. There was no vignette of his kindly, elderly neighbor offering him candy, which could be juxtaposed in the next scene to a white linen coffin–his first cross-armed exposure to death. His ego did not die before his spirit, in some grand, redemptive outpouring of empathy for his killer. He did not ask himself who his killer was, what she might have wished, what histories had led to this moment. Death, not life, flashed before his eyes. Still screaming, he thought only of his unanswered complaint, of the deafening noise of his universe. At the prospect of being sliced into edible bits, he had one big gripe with the universe, which owed him a rather lengthy explanation.

Most often, frustration with the tardiness of one’s interlocutor is precisely what deafens one to one’s desired response. Gabriel’s case was no different. He had ran past row after row of residences, expecting that each would be emptied for the workday hours. He had considered himself forsaken, and had nearly proven his expectations correct, running past his refuge. Filled with such bitter anger at his loneliness, he did not notice my door open, several steps behind him.

I had time, barely, to yank Gabriel inside–just before his demon arrived. She clawed and clamored at the threshold of my freshly locked door. Though quite cordial under normal circumstances, Gabriel did not ask before closing the blinds. I didn’t mind–after all, I would rather not lock eyes with whatever felon had followed him.

After the imminent threat of death and/or severe bodily harm had dissipated, Gabriel came to the abrupt discovery that he was in my home. Suddenly, he stopped screaming; his lips closed tightly, and the heat must have risen from his lungs to his cheeks, for he blushed, nearly crimson.

I sat at the living room table, and gestured with an open palm towards the open chair opposite mine. He stood at the window, staring at me, listening. Just a short, albeit safe, distance away, she was still screaming–I feared for the integrity of my glasses. But he had grown accustomed to the sound. His fright lay in his eyes, not his ears–not her rasp, interrupted, now, by loud choking; but, instead, with my visage. He appeared, almost, as scared of me as he had been of her just a few moments before. This was the first–he was realizing–that he had come into contact with a stranger. Of course, he had his fair share of new students each year; but they met, always, in his classroom, in his office. He had never entered a stranger’s home, save for his early years, when he was a guest under the auspices of his parents, a mere plus one.

He eyed my choice of décor for a considerable period before feeling safe enough to approach me. My hands lay steepled on the table; I tried to avoid watching him. He did not react kindly to my bared teeth, my primate smile: what I had considered to be a universal sign of non-aggression.

Sitting in my living room, we saw only the flash of a car’s brights, which painted my blinds in stripes, the patriotic colors of our flag. We did not hear the murderer’s arrest. Rather, the sudden arrival to our soundscape was silence–a silence that swallowed up Gabriel’s marauding demon.

It was a long time before he began to speak. So long, in fact, that I had almost forgotten he was there. I was thinking of a story my grandmother had once told, when her second incontinence made her speech flow freely. Living with her first husband, they had been victims of a home invasion. The worst part was not the theft, but the insecurity. She loved him, she told me–she just couldn’t take the noise. In a few weeks’ wages, he made up for what he lost–the nightmares lasted much longer. Every night, between the dark hours of 2 and 4, when sound travelled much further than sight, he would wake screaming. For the first few years, it was tolerable; sometimes, his screams didn’t even wake her up. But, later, as the transition set in, the noise became absolutely unbearable. It was a ludicrous thing–a man who could not speak in the day, raising a hellish racket when even the moon was retiring. Neighbors complained. She loved him, she repeated. Sincerely. She was just too ashamed. She left him, with no warning, no plan, silently. The tremor in her hands grew in intensity as the story developed; she was sadder, then, sharing that secret, I think, than she had been at my grandfather’s deathbed. Though she and I were alone in that room, her distant, unseeing eyes sought some other audience. Her hospital gown was dotted, crimson, with poppies; bodies that had become petals, tongues that had become stigmas.

I remembered my shellshocked companion only after his voice came to remind me of his presence. It was deeper than his thin frame would have suggested, and its tone remained far steadier than his gaze. “I’m not one to speak; surely, you must understand?” I nodded. “But I feel that I must. And I feel that you want me to?” Again, I nodded. “Then I will give myself permission to speak, but only under the pretense that it is necessary for your well-being–as my benefactor.” At this, his gaze trained intensely on the grains in my table. I continued nodding, in his periphery. “One more thing: you cannot interrupt. To be frank, I am rather squeamish. If I should hear your voice, I will lose all my nerve.” I thought about his request, hesitant, but without any obvious qualms against it. He waited. Finally, I assented, in our now customary fashion.

He felt nervous, no doubt, to speak words that he had not first written. They were likely to be among his first and last autobiographical statements; in the pauses between them, I watched the rapid movement of his eyes trace the curl of some script he had only just begun forming.

His story was terse, its words carefully chosen, holding hardly any more details than I have given you here. He did not elaborate on himself, his loves, his fears. In the lengthy pause after he had finished, I wondered whether I ought to establish some means for his travel home. Having crossed my threshold, he was returned to life, and this meant returning, too, to that taciturn peace which mimicked contentment, which had been his custom. While I thought over how best to get him to his own bed, I poured myself a cup of tea. I raised the carafe towards him, but he declined the offer.

The most telling datum, perhaps, which Gabriel presented to me, was brief, but I saw it, and knew he had seen me watch. He went from the kitchen to the living room, where he held a framed photo of my late husband: it was adorned at its base with a short dash between the dates of his birth and death. He wept over the frame; his shoulders braving such spasmodic waves that I feared he might break it. He did not ask, nor even turn to face me; the grief was his own.

I do not know how she was alerted–I had not seen Gabriel make any attempts to call her–but the matriarch of the Hernandez household arrived shortly thereafter. She whisked him away, with the little alacrity she could muster, wordlessly carrying her charge, an arm wrapped in his elbow, the way back home. I watched them stagger away, for several minutes, until their backs were no longer visible, submerged in the sky-blue cataracts of my eyes.

With the exception of that brief soliloquy in my kitchen, I have no doubt that Gabriel has not spoken a word of this event, not even to his wife. I think that to be a great shame, really, that others deserved to hear. In the first few months, I tried to share Gabriel’s story with others. But autobiography is an art upon which we have learned to frown; its appearance is met, quickly, with disgust: violently hushed, extinguished below even a whisper. Under such circumstances, how could I be so indulgent to call attention to what were not even my own sufferings, sufferings which, moreover, were no longer present?

Much more than you are, I am quite displeased with myself; but, still, I remain powerless to affect any change. What little remains of my pride demands that I trim the verdant roses of my shame: I must inform you that I am not one to break. The last time I had entered the world of sound was at my own husband’s funeral, and even then I polluted the air no farther than his single graveyard plot. Perhaps it was hearing the sound of another that has done me in, perhaps it is the second incontinence of my elder years, but this story often finds its way to my lips, crawling from out some unknown crevice of my psyche. As a last resort, I have settled upon writing down these impulses of Gabriel as they come. I hope that you may make better use of it than I.