Hum

by REBECCA RITTER

When my grandmother, eighty-four, needs to rush-order copies of The Glass Hotel or Where the Crawdads Sing for her book club, she hits me up. The family has shown her how to do online shopping maybe five or six times now, but it seems to settle in her mind for a week or two before melting away like fresh snow.

So on the first of every month, after she gets the new title in, I get on 200 West and drive through the gates of her senior living community, holding up my yellow badge to the attendant who waves me through. It’s its own ecosystem, Leisure World. Two polling stations, three chapels, an 18-hole golf course, and a population of bold, overfed deer who meander leisurely through traffic, weaving between silver Buicks and big, idling Caddies.

She answers the door, oxygen line trailing behind her. Fifty feet of clear tubing is wound throughout her small apartment, leaving slack twists and turns in her wake. It looks like a cat’s cradle for giants.

She gives me kisses and Lindor truffles. Her ancient Asus laptop takes its own time booting up. The password to log in is four characters long: the first name of my late grandfather, ten years gone. My cousin, an IT guy, set it up for her ages ago. He is also responsible for the mess of cables tangled up on the floor to the right of her desk.

Leisure World’s Wi-Fi is infamously tetchy, and we have spent years trying to tame it. The latest adjustments include two replacement routers, a new Ethernet cable, a call to the ISP, and now a signal booster, blinking orange-yellow-orange in quick staccato. All an attempt to give her enough signal to read email forwards from her still-living siblings, and so that I can click on the blue Internet Explorer icon and buy her a book. I am to purchase Little Lies Everywhere, according to her handwritten cursive.

(“Do you mean Little Fires Everywhere?” I ask her.

“No, it’s definitely lies.”

“Could it be Big Little Lies?”

“No, no, it’s the one with that TV show, the one with Jennifer Aniston.”

“. . . Reese Witherspoon?”

“Yes!”)

As I sit and wait for pages to load one pixel at a time, I am struck by a noise. A high-pitched hum.

The sound seems to grow as I sway gently in my grandmother’s swivel chair. It builds, on my right side, until it feels like a pressure is building inside the tunnels of my ear itself.

It is not quite a screech. More like a dentist’s drill. Somewhere between a dog’s whine and a dog whistle. I shake my head, my earrings jangling like tags on a collar.

“Do you hear that?” I ask her, not five feet away. She has trailed her O2 line into the den, where she can sit on the couch with her feet up and watch the Food Network.

“Hmm?” she says. “Hear what?”

Eventually, I tire of waiting and get up for a glass of water. Maybe another truffle. As I leave the den, I realize that the sound begins to lessen. I follow the slack trail of oxygen cable towards the bright natural light of the kitchen and the noise diminishes and diminishes, becoming more subdued with every step away from my grandmother’s den. By the time I am standing upright at her sink, gulping tap water out of a crystal glass, I can’t hear it at all.

When I sit back down at the computer, it comes back in full force. For a moment I look, curious, at my grandmother’s O2 line. I get back up and follow it to its source, the mammoth-sized concentrator, which sits humming in the hall. But that beast makes a different sound: a deep, churning whoosh, rhythmic, like pressing your ear to someone’s heart. It sounds like it’s breathing. Which, in a way, it is.

But at the desk, there is the hum. Waiting again on Amazon (Big Little Lies is in the cart, but checkout is loading glacially), I put my head down close to the mess of cables, the plastic boxes, the orange-yellow-orange. It feels like sticking my head in a beehive. It feels like whatever the equivalent of staring into the sun is for the ears. It feels like something I should not do.

It is coming up on winter, now, which means my social media feed is filled with dread. Friends lamenting seasonal depression; stressed-out mothers throwing together holiday plans; dinner parties planned around disease transmission. And police and fire departments, sharing countless PSAs about the dangers of space heaters, fire alarm batteries, Christmas tree lights. These are shared and re-shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. There are reports of house fires—a rash of them in Baltimore this year—and scary photos of burnt-out power strips, plastic ballooned and warped into something resembling an oversized éclair left in the oven too long.

The stories take me back to my last year of dorm living, when my roommates and I were all young, dumb, and cold. Not only did we have three illegal space heaters in the same apartment, but starting in October, we took to preheating the oven to 400 degrees as soon as we got home from class. We left the door open until everyone went to bed. I can’t remember, but I’m sure there were nights when we forgot to turn it off. In our rationale, we didn’t pay utilities, and the school wasn’t fixing our busted heat. I have a Polaroid of my roommate sitting in a kitchen chair, resting her stockinged feet and Birkenstocks on the open door of the oven, a copy of The Fire Next Time open in her lap.

Every night before bed now, I plug in my laptop, my phone, my Fitbit, and my vibrator. Also present are a smart TV, an oscillating fan, a charging Nintendo Switch, an electric pencil sharpener, three small lamps, an oil diffuser, and an LED mirror. With the dry November air, I am starting to wake up with cracked lips and a lightly bleeding nose. I’m thinking of adding a humidifier.

Years ago, I started Velcroing a heavy-duty power strip to the white oak of my nightstand. If you shake it, the whole thing creaks: the sharp shhck-ing sound of Velcro sticking and unsticking. But for the most part it stays solid, and it’s convenient as all get-out. The end result is that I sleep beside 1800 watts of electricity, humming six inches from my head.

I’ve had a few near misses, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night. I don’t tell my grandmother about that. She is afraid of the ocean, deep swimming pools, and dogs. During thunderstorms, she used to make my mother and her siblings unplug everything in the house and sit on the stairs in the dark, counting the seconds between lightning and thunderclap. (For the sake of her heart, she doesn’t know about my college space heaters either.)

For the most part, the strip doesn’t bother me, although sometimes images of melted mounds of plastic flash into my brain, just as I’m falling asleep. But as far as sound, I don’t hear a thing. Normally.

That was until about a year ago, when I noticed that the ports on the end of the strip—the USBs, where I plug in an old iPad—sound different from the rest. It must be something to do with the adaptor. A first-generation iPad charger puts out five watts of power; a modern iPhone, twelve. My power strip handles 120 volts. Now, I wasn’t a STEM major, which is why at this moment I am writing a lyric essay and have no job security, so I cannot tell you the math that this power strip is doing on a second-by-second basis. But I know that it is doing some kind of math, and that when it is thinking very, very hard, you can hear the gears of its tiny computer brain turning. That’s when it hums.

Electric noise has a way of building on itself exponentially. The high-pitched whistle from the charging iPad is faint, but strong, and so accumulative that I, who sleeps half a mile from the active remnants of the B&O railroad, under the BWI flight path, cannot sleep through it. The buzz finds its way into my dreams. It drills into my brain. It sounds like the dog, whining outside my door. I sit up in bed, tangled in my eye mask, thinking that I need to let her in. But she is fine. She is fine.

I belong to a number of insect-themed Facebook groups. Bugs aren’t particularly my thing, but I find people who have an enthusiasm for them heartwarming. They’re the kind of people who would not only catch a spider in a paper cup, but photograph it, categorize it, and cross-reference its color and spots against their encyclopedia of arachnids before releasing it into the wild. They grow bee-friendly gardens, pesticide-free lawns. They weep for crushed pill bugs. They mourn dead moths.

They fucking hate mosquitoes.

Forbes and Nature run headlines like “Four Bugs That Serve No Purpose on this Earth” and “A World Without Mosquitoes,” and there’s a reason. If bees all died out tomorrow, nearly half of all human-grown crops would wither and die, or else have to be pollinated by hand. If mosquitoes all died out tomorrow, we would save maybe a million lives per year. Citronella sales would plummet. I could enjoy my backyard on summer evenings, quiet except for the cicadas and the rumble of the train tracks. Bill Gates could stop spending so much of his money on malaria; maybe pay some taxes.

So mosquitoes are not only one of the world’s deadliest animals, but they’re perhaps one of the only truly useless species on Earth. They are parasites, straight through. They live only to drink blood, make noise, and further their own existence.

A few years ago, the Parks and Recreation department of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was the target of public outcry after they quietly installed dozens of electronic noisemakers in their parks. You may have heard of these: they’re called Mosquitoes. They emit a high-pitched ringing sound that, theoretically, only the young can hear. By middle age, your ears have deteriorated to the point that you can no longer hear sounds above a certain register. The term is presbycusis, literally Greek for “old” (presbys) and “hearing” (akousis). It is so universal in Homo sapiens that you can set your watch by it. I can’t right now because my Fitbit is charging. But the point stands.

In Philly, the Mosquitoes run from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. They’re meant to prevent loitering, vandalism, the crime of “gathering.” Breaking curfew. They went up in D.C. a while back, too—on top of light poles, outside 7-Elevens, beside park benches. Little metal boxes, the size of old cameras, mounted up high somewhere, usually surrounded by cages to prevent destruction. Wouldn’t you, at fifteen, have wanted to throw something at a little box that was screaming at you to leave? Did you know that 30 percent of D.C.’s homeless are families with children?

The Mosquitoes in D.C. got taken down because of a discrimination suit; I don’t know what will save us from loitering now.

I think, sometimes, about tinnitus.

I’ve never had it, but I think about it. The feeling sounds familiar. It’s so common, at this point, especially among veterans. Musicians. Athletes. Concertgoers. Heavy metal enthusiasts. Helicopter pilots, I guess, but that’s why they have all the ear protection.

People have been treating tinnitus since before history began. The Egyptians called it the bewitched ear; their doctors poured sweet oils into the ear canal with reed stalks. In Mesopotamia, the condition was treated with opium, cannabis, belladonna. Some tribes in East India believed the constant noise was caused by animals scratching at the ear drum—they proposed fumigation. Welsh doctors in the fourteenth century recommended slicing bread, fresh from the oven, and pressing each side of the loaf over your ears, as hot as could be borne.

There’s a famous episode from the original Star Trek, where Kirk has to fight this big green lizard. You’ve probably seen memes of it: the one where William Shatner shouts “Goooorn!” It’s from 1967, and it’s filmed in the middle of the desert with no budget whatsoever. One of the only things the early production crew had going for them then was that explosions were pretty cheap. Not big, pretty, fiery explosions, but, you know, a simple kaboom? Easy as cake.

Only, it was the sixties, and “workplace safety” hadn’t really caught on yet, so William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were only feet away when a ton of special effects explosives went off, right by their heads. Both suffered hearing loss; Shatner has had chronic tinnitus ever since.

Most people have heard of tinnitus. People think of it as an annoyance. A faint ringing in the ears. But suicide rates in severe tinnitus sufferers are some of the highest to be found. The noise is constant. It never leaves you. It never stops. You stop leaving the house because you get embarrassed, always asking people to repeat themselves. The isolation worsens the depression. The noise becomes your only companion. “There were days when I didn’t know how I would survive the agony,” writes Shatner. “I was so tormented by the screeching in my head I really thought I would not be able to go on.”

I watched this documentary a while back, about people who think they’re allergic to electricity: they call it “electromagnetic hypersensitivity.” They wrap themselves in silver blankets, avoid grocery stores and radios. They don’t carry cell phones. One of the women let a camera crew follow her daily routine. She biked to the supermarket, avoiding power lines. Once there, she did deep breathing exercises, like a free diver priming her lungs, and sprinted into the store, squinting under the fluorescents like they were burning her skin. She’d called ahead to the customer desk—on a rotary phone, I think—and they had her purchases bagged and waiting. She grabbed her things, threw cash on the counter, and ran. When she got back outside, she had to sit down on the cement, panting. Later, she had a meltdown on camera, telling the documentary crew that their equipment was giving her a reaction. She sent them away, needing rest.

When they came back the next day, with a skeleton crew—no cell phones, no laptops, nothing wireless—she was apologetic. She smiled wanly and pulled out a notebook, pages and maps and plans sticking out all over the sides. She showed them her plan to move cross-country. People with the sensitivity, they’re starting to flock to this little town in West Virginia. Green Bank, population 143. City limits are contained within the National Radio Quiet Zone. All wireless signals are outlawed.

It sounds insane. It sounds quiet. It sounds peaceful, maybe.

As I sit down to print the third draft of this essay—interrupted by the heavy stop-and-start hum of the printer as it warms up in the living room—I hear a squeal from somewhere in the house. High-pitched, shrill, shrieking almost. Faint. It sounds like a faulty charger. A dentist’s drill. A dog’s whine. I get up, worried, thinking about melting electronics and routers gone haywire. “Do you hear that?” I ask my mother.

“Hear what?” she says.

I walk to the entertainment setup in the corner of the den. A jumble of cables connects the printer, the modem, the 4G extender, the cable box, the Blu-Ray, the flatscreen, and an old air freshener to a decades-old power strip. Burnt éclairs and house fires flash through my mind. Somewhere in the kitchen, a broken fire alarm dangles from the ceiling. We keep meaning to fix that.

As I get closer to the TV, though, I walk past the hinged French doors that lead out to the deck. They’re locked, blinds drawn closed for winter. I realize the noise is coming from outside.

I unlock the deadbolt and walk out. It is December 2nd. The air is biting and wet. The deck is painted in a layer of melting frost. I can see my breath.

And, looking out into the woods that butt up against the back of our home, a long, wide hill of trees and transmission towers that separate us from the railroad, I see them. Birds. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. In every fifty-foot tree that makes up the skyline, topping every branch and bough, there are birds. Later, a Facebook group of ornithologists will identify them as starlings, but for now, I don’t know what kind.

They chirp, and sing, and screech. All of their voices, together, sound like an electronic scream. I stand in wet socks and stare. They fly and flutter, darting up and down, lighting again and again atop the faint black branches. They float in between the trees and the powerlines. Overhead, a plane roars by.