Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

Goat-Eyes smiled. “Now you can hear everything…and nothing.”

At first he had no idea what she was talking about, but then the sounds within the coffee house began to grow louder. The cute barista was taking the order of a young woman wearing a short-sleeved top that displayed her colorfully tattooed arms.

“THAT’LL BE THREE DOLLARS AND NINETY-EIGHT CENTS,” the barista said.

Each syllable was like a cannon blast, a thundercrack, and he winced, gritting his teeth against the pain caused by the barrage of sound. The woman opened her wallet, removed a debit card, and inserted it into the reader on the counter. Each of these motions produced deafening sounds, and when the card reader began beeping, the noise loud as a fire engine’s siren, Larry moaned. He pressed his hands to his ears, pressed them hard, but this did nothing to shut out the noises assaulting him.

The conversation of the two people at the table next to his, talking about how their respective supervisors were assholes. The hiss of the espresso machine behind the counter, the whirring of a coffee grinder. People sipping their drinks, chewing pastries or cookies. The gurgling in their stomachs as acid churned. Air rushing through their nostrils, down into their lungs, then back up to be exhaled. The thudding of their hearts, the whooshing of blood flowing through their veins, the combined sounds of hundreds of bodily processes at work. He could even hear the crackle of electricity shooting between neurons in their brains, the soft moist tearing sound of cells dividing, the even softer sound of old cells dying…. All of it rushing in on him like a tsunami, invading him, overwhelming him, drowning him….

He let out an anguished cry – the sound of his own voice so loud he thought his brain might liquefy in his skull. He jumped up from the table, only partially aware of everyone else in the café – including the cute barista – looking at him with a mixture of puzzlement and alarm. He ran toward the door, bumping into tables on the way, knocking over people’s drinks, causing them to spill, customers yelling and cursing as he hurried past. He kept his hands to his ears, for all the good it did, and opened the door by slamming into it with his shoulder. He plunged out into the street—

—and was hit by ten times the amount of sound that he’d experienced inside the coffee shop, a hundred times, a thousand. Cars and trucks passing by on the street, engines roaring, brakes squealing, horns honking. Pedestrians’ shoes click-clacking on the pavement. A rumble of an airplane flying somewhere off in the distance. He heard disembodied voices and jumbled musical notes, and he realized he was hearing cell phone conversations and radio broadcasts, picking up the signals as if he were some kind of receiver. It was too much, too much. He couldn’t remember his name, who he was, possessed only the vaguest sense that he existed at all. Everything was sound and sound was pain and that pain had become his entire world, the center of his existence. He was pain, and pain was him.

He thought he was screaming, but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the sounds of the citizens of Oakmont going about their day. Some pedestrians glanced at him with pity, some with alarm, but all avoided him. Hands still clasped to his head, he fell to his knees, wailing, tears streaming from his face. He wanted to lean over and pound his head against the sidewalk until he was dead, anything to escape the mad cacophony buffeting him. He almost did it, too, was on the verge, when the sound suddenly ceased.

The relief was so immediate, so profound, that he gasped and nearly collapsed. Tentatively, he took his hands from his ears, waiting for the pain to return, but it didn’t. He looked at his palms, expected to see them covered with blood, as if something deep in his brain had ruptured. But his hands were clean. He rose to his feet, legs shaky, head swimming with vertigo.

It’s over, he thought. Thank Christ, it’s—

But it wasn’t.

All the sounds that had overwhelmed him simply didn’t return to their normal volume. They continued to diminish, growing softer, less distinct, until finally they cut out altogether. The world around him continued to move – people passed him on the sidewalk, vehicles drove on the street – but it did so in utter silence.

Just as he’d feared, the unimaginable din of the heightened sounds that had plagued him until a moment ago had damaged something inside him – his hearing. He was now as deaf as the people he interpreted for. He’d long thought that if he ever lost his hearing, he’d be able to deal with it, no problem. He already knew how to sign, and he was an okay-if-not-great lip reader. And he was around deaf people all the time. They and their culture weren’t alien to him. He figured he’d be able to adjust to being deaf fairly well, certainly much better than the average person. But the silence terrified him. He felt as if a large part of who he was had just died. How could he play music if he couldn’t fucking hear? And he couldn’t interpret anymore if he couldn’t hear people speak the words he needed to relay through sign language. Not only had he lost one of his primary senses – one he relied on more than the others combined – he’d lost the ability to do his job or pursue his artistic passion. He’d lost the things that made him who he was.

But then he began to become aware of something within the silence. Not sound, of course, but something like it. It reminded him of being aware of a signal that’s just out of the range of human hearing. You could feel it. It might make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, might make