Written August 23, 2019

In an instant, he was reborn. 

Clank. Voices. Or at least he could only guess that was what voices sounded like. He used his nose as his eyes. His lids were too heavy to unglue. The air burned. It was full of chemicals that gave him a sour taste in his mouth. Or maybe the taste was part of being reborn. Swish. Was that the sound of water? He smiled. He heard. Yes, he was indeed reborn. Groan. He made this sound. He felt the vibrations as always, but this time he could truly hear the nuance in the tones. He had looked at a piece of sheet music before, allowing his imagination to ride what he could only think to be the liquid infinity of the melody, dripping with beauty and feeling as golden and pure as honey. But now he could hear the real notes again.

A woman’s voice. He knew it was a woman’s voice. He could hear it from the depths of his cavernous storage of memory: his mother, his sisters, his friends, his aunts. He loved these women, and he loved their voices, high and silvery. If he strained to hear—which, he nearly had to remind himself, he could now do—he could make out what this woman was saying.

“…be making his recovery quickly? I’m so worried, doctor. What if it all goes wrong?”

A man’s voice. The voice of his father, brother, friends, and uncles. Their voices were a deep, gravely baritone. They reminded him of a tundra, so vast and expansive that they could fit wolves and bears and rivers and mountains.

“Mrs. Reed, I assure you that everything will be perfectly fine.” A pause. Silence. The only sound he had ever heard from five years, seven months, and two days old until now. “It looks like Elliot’s already awake. He can probably hear us.”

“Doctor?”

“Mrs. Reed.”

“What if he gets meningitis again? Or another disease that makes him deaf?”

“It’s very unlikely, Mrs. Reed.”

Shuffle. Footsteps. A presence sat beside where he lay on the stiff cot. “Elliot? Can you hear me, honey?” Turning to the doctor, “Can he talk? Now that he can hear?”

“At first it’ll sound garbled when he tries, but he’ll get the hang of it eventually.”

Honey. She had called him that. Honey. The sound of his wife’s voice. It sounded like honey. He had never heard it before. Elliot forced his eyes open. They pointed directly at a ceiling fan hanging above his head. For a moment he felt like he was in a pit with a pendulum. Should he try to speak? Yes. He would try saying his wife’s name.  First he tried to remember how. His memory brought him to a beach with fine, hot sand. He turned to his mother and smiled. She smiled back and asked him if he would like to make a sand castle. The beach was— “Sandy?” His voice rasped. The manner with which it escaped his vocal cords gave away that he had not used it since he was a little boy.

Gasp. Very faint thud of the palm of Sandy’s hand covering her mouth. “Did you hear that, doctor? He said my name perfectly! Oh, Elliot.” She grasped his hand. He smiled. Like on the beach.

“Sandy,” he said again, not so much as a request for attention, but more for the sake of speaking.

“Yes, Elliot, yes!”

Another presence moved on the other side of him. “Elliot? This is Doctor Edwards. I’m going to ask you to sit up very slowly.”

Shuffle. Of sheets. Sheets shuffle. Elliot sat up. Slowly. The room spun around him and he felt like he wanted to throw up. Retch. It’ s a horrible sound, retching.

“It’s alright,” said Doctor Edwards, “It’s just a combination of the sedatives we gave you and changes in the sensitivity of your ear to the endolymph, which is just the liquid inside that makes you dizzy when you shake it up.”

Now he saw everything clearly. At first it had all been fuzzy, but now it was clear. His wife, with her dark hair pulled back into a loose bun, a few strands escaping and lying wispily beside her temple like lost leaves of a weeping willow. Her big chocolate eyes stared lovingly at him from the end of the cot, long eyelashes spreading outward from them as the rays of a small brown sun might do, and her full lips bearing that same sweet smile he fell in love with. Her olive skin did not change its tone under the harsh gaze of the fluorescent lighting, but instead glowed. 

The doctor, with his full head of dirty blonde hair parted askew, five o’clock shadow, bags under his eyes, and the pallor of the tip of his sharp nose giving the impression that he had not stopped working for many hours straight. He too, with his thin lips, was smiling at Elliot. It was a warm and genuine smile, and it made Elliot believe that the doctor was a truly happy person. He wondered if this was because the doctor got a sense of gratification each time he helped a once deaf person hear.

The room was medium-sized—not exactly cramped, but also not having excessive space. Each square foot was utilized to its fullest potential. The entire space made Elliot feel like anything was possible.

More than what Elliot saw, was what he heard. 

Echoing footsteps in the hall. He knew they were echoing, because when he was little his father took him to the warehouse, and the voices and actions of the people working there were amplified by the acoustics of the capacious space in such a way that created repetition, like alternative selves in other dimensions repeating words back to each other. 

Wheels on carts rolling by. Elliot knew they were cart wheels because cart wheels sounded like the wheels on his favorite red wagon, the red wagon he would tie to the back of his bicycle (against the very vocalized and very stern wishes of his mother) and give “trolley” rides to a diverse array of passengers, including his stout dachshund, Pudge, as well as his two sisters and brother.

It did not take long for Elliot to realize there was a window behind his head that must have been left slightly ajar. He could feel the chilly breeze on his neck, and it was this same breeze that carried the chaotic din of the outside world. Car horns and engines. Car horns like the one in Uncle Jerry’s vintage convertible. He would let Elliot ride in the driver’s seat on his lap the Saturdays he came to visit. Elliot would be the one pressing the horn, one of his tiny hands on the steering wheel, while Uncle Jerry placed his big hand on top of Elliot’s and drove down a deserted highway at near-top speed, “whooping” like a wild banshee, making Elliot laugh until tears streamed from the corners of his eyes across his temples in a straight line because of how the wind whipped at his face.

The wind! He could hear the breeze gently whisper into his ear. He could hear the birdsong it carried, like the robins outside his bedroom window in his childhood home. He remembered how he would wake to the unique buzzing of cicadas.

The faint sound of music from far away peeked shyly through the city noise. Music! Ah, music. Finally he could hear it! This was a beautiful Latin ballad, the voice of the man singing it, Elliot could tell even when this distant, was smooth and sonorous. How he wanted to whisk his wife off her feet at that precise moment and dance to the soaring rhythm just as his parents did. If he closed his eyes, he could see them, the very essence of love, swaying, their bodies so close they fused into one. The dimness of the room did nothing to snuff the light emitted from their smiles.

If only Elliot could have heard all of this the past twenty-five years. The footsteps, the voices, the car horns, the laughter, the “whooping,” the wheels, the wind, the birdsong, the cicadas, the music. But he supposed he should be grateful to hear them all now.

“How are you feeling?” Kind Doctor Edwards asked Elliot. “You can answer in sign language, if that’s easier.”

But Elliot did not want to answer in sign language. He felt he had a new power, and he was not going to be afraid to wield it. He searched his mind for the proper word to describe what he was feeling. He needed to remember how someone else pronounced it. 

There was many a time when he would play with his siblings on the rug in his parents’ office when they had adult guests. Words that had no meaning to Elliot at the time but sounded musical in some way were thrown from mouth to mouth in every conversation he was privy to. There were beautiful words that sounded like they should be names of stars or constellations, knights or kings, fair maidens or princesses. Zephyr, Swarthy, Opalescent, Divine. And there were words that sounded ugly, like the names of imps and monsters: Vulgar, Demagog, Atrocity, Lethargic. Out of all the words he had ever heard, his favorite, the one his Aunt Aurora, a professor, showed Elliot the definition of in her treasured Oxford English Dictionary, was—

“Omniscient.” Elliot’s voice was confident, without reserve. His pronunciation was flawless. What was more was that he truly felt omniscient. In his ears rang the noise of the world.

The doctor raised his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth lifting with them. “Omniscient?”

Elliot would try to speak a full sentence. His words were somewhat disconnected, but he was able to speak coherently. “You—asked—me to—say—what I—felt.” 

The doctor smiled more broadly, revealing his good set of teeth. “I suppose I did. Omniscient is a good word.” 

Elliot smiled at the doctor. Then at his wife. This time when he spoke he attempted to string more words together, recalling their pronunciations faster. “Sandy—I have—never been able—to say how—beautiful you are. I have—never heard your—voice, and it too is—beautiful. And, what is—more, is that I have—never been able—to clearly and truly say the three words—I have most wanted to say—to you with all—my heart. I love you.”

Then something wonderful happened. There were special moments when Sandy was elated, or grateful, or simply happy, and her eyes welled up with tears of joy. Elliot would watch her with a grin on his own face as wide as he could make it, only wishing he could hear her voice, wishing he could hear what she said to him when she forgot to use sign language in her  state of enthusiasm as they embraced.

Now, hearing her husband say I love you aloud for the first time, she uttered a noise that came from the pit of her soul, the depths of her heart. It could not be described with sign language. It could not even be described with spoken words. And Elliot heard her.

When they embraced, he could also hear the words she whispered next to his ear. “Elliot. Elliot, I love you, too. So, so much. I must have said it aloud a thousand times a day, hoping you would somehow hear my voice.” Her tearful eyes looked at Elliot’s. “And now you can.”

Sandy stood up and turned to the doctor, taking his hand in both of hers. “Thank you, Doctor Edwards. You do not know how much this means to me.”

For a brief moment, Elliot thought he saw tears in the doctor’s eyes, but he must have composed himself quickly, because in a second the look was gone. “Mrs. Reed, Mr. Reed, I don’t think you know how happy this makes me. I am so glad that my work can bring so much pleasure to a family, and I am so glad that the surgery went splendidly for you, Elliot.”

There they all were. Three people with their own paths etched in the fabric of the universe, smiling at each other. Elliot knew that if he was still deaf, this moment would have been somehow diminished, a diluted version of what he was now witnessing and hearing. He was always able to imagine a person’s tone from their facial expression. He was good, excellent in fact, at detecting the slightest change in countenance—the most minute relaxation of a muscle, a twitch in the corner of the lips, a flicker in the eyes. But there was so much more that he had missed. An entire dimension, now at his disposal, which he could only dream of having before. 

He listened to the chorus of breath coming from himself, his wife, and the doctor, reveling in the moment. He closed his eyes, basking in the glory of life and love. Whoosh. Honing in on any noise that made its way to his ears. Plop. He could hear everything. Whisper. It was as if his ears were a pair of lions on a plane with no end. Roar. They pounced on every sound wave that crossed their paths. Smack. Click. Skid. Zip. Zoom. Fwap.

And suddenly—Silence. This was not the silence that had plagued him for years on end, no. This was an enlightened level of silence. For Elliot had realized something. He had realized that sound and noise were only a medium through which one could attain a higher understanding of life. Elliot did not miss the sound of music, he missed what the sound of music could evoke within his being, beyond his eardrums or endolymph or ossicles. 

When Elliot heard a car engine rev or a car horn beeping, he thought of his Uncle Jerry. Uncle Jerry, with his suave half-smile and excellent posture. Uncle Jerry, who no one could guess was a wild card at first glance, but who could crack a joke in a full room of people and have every single one of them toppling over with laughter, no matter how placid a person was.

When Elliot heard pieces of paper rustling, he thought of Aunt Aurora. She, with a coffee cup in her right hand and frameless glasses perched on her nose, could not ever be found without a book in front of her face. Rustling paper meant that Aunt Aurora would pick little Elliot up and put him on her lap, flipping through a four-inch-thick encyclopedia and teaching him something new every ten seconds. 

When Elliot heard sizzling, he thought of his mother, her brow knitted deep in thought, standing over a pan of bubbly frying bacon as the light from the window above the stove played in her auburn ringlets. When he heard sweet music, he thought of her crooning to him at night, his head on her lap, her hand stroking his hair with those long, elegant fingers. When he heard a woman speak, Elliot thought of how his mother used her ability to do so: to teach, to reprimand, to praise, to say the only three words that made Elliot’s heart melt with a warm joy. She used it when she discussed business at her non-for-profit and when she spoke to her family. When she told Elliot and his siblings that they could do anything in the world. When she played make-believe with them.

When Elliot heard laughter, he thought of his father, who had a deep, hearty one that rose from the bottom of his stomach to his irreplaceable smile. Elliot’s father was a king, a god, Zeus himself as far as his children were concerned. When Elliot thought of the sound of a lightning bolt, he thought of his father. He was a romantic. The best playmate (tied with Elliot’s mother), and the best wrestler (Elliot and his brother had learned this through personal experience). But when that baritone voice boomed out a scolding, the world bowed down at his feet.

Sound has meaning. It is not something to keep at the back of one’s mind. Noise is not simply noise, to be regarded as a nuisance or disregarded altogether. Music is not music if there is not a feeling behind it. When a song fails to stir emotion, it is that moment when one should study themselves and how they have led life up to that point. It is that moment when one makes memories that will connect to the melody. Any sound should be considered in this way.

Elliot thought about all of this as he sat there, on the stiff cot, in the presence of his wife and doctor. As he listened to the sounds of his surroundings, those sounds soon morphed into something more. Beyond life or death, comedy or tragedy, space or time. Those things were immaterial. It was the sound of the universe that mattered. A sound that called across a void to Elliot, a sound that did not need to be translated into sign language or spoken words. It was true, it was power, it was light in a sense beyond light. It told him secrets that no ancient labyrinth could bury in dust. And Elliot listened. And he smiled.