"The Booth"

I came to inside the booth; this tiny, dim booth with a chair and a table and a pair of headphones jacked into the wall. A torn-off scrap of ruled notebook paper, folded in half once, perched on the table like a place setting. It said "Put the headphones on.”

I picked up the paper—the handwriting was my own—and crumpled it up with five fingers as I slowly turned a full circle. No door. A flat, yellow, circular light fixture eight inches above my head glowed wanly. And beyond the table a plexiglass window, tinted and only darkness beyond. I saw my vague reflection in it; I looked like myself.

No door. How does one get into a room with no door and a sealed window?

Rather than panic, I put the headphones on my head—they were big, made of aged, beige plastic. A dingy white spiral cord ran away from their bulbous cups. The ear pads were a little chewed with time and wear. The hum of an open line met me, not static precisely, just a yawning sonic chasm. And then...

A heartbeat. Slow, steady, insistent, joined suddenly by another, higher pitched, more rapid, very strong. This went on for a long time, and it lulled me into a stupor. I hung slackly in the chair, listening to the dueling thump-thumps. Suddenly, there was a low tone, the sort that tells you to buckle your seatbelt before landing. Maybe it was a hearing test—maybe I should have been raising my right hand. On the heels of that sound came a soft, calm woman's voice. "9.3 months" it stated simply.

Then I convulsed and flopped out of the chair in shock as an infant's first shrieking wail filled my ears. The headphones fell off but I still heard it bawling, a hitching tinny scream several feet away. After a few minutes it subsided and sounds too quiet to discern from a distance muttered from the speakers. I tentatively placed the phones on my head once more.

It was my mother’s voice, but clearer and sharper than I had ever heard it before. She sounded young and cautiously triumphant—she was telling someone how beautiful he was.

The calm woman returned. “2.1 years” she said. The inflection might have been used to say “fourth floor.”

The sounds now were strange. Clacking, rattling noises. Hollow plastic thuds. Small pieces of wood thunking into each other. Something like broken glass that caught my attention immediately and slammed a memory association into place: Legos, the fat ones made for children still young enough to see with their mouths. More of these noises followed, including the various burblings of a small child. Then abruptly there came a louder crash, and the child began screaming. I was somewhat ready for it that time, so although I jerked in my seat I did not fall down again. Pounding footsteps grew near and I heard my father’s voice sag from angry to sympathetic in the course of a few syllables. I touched the scar on my chin.

That is when I took the headphones off and set them down on the table; slowly pushed myself away until the back of the chair met the back of the booth, eliciting an involuntary yelp from me. My body shook. No one could possess these sounds, for they had only been recorded in a single place, by a singular listener. They were only in my head. Hearing them replicated and played back this way created an exhilarating harmony the likes of which I thought should be impossible. It scared me. And yet… I went back to them.

The calm woman returned several times, bringing me through my childhood, my pre-adolescence. I heard myself terrified the first time I watched “Jaws.” I heard the rapid breaths that accompanied my first foray into masturbation. I heard old cartoons, dead relatives of whom I had no recollection until that moment; school lessons; school buses; and snippets of popular radio caught in passing. I heard myself talking to myself, in private, telling myself truths and mistruths and the inexperienced rationalizations only children can conjure for themselves. All of it began to hurt, but I kept listening.

“16.9 years” the calm woman said eventually, and I heard Opal’s long lost voice in my ear. She told me it was alright, and I heard her sigh. Our first time together; my suppressed groan as I turned away from her, pulled out because the heat was too intense and we were innocently unprotected. The music that filled the next few hours was an elixir of the most potent recollections—whole albums played through my mind not once or twice but a dozen times each, every time a different situation. Sometimes the sound of a car engine rumbled under the melody, sometimes just the wind buffeting curtains in an open window. Opal and I were singing together through many of them. I cried.

Time seemed to have lost meaning. I neither ate nor slept, nor felt any bodily urges except the intense curiosity and desire to keep listening. The gaps between episodes grew smaller and smaller until the headphones were playing a continuous stream of auditory memories, lapsing only during those times when I must have been asleep. I heard relationships begun and ended, heard myself in yelling contests, heard myself laughing in a room full of family. I drifted forward through my late teens, my early twenties—my marriage, all of its trials and passions, its stupid arguments and agonizing reconciliations—until finally the calm woman said “30.00183 years.”

Then I heard the train’s horn blare, the horrible roar of the engine, and the sound of my tires screeching across rain-soaked asphalt. The sound of collision was mercifully brief, and the crunch at the end I did not recognize immediately: it was my skull caving in. I stared at my white-knuckled fists on the table, unmarked and unbroken. I bent my hearing down into a new aural abyss that was now filling up the headphones’ soundscape. Thoughts coalesced for me—I was dead, and all that remained was dead tape. But then, before my stunned hands could remove the whispering static, a fresh set of voices began to fill the space.

It was not hard to grasp; I was listening to my funeral. A priest was speaking the name of my brother. And I paused with my hands resting on the phones, the mystic monkey’s hear-no-evil pose. And I asked myself, as my brother cleared his throat at the pulpit: Was this mine to hear? Should I listen?

Would you?