Of Sound Mind Read online

Rosen & Wallingford ENT Associates has a suite on the fifth floor. Kathy, the receptionist, wears clinging sweaters, blouses, or T-shirts that showcase breasts too ample for her slender frame. Her forehead is still trying to chase lingering acne. Richard knows about girls; he doesn’t need an owner’s manual. He’s had girlfriends, though not recently. He has thought about asking Kathy out once or twice, but the connection doesn’t seem to be there. They’re civil to each other; that’s all. He nods as he passes the front desk.

  “Morning, Kathy.”

  “Oh, Richard, there’s a change in your schedule. Your ten o’clock, Mrs. O’Hanlon, canceled, so I stuck in Mrs. Campbell.”

  “Who?”

  “Loretta Campbell. Doctor wants a complete workup for dizzy spells. And Mr. Caracappa can’t make it this afternoon at three, so I rescheduled for tomorrow morning.”

  Richard shrugs. “Thanks.” Campbell, O’Hanlon, Caracappa; it’s all the same in the life of an audiometric technician. Plug ’em in, turn the dials, jack up the hertz. At first, it was a novel task to run the contraption and let loose the thin, high-pitched tones; he was a kind of Master of the Machine who could exercise dominion over all sounds in the universe, the faintest of which could not escape his astounding acuity. But now, after eighteen months on the job, it has grown routine. Once he gathers a few extra dollars and musters sufficient stamina, he’ll study to be an audiologist qualified to administer an electronystagmography and an auditory brainstem response, tests designed to evaluate the balance mechanism and central nervous system, the clumsy terms portentous enough to scare the earlobes off most patients. For now, though, he has to be content with his audiometer and merely assisting on the ENGs and ABRs.

  It is ironic—Richard is quick to detect irony—that the boy with superhearing has grown up to be a tester of other people’s hearing, as if searching for a fellow traveler. He considered technical training in several medical disciplines and gravitated to audiology. Who better to make the call than Richard Keene? But, of course, it’s the machine that does the real work. The technician’s just a recorder, a secretary, like Kathy at the front desk.

  This particular workday is uneventful, as most of them are. One woman displays a sense of humor—she professes to have better hearing than her Chihuahua—but the others sit glumly in the booth and raise their hands when they hear something or think they do. On the other side of the glass, Richard reminds himself that the human element in this process does matter. The good technician doesn’t telegraph the sounds but varies the rhythm and looks away from the patient to avoid prompting. A raised hand is easy enough to pick up without making direct eye contact; it’s surprising to see technicians who don’t grasp that. Limited peripheral vision in some cases but mostly stupidity. Richard prides himself on technique and producing reliable results. So he’s worth something, after all, as he sits in his mechanized cell and spools out filaments of sound.

  This day, in addition to his regular customers, he has a personal health matter that needs attention. During his lunch break, he takes the stairs to the sixth floor to see an osteopath. Dr. Melvin Natrol is rostered on Richard’s HMO, and you can’t beat the convenience; if he knows what he’s doing, it’s a bonus. Richard’s right knee has been bothering him the last couple of years, and now the dull soreness has become a stabbing pain. Still, he pounds the treadmill nightly in his apartment building’s fitness center, driving his weight onto the tender knee, kneading it like mad afterward to lessen the pain.

  “Maybe it’s time you got an MRI,” says Natrol, swarthy and rather grave as he flexes Richard’s leg dangling aside the padded table, the patient seated there in his briefs, pants draped over a straight-back chair. Richard grimaces more at the doctor’s suggestion than at his probing hands. Natrol notices.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Natrol manipulates the knee some more, thumbs it.

  “Can you breathe in those things?” Richard asks.

  Natrol looks at him, begins to understand. “Usually.”

  Richard manages a weak smile, which Natrol returns.

  “A little claustrophobia?” Richard’s frozen expression provides the answer. “I’ll get you into one of the newer machines. It’s like flying first class.”

  The subway ride home is decidedly lower than first class, but Richard is learning to tolerate this cramped, subterranean passage. It is a kind of training regimen as he attempts to blunt his claustrophobia. As the train hurtles through the darkness, he finds a seat smack up against the window and stares at his photographic negative in the tunnel-blackened glass. His iPod parries the sonic insult with soothing strings, the burnished sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Richard closes his eyes and floats on the rise and swell of melody, the train’s clatter and hollow roar receded to a far corner of the stage.

  Six weeks on his own, he’s a man of the world now. He’s getting the hang of it. His mission is to rejoin the human race. The doctors told him it was high time, and he accepted their recommendations. Time to move out of his parents’ suburban home, where he’d been forever, a halfway house following his six-month stay at the mental treatment center, that repository of bruised minds, of beige walls and restful gardens and rooms with shatterproof Plexiglas windows and no mirrors, where he had his books to read and jigsaw puzzles to solve but was denied the rope or string he requested for practicing his knot-making, an old skill, an activity he believed to be therapeutic.

  At Fifteenth and Market, the City Hall stop, Richard emerges from the depths into a jamboree world. Skateboarders dodge grim, hard-soled walkers in the plaza dwarfed by the gray Bastille-like tower conceived and built in another era, topped by the city’s historic benefactor, William Penn and his Quaker garb memorialized in black bronze. Richard approaches the river of traffic on Market Street, and the blare of car horns bounces off his earbuds, but enough of it filters through to make him wince. When the traffic light signals him to walk, he scoots across the street to the concrete apron at the foot of the high-rise offices of Centre Square. In front of a twenty-five-foot-tall sculpture of a clothespin, a pale, ill-dressed man points to a homemade chart propped on an easel. The circled words tension and peace and happiness claim much of the space on the chart.

  “Everybody is looking to get rid of their loneliness,” the man says to a clutch of onlookers. Looming above him, the giant chocolate-brown clothespin is pinched at the top by an oversized metal clasp. The small audience is an oasis in the surge, for the sidewalk is thick with the day’s work crowd careening for the exits, anxious to escape from the place where they make their livelihood. As center city empties itself of the white-collar horde, it turns the streets over to the twilight people, a mix of stragglers, incense peddlers, and club hoppers.

  Richard’s refuge, he hopes, is a building a few blocks away on Locust Street, and in daylight, his apartment building, the monolith that is the 42s, arches skyward, poking cottony clouds.

  The sliding-glass doors part and Richard is home. He passes the front desk, where chief attendant Frank is speaking with an elderly couple, and heads straight to the mail room. Tarnished-metal slot doors, like miniature crypts, fill the walls. Richard keys one open and eyes a narrow cylinder of space between wraparound catalogs and a large, manila envelope. He tries to remove the whole wedge with one tug, but it stalls on the edges of the compartment. He grips and tries again in vain. Finally, he angrily yanks the mass toward him and, with a small rip, it spurts from its cloister, out of his hand and onto the tiled floor, scattering at his feet. There’s a yellow slip among the fallen, telling him he’s got a package waiting at the desk.

  Richard gathers up his pile, marches back to the front desk, and extends the slip to Frank, a gregarious fellow who has manned this post for several years and likes the idea of running the building’s nerve center.

  “Twenty-two oh seven,” Richard says without expression. He dislikes small talk and is not a big fan of Frank, who seems more concerned with his own image than the
welfare of the tenants.

  Frank reaches under the U-shaped counter, selects an item, and hands it to Richard. It is a small parcel too rigid for the mail compartment.

  “There you go, my man.”

  Richard takes it, mutters, “Thanks,” and moves away quickly to the elevator, another station in his training regimen to combat claustrophobia. He gets on, moves to the rear as others board, and shuts his eyes, imploring the door to close and set the conveyance in motion. The elevator pulls upward and Richard opens his eyes. The little light on the horizontal panel above the door is on the move, hopping floors. The corresponding side panel shows six floors lit, only one lower than Richard’s. When a woman gets off at fourteen, Richard feels the lift in his chest, the readiness to rid himself of this closed-in shuttle. The next chime is his release, and he’s off the elevator, into the hallway, and across it at a modest angle to the first apartment on the left, number 2207. Home.

  Inside, he sorts through his mail, tosses the solicitations, opens the parcel (a historical documentary titled Skyscrapers ordered through Amazon; he has seen it on PBS), and checks for telephone messages. There are two, the first in a familiar nasal voice.

  “Richard, it’s your mother. Your father and I would like to come over for dinner one night, if you’d be so kind as to extend an invitation. You know, we haven’t even seen your place yet—it’s been at least a month, hasn’t it? We have a birthday present and housewarming gift for you all wrapped up in one. Anyway, call me and let’s schedule. Hope you’re all settled in and having a ball . . . Lotsa love.”

  Six weeks, to be exact, since leaving home just shy of his thirtieth birthday. His parents help with the rent (good of them, but not a huge sacrifice since they had to be happy to get him out of the house); center city isn’t cheap. Comes the liberation, finally, the doctors’ latest and boldest prescription more than two years after the illness. But the cure is not immediate; the same fears have moved right along with him and dwell with him in his new apartment.

  “Second message,” says the female-approximate computer voice, followed by a prerecorded pitch for a center-city singles group, something about a Friday night bash at a pub on Walnut Street. Richard erases it. There must be a constantly updated file of every newcomer to every place in the world, he thinks. By phone, mail, or Internet, they get you; there’s no hiding. But he didn’t come here to hide—quite the opposite. He’s here to make a new start, join the crowd, reconstruct a life. Still, he yearns for solitude and silence—at least he thinks he does. But he can’t trust that impulse either. Which way does freedom lie?

  He spends nearly half an hour in the bathroom, dousing his face with cold water, sending streams of saline spray up each nostril, roosting on the toilet and straining to remove the accumulations of twenty-four hours. Must get more bran and roughage and flaxseed into the system. He scrubs his hands with antibacterial soap, orange and fragrant.

  He knows he’s compulsive, neurotic. Not so easily rectified.

  He munches on some garlic crackers, chews a carrot, and makes himself a turkey-roll sandwich with lettuce and tomato on wheat bread. A nectarine for dessert. A good, balanced dinner with no mess to clean up. He mutes the TV evening news and gets the subtitles, then powers on his Bose sound system—the one high-end item he owns—and listens to the New York Philharmonic embroider a symphony by Berlioz.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, Richard changes into gym shorts and cross trainers and gets back on the elevator, taking it to the top floor—number forty-two—which, in addition to the fitness center, houses a banquet room, an indoor swimming pool and, outside, an expansive sundeck still bright and warm though it’s nearly 6:30. Through the windows, Richard sees a lone female form bronzing on the deck in the late-summer sun, coaxing the last coat of pigment before the long, pale winter; he just glances, never lingers. The banquet room is silent, chairs and tables stacked to one side, but from the fitness center comes the drone and squeak of movable parts, mechanical and human. Richard strides to a vacant treadmill at the far left. Of the other four machines in the row, each facing floor-to-ceiling windows, two are occupied. Through the glass, the city’s skyscrapers loom like giant rockets.

  For Richard, the treadmill is an escape hatch from discomfort. He grips the rubber-sheathed sidebars, extends each leg behind him in turn to stretch the hamstrings and calf muscles, and looks down the row. A hefty guy about his age pads along on the middle treadmill, surprisingly light on his feet. Two over from him, at the end of the row, a woman moves at a fast but fluid clip. Her curves are encased in a cotton sports bra and spandex shorts. Red hair as bright as a flare falls onto bare shoulders. Richard feels that ping, the little jolt that tells him this is a woman he desires but who intimidates him. He sees her up here all the time, it seems, and each time he gets the same feeling. All he can do for now is match her pace.

  He drapes his towel over the right sidebar, punches up a starter pace on the electronic monitor, and begins walking, quickly moves to a jog, and soon accelerates to a miler’s steady swiftness. The soreness disappears from his knee as his speed increases. He doesn’t use the iPod when he works out. His light breathing and the treadmill’s hum serve as a sound conditioner and, moreover, he doesn’t like sweating into the earbuds.

  The big guy two over steps down after another five minutes, and Richard and the redhead are left to match strides, separated by three vacant treadmills. Visible through a glass wall to their left is an adjoining room packed with strength-training equipment, where a weightlifter lets a heavy iron plate fall to the carpeted floor. The thud jars Richard, almost knocking him off his stride. He feels a twinge in the knee, shakes it off, and resumes the pace, glowering toward the offending weightlifter, who is looking the other way; Richard’s look of contempt is a safe move with no repercussions.

  The woman on the treadmill is aware of Richard, the way any fine-tuned athlete feels the competition without looking at it head-on. Though he doesn’t know it yet, her name is Janet Kroll and she’s been living at the 42s for about a month now, a short time less than him. She stays on the treadmill for another forty-five minutes and follows with fifteen brisk minutes of resistance work, using dumbbells and selectorized machines. Her shoulders have a small swell of muscle, and her legs are taut as a dancer’s. Richard’s discreet glances take it all in, and when the two of them pass on the floor, he notices freckles below her eyes, giving her a vulnerability she lacks from a distance. This relaxes him for a moment, but he needs more time to find his comfort zone, to muster the confidence to speak to her. That time is always elusive. As Richard fills a paper cup with filtered water from the cooler and downs it, Janet Kroll and her tumbling, flame-colored hair and well-contoured body stride out of the fitness center.

  TWO

  On the elevator drifting downward, Richard towels his face and closes his eyes. With no one else on board, he feels secure in the space. The elevator descends, a suspended box humming down a barren shaft. Richard feels like he’s floating.

  The chime and an absence of movement yank him from his repose. The door slides open and, just as he steps off, a tall woman wearing orange hoop earrings steps onto the elevator. She is a mere passing image to Richard, who is already angling to his left and nearing his apartment across the hallway. He withdraws the single key from the back pocket of his shorts and inserts it into the lock.

  When he tries to turn the key, it doesn’t cooperate. He wiggles it to no avail, then removes it and tries again, gently, but the key will not go. And just like that, Richard is lost, a man falling through space, as if he were back in the elevator disengaged from its pulleys and plummeting. It doesn’t take much to throw him off-kilter; panic is always crouching nearby and ready to spring. He feels the same unnerving sensation as when he stands before the mirror and has difficulty recognizing himself, doubting all of existence. Where am I? Who am I? His heart palpitates as he looks up and finally sees the number above the peephole on the door: 2307. His apartment’s count
erpart, one floor up. All of them lined up to the sky, floor after floor after floor, but only one that’s his, only one that opens to his special little world.

  The woodpecker pulses retreat from his heart and are replaced by three thumps like a heavy-footed man stomping out the front door. Richard shakes his head and looks back toward the elevator, searching for clues. He’s got it. Of course. The tall woman with the orange earrings, stepping on as he got off. Her floor. On her subsequent way down, a futile stop at the floor just below, twenty-two, which he had pressed when leaving the fitness center on forty-two.

  He has taken that postworkout ride almost every day for six weeks now, and this is the first time it’s been interrupted. The ride is languid, dreamy and kinetic, and gives him a sense of distance and time elapsed. He has almost always had the elevator to himself for this trip, coming down from the top floor, the day’s rush over.

  Clean, deductive reasoning. Nice to have a rational explanation for things.

  He turns to leave the apartment door but doesn’t get a step away before the coarse sound of tearing fabric stops him. To Richard, it is a sound as cruel as a blade slicing flesh. It has come from inside apartment 2307 and is followed by a woman’s plaintive cry, then a man’s voice saying matter-of-factly, “Keep quiet.”

  Richard steps back to the door. He hears a shuffling within, a swishing sound like palms rubbing against one another, then a muffled scream, a woman’s howl, but muted and distorted as if she’s wrapped in cellophane.

  “I told you to keep quiet. I’m not going to rape you.”

  Richard edges even closer to the door, plasters himself against it. As a gasp becomes a whimper, he concentrates fully, trying to catch every nuance of sound, fighting off the intrusion of his heart, which is racing again. He will store these sounds in sequence in his auditory memory, while his concentration filters out sounds beyond this threshold. What he hears, he will be able to replay in his head as if on a digital recorder. But while he trusts this capability absolutely, he has grown to distrust his state of mind at any given moment. That mind’s power of invention. Devilish and unchecked, his mind has a mind of its own. Is he hearing what he thinks he is hearing? Is he standing where he thinks he is standing?