Your Turn to Suffer Read online

  He took a bite of his muffin – it was a little dry but it tasted all right – and as he chewed, he thought about the interpreting job he’d just completed. He’d been so concerned about Lori that he hadn’t been able to focus on his work, and he’d made mistakes that he hadn’t since his first signing class in college. He’d felt like a fucking idiot, and his embarrassment and frustration had only caused him to screw up even more. He’d managed to muddle through, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if the event organizers had decided not to pay him. As it was, he was half-seriously contemplating not cashing the check they’d given him.

  Only two baristas were on duty at the moment, a man and woman the same age as the students. They were probably students themselves, he thought, working to help pay for college. He’d worked as a waiter during his own college years, and he knew what it was like to have to serve irritating, rude customers with a smile and a pleasant tone, and he appreciated anyone in a service position that was able to remain positive during an interaction with a customer, whether that came to them naturally or they had to fake it.

  The young man who’d taken his order was a hair under six feet, with light reddish hair cut close to his scalp and a well-trimmed mustache and goatee. A lot of men that age affected a scruffy lumberjack look, but Larry wasn’t a fan. It was hard to kiss a man when you had to battle your way past facial hair so thick that you needed a machete to cut a path to the lips. The barista wore black-framed glasses that made him look intelligent, and he wore a black T-shirt beneath a green apron with the Grinders logo on it. He’d seemed genuinely friendly when taking Larry’s order, and Larry had enjoyed talking to him. Sometimes Larry could get a vibe when a man or woman was interested in him, but he’d picked up nothing like that from the barista. It was a shame. He was really cute. Then again, he was probably ten years younger than Larry, maybe more. Not an insurmountable age difference by any means, but he knew if he attempted to chat up the boy, he’d only fuck it up, worried as he was about Lori.

  No cock for me tonight, he thought.

  He didn’t feel especially bad about this. He fucked the same way he ate – whenever his body told him to. And he had others things besides sex on his mind right now.

  When he’d woken this morning, he’d almost called and cancelled his gig. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving Lori alone after last night. But he was also afraid that if he stayed home to be with her, he’d be feeding into her…what? Delusion? Fantasy? He wasn’t sure what to call it. Despite what the police and the crime tech had said, he wasn’t certain that someone had broken into the apartment last night. Why would someone go to the trouble of forcing open the patio door and entering the apartment, only not to take anything? And if whoever it was had really wanted to get to Lori, it wasn’t as if the door to the master bathroom was made of thick, solid oak. It was a cheap, flimsy thing, easy enough to break open if you put your back into it. And why had this theoretical invader departed before he’d gotten home? If he, she, or they had been pounding on the bathroom door the way Lori had described, they wouldn’t have heard him coming up the stairs and opening the door. But he sure as hell would’ve heard them. But he’d heard nothing at all. If Lori’s car hadn’t been in the parking lot, he might’ve thought she hadn’t gotten home yet, it was so quiet.

  Even if someone had sneaked into the apartment last night, no way did he believe it was a group of fucking shadow monsters. And he didn’t think the weird dream she’d had of a tower filled with otherworldly beings held any special significance. As for the goat-eyed woman Lori had encountered at FoodSaver, she’d probably been suffering from some sort of mental illness, maybe a physical deformity too, which accounted for the weird shape of her pupils. Then again, it was possible Lori had hallucinated that encounter as well. He knew she had some memory problems, at least when it came to the subject of Aashrita Dhawan and the girl’s death. She’d told him of the incident on several occasions, only to completely forget she’d spoken to him about it. Hell, it seemed like she sometimes forgot about Aashrita altogether. The first time this happened, he’d tried to repeat what she’d said to him, but she quickly became drowsy and fell asleep. She hadn’t quite passed out, but it had been close to that. Afterward, he’d decided not to push her on the matter. Maybe one day she’d come to terms with her guilt and be able to remember permanently. Maybe she wouldn’t. Everyone dealt with trauma in their own way.

  But because he had experienced her remembering about Aashrita only to almost instantly forget again, it wasn’t a big leap to imagine that she might have other psychological issues – like believing she was being persecuted by some bizarre group of mystics that called themselves the Cabal. He’d listened to and supported her last night without judgment because she’d been so freaked out. But if he kept up the pretense of believing her story, he feared he’d only strengthen her delusion, which in turn would only make it harder for her to break free from. So he hadn’t woken her this morning, had left a note for her in the kitchen. Now he was beginning to wonder if he’d done that more for his own sake than hers. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to deal with an ex-girlfriend who was beginning to go crazy. They might not be lovers anymore, but they were friends. He shouldn’t have abandoned her like that. Who knew where she might be right now or what state she might be in?

  He picked up his phone and tried to call her, but he only got her voicemail.

  “It’s me. I’m just calling to see how you’re doing. I’m worried about you. Please call me as soon as you get this.”

  After he disconnected, he checked his texts and saw she hadn’t replied to the message he’d sent. He then slipped the phone into his pants pocket. He was beginning to have a bad feeling now, and yeah, maybe he was overreacting, but he didn’t care. He needed to see Lori, to speak to her, to reassure himself that she was okay.

  He’d only eaten a couple of bites of his muffin and had a few sips of his latte, but he was too anxious to want more of either. He reached for them, intending to throw them both away as he left the shop. But before he could take hold of either, someone walked over to his table, pulled out the chair opposite his, and sat down. It was a woman. And she had eyes like a goat’s.

  Larry had read about people whose mouths fell open in surprise. He’d never experienced this reaction before, nor had he ever witnessed anyone else having it happen, so he’d always figured it was bullshit. But his mouth fell open now and he thought, I’ll be damned. It really does happen.

  He couldn’t believe how much her eyes resembled those of a goat. No, not resembled. They were goat’s eyes, large and watery, and they examined him with a detached, cold, and altogether alien intelligence. Like the woman Lori saw in the grocery store, he thought. No, not like. The same woman. He was getting over his initial shock at seeing the woman, and he now noticed that the skin around her weird eyes was soft and doughy. She exuded a strong body odor too, the stink so intense that it made him gag, and for a moment he thought he was going to spew latte and bits of chewed-up muffin onto the table. The blue sweatshirt she wore was almost disappointingly bland. A…being like this should be garbed in clothes that presented a sense of dark glamour – a black leather bustier with a high-collared cape, maybe.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Larry.” Her voice sounded normal, conversational even, as if they were two friends having an intimate personal conversation. “I thought you were Lori’s friend. Her best friend. Best friends believe each other, support each other. They listen. That’s your problem. You don’t truly listen.”

  He was only partially aware of what she was saying. He was too mesmerized by her eyes to fully concentrate on her voice. It wasn’t just the weird rectangular shape of her pupils, although that was some of it. But what had captured his attention was how black those pupils were, a black so dark, so deep, that it seemed to go on and on forever. Those eyes held endless voids within them, and he felt the darkness calling to him, threatening to draw in his awareness, his min
d, his very self, and swallow it whole.

  “You fascinate me,” Goat-Eyes said. “You have two professions, one based in sound, the other in silence. Do you love both, or are you merely reluctant to commit fully to one or the other?”

  These last words snapped him back to himself. As a bisexual person, he often got the Why don’t you pick a side? question from both straight and gay people. He’d given up trying to explain that it wasn’t about sides, wasn’t about choices. No one ever understood, not really, except other bisexual people – and Lori. She’d accepted who he was without question, and that was one more thing he loved dearly about her. So when Goat-Eyes said he was unable to commit to sound or silence, it had struck a very raw nerve in him.

  He found his voice for the first time since she’d sat down.

  “They’re different aspects of the same thing,” he said.

  “Are they now?” Her mouth stretched into a slow smile. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  She reached toward her face, touched the doughy flesh around her eyes, and with thumbs and forefingers peeled off a pair of dime-sized pieces of thin, whitish skin. She held them out, as if for him to examine, then she flicked her hands forward and released the scales. They flew toward him like tiny shuriken, and he thought they were going to strike his eyes. But they veered off at the last second, and curved toward the sides of his head. An instant later he felt sharp pain in his ears, as if someone had inserted long needles into his aural canals. It hurt like a bitch, and he cried out in pain. He felt a wiggling-squirming sensation, and he had the impression that something inside him was being rearranged by the flecks of Goat-Eyes’ skin. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the pain stopped.

  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 you wince and grit your teeth, make you look around to see if you could pinpoint the origin of the non-sound. But of course you never could. This non-sound was like that, and it quickly grew stronger, more intense. Shivers began to run up and down his spine, and a cold fluttering took up residence in his gut. He felt a headache building rapidly, and he thought of Lori’s migraines, hoped his headache didn’t grow into one of those monsters. But damn did it hurt. Another wave of vertigo came over him, different than the last. He felt imbalanced in every part of his body, as if his very atoms were quivering so violently the binding forces between them might break and he’d fall apart into nothing.

  He became aware of a deeper non-sound then, one so vast it seemed to permeate all creation. It was the silent scream of the universe dying, a scream that had started less than a nanosecond after the Prime Event and which had continued ceaselessly for trillions of years. The universe was born to
die, and it had been doing this since the beginning of time and would continue to do so after time itself had become a meaningless, forgotten concept. Hearing the deathscream of all existence was far more agonizing than the heightened sounds of before had been, for this non-sound affected him on a mental and spiritual level rather than merely a physical one.

  He remembered what Goat-Eyes had said.

  Now you can hear everything…and nothing.

  She hadn’t spoken metaphorically. He had been able to hear everything before, and now he could hear Nothing with a capital N. He was hearing the unvoice of Nonexistence, of Nullity, of the Void, of Oblivion…and it wasn’t simply killing him – although it was doing that as well – it was obliterating him, reducing him to nothing piece by piece, bit by bit, and he knew that soon there wouldn’t be anything left of him. The consciousness that thought of itself as Larry Ramirez would be gone, and capital N Nothing would take its place.

  Wild, unreasoning, animal terror gripped him. Although the thinking part of his mind knew he couldn’t escape the unsound, the instinctive part, the part that, when confronted with danger, reacted first and saved thinking for later, shrieked at him to flee, and that’s what he did. He ran into the street, mouth wide open as if he was screaming at the top of his lungs, but he could not hear his own voice, had no idea if he was producing any sound at all. Cars swerved to avoid him, the drivers behind their windshields looking shocked, confused, angry. When he reached the middle of the street, the rational part of his mind started functioning again, and it informed him that he had done something extremely foolish. Vehicles continued streaming toward him, and he knew he was in serious danger of being struck by one.