Wolfe Silver

I can't always hear the sounds of nothing, but whenever I'm sick, and/or stressed, and/or trying to fall asleep they definitely get louder.

I've always had this, for as long as I can remember. When I was a small child, I noticed there's a constant high-pitched noise in my ears, like a mosquito's trebley buzz, or an old-timey CRT television's thin whine. When I'd squeeze my jaw, it'd get louder and change tone. It was fun to play with. It was never loud; sometimes I'd doubt if it was even there — maybe it really was the TV? Or the computer screen? Or the fluorescent light fixture? Any real, actual sound around me would instantly cause the constant whine to be dwarfed, hidden, forgotten.

When I came back from Denmark to Israel at age 14, I was in a permanent state of depressive shock. There are not many people on Earth whom I would describe as animals derogatorily, but my fellow countrypeople in Israel wholeheartedly deserve the insult, and worse. Loud, obnoxious, rude, disrespectful, stupid. That was my experience going to a public school in Ri̱šon Leciyon (/ˈʀiʃon leˈt͡si(j)on/). That was my everyday. Crowded classrooms filled with some of the worst, absolute dumbest people I've ever encountered, all fighting each other for attention by yelling as loud as they can.

That, let me tell you, did not help.

I don't remember how long it took until I noticed the sounds again. Maybe a few months, maybe a year or two, but I eventually did. The high pitched whine of my childhood was still there, all those years, but a new sound had joined it. A deeper, lower, pure wave of some kind. I've heard this phenomenon described as a ringing in one's ears, and I think that word definitely captures the texture and timbre: like the constant echo of a bell ringing.

I went to a specialist and told him about it. I'd done some reading on Wikipedia: apparently this has been assigned a name, Tinnitus. In my case, Subjective Tinnitus, since there's no actual movement or vibration of my eardrums. I told the ENT, who was patient and polite enough, that I suspect I might have that. He looked inside my ears with a pointy device with a light, and concluded that I'm probably right. If I can hear a constant ring, and there's nothing he can see from outside, then Subjective Tinnitus it is. But there was nothing he could do.

People live with tinnitus their whole lives and just get used to it, he said, and I will learn to live with it too. I was destroyed. I had to learn to live with this?

But despite my disappointment, somehow, I mostly did. My initial shock of returning to the jungle of Guš Dan (/ˈguʃ ˈdan/) would slowly, bit by bit, give way to the banality of everyday suffering, until, a couple of years later, school would finally be over. Working in an office was never nearly as bad as sitting in the literal echo chamber that is an Israeli classroom, and I let myself slowly forget. Sometimes, late at night, the ringing would come back, but I had other things to worry about, and it wouldn't bother me.

In my mid 20s I found a really nice apartment to rent in Tel Aviv: newly constructed, with big sunny windows, a kitchen that wasn't too small, and a friend as my flatmate. My room faced a busy street with lots of buses, cars, and trucks, Dereǩ Salame (/ˈdeʀeχ ˈsalame/), and I'd often sleep with the window open, without giving it so much as a second thought. I didn't usually have trouble sleeping through the noise, and whenever I did, I'd use my medical weed to get through it. I enjoyed the feeling of things constantly happening, of the city being alive and prosperous around me.

I don't know when I first noticed the new tones. During an unusually quiet night on Salame maybe? Or perhaps after moving back in with my parents in Rišon? Or maybe only after having left Israel for good? If I ever wrote about this, I couldn't find it. But new pure tones eventually sprung up. From a duo of a high pitched whine and a single bell tone echo, a budding orchestra of church bells has sprung up, all echoing at the same time, all discordant, disharmonic; an awful clanging of nothing and everything all at once.

And yet it's really no problem at all most days; most of the time. I sometimes forget it's even there. But on quiet Central European nights, with a mild sinus infection, or with mild vertigo, or with a headache, it comes back out at full force. The church bells that don't exist anywhere but inside my own head; they start, and they don't stop.

They often overpower other sounds. The soft tapping of my thumbs on a glass touchscreen gets drowned out by an unclear, detuned chord.

What if it intensifies? What if it never stops intensifying? What if eventually it drowns out every other sound? Will I go deaf? I sometimes imagine what it must be like to be profoundly deaf, as one often does when learning signed languages and interacting with Deaf communities; but I'd always hoped that should it happen to me, that at least it'd be a peaceful, quiet affair. And yet as it stands right now, it seems like the more likely outcome is that I will, one day, be forever more consumed by noise.