Saturday night

I was awakened in the dead of night by a shout from a pubescent male. I was not, strictly speaking, asleep, but the shout awakened me nonetheless. My ears had stopped scanning the neighborhood for sounds and were resting. If they monitored anything, it was the peaceful snoring of my cat.

But then came this shout, and suddenly I was paying attention again. The sound split the night in two: the relative silence which came before, and then the period after the sound, when the camouflaged sounds I had apparently been ignoring came into relief. I heard the shushing sound of cars passing by. I heard the cry of a police car off in the distance, off to right some wrong or just cruise through all of the intersections without having to stop. My street is a popular one for both such behaviors.

The boy was attempting to sound like a man, so whatever had excited or agitated him seemed to make him feel that he would be better served if his voice would just change already and stop playing games with his life. I wondered if he was in the period where it is not uncommon for a boy to be mistaken for his own mother on the telephone. This is not exactly a high point in life. Still, his attempt at disguise was detectable through the windows and walls of my building, and I have no doubt that it was transparent to his intended listener as well, who made no audible reply.

I looked at the clock on my computer, and saw that there was still an hour left until the bars closed. Saturday-night drunks were due shortly thereafter to festoon the street with shouts of their own, wearing their disregard for the rest of us like badges. Their shouts, curses and fights would echo off the buildings and intrude upon apartments all across the city. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the lack of respect for one another that city life seems to foster. The sirens will continue at all hours, and the shouting as well. Only yesterday a car that had parked outside of my apartment was showing off its grotesque new speakers for a gathering of onlookers. The bass notes shook my building so much that a picture fell off of the wall.

What is the purpose of such speakers? They do not accurately reproduce the music their owners would have us believe they love so much. They merely produce a more palpable sensation, and transfer the act of listening to music into an experience that can be more readily seen in the vibration of things, and felt through the skin. "Here is your new heartbeat," the rhythm section says, and the body has no choice but to follow along. This is understandable in a club or at a concert, perhaps, but not outside my home on a beautiful spring afternoon.

Within moments of the boy's shout in the street, and the passing of the siren, my brain was already trying to convince me that neither sound had actually happened, even though it could accurately reproduce either one when I asked it to. The silence they suddenly left behind had a shape like sound itself, and my brain was telling me that this was the sum of sound.

I am sleepless again tonight, but so far nothing so exciting as a boy's shout has come along to pull me out of me and into life. I am just lying here in the dark, illuminated by the face of my laptop. In a moment, I will smoke another cigarette and stare jealously at the foot of my bed, where my cat is sleeping peacefully once more.