The Silencer

The Silencer

By

Drew Gummerson

It was the size of a match box. I almost didn't see it lying on the
welcome mat and I wouldn't have seen it at all if I hadn't lain awake
nights in a row breathless and sweating waiting for its arrival.
Cupping my hands like I was carrying a bird with a broken wing I took
the box into the kitchen and placed it on the table. I sat down on the
only chair, bending myself to its angled shape. It was a Monday.
My name was too long to fit on the front of the box and the person in
the packaging department had continued her looping letters (I knew it
was a woman) right around to the back. Alexander Shostakovich. It was a
long name, its length never decreasing as it was passed down from
generation to generation. And each generation the same. My father had
dandled me on his knee and cooed that I would never amount to much, it
was in my blood.
I studied the box, turning it around and around in my fingers. I even
held it up to my ear. If it hadn't been for the passing minutes, my
expected arrival at work and the part work played in my plan I could
have sat like that all day, for days. I ripped off the manila
paper.
There was a small plastic object the shape of one of the suppositories
I had been proscribed shortly after my sixteenth birthday and a tiny
Greek tragedy mask cast in silver. Just as the advertisement had said
there were no wires or cumbersome batteries. It was both discreet and
elegant.
Above the crowded sink on the grease encrusted wall the second hand of
the clock was moving. Its journey never stopping. Quickly, I slipped
the plastic suppository in my ear and attached the tragedy mask to the
front of my jumper.

Mr Matthews was standing by my work station. He had an arm bent at
ninety-five degrees and he was looking at the face of his watch. I
could hear the coarse hairs of his forearm scratching against the inner
side of his polyester shirt. I smiled because what I had been waiting
for on the bus was beginning to happen. It was working.
"It's not funny," Mr Matthews said, noticing my smile and filing it
away for future use. "Your tardiness has been noted and will be duly
transcribed."
I nodded my head and sat down. I tried to look immediately busy with
two sheets of A4 paper covered in a spidery pattern of binary numbers.
Mr Matthews stood over me for a minute and then walked across the
floor. The caress of his leather-soled shoes against the fibres of the
brown carpet tiles was a love song. His door closing a volcanic
eruption.
All morning I listened, if listen was the correct word for one so
acutely perceptive as I had become, to Mr Matthews in his office. I
heard each crossing of his legs, each scratch of his skin and most
unpleasantly, yes, each of his frequent trips to his en suite toilet
and bidet set. It was the auditory equivalent of Technicolor. It was
the Victoria Falls after an African monsoon. I didn't do any
work.
Later, just as I was thinking it was going to be a morning that bore
no fruit, I sensed the feet moving in a new direction, treading a new
course, and then I was positive, sure, they were! My family history was
about to be evaporated by a burning sun. I wiped my brow and sat
clutching my pen. Indeed, I was clutching the pen so tightly the noise
emanating from it was that of a bridge in a disaster movie just before
it crashes into the fast flowing waters far below.
Mr Matthews removed the picture.

"We don't often see you at this time of night."
The loudness of Mr Takahashi's voice almost knocked me to the floor. I
muttered that I had forgotten some documents and I slunk past the
security desk to the bank of lifts. For quietness's sake I was in my
stockinged feet.
Then, a Titan giant crashed a heavy hammer against a six foot golden
gong. I spun around. It wasn't a gong, it was a ping. A lift had
arrived, called no doubt by the sadistic Takahashi. I turned and waved
thanks. Takahashi smiled back and under his breath called me a real
jerk.
The lights were on but there was no one on my floor. I went straight
past my desk and straight to the door of Mr Matthews' room. I pushed
down the handle and went inside. All I could hear was the thump thump
of my own heart, the blood in my veins, electricity humming through the
wires.
I crossed the room that I had only entered before to be chastised or
upbraided for some slender misdemeanour and stopped in front of the
framed picture of a nubile woman drinking from an upturned bottle of
our most famous product. This was it. I gripped the two vertical sides
of the wooden frame and lifted it down on to the floor.
There was the safe.
I moved the dial exactly as I had heard Mr Matthews do earlier. Left.
Right. Left. Left. Right. One by one the tumblers fell into
place.

The cylinder stood alone in the centre of my kitchen table. It had
glass sides, a silver top. Inside I could see the purple liquid
bubbling viciously. That was our hook, a soft drink that isn't soft.
Our engineers and chemists had worked for years on the formula for
permanent carbonation. Finally success.
And it was mine. Mine to sell to Kurambawa, an agent of Bubble.com.,
our biggest rival.
I bent and kissed the side of the glass. Perfect. I only wished it
wasn't so loud. Each bubble bursting on the surface was like an
explosion. And I couldn't even begin to estimate how many of these
explosions there were every second. As Mr Matthews had said, "this
isn't a soft drink for pussies". No sir.
I went into the bathroom and gazed at my face in the cabinet mirror. I
put a finger up to my ear and tried to prise out the ear-piece I had no
further use for. I only succeeded in pushing it in further. The noise
got louder.
I pulled open the cabinet door, my reflection skidding off its smooth
surface, and took out a cotton bud. I scratched the wool off one of its
ends and then used the point as a lever, inserting it into my ear. No
luck. The bud snapped. I dropped the pieces in the toilet bowl and
flushed. The noise was horrific. I collapsed on the floor, my hands
over my ears, screaming silently.
Upstairs, I knocked quietly on Madame Zola's door. She opened it
immediately with a crystal ball in one hand and a black cat in the
other.
"I wonder if you could help me," I said.
"I knew you'd come," she said.
I sat on a chair with my head horizontal on her fortune-teller's
table. Madame Zola stood over me with a jug of nearly boiling water.
She splashed some into my ear and then picked up a tiny rubber
plunger.
After forty minutes Madame Zola put down the plunger. "It's stuck,"
she said. As instructed she was speaking very quietly. Even up here in
this flat I could hear each bubble popping down below in mine.
"What do you think I should do?"
Madame Zola shook her head. "I see into the future. The present I know
nothing about."
"Then what will happen?"
Madame Zola's face went dark, like when a cloud surprises the sun on
an Autumn day. "You must go now. I have a client."
Downstairs back in my flat I put the fizzing bottle in a cupboard, I
smothered it in pillows, I wrapped it in blankets and put books on top.
It made no difference. None at all. And it was getting worse.
I heard Madame Zola's client upstairs sobbing for her dead father, I
heard the family in the house opposite arguing over which TV channel to
watch. Outside cars went past, the chip-shop at the end of the road
fried endless baskets of chips, mice galloped behind the
skirting-boards and then at eleven o'clock I started to hear sounds
from the neighbouring town.
But louder then everything were those tiny bubbles. Little itsy-bitsy
bubbles.
I don't know what time it was but eventually I decided to go to bed. I
didn't expect to sleep but I had a vain hope things would be better in
the morning.
It was as I removed my shirt to that perpetual firework display in my
head that I noticed it. The tragedy mask I had pinned to my jumper
earlier that morning was now embedded in the skin of my chest. I
realised I had been attacking the problem from the wrong angle. I had
an idea.
I went into the kitchen and opened a drawer. I took out my father's
hunting knife. Alexander Shostakovich was printed on it in gold
Cyrillic lettering.
In a wood somewhere a lumberjack felled a mighty oak. Worker ants
dragged desiccated leaves back to their towering nest. A billion
Chinese chattered and smoked. And infinite nuclear explosions raged in
a glass-sided cylinder.
I inserted the point of the blade at the bottom edge of the mask and
began to cut. There was no pain. I just wanted rid of the noise. I
wanted to sleep and in the morning to collect my money. That's
all.
I thought of my father and the massed ranks of Alexander
Shostakoviches. I would be different. A success.
I cut deeper and deeper and still the mask was there. Still the bottle
fizzed and spluttered. Just tiny bubbles. Just little tiny almost
infinitesimal bubbles.
Blood was pouring down my legs, forming an ever enlarging reflecting
pool on the floor, lapping at the shores of the walls. I was on a
tropical island, lovely, Edenic, so when I saw my own heart I was
surprised. But I was sure of it, the noise had lessened. Just a little
bit further and I would be there.
What would my father say? What would he say?