Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
She sits in the apartment and hears the silence behind the roar of traffic outside her window. Even in rush hour, the stillness of solitude dominates her world on both sides of the glass.
It is scary sometimes even though she tries to remind herself that it is just an illusion. Even in this vast country with its relatively small population it is hard to really be alone.
There are people in all the units of this building and people in the buildings that surround it. The cars are full of people, even if pedestrians only pass by occasionally. Right now, the stores, offices, schools and community centres are abuzz with human activity. The mail carrier, telephone and internet bring messages from various sources.
“It’s quiet in here but there is a world out there,” she reminds herself. “It’s just that the world seems so far away from me most of the time,” she reflects. The spaces between people are usually immense chasms of uncertainty. “It’s the uncertainty that can ring loud.”
Everyone is contained in their cool containers. Funny to think that they stay there to keep warm, ponders the woman.
Silence is the tactile gnawing unknown or unacknowledged existence that irritates the brain and skin. Silence is the hum of traffic and transmitter, the ocean waves and air currents. It tickles the skin and prickles the mind. Silence is the murmuring awareness of permanence and mutability together. It is the knowledge of infinity and transience resting but alive at the back of our minds.
It is our—humankind’s—fault that we detect the silence. Rather, we imagine it. Time is a construct. We decided to measure space. We invent labels even for those things, the voids. If we did not know, we could carry on without pausing to glance around and wonder every so often.
We know something about the subatomic level of existence. We know something about the particles constantly shooting through space, the birth and collapse of galaxies, the movement of magnetic forces and planetary rotations, and so on. So we anticipate that space and silence is an illusion for scientists say that something is there in the voids. What, we do not always know. We guess.
We know about the silence. We look at the pictures of celestial bodies in the surrounding universe disseminated by NASA and carry the images around with us. The consequence of this vulgar knowledge of the heavens is fear. Silence is anxiety in motion along the spine, under the skin and in the pit of the stomach. The individual person’s movement and those of his compatriots and colleagues, the co-inhabitors of human society, resonate across the webs of societal interconnection causing ripples in our overlapping pools of existence. The tension is absorbed. “What does it mean?” we wonder. “What are they about?”
The silence cannot be innocent, we conjecture; it must be threatening. People have become used to hearing lies, the lies of politicians and advertisements, the false prophecies and hopes of religions and spiritual leaders, doctors and lawyers, the lies of happy faces and school books and non-profit organizations and parents, the lies of thieves and murderers. The silence is a monster in the darkness of our blindness and lurks to taunt us from between the shadows and lines that are supposed to demarcate what is and what is not. People have become used to expecting danger.
But she thinks that people live just far enough away from her self that their movements do not reach her. Tiles squeak and heavy heels pound above her and cause one window loose in its frame to rattle but she thinks that she remains unmoved. Sounds drip along the curve of her skull onto her back and trickle onto the floor for her feet to trample. Some babbling annoyance can be detected from here out in the hallway before the hinges of a door groan and its latch registers a complaint as it opens and shuts. The school nearby emits a wry low-pitched buzz when the hours of class start and conclusion are struck. The outside noises of the beast scratching the pane of her existence enough for her mind to coldly note the activity but she is determined not to let them make a scratch on her. She is even immune from the laughter and calls of the children alternately swallowed and disgorged during the daytime by the school.
You see, there is contempt in her gaze. Everywhere she goes, she carries contempt like a shield, thin as it is, and conceals the dagger of arrogance, false as it is, maintaining an attitude of smooth and calm wisdom, perforated and threadbare as it is, a stoic and righteous tolerance, as shaky as it is, in the face of modern indignities, injustices and calamities.
Even the cat does not penetrate her consciousness although she sees him and knows about his existence. He moves in synch with her and his cries and scratches are predictable. Though with her, his life is outside hers. He has, really, become an extension of her, so ingrained are their parallel habits of cohabitation. Her husband was like that, she thinks.
She gives the lunch dishes a light scrub and decides to wipe them dry right away rather than let the moisture evaporate as they lay in the dish rack awhile like she usually does. She is tightening her regime of neatness.
She grabs the house keys from the hook under the upper kitchen cupboard, looks down at herself to check the condition of her clothing, and, satisfied with her appearance, exits the apartment for a quick march to the mailbox downstairs in the lobby. She returns and hurriedly closes the door, twisting the deadbolt shut and turning to pad around the corner of the hallway and across the kitchen floor in her boot-like slippers and place the envelopes and flyers on the table. Having returned the keys to their roost, she sits down at the table to peruse the day’s deliveries.
There is an envelope from a charity addressed to her among them. She glances up at the glossy calendar on the wall to recall her established pattern of giving, as per the season and issue of the day. With a finger to the chin, she proceeds to turn her attention back to the same envelope. But she must rise to fetch the letter opener from its place in the desk drawer in her room.
In her room, she hesitates for half a second, arrested by the question as to why she does not just perform this task at the desk. “The kitchen is cozier and closer to the apartment entrance,” she reasons, opening and closing the desk drawer quickly and turning swiftly to return to the kitchen table. As she sits back into the chair, she remembers that the desk had been her husband’s work space and the kitchen hers. Resistant to the gender division of the household as she had always been, she had accepted this arrangement for the sake of convenience regardless. She may not be particularly religious, but she likes order. She is a woman born in Canada and raised there during the regimented years of the Second World War and no amount of participation in the domestic rebellions that followed that period could undo that fact.
She glances over the newsletter about the ongoing campaigns of the Red Cross accompanied by photographs showing scenes of crises here and there. It is not necessary to read it. She gets the gist already. “Doesn’t everybody get the gist by now?” she would ask the air in mild anger. “How much does one have to know, eh?”
She rises to retrieve the cheque book from the desk drawer. She is a long time contributor, although she refuses the requests for “PACs,” the regular monthly contribution by automatic bank account withdrawals or credit card payments. Aside from the tainted blood scandal, there have been no reports of funny financial business, so she dutifully completes the cheque form for the annual donation of one hundred dollars, lifting her chin in proud and righteous self-assignment of important duty.
Her husband left a well-stocked bank account and she receives her portion of the pension. She used to nag everyone about saving money. However, one of her daughters and even her son continue to approach her about money in the rare moments of contact with them. Well, easy for her to say, indeed, for she only worked part-time for a few years sprinkled throughout her adult life from her college days to midlife. She was and still is mostly dependent on her husband’s income and is long since resigned to that realization. Her own government pension income is a miserable sum.
While she wishes to live correctly, she does not want the information from the charity. She throws it and the junk mail onto the floor, an old habit she repeats even though it is an uncomfortable strain to pick it up for disposal after.
Perhaps she is becoming dumb as well as deaf. Her friends from across the years phone her periodically to report the latest developments of this issue and that, or come to escort her to one event or another but she mostly listens without hearing, merely nodding and grunting in response. She catches the drift well enough without hearing it. “There is simply no more need for so much talk,” she figures.
She has been well schooled in keeping mute. She grew up in an era when children were best seen and not heard, according to most adults in positions of authority. In school, they were supposed to work in silence and not speak unless asked to, for a child would get paddled with the yardstick if they dared to speak up. Opinions were generally unwelcome, as were expressions of glee or any other emotion, especially dislike. Politeness was the golden rule. You were not supposed to dislike things. Fathers and teachers and ministers knew best, not little children.
It seemed that life was always putting her in situations that kept her muzzled. She was forced to go to church for a few years. At least there were occasions to sing something, even if the songs seemed to suck the life out of people instead of fortifying them as they were said to do. The songs and prayers, though spoken aloud, were not expressions of herself. At work and to and from work on the buses, people could share silence and not much else, most of the time. They had to listen to commands and follow them without answer. She had not been one to linger in the washrooms to gossip and make fun of others, like some of the girls at work. There were hazards to that activity that she could not afford to risk. She had been tempted, out of curiosity, to strike up conversations on the bus but anyone who spoke up during the commute seemed odd. Then there was her life at home with the little ones—years spent with little souls who could not talk with her as she wished until they passed the toddler stage, at which point they were placed in school as early as possible.
All that one could let loose at times were wisps of vapor escaping from the fires deep within. People were not supposed to expose the fires, and they certainly were not supposed to talk about them. Boys and men could get away with doing that sometimes, but it certainly not ladylike.
You most certainly do not expose your problems if you were to be respected. Prattling on about one’s difficulties was a sign of weakness, so she and her peers were taught. Grown-ups were to maintain the appearance of faultless strength. Most certainly were mothers, of all people.
By now, being quiet is a well entrenched habit. When her children call her, she tries to listen but understands little. She wants to know but their lives do not make much sense anymore. “Well, they don’t bother to communicate much anymore, anyway,” she shrugs.
The photographs they send do not speak. The letters are routine politeness and fake cheeriness. For that reason, the letter from Lucy, her eldest daughter, does not warm her much. She can guess that it does not say anything. After slicing open that envelope, she examines the letter inside. “God, five pages of the gibberish!” She drops the contents onto the tabletop. She does not want to hear the patronizing tone, the indecipherable details of the family life, so far away, nor the platitudes of dutiful daughter speaking to Mother.
Neither Lucy nor her other kids have the grandchildren send something, or at least put it in their names, even if only to humour her. “They are old enough to write now. They should do that,” she chides.
Partly out of vanity but more because she likes to be well prepared and orderly should they arrive at her doorstep, she remains living in the two bedroom apartment with its guest bedroom. At least a friend comes to stay now and then. But they, her own flesh and blood, rarely pay visits. “We’re busy with this”…”we wanted to _ but that came up and we couldn’t”…”maybe in a couple of months”…”blah, blah, blah whatever,” she would mutter to herself whenever she thought about their absences. She could not hear the excuses anymore if she tried. “Maybe that is why she cannot comprehend much else about them now,” she muses. So she does not ask questions of them anymore either.
She scans the pages of the flyers. It is just a habit. She rarely actually buys anything other than groceries and basic household supplies anymore. Besides she can just call the supermarket whenever she runs out of laundry powder or shampoo and request an addition to her monthly order of supplies. Lucy took her to get some new clothing last year and she does not need anything else for the time being. She never changes her grocery order, which is brought to her door regularly like clockwork by a nice boy once a week. He even unpacks the heavy bags in the kitchen for her, all for the two dollar charge afforded to seniors by the supermarket. She only makes a monthly trip the eight block distance to pay her tab with cash at the supermarket, once she has withdrawn her regular monthly budgeted “allowance” from the cash machine inside its entry way, pushing to the front of the line at the store service wicket to complete the payment then exiting the store rapidly to meet the taxi she has booked that is waiting for her. She has never heard of anyone being robbed here before, but she is not willing to take a chance.
She tosses the junk mail into the recyclables container that sits on the floor at the end of the counter close to the table. She goes to the bedroom for a third time to take out an envelope and a postage stamp from the desk drawer and returns to the kitchen table where she places the donation form and cheque inside the envelope, folds its flap and turns it over so that she can stick the stamp onto a corner of its face. It takes her a moment to separate the stamp from the film by picking it with a thumb nail before she sticks it onto the envelope. The depiction on the stamp is of a Canadian flower, which she respects, unlike the mini portraits of the Queen, which she prefers to position upside-down on the postal envelopes.
It is time for her daily walk and she will make her destination the post office today. Not that it is necessary for the purpose of posting the envelope; there is a mail box only two blocks away. However, she wants to walk a certain distance, or, rather, for a certain amount of time in order to get in a little exercise.
Setting the addressed and stamped envelope on the little table in the hallway, she slides open the closet door to access her coat, scarf, hat and shoes. She dons the hat first, twisting around to check herself in the small mirror hanging above the little table. "Oh. I do need a little powder,” she notices. So she goes into the bathroom and reaches for powder case, opens it and removes the brush to dab at the powder and stroke her face gently with it before the vanity mirror. She stops for an instant. “Ridiculous. Who will notice me? Why do I care?’
Packing up the powder case, she returns to the hall closet and dons the scarf followed by the coat. The Hush Puppies resting on the mat in front of the door, she slips her socked feet into them, only needing to push a little to get them on properly.
Taking the keys off the table with one hand, she turns the deadbolt then the door knob with the other and steps into the outer hallway, turning hastily to face the door and turn the lock into the closed position with her key. She then removes the gloves from her left pocket and dresses her hands.
Passing by the elevator she enters the stairway and takes the two short flights down to the apartment lobby, and quickly leaves the building. A cold wind greets her as she steps outside and moves along the bare damp sidewalk.
It is winter. No matter, it always seems like winter all the time. Her surroundings always appear colourless, washed in tones of brown and grey. Springtime can seem just as bleak. The flowers cannot flirt with her. The green growth cannot seduce her. “Do other people feel like that, or is it just that spring has nothing to offer the aged?” she wonders, for the umpteenth time. It is not the kind of thing that people say, she knows. She does not want to talk about it however much she wants to learn the answer.
Looking around, she can detect no changes to the environment since her last walk here. Nobody is in sight. Thankfully, there were people of all ages residing in the vicinity of her home but the downside of that situation is their absence during the day. Few women stayed at home all the time, whether they worked for a living or not. Children were whisked into daycares and school and other kinds of learning programs at every opportunity. If a pair of eyes catches hers, she averts the look and tucks her chin in, eyes fastened on the broken concrete ahead of her.
“You barely saw a sign of their pet animals nowadays,” she observes. “Instead, you just see silence. Nothing speaks much to you, around here at least.” If she did not need to stretch her limbs, she would just stay indoors rather than endure this cruelty. “Better to at least be somewhere where you can hear yourself, under the circumstances,” she tells herself.
Inside her suite, she could pick up the moaning and gurgling of the fridge and notice when its motor stopped. She could notice the drip of the faucet whenever she failed to tighten the tap well enough, or whenever it needed its routine maintenance. She could discern the discussions and music released by the radio or TV, when she chose to turn them on. She could sense the roar of the ceiling fan in the bathroom and the hood fan in the kitchen and switch them off when they reached the crescendo of her patience. She controls the noise there. It is her dominion. She has learned to prefer her own noise and can stop listening to it when she chooses.
Nowadays, it has become as if the things in her apartment and just outside its doors have learned to shut up, so that she doesn’t have to switch motors and circuits on and off herself. The go in and out on their own, it seems. Silence dominates these days.
And so moves her life, a sluggish stream of days that meld one into the other in a dull grind of silence with nothing much ever altering its course. “Pathetic!” she would sometimes declare to herself.