by Luke Boyd

The airport.

I know a place you can get over the fence where it runs through a stand of trees. Back in high school we would go out there sometimes, take a six-pack and lay on the grass watching the planes roar overhead. And of course don’t forget the pulsing fields of neon runway lights, they’re everywhere. From above it must look like you’re landing directly on top of a cityscape.

So it’s Robin, Bill and I out there until the pink starts seeping into the eastern edge of sky. Bill’s already asleep, wrapped up in a corner of the heavy emergency blanket we are all sitting on. Robin just talks. Nonstop. Except for when there are planes taking off or landing. Then she lays very flat with her ear to the ground and her eyes fixed on the blinking light show spread out all around us.

Audio Stimulus Dependency Disorder.

That’s what Robin says it is. An addiction to noise (and sometimes light) activity. And she tells me she’s got it bad. So bad that when it’s totally quiet she has to talk rhythmically to herself. To keep from losing it she says. Other times if there’s only one sound going on in a room, she will latch onto it and amplify it in her head, searching for patterns. She records lots of stuff too she says, like the train tonight. She’s come other nights to and made recordings of it. Usually she does that a mile or so further down the line where it echoes between the concrete bases of a broken-down overpass. The tapes are never as good as the real thing though she says. They just hold her over, when she’s laying awake at night or at a wedding.

So I lean down over her as she’s lying with her ear cupped to the ground and the whole world sounds like it’s shaking to pieces over my head. I lean down real close and whisper into her skyward turned ear.

“So what is it about sound or light that’s so addicting? Like, what does it do for you?”

She doesn’t answer right away and for a minute I wait, not even sure that she heard me. I mean, if she routinely does this type of shit she’s got to be damn near deaf by this point.

Then she rolls over on her back and her hair spreads out on the blanket behind her. And she fixes me with this stare. It’s the same kind of look she had when she was watching the sirens on top of the ambulance, when they were turning round and round in her eyes. Only this time she’s looking dead at me with that hypnotized look. She sucks in a long deep knife of cold air and the slowly exhales it, whistling it out through her teeth as her chest rises and collapses back down.

“Well. It’s kind of like sound taking up space, not only outside but in your head, too. And for me when there’s no sound it’s like the world is empty, like there’s nothing worth feeling out there. Haven’t you ever watched TV with the sound turned down?”

“Yeah. Like if I’m doing something else and the noise from the tv is a distraction, but I still want to catch what’s going on.”

“Okay, yeah. Well for me silence is a bigger distraction. Everything is empty and hollow until there’s sound to fill it all up. People, cars, airplanes—anything. It’s all tumbleweed just blowing around out there, getting tangled up in wires or stuck under fences. Until you can hear it all happening, but not just hear it with your ears, hear it with your whole body. Your body—like a huge receptor that you can tune in to anything you want. And that’s the thing is with sound, you can feel it and you can hear it. And those are the purest ones, the sounds that leave you shaking even after they go away. The sounds you can hear in the background of everything else all day long.”

“I think I kind of get it. I mean, I can still hear the train from earlier tonight, and with the headache it gave me, I guess I can still feel it, too.”

She gets real excited and props herself up on her elbows. Her face is only a few inches away from mine and even though I doubt she’s thinking about kissing me, every time a girl gets this close to me I always think about kissing them. And she has perfect skin—backlit by the runway lights half of her face is cast in blue.

“Yeah, okay, so you have a headache. I got really bad ones the first few times, too. But they go away. You have to kind of work yourself up to really big stuff—like the train. It’s taken me years but now I’ll pull fire alarms at the mall and just wrap my mouth around the whole fucking box. For me it’s kind of like growing— it’s something my doctor says is getting progressively worse but I think it’s getting better. He says he’s seen cases where people have ended up puncturing their eardrums on purpose because they’ve lost control but for me it’s not that way at all. I mean, I never hate it or wish I was different. Even when I wake up at night and I can still feel that fire alarm going off inside my mouth, or I get a migraine from staring directly into a strobe light, I’m still in control. This is something I want to do and nobody gets that. There’s no way to understand it unless you get into it, unless you really listen.”

She doesn’t kiss me but instead pulls me down on the blanket. Her fingers are laced around the back of my neck, smooth and hot. There on the blanket with Bill huddled up asleep next to us she closes her eyes and pulls my mouth against her ear. I’m not sure what to do with my breath loud and rough going into her ear and coming back out to me. I guess I’m not supposed to do anything—she must be waiting for another jet to come roaring low over our heads. I feel like a jerk for asking so many questions but she seems eager to make me understand. My mouth is crushed against her ear and when I talk my lips press on her earlobes.

“So then what about the lights? Where do they come in?”