Silence is Not Always Golden

The air was silent, as usual. The only sound was the deafening roar of crickets chirping in the nearby bushes. Their own perverted melody rang out into the wet night, off the damp pavement and echoed in my ears.

It was late, also as usual, and I was very tired. Work had been as tedious and humdrum as always, and I suffered from the same malaise as most everyone in this day and age. I don't know, perhaps it was the general ennui of my situation that primed me for the fiasco I got myself into. Perhaps if I had managed to find something more interesting within my own life, or perhaps if I just wasn't as tired as I was...

I can probably make up many excuses for why I did what I did, but it doesn't change the fact that I did it.

The commotion under the street lamp was surreal at best, a rift in the otherwise complacent day-to-day humdrum that had been my life. Hell, everybody's life was humdrum. Any commotion was, to say the least, odd.

The poor guy had obviously had too much to drink. The two constables trying to contain him weren't having much luck, and it was obvious even from my distance that they were losing their patience with him.

"No way!" I heard him cry out. "I don't have to be quiet! It's a free country, goddamn it!"

The constables apparently intimated to him that his outburst would not be tolerated. I was too far away to catch what they were saying. Then again, they weren't exactly directing their comments at me, either.

The drunken man staggered a little, well okay a lot, and took a swipe at one of the constables. He missed by a mile. "Fuck you!" he caterwauled. "I can say whatever the hell I want to say!"

One of the constables apparently run out of patience at that point. He unsheathed his stunstick and tapped the poor drunken sod on the shoulder. Down he went unceremoniously into a puddle in the gutter. The constables simply picked him up and hauled him into their car. The episode was over.

It wasn't over for me, however. The shrill voice of the drunken man rang in my ears for hours afterwards. The abrasive sound echoed endlessly in my head, causing me much discomfort. The physical discomfort soon transformed into another kind of discomfort, an emotional one: I was envious. Jealous, even.

I looked at my wife, sleeping soundly next to me. Every once in a while her dreams were unleashed into my own, 'talking' in her sleep as it were. The unfocused, unbridled desires pent-up during the day were occasionally released during compromised R.E.M. sleep. She never uttered a sound. Then again, none of us had for years.

It had been years since I had heard the sound of a human voice. Decades, even. As I lay in my bed, trying fruitlessly to find sleep, I counted back the years since I had last used my own voice. Thirty? No, more. I was five, I think. Thirty-one years. I marveled at the time that had passed, and not one peep.

The laws were clear; noise was not to be tolerated. A higher calling was required; those who could not communicate without talking had been confined to concentration camps. "Re-education" institutions they had been called. No one knew precisely what went on when drunken idiots like the one I'd seen that night were removed from the state gutters, but rumors abounded and the images weren't pretty.

My curiosity got ahold of me. I'd been married now for ten years, and it suddenly dawned on me that the one thing I knew nothing of my wife was the sound of her voice! I wanted to know, I had to know!

I thought of waking her, to ask her to speak to me, but then sanity reawakened. What was I doing? Was I daft? The sensors outside on the lawn would surely pick up the frequency from my voice.

I rolled onto my side, and watched her sleeping form. She was on her side as well, her back to me. I reached out my hand to touch her, tracing a single finger down the curve of her neck, down her spine, resting gently upon the subtle rise of her buttock.

The images from her dream changed almost instantly, and I couldn't help but smile. Her mind's generation of visuals changed in a strong cascade, where images of her workplace suddenly changed to a flurry of hands and fingers over her nude form. I couldn't help but smile to myself. In lighter sleep, and absolutely while awake, my wife would never have allowed herself to communicate to me such lewd and wanton sexuality. Her dreams, however, released all of those fantasies to me.

I pressed the tips of two fingers against the small of her back, and watched her dreams change. She was still in her office, but this time she was bent over her desk, someone's hand pressing down on the small of her back as he grabbed the waist of her skirt in his fist. Pulling down forcefully, he pulled the skirt completely down and away from her body, revealing her naked ass to him.

I could feel her apprehension, how she was both afraid he would take her and hoping that he would. I didn't know who this faceless man was, after all it wasn't a fantasy, it was a sex dream. I found myself getting hard as I vicariously participated in her dream.

The dream was from the man's perspective. She was watching herself get fucked from behind, though he hadn't entered her yet. Suddenly there was a man in front of her desk, and this man I did know. It was a mere boy, though. An intern from a local college, certainly fifteen years her junior. She was his immediate supervisor in real life, but this was not real life, I kept reminding myself.

She ordered him to take some papers off her desk and file them. He did so without comment or even acknowledgment of her dubious position sprawled on the desktop. The man behind her held his cock in his hand, and for some reason it seemed to have peculiar extensions around the head. He rubbed it up and down her slit, and then entered her, fucking her in long, smooth strokes. Almost like a machine, in fact.

While he was doing this, she continued to order people around the office. File this, do that, take this memo, write that report. All the while, her pussy clutched at the man's cock, her hips slightly gyrating against the mattress. I pressed my own cockhead against her pussy lips, now distended behind her as her legs were drawn up.

The intern returned from his assignment with her cup of coffee. Had she ordered him to get her a cup of coffee? I didn't remember any such thing. He stood in front of her, but instead of giving it to her she told him to drink it, that she couldn't read and would get it another way. She unzipped his pants and released a very long, but very thin cock. He began drinking the coffee, and she began sucking on his cock. I couldn't help but make a mental joke about how she never liked cream in her coffee before.

Suddenly, there appeared to be an audience. The board of directors, secretaries, and even her boss were sitting around the desk watching her fuck and suck as if it were part of her job description. For some reason only the women were masturbating through their clothes. I felt a slight twinge if this meant that she may have lesbian tendencies? Somehow I doubted it, but it was only a dream, after all.

I slid my own cock inside her slowly. I could feel her pussy muscles grip and squeeze me as she dreamed I was her strangely-appendaged dream lover. In her dream she took the intern's cock out of her mouth and mentally barked at him for her coffee. He looked down at her and nodded. He drank some more coffee, and then his hips began pumping back and forth. I knew the signs as well as she did. He was going to come, and she was going to get her hot coffee. She thought encouraging comments back at the intern, and I could feel her own muscles contract violently against my own live cock.

As he came, so did she. As she came, so did I, but it wasn't for that reason. In my own mind I wanted her to cry out, to call my name. I wanted to hear her scream out loud that she wanted to be fucked harder, faster, harder!

But there was only silence, as there had always been silence. I filled her womb with my seed, but to me there was something drastically missing now. My own mind cleared with the orgasm, a clarity that I knew was going to lead to an obsession. My wife slipped out of R.E.M. sleep into a dreamless state, and I withdrew from her body.

Exhausted now, I slept. It was a restless sleep, one filled with a cacophony of voices, human voices. To me, it wasn't noise; far from it. It was melodic, harmonious. Each individual voice combined with others to form beautiful melodies, but even as I dreamed I knew that it was impossible to ever get to hear such wonderful sounds.

I awoke the next morning along with this obsession. I wanted -- no, needed -- to hear my name called. It wasn't a particularly wonderful sounding name, at least not in my own head, but that didn't matter. I wanted to hear it. I couldn't even remember the last time I heard it, or who spoke it to me that final time.

I clamored down the stairs, hoping to find some breakfast. My wife was already there, and it suddenly dawned on me that I never really knew her name. That's not really accurate. I knew what her name felt like, and the mental nuances that constituted it, but I didn't actually know what it would be like spoken out loud. We weren't childhood sweethearts or anything, in fact we met after college. I suddenly wished I could hear her tell me her name. I wanted her to say both our names.

I opened my mouth to surprise her with a, "Good morning!" As the alien pressure built in my throat to emit the forbidden sounds, panic gripped me. I was suddenly frightened, more frightened than I had ever been in my entire life. I was frightened about being caught, about my vocal chords not working after all this time, about having forgotten how to speak, about my wife even turning me in. Mostly I was frightened about what she would think of me.

I loved my wife. I have always loved her, there's no doubt. But she was always a conservative, low-risk person. She worked as an accountant manager and was the typical accountant type. Glasses, hair-in-a-bun, no deviance from accepted norms or rules type. Her dream the night before was radical in that she would never, not in a million years, have ever consciously had such a fantasy. Truth was, she probably didn't remember the dream at all, and would fervently deny that she was even capable of such debaucherous thinking.

Fortunately, her back was to me, and by the time she turned around and saw me there, my open gape had turned into a weak yawn. I searched her face and found that she suspected nothing.

I asked her how she was this morning, did she sleep well? She smiled and nodded.

"Any interesting dreams?" I asked.

She looked somewhat exasperated. "Not this again," she replied. "You know I don't dream. And all that crazy talk about me sharing my wild sex dreams are a little hard to take, you know."

I nodded and smiled as if I were just pulling her leg this morning. I was quite glad that I hadn't attempted to speak out loud earlier. I think she might have blown a gasket or something.

At work, I was more than just a little distracted. I kept imagining having sex with my wife, and the echoes of her voice -- or what I imagined her voice would be like -- at the moment of prolonged orgasm kept me hard as iron throughout the day.

"Jack," I heard in my head. It wasn't so much as the actual sound of my name but rather a feeling that my attention was being summoned. I looked up from my desk and saw Christina standing in the doorway. Before I could stop myself, I wondered what her voice sounded like.

I raised my eyebrow. It was my best attempt at a thoughtful, inquisitive look.

"Jack, we've been trying to get your attention all day," she chastised me playfully. "You've been on the moon or something?"

I shrugged it off. "Just tired, I guess," I lied.

She came in and sat down. She just smiled. This woman was remarkably perceptive. She knew I was bullshitting her even better than my wife. And I had known her for a far shorter amount of time.

"I don't know if I should say," I confessed. "It's the kind of thing that can get a person into trouble, ya know?"

Her curiosity was peaked. "Well, now you're going to have to tell me!" Her grin was huge. "After work, we'll talk."

Christina and I weren't extremely close, but we had worked on a number of projects together and shared a beer and a laugh at times, but nothing more. I was a devoted husband, after all, with a wife who had met all my needs. Well, all my needs up until last night.

I realized that I would have to come up with something, or tell her the truth. When the time came after work, however, I realized that I simply wasn't very good at coming up with imaginative stories, and she wasn't going to believe me if I lied.

I told her about the drunkard the previous night. I explained how the sound of the man's voice startled me at first, and that I could see why speaking had been outlawed in the first place. The drunken political diatribe coming from this fool simply sounded abrasive. There wasn't the cool, soothing tones of explicit understanding that we get from the more pure, non-verbal mode of communication.

Even so, I explained, there was something liberating about his outburst. There was something, raw, something genuine and emotive. I could feel myself getting more and more animated as the words came to me. Passion! That was it! There was passion in this man. I wanted that passion, and I wanted it more than anything.

Once I started explaining everything to Christina, everything else came out as well. I brought up the subject of my wife, and her conservative nature, and how I just couldn't explain it to her. I explained that my wife's dream left me wanting her to call out my name in that passion (I judiciously left out the specifics of the dream, though I could tell Christina was more than just a wee bit curious).

I had never known that the human voice could be so flexible, I pondered to myself as well as Christina. It was the first time in more than thirty years I had heard someone speak, and at some point in that time I had come to believe that when people used to speak, they had only a flat monotone. The idea that there could be richness, tone, and pitch simply escaped my memory and my imagination.

As our conversation -- well, my diatribe, really -- continued, I suddenly had a mental image, a memory, of my mother in the kitchen when I was a child. I seemed to recall her making some noise with her throat, some sort of change in pitch with some cadence, a rhythm. What was it called? It wasn't singing, I could remember that. Humbling? Hunning? I couldn't remember.

"Humming," Christina interjected. It was the first time she had broken into my stream-of-consciousness. My thoughts were completely sucked out of my head at that point, ripped away from me by the interruption. My concentration had been broken.

She confused my silence for anger. "Please," she prodded. "Go on."

I wasn't angry, or even upset, though. I just had simply been brought out of my self-absorbed ramblings such that I saw how I must have looked to Christina, and had thus become self-conscious. My ramblings were nothing short of blasphemous, not to mention highly illegal.

I shook my head. "No," I replied. "I've said too much."

Indeed I had. I thought back to the drunken man. Perhaps he may receive a more lenient sentence because he had been drunk. My ramblings, on the other hand, were from a man who knew precisely what the risks were, what the price to be paid could be. The punishment for my transgressions were unknown to me, but undoubtedly dire. I guess I trusted Christina, but it suddenly dawned on me what little I actually knew of her, and it dawned on me how precarious a position I had placed myself.

The look of concern must have shown on my face. "Jack," she reached out to place her hand on mine as she tried to get my confidence. "You can trust me. I won't say a word, I promise."

I must not have appeared to be thoroughly convinced. She sat up, and said, "Come on,"

"Where are we going?"

"I'm going to show you," she told me as she gathered her belongings, "that you can trust me."

"How?" I asked.

"You shared something with me that's very sensitive, I know," she said. "And now I'm going to show you something that's very sensitive as well. Tit for tat."

We walked out into the cold pre-dusk air and she hailed a cab. She produced a card out of her purse and gave it to the driver. I never saw the address.

We arrived at a townhouse in an upscale part of the city. We got out of the cab, and Christina paid the driver. She knocked on the door, and a small window opened in the door. Whoever it was behind the door must have recognized Christina immediately, or she communicated directly with him without allowing me to be privy to the conversation.

Either way, the window was replaced, and the door opened. We walked in, and Christina handed the doorman her coat and purse, and gestured for me to do the same, then ushered me into an adjoining room.

It was an old room, a library, filled with books and old portraits on wooden paneled walls. I walked into the room and began looking at some of the books.

"Jack," Christina said.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. She hadn't simply thought my name, she said it.

The shock on my face registered with her. She came toward me with her arms up, palms facing me, trying to let me know that everything was all right. "Jack," she said, "it's all right."

I suddenly realized that I had been backing away from her as she approached me. A chair seemed to appear just behind me, forcing me to sit down harder than dignity would permit.

"Listen to me," she said. Her voice was remarkably soft, so smooth, and so different from the abrasive drunken man the previous night. I could never have imagined that human beings could have such different sounding voices. The sound of her voice had me entranced completely. It was so soft, and so... melodic. The word seemed to appear out of thin air, but fit the situation so well.

"There are organizations, Jack," she explained. "People who don't agree with the law that forbids us to speak out loud. Years ago, there used to be a law against alcohol, believe it or not. But people thought that law was ridiculous, and they created places where they could drink in peace. They called them 'speakeasies.'"

She chuckled at the irony. "Anyway," she continued after a pause, "there are speakeasies all over the place now. We're secret, of course."

I just sat there, dumbfounded. With a smirk, she leaned forward and touched my chin, closing my gaping mouth. "Well," she said after a moment's pause, "aren't you going to say something?"

While she spoke it honestly hadn't occurred to me that I was in an element where I could actually speak out loud and not be ashamed by the sheer desire of it! But what would I say? After more than thirty years, would my voice even work?

My jaw opened again, and I took an inward breath. Christina leaned forward to hear what I had to say, but all I could utter was a mere throaty breath... again.

She sat back, but smiled. "It's okay, Jack," she said. "Here, let me help you."

She came over to the chair and sat down on the armrest. She was close enough that I could smell the sweet perfume, and even see the small, irregular rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

She placed one hand on my back, and the other she placed on my chest. A small chill rode up my spine as I was touched for the first time by someone other than my wife. Her soft fingers came up to my throat, and rested upon a small bump there.

"This," she said, smiling, "is your Adam's apple. It's where your vocal chords are."

I must have looked confused. My what?

She giggled. "Your vocal chords," she repeated. It's the organ that allows you to speak. They don't teach you those sorts of things in school, I know, but you'll learn that there's a lot of things that you can do with them." She had a particularly mischievous twinkle in her eyes.