Disquiet

Traffic was quite intense on both sides of the park yesterday. It was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, which meant that while lots of people left the city, many also flocked to it. Car traffic was so bad that some seemingly well-conceived plans unravelled, and I found myself stranded for a few hours. Entirely by chance, where I found myself stranded was in a parking space directly across the street from a small office that I rent. So, I went inside. The noise of traffic quite suddenly gave way to an encompassing silence.

It was possible that I was the only person in the three-story building yesterday afternoon. The gate was locked, which it never is on regular weekdays, and often isn’t on weekends. The front door to the building was locked, which it only is on weekends. The front office was empty and dark. I took the stairs, and heard no one on the second floor, or on the third and top floor. Nor was was elevator, a creaky old thing in which I was once stuck for a few minutes, evidencing any sign of use.

My building is fairly quiet during the week, when the offices, most of them keeping their doors closed, might emit the occasional sound of someone speaking up while on the phone to make themselves heard, or of music, or of furniture being moved around. Yesterday, a holiday: nothing. I settled in at my desk and wrote a bit, then took a break from writing to read. I played music for awhile on the stereo, and eventually turned it off. Without any typing or page-turning or my taking notes with a pencil in the margins of a hardback book, the room was silent. The hallway was silent. The floor was silent. The building was silent. The building was so silent that I stopped reading and writing simply to take in the silence, the peculiar experience of this place of work exuding no aural byproduct of productivity.

The building was so silent that later in the day I wondered if the church next door had neglected to ring its bells, which seems especially unlikely given that it was a Sunday. I had no memory of the bells ringing, despite my having spent a considerable chunk of my stay just sitting and listening. I hadn’t just listened to the silence. I had listened for the silence. I wondered if the silence inside the office building had become so prominent in my imagination that the idea of silence had, in turn, blocked out the outside world.

*(Image adapted from a photo by walknboston, used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/48Wx7G) and a [Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).)*

Two guests slept in the house, one in a bedroom, another in the living room, crashed out on the couch. It is rare that people stayed the night, and the house felt different and much of why it felt different was how it sounded. I’m used to stray, strange noises. I live in the city not far from the ocean in one direction and the bay in another, and quite close to a massive park. All manner of people and wildlife make themselves heard on a regular basis.

The building itself is over 90 years old. It creaks. It gives. It moans. It has regularly let the world in: a neighbor’s quiet party experienced only through chance fragments of the goings-on, such as the nearly sub-aural thud of the drum track to some quietly played music tuned just below annoyance and recognizability; a squeal in the backyard that seemed like a litter of mice but turned out to be a solitary, frightened, cornered skunk; off-season fireworks shot off at a considerable distance and echoing peculiarly; bands playing at one festival or another a few blocks away.

Eight years living in this building, I find all those sounds now familiar, and their familiarity has made other sounds more familiar than they might have been: permutations of the known. The guests provided permutations as well — not just of the known, but of the intimate. Footsteps in a new cadence, tracing a new route, but on floorboards I’d recognize anywhere. Water turned off just shy of fully, leaving the sort of drip that otherwise never happens. Cabinets closed just too quickly, a toilet seat dropped by mistake. Things few people rarely do in their own homes, but that they do naturally in other people’s homes.

Hearing these sounds — in the early morning, in the middle of the night, mid-day when the world has briefly gone otherwise quiet — turned my home, so new were the variations, into something akin to another person’s home. At night, for the duration of the visit, there were sounds I couldn’t hear — more heartbeats, more breaths — but I knew they were there. And even when the guests have returned to their homes, they will leave an echo in mine.

*(Photo by Flood G., used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/f2gtua) and [a Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/).)*

Yesterday evening I headed down the main thoroughfare in the neighborhood by foot. I walked the few blocks from my office to a restaurant, with plans to meet up for dinner. Foot traffic was fairly heavy, especially at the bus stops. People were being disgorged en masse, and then self-distributing into clumps that wandered in various directions. It was the end of the work week, a Friday, and the start of a three-day weekend, thanks to Monday’s national holiday.

The streets were as busy as the sidewalks. I only paused for red lights, and otherwise was a willing participant in the consensual choreography, the near constant motion, of urban life. Whether walking or standing still, I found myself especially conscious of the passing cars. Some honked, while others revved their engines, or changed lanes in a manner that through conscious design or mere physics emitted an aggressive noise. No matter a given driver’s mood, every car sounded forceful, violent. The mere inches between vehicles and pedestrians seemed forebodingly tight, tense, ill-planned.

It’s not that cars don’t necessarily belong in the city. It’s just that in so many cases they seem contrary to what makes the city work. Despite the threat of physical harm, for the most part everything moved in relative sync, but the outliers, through sheer threat of bodily injury, loomed larger in the consciousness. Now, the drivers who treated bicyclists like targets and pedestrians like pigeons, expecting them to shoo submissively, weren’t alone in their selfish momentum. There, too, were bicyclists who treated drivers like annoying siblings and pedestrians like drivers who happened not to be in cars at the moment, not to mention pedestrians who walked as if they were daydreaming in a large, open field.

The cars, of course, weighed more than the bicyclists and pedestrians combined, and moved decidedly more quickly. There was nothing collegial to the way the cars rushed past. The volume of their engines, the doppler patterning of their motion, the squeak of their brakes, all separated them from the rest of society. Every few cars, I’d see someone chatting away, voice muted by glass and speed. They were engaging with someone, somewhere — just not with those of us in their immediate vicinity. Even the drivers’ silence set them apart.

*(Photo by Mike Klubok, used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/zYE5Ls) and [a Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/).)*