SOLITAIRE
by Robert Healy
The walls of my room bear no sounds the way they used to. The only thing that causes me to panic about this peace is the thought that perhaps it shall never cease. For peace is only good in moderation, otherwise it cultivates ugliness, selfishness, apathy, stagnation.
My sink drips. Drop after drop, plink, plank, plunk, all down the drain. It doesn't affect me too much, until I try to sleep. At night, in bed, it's all I hear. I shout for silence and receive nothing but sound, the pounding of gravity pulling from my faucet. A sophisticated plumber is what I need, I've already tried the maintenance man. Generalists—they never get the job done.
Anyway, it's these sounds and silences I've been focused on. Sounds from my sink and silences from my surroundings which used to be so loud.
My apartment building is located in a compound with two other buildings, and we share a parking lot. Recently, more spaces have become available. I didn't take much notice of this at first. Not until the garbage room became filled with the leftovers of people's existences. Old posters and pots and the odd objects we collect to keep our junk drawers satiated. Week after week the garbage room received these castaways, and after a few encounters with these remnants I became aware of an increasing emptiness inside of me. This deep, almost esoteric understanding that I was being abandoned—that I was being left alone in this massive building made for many.
Where before I would feel bad for playing music too loud, now I found myself shying away from all sound at all, for fear of disturbing my walls. How I wish I had a neighbor to annoy, I found myself thinking. I'm sure they would appreciate my music if they were still here! But alas they have left me, and I am all alone.
It was Sunday, and sad out. I decided to investigate my isolation and came to the conclusion that my neighbors must have all been captured. That there must be a rational reason for their collective departure and perhaps they'd been taken for torture by a highly-trained group of alien abductors or black-ops specialists. But why, I wondered. What's so special about me that causes my neighbors to be removed? Am I being researched? Experimented upon? I'd like to know, I'd like to know.
And then I began to wonder about the reality of my situation. I looked in the mirror a day or a month after the disappearances and a man told me that there is much to be said for silence, especially in a simple mind such as yours. I accepted the compliment and turned away, only to wonder where he had come from. I spun back around to find him gone, leaving the mirror to return just me and my surroundings. That's the last time I'll turn my back on the truth, I told myself, and returned to my musings. There was something specific I had been thinking about, and it was becoming more and more opaque as time passed, along with the rest of my mind I worried.
The thought was that I had forgotten what my neighbors looked like—I couldn't remember if I'd ever even seen them. They were like relics in my mind and they were rusting and I began to believe that they'd never really been there at all.
I wanted the truth, and I had no evidence to even begin my pursuit, and so I sat and waited and wished for my neighbors to return.
It was hot in my apartment. It was summertime and all I could do was play solitaire and sweat. A deck of cards and a man with no intuition—the time and the silence and the sink just dripping away. Nothing could be done and it felt like the curtains had come for me, my one man show and an audience of echoes.
I sat and played solitaire and my walls were silent and my sink plinked and planked and plunked and my windows revealed an empty parking lot and a sweltering hot day and no one around and nothing but air to fill the space between here and the ocean.
END