The History of Sound: Stories

by Ben Shattuck

My error was that I thought David was the first of many. That I’d had a taste of love. I was eager for my future. How could I have known that all the rest—Alex, Laura, William, Vincent, Clarissa, Sarah, and most recently George—were only rivulets after the first brief deluge?

He was not a bad man—just angry. Just missed his friends and missed his wife.

My grandfather once said that happiness isn’t a story. So, there isn’t much to say about those first weeks.

Now, in my eighties, I know that most things we love are seeded before we’re ten. When I asked what he liked about the songs, the ballads especially, he said—I remember his words exactly—that they were “the most warm-blooded pieces of music” he knew.

The history of sound, lost daily. I’ve started to think of Earth as a wax cylinder; the sun the needle, laid on the land and drawing out the day’s music—the sound of people arguing, cooking, laughing, singing, moaning, crying, flirting. And behind that, a silent sweep of millions of sleeping people, washing across the Earth like static.

But this wasn’t a comfort. Only a reminder of the regret I thought I’d let go.

It was only a reminder that I actually, amazingly, still loved David. That my feelings for George and Clarissa were mindful, thoughtful, compared to this bone-deep kind that David’s voice had shaken loose. How to put it? This type of sadness. Not nostalgia. Not grief. Just the obvious and sudden fact that my life looked an inch shorter than it could have been.

But this cylinder reminded me of what I’d missed—which is, I think, a life that I didn’t know but of which David was a part. The real one. And how ridiculously short it had been.

The memories of fireflies and swimming naked in the waterfall did nothing but make very fine and long incisions in the membrane of contentedness I’d built up over the years—a good home, a successful career, kind neighbors, a few great relationships. A wasted life.

As we watched the two figures hobble forward, through the wet sand, there were the sounds of gulls screeching, of the wind passing over our house and the dune grass, and of the sea feeling the land, saying to it with each wave, Here you are, here you are, here you are.

Our house was a sacrifice to the wind. The wind rattled the fireboards and casements at night. The wind threw sand on the windows and guided it through the siding, no matter how many times I resealed it. Sand came down the chimney. Pooled on the hearthstone. Snaked over the floorboards. Banked up on all sides of the house. Collected at the feet of the table. It came in on my clothes, in my hair, under my fingernails, and filled my bed. I dug it out of my eyes before I fell asleep. My shoes were shovels. I swept the house every day, and still. “At least we won’t need to dig the graves,” Laurel would say, “when we’re buried here.”

The only unpredictable parts of a life are what comes with war and bad health. That is my experience.

My father said that every story is a confession if you listen closely enough.

“It should be obvious that he and I were once very close,” she said. “We were meant to be engaged. What you are seeing is an example of regret, Edwin. Of two people who might have married, but didn’t for circumstances out of our control.”

Around the house, the dunes shifted one sand grain at a time in the ceaseless wind.

And by that time, all of Mark’s and Julia’s and Ian’s problems would be so far in the past, so irrelevant, it would be as if they’d never even touched the earth.

Water returning to the sky—proof of a soul’s journey.

But you should have a little pain in your life—humans are meant to have a little pain. Endings, I suppose, like seasons, like winters. That’s where all the good stuff is. Ripped apart, so you can feel the mending. There’s nothing like it. I wouldn’t wish an uneventful life on my worst enemy.”

“End first love while in bloom, before it dies petal by petal.”