Do You Hear What I Hear?
by Kurt Fawver
“Will
the Carolers come tonight?”
My
daughter's question flickers across the room like dying firelight
from the hearth. I hand her the noise-canceling ear defenders,
sparkly red and green for the holidays, and shrug.
“They
might,” I say, too tight. “But they might not. It's better not to
take chances.”
She
scratches at her ears, already annoyed with the extra obligations of
the season.
“Has
anyone ever heard them?” she asks, the same as she asks every year.
I
dig in the closet for my own defenders and come up with more tinsel,
more burned out lights. A bead of sweat pops upon my brow. “The
only people that have heard them are the people they take,” I say,
“the people who are listening.”
I
throw boxes from the closet and rummage beneath the past year's
detritus. My daughter finds some bauble rolled free of the mess and
begins playing catch with it.
“And
where do those people go? Where do the Carolers take them?”
“No
one knows,” I mutter, “but they never come back. Now put on those
defenders like I told you to.”
She
does, then yells, “I think the Carolers take people into the sky
and turn them into snow. That's why it snows so much after
Christmas.”
I
can't find my defenders. They're not here. Oh my god. Oh my god. I
shouldn't have waited until the last minute to prepare. I should have
planned better. But don't I say the same thing every year? And every
year, doesn't it all work out, anyway?
My
daughter points to the window and screams, “See? It's starting!”
There,
twirling in the wind, are tiny, icy flakes.
I
run to the bathroom and consider tissues, consider cotton balls,
consider ramming the tweezers deep into my aural canals until blood
flows and silence reigns.
But
no. No. They might not come tonight. We’ve had plenty of Christmas
Eves free from their sinister melodies. My hands tremble, my forehead
drips fear, but they might not come.
In
the living room, under the multi-hued twinkle of the tree, my
daughter shouts, “I wonder what they sound like. I bet it’s so
beautiful that it makes people’s hearts beat super fast, and then
their hearts get huge and explode and the Carolers suck up all the
little bits because it’s like candy canes to them.”
She
giggles.
I
walk back into the living room and lift two pillows off the couch.
I
press them hard against the sides of my head. My daughter regards me
with curiosity then breaks into laughter, which, both fortunately and
unfortunately, I can still hear.
“You look like a sandwich,”
she says. “My dad is a sandwich.”
And she laughs harder.
I toss the pillows back onto the
couch and swallow both a curse and the acids that are creeping upward
from my stomach. I have to find something to muffle the sound. I have
to block it out, somehow.
I leap upstairs to my bedroom,
grab my phone and earbuds off the nightstand, and jam them into my
ears as far as they’ll go. They’re not noise-canceling, but maybe
if I crank the volume of a rock playlist high enough, it will drown
out everything else. Maybe. Hopefully.
This is not how I wanted to die.
Downstairs, my daughter is
singing the refrain of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” but
replacing the words “Santa Claus is” with “the Carolers are.”
I head back down to her. She’s
picking up the presents her grandparents left under the tree this
afternoon and shaking them to hear the rattles and thuds from the
opposite side of their mystery. She wants to know, so desperately she
wants to know. But she shouldn’t know. No one should.
I sneak up behind her and lift
her into the air. She squeals and drops a box from her hands. I set
her down and shake my head “no.”
She laughs and runs off, into the
kitchen, probably to smuggle away another cookie. I glance at a clock
and wring my hands. There’s too much time left in this night. Too
much room for disaster and unhappy endings.
And my daughter returns, her
mouth stuffed full of something I can only presume is sweet and
buttery.
I set my phone’s volume as high
as it will go, select some post-metal albums, and hit “Play.”
Bass rumble explodes beneath my skull and I stagger backward,
flopping onto the couch. My daughter shouts something, but I can’t
hear it – blissfully, graciously, I can’t hear it at all. Though
my tympanic membranes are straining under the pressure, though my
brain is suffering seismic damage, I smile, because this is Christmas
and Christmas is a time of joy and I’ll have my daughter believe
nothing else.
I pat the couch cushion beside me
and motion for her to sit. She doesn’t. Instead, she prances around
the tree, performing faux jetes like an exhausted ballerina. Behind
her, through a window, I swear I catch a glimpse of something long,
dark, and sinewy slash through the snowfall veil.
My daughter stops in front of me,
pirouettes, and bows. Another song, more raw, more jagged, begins
playing. I wince, but I also clap and blow a kiss to my tiny dancer,
hoping she didn’t notice my pain.
She bows again and yells, “Thank
you, thank you, thank you.”
I can hear her. The music has
stopped.
In a rush, I grab my phone and
tap the dimmed screen. No response. I mash the icon for the audio
player, but nothing happens. It’s all frozen, frozen as the evening
sky, frozen as the dead, lying wholly alone and uncelebrated below
the wintry ground.
“Damn it,” I whisper, teeth
suddenly chattering, pulse pounding at my throat.
I hold the power button until the
screen goes black. The phone should restart in a minute. I should be
fine. This is just a minor setback, a bump in the road. I’m sure
I’ll be fine. We’re simply having a wonderful Christmas time, and
terrible things are frightened by the dulcet glow of wonderful
Christmases. Aren’t they?
I pound the couch and jiggle the
phone, croaking, “Come on, come on.”
My daughter leaps onto my lap
and, assuming I’ve muted her along with the rest of the world,
screams into my ear, “Why are you on your phone? Why are you not
wearing your defenders?”
My hands are too sweaty. Just as
I see the screen light up again, I bobble the phone and it falls to
the floor, my earbuds popping out, trailing a comet tail behind the
reanimated device.
I set my daughter to the side and
lunge after the whole tangle of electronics, ending up on the floor,
on my knees. And that’s when I hear it, in the seconds between
contentment and disaster, in the blink that separates happiness from
tragedy.
Though
it is hollow, distant, and undercut with something like the sound of
a thousand centuries of static, a verse of “Winter Wonderland”
hisses into my brain. Outside, the dark, elongated form whips past
the window again.
My
daughter pats me on the shoulder and offers me a contraband cookie
from her pocket, but I don’t notice or care, much though I might
want to. The twisted, down-tuned chorus beyond my door replaces the
spark between my neurons and the warmth within my blood. It settles
in my bones, turns the glitter on the tree to rust and scabs over the
wrapping paper on the presents. It moves my soul, but not in the
direction of joy.
My
little girl was right from the beginning – the melody is beautiful,
so beautiful. It is also horrible, so horrible.
I rise to my feet, not of my own
accord, but to lift my spirit into the melody of the carol.
“Daddy?” I hear under it all,
as though from across the universe. “Dad? Where are you going?
Dad?”
I march toward the door, feet
shuffling with the rhythm of the song. A tug on my hand. I can only
hope she doesn't take off her defenders. Let that be my present this
year. Please. Let that be my last present.
I throw open the door and watch a
vortex of snowflakes spin and drift in its wake. At its eye flickers
a darkness, an oblong darkness, like the slit of a lizard's eye. It
colors the falling snow, rendering the world in glittering shades of
ash.
My body moves to the music,
impels me to take the next step. The final step, perhaps.
I don't want to walk outside.
I must walk outside.
I don't want to leave my
daughter.
I must leave my daughter.
I don't want to be whisked away,
forgotten amongst the twinkling lights of the season or the twinkling
stars in the sky.
But I must, as all things must.
The Carolers are on the stoop,
waiting, and this night their chorale is for me.
