The room filled with the sound of air rushing from the registers and out of the corner of his eye he watched the paper on the top of the stack waver, then begin to move sideways until two of its corners hung down and touched the desk. He tapped it back into place with one finger and dropped a paper clip on top to hold it, then he tried to go back to his reading.
     But he was too aware of all the noises. The furnace rumbling on. The refrigerator starting up. The toilet flush taking its own sweet time to die away. They’d all become major distractions. Sometimes the phone made the whole house rock, and he had to wait until the seventh or eighth ring before he could trust his voice to say hello.
     He couldn’t get used to it. The quiet, the being alone. It was like wearing a coat that didn’t fit. One made for someone else, not for him. Not for Gerald Flaherty who grew up in a third floor tenement in Southie with six kids all a year apart crammed into two bedrooms. With the stairwells full of Mrs. McInerney yelling at Mr. McInerney. With deaf Mrs. Riley’s My Wild Irish Rose cranked up full blast.
     And after that, at least for the first few years, he and Evie had talked a lot. Sometimes he tried to remember when the conversation slowed, tried to remember when producing it became an effort. But by then it probably didn’t matter, not with Karen and Timmy there to take away the silence.
     Now, though, there was nothing. Just the furnace and the refrigerator and the toilet. And Karen and Timmy every other weekend and school vacations.
     Behind him in the kitchen, the refrigerator started humming and he gave up trying to concentrate, dropped the red pen on the paper he was correcting and looked beyond the windows at the wedges of pond showing through the trees. The furnace shuddered, clunked, and the sound of the warm air flowing from the registers disappeared while he wondered all over again why it seemed like a good idea, taking this place. With its trees and its pond and its inaccessibility. With its fucking privacy. He should have stayed in the apartment with the upstairs tenants pounding up and down past the wall behind his bed, the car doors slamming in the parking lot next door, the teenagers screaming rock music full volume every night in the park across the street.
     He couldn’t explain it except as a sort of temporary insanity. A moment of artistic madness. He’d had visions of himself writing and reading in the woods. Another Thoreau. Except he should have remembered that even Thoreau needed to hit town on Friday and Saturday nights.
     A slim arching shape passed across the water, disappearing behind the trees and emerging again. He watched it. Solitary. Silent. An illusion. Because there would be another right behind it. And another. Dozens. In the middle of the night he heard them, honking and yelling, making him feel it all the more. The being alone. Next time, he’d play it smart, guarantee the company of others. Come back as a goose.
     He forced his eyes down to the paper, reread the first two paragraphs, reread his notes and corrections. But by the time he caught up to where he’d left off, the words were blurring and the conversation was in his head again, replaying itself for the fourteenth time since they’d had it at seven P.M., the playback pricking him just as much as the original. Those damned silences Evie hit him with, making it impossible to even pretend they could have a civilized conversation.
     “Uh...I’d like to change the kids coming to next weekend, Evie.”  Feeling like he was asking for one of her kidneys. Silence. “Something’s come up for this weekend, but then I’ll take them next weekend which goes into vacation and the following one, too, as I normally would.” Silence. Not even an ‘un-uh’ to break the tension. “That’ll give you a solid week if you want to make some plans.” Feeling like a seven-year-old asking his teacher for permission to piss. Wishing she’d go ahead and make plans. To have a personality transplant. Get married again. Go to the moon. Anything that would take this hook out of his back.
     “Do I have a choice?” Four years and still that venom in her voice.
     “Look, Evie, if it’s not convenient, just say so. I can change my plans. I just thought...”
     “Oh no, Jerry...don’t change your plans.” Sarcasm. “Not for us. Thanks for calling.”
     He’d stood there with the dial tone screaming at him, letting it punish his ear. He needed to be punished, right? After all, why walk out on your wife and kids just because the marital relationship had faltered. Didn’t they all falter eventually? He should have stayed. He’d taken a vow. He should have stuck it out. Maybe the pain would have begun to feel good after a while. Another martyr in a hair shirt.
     He forced his concentration back to the paper. Some things, he knew, were guilts you could do nothing about. Other things, though, were preventable. Like ungraded papers. Plus he wanted this weekend free of guilt. At least as free of guilt as he could make it.

     He heard the car before he saw it. One of the advantages of living on a rutted dirt road, though he’d noticed lately noise didn’t need to be obvious to catch his attention. Sometimes, in fact, there needed to be hardly any noise at all. Which made him think about Darwin and the survival of the species, adaptation. Maybe he was adapting, too. To his environment. Becoming something primal, something with exaggerated senses. Maybe his ears would grow big.
     He pushed his chair back and stood up when he saw Joy getting out of the car, wondered if his thoughts were a sign of something, too. A mild psychosis, perhaps. He walked across the room and pulled the door open. Or maybe total dementia. He leaned against the doorjamb and watched her walk across the yard, letting Evie and aloneness and total dementia slowly drain out of him.
     “Hi Professor.” She called it out, waved.
     She was only a little over five feet. And skinny. And she had this voice that should be coming out of a Green Bay Packer.
     He smiled. “Hi.” He said it softly so she could only read it on his lips.
     It was that voice that had made him turn around. A faculty party. Usually a lousy way to spend a Saturday night. But since the alternative was staying home alone, he’d accepted the invitation to immerse himself in human noise. And then there was that voice, scratching at the edge of his awareness for a while, like something wanting to be let in. Until he’d been forced to disengage himself from another one of Peter Bean’s rafting stories, turn around and attach the voice to a face. So it had turned out to be not a bad party after all.
     “You manage to get your weekend plans changed?” She hesitated in mid-stride, waiting for him to answer. He nodded and she started toward him again.
     “Good, because have I got plans for us.”
     It was five days since he’d last seen her. Six since their first meeting. Long enough to start losing her...the exact color of her hair, whether her smile was quick or slow, her eyes gray or green. Though the sense of her had stayed, the sense of light and sound, a humming, pleasant and warm, filling all the corners inside him. But maybe not real. Maybe exaggerated by absence and imagination and wanting. It had happened before, so that the second date was like waking up and finding out there was no Santa Claus.
     He watched her come up the steps, glad it wasn’t that way now.
     “Hang gliding is not dangerous.” She said it again with a perfectly straight face. “Really. It’s not.”
     He went into the kitchen, took two beers out of the refrigerator and brought them back into the living room. “I’ve heard people break their necks up there on a pretty regular basis.”
     She took the bottle he held out and settled into a black vinyl bean bag. She contrasted nicely with it. Pale skin, pale hair. He liked looking at her. And the room felt different now that she was in it. He felt different. Like a tension had lifted.
     “We could just stay here.” He sat down on the floor across from her.  “It might be fine to stay here. We could pretend we’re sequestered.” And when he saw the look on her face... “You know, cut off, stranded. Marooned.”
     She laughed, and then her face settled into downward lines. “But it’s the first Friday the weather’s been good. And it was such a long winter.”
     The look on her face reminded him of Karen. Karen’s look when she thought she was being unfairly dealt with. A little girl look. It fit Karen. But it fit Joy, too, which reminded him she was young. Generally, the women he knew were near his age. That seemed to make sense. But it was a double-edged sword, too, because right away he noticed things about them...a flatness in tone, a preoccupied look, a narrowing around the mouth. Things that reminded him of Evie. It was different with Joy. All her edges were still soft.
     “I told my friends we were coming and that I was bringing you.” She leaned forward and suddenly the little girl was gone. “Besides, we have the rest of the weekend to ourselves. Right, Professor?” She smiled, and thinking about the rest of the weekend almost took his breath away.
     
     The wind gusted and he felt the pull of the harness, dug his feet in, leaning away from the brown rocky slope. Funny, it hadn’t seemed so far when he’d been looking up from the bottom. And the others had made it look easy. Fun even. “Just go,” he muttered, “just fucking go.”
     He looked down to where they were watching, but the small group had broken up. Tired of waiting, he guessed. Only Joy was there now, her purple hat pulled down low over her face.
     The whole thing seemed surreal. He didn’t belong on the side of a mountain, wearing wings. He had people to stay in one piece for. Timothy. Karen. The students whose papers still needed to be graded.
     Joy put her hands on her hips, looked down at the ground then up the side of the hill again, and he knew he either had to walk down to meet her or do it the other way. And right now, he wasn’t sure which would be harder, except he figured she hadn’t learned much yet of compassion.
     He could try and make a joke of it, say the pre-flight check had indicated a malfunction. But she’d look at him in a different way, see something she’d missed. And then it would all go away. The weekend. The ease. The company. And damn-it-all, he could feel it creeping up on him right now. It was coming up from behind, ready to spring. That exquisite fucking isolation. And so he began to run.

     It took a while to sort things out.
     His mind seemed stuck in first gear with no clutch. Like that old Chevy they’d inherited from Evie’s grandmother. And he remembered that no matter how many times she tried, Evie could never get the knack of shifting by RPMs alone.
     He listened. A hospital. He could tell by the sounds. He opened his eyes. Evie.
     “Remember that old Chevy?” he said.
     She didn’t even blink. “Of course I do. Timothy almost made his debut in it.”
     All his memories. In her head, too.
     She stood up, reached for her purse. “I promised the kids I’d wait until you woke up. To make sure you were okay.” She stopped fidgeting with the purse and looked at him. “Are you okay?”
     The question made him almost love her again. “I don’t know.”  He felt fuzzy, disconnected. “Am I?”
     “No broken bones. Sprained knee. Sprained shoulder. Contusions. Slight concussion. You’re lucky.” She took some keys out of her pocket and smiled a little. “You landed on your head.”
     He had an impulse to apologize. For what he wasn’t sure. “Thanks for coming. How are the kids...are they okay?” He knew they were, but he wanted to hold her there just a little longer.
     “They’re fine. I’ll bring them tomorrow. They’ve told all their friends their father hang glides.”
     “Evie.”
     She was on her way to the door. She turned.
     “You wouldn’t know what happened to...”
     Her lips went tight, and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut and just let her go.
     “To your friends?” She stood there looking just like her mother, and it hit him that the girl he knew wasn’t there anymore. She’d spilled out a little here, a little there, until now there was almost nothing of her left. And some of that, a lot of that, was his doing.
     “They had to leave,” she said. She looked at him for a second. “Probably had a curfew.” Then she was gone.
     He could see that what happened had confirmed everything she already thought about him, and for a split second he saw very clearly how they were tied to each other. His actions, a justification for her attitude. Her attitude, a justification for his actions. And what used to be a justification for love, now a justification for disappointment. The thought created a hollow in him, a doubt that anything he’d ever done was for the right reason.
     He closed his eyes.

     Someone moaning woke him up, and instead of the fuzziness, there now seemed to be pain in every part of his body. He closed his eyes and concentrated on what he heard...a tray rattling down the corridor, voices murmuring, a door closing. And something else... something faint and constant. A humming. No, a buzzing. A ringing. Something inside, not outside. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

     Tinnitus. That’s what it’s called. The doctor’s words ran through his head. It can be brought on by a blow to the head. There’s a chance it may go away or diminish somewhat. And since yours isn’t severe, you may grow accustomed to it and hardly be aware of it at all.
     He stared at the papers in front of him and tried to be hardly aware of the noise in his head. But it was like trying not to think of elephants. Then his knee began to ache. He rubbed it. A silver lining that for the rest of his life he’d be able to predict bad weather.
     The furnace rumbled and the humorous card Joy had sent wavered slightly at the first flow of warm air. He’d thought for a while she might call.
     He looked up at the sound of car doors slamming. Karen and Tim were lifting their weekend supplies out of the back of the wagon. Evie stood holding a bag of groceries. He pictured her putting them away, quickly, efficiently, knowing where everything went even though she’d never been in his kitchen. She handed the bag to Timmy and got back in the car. She’d wait until they were inside, until she saw him wave from a window.
     It occurred to him that he hadn’t heard the car coming. Which meant what…that he wasn’t becoming primal after all? That he was merely damaged? And being damaged, well…that was the human condition, wasn’t it. Unavoidable.
     He watched them as they came up the walk, at each other as usual. Arguing about who was carrying the most, who’d get to sleep on the spare bed or the couch, whose turn it was to light the fire in the fireplace. He knew that sometime in the next three minutes they’d make him tell the story again. And by using his imagination and filling in the blanks, he’d managed to come up with a pretty good one. He even liked hearing it himself. Somehow, diving head first into the ground at ten miles an hour impressed them like nothing else he’d ever done. And when he thought about it, maybe they were right.
     He pushed himself up from the table, gave his knee time to catch up with the rest of his leg, realized that for a while he hadn’t been aware of the noise in his ear. It hadn’t stopped, but for a while he’d forgotten about it. Which meant maybe the doctor was right, maybe he’d learn to not hear it most of the time.
     Then the door opened, and the room was suddenly filled with noise and energy and comfort.