Hearing it was one way to describe it. By the middle of fall he could sense when the sound would soon arrive to crawl up his body like a spider, late at night; the air in the duplex would go still as a coffin and he’d move to the window to peer out the blinds, bracing himself for the sound’s throbbing ache. 

“Is it here,” his mother would ask, and by that time it clearly was; this deep-frequency tremor that caused the walls to shake, that would strum the tendons in his forearm like the strings of a bass. 

Much later, when the police walked through, they would wonder why everything that belonged on a shelf—mugs, framed photographs, a rotary saw, the Ruger—rested instead against the baseboards. But John had not yet moved these items to the floor. For now he lay still, kept awake by the sound. He would, he knew, trade the innermost parts of himself to discover its source.

Desires usually evolve with circumstance. But John’s only narrowed and intensified, and soon he came to believe that knowing the cause of this sound that tormented him would reveal all that lay just beyond his understanding. Solving it would solve a great many other things; he would find himself at the center of the maze. 

And so he began to gather information. He knew the precise schedule by which the new couple next door would turn on and off their lights, their television, their shower, and how those times correlated to when the noise was strongest; he knew that one of the tenants in a building up the block had a restraining order against someone else on the floor below; he knew that weather patterns throughout the year had altered the flight paths of planes coming in and out of the airport a few miles away. He suspected each of these factors to varying degrees on varying nights. He had not ruled out the possibility of some coordination between them.

Whenever the singularly blinding pain would get started—while it still just simmered in the tips of his fingers—he would try to think of other things, as his mother had suggested he do. Specifically, he tried to think of nothing. This was what monks did, he’d read, or torture victims. But not long after he’d find rhythm in his breathing the pain would intensify, and by the time it worked its way up into the base of his neck he found himself thinking of everything at once. The pain, of course, but also the anger at the pain, and the dismay that he could not solve it. The contortion of it all remained knotted in his chest well after the sound disappeared.

“Try to sleep,” his mother would call from her bed whenever she saw he’d risen to take up his post at the side window of the house. But how? How, after being in such excruciating pain for so long, could he sleep through what felt like the collapse of the walls of Jericho? 

John had lived on his block for a very long time. He’d been here when the house next door, where the new couple now lived, was instead the hair salon his mother went to, back when she went places; he’d been here when the boy was shot in the knees on the corner to the north. He’d been in this place long enough to feel betrayed by how it now conspired against him, out of sight. 

Shadows of movement in the darkened house next door; a bathroom light flicked on for a minute, then off. A car across the street blinking its hazard lights. A television on in an apartment window, flashing iridescent reds and blues. It wasn’t visible from this window, but behind his house a man named Mike lived in a tent with his dog. John had never heard the dog howl, even when the sound was at its peak. Nor could he see the usual group of boys who came together in the glow of evening to play hockey in the alley. They’d go for hours on end, and the boys who just that winter were starting to find their bodies would play violently. But when spring came most of them would disappear, and by the next winter the game would feature new, younger members. This was how it went. 

A bus went by—the buses would shake the house when they went by every eight minutes on weekdays and sixteen minutes on weekends—but that rattle was not the sound, which rumbled like bass, intensifying slowly past the point of earthly comparison.

The trick was to catch the fuckers in the act, Mike had suggested once, calling out from his open tent. The trick was to find the weed while it was flowering and pull it out by its root.  

▲

In the thirteenth century, the Umbrian village of Gubbio was visited, for a time, by a wolf. The villagers first learned of the creature’s existence when some livestock went missing. In desperation, a shepherd kept a night vigil to learn what was causing his sheep to disappear, and in that darkness he watched the largest creature he’d ever seen attack and carry off another member of his flock. 

The shepherd alerted some soldiers in the village to his plight, and they agreed to guard the animals until the shepherd felt confident the wolf had gone. But the next night, there it came; the wolf attacked and killed another sheep, and when the soldiers lunged to slaughter it they found, to their horror, that the wolf could not be harmed by their weapons. The beast killed the soldiers right there in front of the shepherd’s house, and when it was finished it went into the village and devoured the families of those soldiers, who had come out of their house looking for their fathers and husbands. 

This was the beginning. The wolf had developed a taste for flesh, and after a few more violent killings—a merchant, a child playing in the town square, a woman out in search of her missing child—the town shuttered its doors in the face of the siege. No one but heavily armored guards went outside, and the few who dared to seek out the wolf did not return. This would be the end of Gubbio, a town that up until then had kept to itself and worshipped faithfully. The people of Gubbio were a people who’d tried to do what was right, and in return their God had sent them a devil to drive them to oblivion.

Eventually, beginning to run out of supplies in his home, the shepherd took up his own old sword and went to find the creature himself. He was out of sheep by now, and of a brother and an uncle, both of whom had tried and failed to help. He’d never felt so alive as he did that night; the moon against the deep blue sky dazzled him, and after a few minutes he felt fine shedding his coat. The shepherd had resolved to die bravely rather than cower any longer behind a locked door, and in the end, that was what he did.

▲

“Where, specifically, do you feel it?” the woman living in the house next door asked over the phone. 

They were only talking in the first place because he was sure he’d found it—their basement light was on whenever he heard it, and this couple next door was new to the neighborhood like the sound was. But the police had stopped answering his calls, and after the fifth consecutive night of placing a noise complaint he awakened to find new curtains in their windows, along with a note in his mailbox. A phone number and an offer to help were scrawled on it.

He had called them to yell. But after a minute of her protests that no, the sound was not coming from their house, she let slip that she was a doctor. And now in her question, he saw the same sleight of hand all doctors tried to pull—she was asking him about the pain, not the sound. Well. He would make it clear to her what he thought of doctors.

When her house was generating the sound, he informed her, he felt the pain in his ulnar nerve, and as it got worse throughout the night it would slide up along the flexor digitorum profundus until it reached the median nerve near his elbow. By now he knew the forearm better than any of the doctors saying the words peripheral neuropathy to him, and he certainly knew it better than this person now on the other end of the line. All he needed her to do was make the sound stop. Didn’t she understand? This was not a question of anatomy; in the moments when the pain escalated past any hope for meditation, it was no use to him that he could strip his own body down to its labeled parts. But that was the trick behind the medicinal curtain, he knew, and he told her so: when it’s all just pieces, you can treat them however you like, can’t you?

▲

This would be the end of the story. Maria had decided this not for any distinct reason, but instead based on the accumulation of countless innocuous ones. She was here one final time to get her things. Her disappearance, while sudden in the moment, would make sense in retrospect; all she needed now was an opportunity to set the narrative in motion.

Xi, he played. And box. Counting the x twice aloud—“Ten, and ten,” he said to her, tallying. He took a sip of his wine, and so did Maria.

This had become the ritual: she would finish at Pat’s Tap and head straight over here with her stuff in a bag, worn out from an evening of wiping beer off tables and hands off her elbows. The board would usually be out by the time she arrived, so that when they finished what they did beforehand they could sit right down and play. They would drink and he’d tell her about whatever happened at his law firm that day, and when he asked she would tell him that she wrote then worked, in some order—a joke about how both things in certain instances became the other. It was funny enough to put off any follow-ups. Eventually she’d fall asleep while he played a video game, the boom off the speakers pulsing through her body while she slept. 

They’d bonded first and foremost over words. He’d read enough to be interesting in conversation those first few dates, and he was handsome enough in comparison to the other men in this damp city that it felt worth sticking out for a while. She’d found no reason not to; his apartment was nice, the fact that he had a real job and real money was nice, the sex was nice. The seed of a life was here if she wanted it.

The only time they’d ever really fought, weeks ago, they stood and paced, and out of instinct or otherwise he had drifted toward the door and locked it.

“It’s your turn,” he said. She’d give him this: his words didn’t slur when he drank. But he’d go to the bathroom soon, and that’s when she would leave. She knew he would call, in the coming days. Minutes from now, once she was back outside and walking briskly, she would pull her phone out of her thick coat pocket multiple times to check, brushing the falling flakes off its screen. The question was whether he would chase her. It’s not that she was scared, any more than she would have been of a loose dog. She’d been made to understand well before now how men in pain behaved. But there were certain pragmatic concerns.

The board game did not actually hinge on words, she had learned. It hinged on pieces and positioning, a detailed knowledge of sounds and syllables that technically counted but functionally meant nothing. Letters mattered, but not anything they could be put together to make. He found this to be very clever, the way he would place X’s on the spaces offering unearned bonuses while she waited carefully to place dys in front of trophy, extending it into a valueless void where everything only counted for what it was; his smirk while he kept score told an old story she knew intimately. You could make something beautiful, or you could win.

▲

Of the boys playing hockey in the back alley who would not go on to play professionally, one of them dreamt of doing so far more fiercely than the others. His name was Justin, and he was the goaltender. The game only had one net, and so he was teamless—he became everyone’s opponent at one time or another, depending on who had the puck. 

Before bed each night Justin would watch clips of the game’s most formidable scoring threats—Ovechkin and Crosby, Subban, Stamkos, McDavid. After he worked through the videos of players he knew he would then turn to grainy footage of players whom his father, a proud Québécois, once described in mythic tones—Tremblay, Lafleur, Jean Beliveau. Men who had learned the game on the ice, not in rinks. He would carefully study all their movements,, their various fakes, slowing the videos down at the moment they would win the battle against the goaltender, when all became inevitable, but before the puck would leave their sticks. This moment—just before the siren and boorish celebration of the goal, when the man in net had been twisted fatally away from the puck—he would fall asleep thinking about. He hated it. 

He hated the interruption, mostly. Fishing the puck out of the net in the twilight, resetting for a faceoff, starting over from scratch whatever rhythm the game had managed to achieve. The other boys were unbearable in the aftermath of the decreasingly few goals Justin allowed, mimicking some dance they’d seen on SportsCenter, shouting at him and each other. 

Many years later, whenever the tarmac became freezing and loud, he would reinhabit the only fleeting stretches of his life during which he’d ever felt peace. The long, uninterrupted periods of play, skaters gliding end to end with no respite, the session kept alive by his staunch refusal to allow a puck to pass. The frustration and fatigue evident on the other boys’ faces. It was the happiest he would ever be, before his knees left him and his whole future burst like a thundercloud, and mere minutes before the two dark figures came stumbling into the alley toward them that night. 

He’d prepared. The night before, in his bedroom with the door locked, Justin had managed to slowly descend into a full split after months of careful stretching. The splits came to him just in time: a few days earlier, Ottowa’s Erik Karlsson had scored an overtime game-winner against Toronto on a flashy-looking wrist deke, and Justin had watched the clip a hundred times, knowing that the other boys would be emulating it.

They were trying, but Justin was ready. Pucks ricocheted off his blocker into the gutter along the side of the alley, and against the back fences of yards. Finally, after what felt like a straight hour of fruitless skating, snow started to fall. “Next goal wins,” one boy declared, panting.

Justin loved this particular crucible; it freed him from time, as long as he did what he was supposed to. If there was no goal, he could stay crouched under the streetlamps forever. With good enough goaltending, he could have lived and died right there in net rather than in the forgettable ways he eventually would. And there would be no goal. Moments before the woman rounded the corner into view and a few more moments before the man appeared behind her, one of the faster boys got a clean look at the net from ten feet out and choked down on his stick for a wrist shot. In quiet moments for the rest of his life Justin would hear that sound in his head, the deadened thump of the puck as his glove swallowed it whole.

▲

It took two fevers to turn Francis of Assisi toward God. The first, contracted while Francis was a prisoner of war, caused brief thoughts of eternity to flare up inside him before giving way to more militaristic ambition. But the second, years later, stuck; he soon disavowed all spiritual and material wealth, devoting himself to a life of mysticism he’d found through sickness.

Eventually this vocation brought him to Gubbio, where he now sat in his modest room with the front door barred and the windows boarded up.

When he heard the first rumor about the terror that had arrived at the village, he knew. He’d long ago come to understand that he held special commune with the creatures of the world. Doves listened intently when he preached, and the rabbit he’d freed from a snare followed him for miles afterward. This was the hidden truth he’d been chosen to reveal: the rest of creation wasn’t as far beneath man as it imagined.

What now lay in wait outside Gubbio’s gates, however, was a different story.

Francis prayed. I don’t understand, he said while putting his coat on. He didn’t need to. Where are you in this carnage, he asked, lacing his boots. But where was God anywhere? What made Francis think he was the one animal to stumble out of Eden who got to know?

He would emerge from the walled village and seek out the wolf. He saw now that his time since surviving the fevers had been borrowed, that God was now asking for it back.

Francis expected to be mauled the moment he stepped outside the front gates. But he was not. He walked a full morning, and then a full afternoon; he flinched at every small sound emanating from the woods. With each branch snapped underfoot, he prayed for his faith to increase. Shepherds had told him their best guess as to where the beast lived, and he made his way there. For the life of him he could not see how the coming events could be called martyrdom.  

As he walked further and further from Gubbio he felt something peel off him like snakeskin. All this time thinking his gift was meant to bring the beasts of the earth toward heaven, but he’d had it backward. He could see the cave lying up ahead; whatever gap existed between him and the animals would soon be violently closed. Prayer had no bearing on the sharpness of fangs. This time, as two creatures stood beneath the God that made them, it would be Francis who would come away changed.

▲

Life, John had found, consisted of constant tradeoffs and negotiations. You had to know what you were willing to give up in order to get what you wanted. He had made peace with hearing nothing ever again if it meant ridding himself of the sound. 

So began his quest to block everything out. Earplugs for sleeping, headphones during the day, a soundproof material bought in bulk at the hardware store that now coated every spare inch of his walls; he spent weeks implementing these changes. After countless nights of research, he’d learned that some human senses were intertwined. Smell and taste, obviously. Or, no matter how much distance or separation between you and something seen, you could practically hear any noises emanating from it. Heavy curtains now covered his windows so that he would no longer be tempted to rush and look. 

But the sound would not relent. Even now, many weeks into his crusade against his senses, the sound still slammed through his body like a train.

He was awake and staring at the walls, the shelves. He swore he could see the sound moving through the objects upon them; through the curtain rods he’d hung. When he lay under siege like this, sleep deprived and ashamed, he would look over to the bed that had been his mother’s and would say, not loudly, See?

He did, and that was the problem. Too many landmarks by which he could see that a demon crept through his home. John rose and took hold of the nearest hanging item, a skillet, and set it carefully on the floor. The empty space on the wall stood silent now, and he felt thrilled by a jolt of relief. He got to work.

Eventually, a void. In the center of the darkened duplex he had rid himself of all threats to his senses; all he could feel was the blink of his eyes. He knew that the sound was in here with him and that, if given the opportunity, it would inhabit anything that moved. And so he would not move. He would become nothing, and so would it.

Eyes open. This was critical. If he allowed himself to drift toward sleep, his mind would conjure visions and structures that ranged from amorphous shapes and colors to a memory of him and his mother sitting at a table with coffee, long before the sound had snuck like a thief into his life. The simple vision could have been any number of countless days in which they had sat there like that, unencumbered by what would soon arrive. And John knew amidst the flaring pain that this was a cruel trick of the sound, this reminder that things had not always been this way. It wanted him to feel it: he had once lived free.

He stood. In the darkness he groped for his coat and boots. This was not how he would choose to live; the source of the sound was out there, finite, and he could see now that there would be no hiding from it.

The illuminated houselights at this hour were few and far between, but he knew them like a language after months of peering carefully into windows. John could now even detect movement behind curtains—the knowledge and familiar technique of it flooded back to him. Alone on the frozen street he stood still and listened; it felt good to act instead of wait, and as the sound vibrated in the tips of his fingers like a current he practically welcomed it. He had come out here to meet it where it lived.

The body had ways of sensing things before the mind could, John knew. Odd itches. Phantom limbs. He’d decided to turn back inside at the exact moment he finally saw movement across the street.

A woman walked briskly on the sidewalk up the block, the collar of her coat pulled high to her face. Her phone glowed in her hand before disappearing back into her pocket. And there, he saw it—her head had glanced just slightly in his direction before darting forward again, her pace quickening.

Rigor in pursuit bred faith in outcomes. You had to believe even when the world tried to beat belief out of you. Here in the dead of night, John believed. He believed because he’d pushed too far not to, had endured countless disappointments. The frayed threads of his life held no meaning on their own but could find some, now, at this intersection between what was hurting him and his chance to stamp it out for good.

Belief. This was how John knew for certain, as he stepped off his porch, that the woman walking up the block held knowledge of the sound. 

▲

On the phone that day, the doctor in the house next door had asked him about his pain because that was what she always did. Simple as a reflex. Pain was a story the body told itself. She had come to understand her life to be built on these stories, coaxed out of people and relayed secondhand and answered. In many instances her role was only to listen—she was not this man’s doctor but she was the doctor this man had found, right then.

Her own body had lately started telling her a story: it was not so easy to move between the realms of the living and the dead without carrying a little of both.

A man comes into the clinic. This was the start of every joke told by every physician. A man comes into the clinic and says that he’s in pain. Where, the doctor asks. Here, he says, touching his arm. And here, and here, and here, moving his finger systematically across his whole body. By now the doctor has figured out the problem—this is always the root of the humor, that the doctor understands things about the patient that the patient does not understand about himself. There’s nothing wrong with your body, the doctor says to the man. The problem is in your finger.

John—she’d learned his name from a police officer in her front entryway on the third night of visits to her house—had not called her to tell his story. He was looking for a different one, one with an origin somewhere outside himself. She could hear what he truly asked between every medical half-truth he rattled off.  

What did he say, the police would later ask her. 

That he was in pain. 

Well, what kind?

What kinds are there, she would almost say. The feeling of leaving one family experiencing the worst moment of their lives to go inform a different one that they were about to, as well—was that so different than John’s sound? 

She’d been certain right away that it was neurological; she knew he was harassing her because of what her colleagues would call a “fixed false belief.” And yet for weeks she found herself flinching or freezing at the ordinary rumblings of the block. What if he really was hearing something? And what if she could fix it?

Once in the early morning before getting in her car she’d heard the low throb of a bass line up the street. She couldn’t help it; in scrubs she wandered slowly toward it. Freezing out, and her coat was in her car. It sounded like the lowest register of a rap song or an action movie. But after walking the length of a few houses suddenly the sound was elsewhere, back the way she came. She spun and walked back before it shifted locations again. She scoured the dark street, interpreting shadows by herself in the dark winter morning, but she’d lost it. 

No, she scolded herself. That was the wrong way to put it.

▲

Brother Wolf, Francis is said to have called out, in the moments before asking the animal to repent its sins. Improbably, the wolf agreed; the two of them, man and wolf, stood there in the forest and talked, and with Francis as the vessel God revealed to the wolf the terrible wrongs it had committed. Then they walked together back to Gubbio, side by side so that each could keep an eye on the other.

The villagers shrieked when they first saw Francis leading the wolf through the gates. But he calmed them: the wolf had confessed, he told the nervous crowd, and was here to make amends. The wolf had no way of giving back what it had taken from so many of the people, but it vowed to help in whatever way it could. 

Slowly the villagers of Gubbio accepted the wolf into their fold. It worked in the places it was able, and on the various anniversaries of the atrocities it had committed it bowed its head with appropriate contrition. They let the wolf sleep in a stable that was vacant because the wolf had killed the very animals it once housed—these little ironies were unavoidable on any path toward reconciliation, and when they made themselves apparent all parties would laugh or pray or just let it lie outside the limits of their shared language. Through this subtle work a version of peace took hold.

They called it a miracle but Francis wasn’t so sure. He’d become tired and wary of the countless questions about that night in the cave. Was it so unthinkable that a creature might feel shame if shown the truth of who it was?

One evening as the sun dipped Francis noticed a shadow wandering toward the edge of Gubbio. In this town everyone knew each other and their habits, and this was strange; overcome with curiosity, Francis approached the figure right as it reached the gate. The wolf came into view, large as ever, and its eyes flitted past Francis for a second when they stopped to talk.

“Where are you going?” Francis asked. The two of them had not spoken much since the wolf had been welcomed into Gubbio. There simply hadn’t been that much else to say.

“Home,” the wolf said.

Francis could see he did not mean the stable. “Why?” he asked instead; simply, quietly. 

“When you came to me, you told me that, with repentance, God might see me as a man, his favored creature.”

“Yes,” Francis said. 

A wildness had returned to the wolf’s eyes. By now Francis knew that the wolf had discovered on its own what it had taken divine intervention for Francis to learn. There was nothing extraordinary in the two of them talking. The miracles hadn’t happened yet.

“I’ve seen men, now. I’ve worked with them, eaten with them, lived among them. I’ve watched them desire and pursue.”

“You have,” Francis said. The wolf’s eyes darted over his shoulder once more.

“God is mistaken.” And out the gates it went.