I don’t know if it is sufficient to say I have tried. Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough. I feel the bitter taste of defeat in my mouth. Now I can even scream, but they won’t hear me. And the funny part is that they won’t hear me because they have gone through the procedure voluntarily.
I still remember on the news, a small but loud—pun intended—group of people claiming hearing was a curse. Everybody laughed, even I did, the group was a joke. But some people don’t know how to play. I also did not care; I enjoyed the meows of my cat or the panting of my girlfriend. Hearing was rad.
The streets were flooded with pamphlets claiming that hearing was evil. Words were lies and lies disturbed the order, and only non-hearing brought inner peace. My tits and ass! Their group used earmuffs, and I thought they only came in yellow. I was honestly flabbergasted to see lunatics wearing them in public. We laughed at them, but looking back now, though, it was our fault. We steered them away from us.
Then it happened to me. I came home and my girlfriend had two pairs of earmuffs, and mine had a red ribbon glued to them. I laughed, but her face told me she meant it. I deflated. I thought she liked music. I thought she liked to hear my voice and our cats. I thought she enjoyed eavesdropping just like me.
She tried to convince me that words and sounds were a way of lying and destroying the mind. We had a mortgage together. I took the earmuffs. I could pretend for a little, right? One thing I noticed right away was that people with earmuffs would fart without ceremony. At least my girlfriend started doing it.
It would be funny if she didn’t refuse to communicate with me. Hell, I even tried to learn sign language, but she would have none of it. Texting on her favorite social media app was the only way we could exchange words. I realized, though, that the app she used excluded and modified words considered evil by them. Huh, it could have been a glitch, but I asked her why I could not type the word squid. She just answered me squid was an evil animal and therefore excluded from their vocabulary.
Squids aren’t bad, I mean, we have geese, and compared to geese, squids are fine, I guess. How often do we, living in the middle of the continent, get in the way of a squid? In no time, her vocabulary became so restricted we spoke only of meals (that did not include squid), work and practical decisions that involved our lives. She stopped smiling.
The number of people on the streets wearing earmuffs gradually increased. I wore them in sympathy for my girlfriend. Our wedding date was set for less than six months from now, and we had both decided on our dresses and the flavor of the cake. Wearing earmuffs made our reception cheaper—no more pianist or live band. But if we didn’t dance, how could we have fun at the party?
I just tried to keep the peace, and for some months, it went well. It happened slowly, I guess I did not understand, I was so dumb. After work, with a glass of wine, my long hair in a bun, I was cutting fish for dinner.
She then texted me: ‘I don’t know, Uzma… I know you have been trying, I know it, but it is not working anymore. I know you remove your earmuffs.’ She told me while pointing at the statistics on her phone.
‘You can see my usage? Are they connected to your phone? Have you been spying on me?’ I could only scream, waving the knife in her direction.
I yanked the earmuffs off and threw them at her. It wasn’t my best moment, but I was angry and tipsy. Everything after was a blur. I saw her packing her things in only two suitcases and leaving our apartment. I was so absorbed in my own life I did not notice that the world was being divided between hearing and not hearing people.
Even neighborhoods had formed: while the hearing had noisy neighborhoods with music and talk, the non-hearing people’s neighborhoods had sound level meters spread and noise above 45 decibels was punished by the recently created sound guard.
The government tried to intervene; lynching became normal to the point it did not even make it onto the news anymore. What made the news, though, was the creation of the procedure. I was just too busy cancelling my wedding and losing most deposits when I read about it. At first, I thought nobody would really do it.
The first time I saw it was in a supermarket. Ear canal sewn shut and ears removed completely. Weird as fuck. People communicated through their screens with simple and pre-saved messages on their phone. The phone spoke for them. In fact, the ones who went through the procedure, which they called Sense Readjustment, walked around proud of themselves.
Men would get a fade cut to show where the ears were, while women would have the most colorful hairclips to call attention to their new look. Not that I was ashamed of my own ears and my ability to hear, but I started wearing my hair down, covering them. Their violence was silent, very much pun intended. The division reached a point where entire areas of the city went silent and soon commerce and companies specialized in their own clientele.
Personally, I was going through a bad breakup; I missed her so much. Every woman without ears was my ex. Every screen pointed at me with premade sentences was her. The bills became too high, our spacious apartment was too expensive to keep and I had to downsize. It was just our cat and me. Even our side of town became silent, nobody was really happy.
My company became silent, the boss was non-hearing and, for the sake of money, we had to abide. I still could hear and talk, but I had no one to talk to. In silence at work, and in silence at home, so despite my misfortune, I adopted a dog. My cat and my dog meowed and barked. I spent days without hearing my own voice.
I tried bars, and I tried online apps, but I had lost the spark—I had lost the capacity to connect with people. I couldn’t think of anything I could share. My dates were stale, perhaps because I was still wearing both of our bands. I don’t really know. I saw something about children of non-hearing people getting the procedure right after birth. But I couldn’t care less. I was living my life as if I were the only person who felt pain.
So I was surprised when the non-hearing came for all of us. I quickly packed up the cat and the dog and tried to run, but I couldn’t outrun the power structure. The cameras and phones mapped every person with ears. My problem was that I thought I could coexist with such an intolerable difference. I thought they would live their lives and let us live ours.
It seemed the more limited their phone vocabulary was, the more rage they carried within. Their group swallowed ours, and here I was, running for my life with two noisy little things inside their respective carriers.
When the words were absent from their mouths, their brains ceased to exist, and the only noises they made came from bodily functions. We escaped, though, by the skin of my teeth. The last wagon with hearing families was leaving. If I had had more money, I’d have a car. But I had lost that too. And with Mimi and J, I left. Here I am.
*
Uzma finished her report. She read it slowly and then tried to correct it. But instead, she crumpled the three sheets of paper into a large ball and tossed it into the trash. She thought it was a silly and disconnected piece of writing, and it could not inspire the hearing people. She fed J and Mimi thinking about her ex-fiancée disfigured inside the city they had seized.
She jumped onto her tiny bed in a small room she shared with another twenty people and their animals and the animals’ fleas. Civilization had been kind to the non-hearing. For the hearing, only savage nature and a refugee camp remained.
The meals were meager while they waited for the help of the neighboring city for allocation. Uzma, however, noticed the camp losing people—not to death or to the new apartments in the new city. The non-hearing wandered around the camp, calling people back to the city.
Broken by the difficult living conditions and homesickness, many people slowly caved in and moved back. Uzma felt some relief seeing the beds empty, at least J and Mimi weren’t sleeping on her legs, biting each other and sometimes her.
She was doing the dishes when she saw her ex-fiancée. She pointed the phone at Uzma. The message was simple: ‘I miss you. Come home.’
Uzma chose a dish stained with tomato sauce and wrote an answer with her finger.
‘I can’t hear you.’
