4

The following morning, I wake up in the afternoon. It is a Sunday, and from the moment I wake, I am embraced by the satisfying, warm feeling of accomplishment, even though the goings-on of the night before take a few more seconds to come back to me. I lay in my bed for a moment, motionless, staring into the ceiling, and attempt to prod those thoughts, but realise that through the mist of fatigue that surrounds them, they are almost as if from a dream and not reality. No matter how much I consider them, no part of me can directly affirm with greater certainty that they are indeed real and not purely imagined. This chain of thought quickly spirals into another of greater unconfidence, propelled by my prior fear of not quite knowing whether the experiment was a success, and before long, my warmth of accomplishment is snuffed by the constricting suffocations of uncertainty. I do not continue to lay in my bed, and without allowing another second to pass I leap to my feet and begin to think about what my next steps should be.

The truth is – and I know it – that I will only begin to see the fruits of my efforts bloom towards the evening – the torturous evening – and that if I want to be completely honest to my experiment, I will need to allow the remainder of the day to pass without interference, and simply see what happens. 

So to this end I embark on a trivial passing of time. It is immediately difficult: the only thing that occupies my mind is my neighbour, and I am helplessly attentive to the minutest sound that might come from the direction of his apartment, and in the place where I would typically find my greatest peace – my work – not even there do I find any solace. The minutes appear to draw on for hours, and the hours become eternities that I cannot bear. I try to return to a given project, one I produced from my box of get-to-these by my desk, but every time I turn to look at any work, an indefinite silence passes, and I notice only after a while that I’ve spend the entire time doing absolutely nothing, staring blankly into the surface of my desk, at most listening for any clues that might come from the other side of my bedroom wall. My torment is only exacerbated further by my neighbour’s behaviour that day: had he chosen to do nothing, stay in and relax, or even go out, so that beyond the walls of this building I could not hear him, then I would have an iota more of calm than I do waiting for the hours to pass, pierced like an electric spear with every insignificant noise that comes from his actions, while on the opposite side of the wall it seems that my neighbour is constantly on the move, doing who-knows-what on a dull Sunday afternoon, and neither my ears nor my mind can rest.

It is only after a couple of hours of this endeavour that I determine that I cannot, after all, allow this investigation to wait until the evening. My cultivated understanding of the correct proceedings of scientific inquiry is dominated by the incessant suffering I feel when oppressed by the anticipation, and I decide that in the end, there is no sense in progressing any further if I am only to be faced by anguish. So within the silent afternoon, I arise from my desk – at which no work has been done – and I embark to see my neighbour once again.

Almost in a single thought, I leave my apartment and find my neighbour’s door, knocking three times for attention. This time there is no obfuscation of my alert, and within moments I can hear the footsteps approaching. I realise as they near, in the split second that precedes the opening of the door, that there is a slight chance that my neighbour did in fact see me and remember me that night, and that upon witnessing me waiting at his door he will respond with immediate hostility, and I feel myself tensing. I hear the single lock twisting open, and in the milliseconds that it takes to turn around, I manage to ease my worries by reasoning that if my neighbour did in fact see me, he would not make a parade of addressing the matter and would instead come to confront me directly, and seeing as how for the entire day so far I have received not a single knock on my door, I can expect that he is still none the wiser. This last-second realisation helps ease my tension a little bit, but ultimately I am still not the undisturbed self that had left my apartment to begin an inquiry, and when my neighbour finally opens his entrance door, I am lost for words.

‘Hello,’ he says in greeting.

I am momentarily caught off guard when I hear him speak. His greeting is plain, bland – like he is reading it poorly from a script.

‘Uhm,’ I begin to fumble. I scramble for my neighbour’s eyes, lifting up my own from the floor where they started, and along the way I notice that my host’s garb has significantly changed. Though the articles themselves may not differ all that much, they are all cleared of any old grease, and it helps him look remarkably more clean. Once my gaze finally reaches his face, I find it adorned with a plain, polite smile, and almost mechanical stare; – ‘Yes, hello,’ I manage after a while, and forgive him a smile of my own.

‘How are you doing today?’ he asks me.

Upon hearing this question, I take a more careful look at my host. His face is plain, simple, but nonetheless pleased – and pleasant. The question appears genuine on his lips, yet I cannot dismiss the reality that its earnestness is discordant with the neighbour that I came to know yesterday. When a few moments of uncertainty pass, with me inspecting my host as subtly as I can, I realise that something within him has changed. This is the first moment when I can feel optimism regarding the success of my experiment, and its notion is so overwhelming that I nearly burst open from excitement in the corridor of our floor.

‘I’m doing quite well, thank you,’ I respond to him. ‘I just wanted to pop by and – well…’

‘You feel that we did not leave on the best of terms on Friday?’

At this interjection my eyes pop from their sockets, and meet my neighbour’s.

‘Uh,’ I fumble, the words I was ready to say already in the air, ‘yes, actually. That’s correct.’

‘I was thinking the same,’ affirms Jake, with a self-critical frown, ‘well, why don’t you come in.’

At the end of his words, he gestures the door open with one arm, and with the other motions me to come inside.

‘It’s convenient, actually,’ says my host, walking away from the door and into the sitting room, in a manner similar to that from my first visit, ‘I was actually just cleaning today.’

As I step into the apartment, I realise that indeed, the rubbish from the hallway is entirely missing. Inspired by an immediate onset of joy, I leap after my neighbour into the sitting room, but am somewhat dismayed at the floor at my destination.

‘I haven’t quite gotten to this room yet,’ he chuckles.

Both the sitting room area and the kitchen remain rather unchanged from how I remember them on my first visit. The same clutter lays carpeting the sitting area, and the same discarded shirts cover the sofa. Witnessing an identical scene to that which I connect with my first visit quenches my enthusiasm by a little, and my mounting optimism is reeled back by the possibility that I have been too quick to hope that my experiment worked, but the moment my eyes return to my neighbour, and I assess without doubt once again that he is certainly not the same Jake that I met that day, I feel a little eased in my anxiety.

While the two of us settle in the living space, I see my neighbour drift towards the tiled kitchen, and then to the fridge. Regarding his movements, I notice that there is little intention behind them, and wonder whether he will – as he did before – produce a bottle of beer from this fridge; but once he walks close enough to it, he simply sways around, and finds comfort in leaning on the countertop beside it.

‘So, the Friday…’ begins Jake.

‘Yes,’ I join in.

We look at one another for an awkward second, deciding without words who ought to begin the conversation. Feeling lost in the silence, I find the weight landing on me, and I am compelled to continue.

‘I am awfully regretful,’ I begin, ‘that our first encounter had to be one of such awful disagreement.’

‘I am of the same voice,’ responds Jake with a pleasant smile, and his echoing of my choice of formal language shocks me a little.

After an uncertain pause, my company continues.

‘I feel like I was feeling perhaps a little hostile, being confronted so directly by – well, by a stranger.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ I say sheepishly, ‘I was perhaps a bit too hasty – a bit too direct, as you’ve put it, in my issuing of a complaint to somebody I barely know.’

Jake smiles understandingly.

‘Of course,’ he says, ‘I think that the two of us were perhaps not our best selves that evening, and it impacted negatively our first impressions of one another.’

I smile in response, and even let out a subtle chuckle.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I agree.’

For a potent second, the two of us share in a moment of mutual compassion.

‘Well,’ returns my host, ‘what do you say, in that case, that we try again? Afresh, like new neighbours.’

‘I think that sounds like a wonderful idea,’ I confirm with a smile.

‘Fantastic,’ he agrees, pushing himself up from his slight lean on the counter. ‘So, did you get much work done yesterday, then?’

His reminder of the agonising night and day I spent for the past twenty four hours as a result of his noxious habits causes some of my forgotten anger to bubble up to the surface, but I halt it before it might reach my lips and taint my smile.

‘Not much,’ I answer indifferently.

‘You ended up taking the day off then after all, did you?’

Again, like a bolt of fire, I am ignited by his comment; and again, I do not falter to it.

‘No, just… couldn’t focus, I suppose. Happens sometimes. Real hindrance, I must admit.’

‘Ah,’ responds my host with a broad grin, ‘I know precisely what you mean. Happens to me a lot of the time. You plan to work one day, and all the sudden, poof! there goes all your inspiration, and you feel like the day has gone – wasted.’

The momentary spark of empathy which we share manages to distract me for a second from my pure distaste for the hypocrisy before me, but I quickly manage to return to my rational train of thought.

‘You know,’ I say, ‘it occurs to me that I never did ask you what you do for work.’

Jake’s expression relaxes from his elation to one of humble pride.

‘I’m a musician,’ he explains.

‘Ah,’ I admit, ‘that explains the guitar.’

His eyebrows furrow in surprise.

‘You know about my guitar?’ he asks.

For a moment I panic, realising that my image of the guitar was inspired entirely by my visit from the night before, but I swiftly manage to salvage my slip up.

‘I heard you playing it before,’ I explain, ‘–or at least I assume that was you playing it.’

This brings my company back to a full smile.

‘Yes, of course,’ he recalls, and not for a single instant during his recollection does any shame mar the vibrant joy on his face.

I stand there for the single second of silence that elapses between us, looking at him, getting closer and closer to betraying the truth within, and just as my train of rational thoughts of reassurance nears its end, a spark of brilliant inspiration lights up my company’s face. 

‘Here,’ he says, ‘come with me. Let me show you my setup.’

As he enthusiastically instructs me, he walks his way over to the doorway, and he manages to turn his back to me on the exact instant before the one on which I begin to snap, and mouth fuck you to the back of his head. By the time I hurry myself right behind him in the hallway, however, I am once again fully composed, and comfortable to continue with the charade.

While we make our way through the hallway, I am returned to my amazement that the entire floor area is clear of debris; not only, it appears, the initial landing space in front of the entrance, but also the remainder of the hallway too. 

On the way, I notice that the door of the utility closet is slightly ajar, and as we pass it I manage to peer inside. With the help of ambient illumination, I can see that the closet appears to be completely empty, with the arguable exception of a vacuum cleaner sitting at the bottom, covered with an ironic layer of dust. As we amble amicably to the end of the hallway, I remark to myself just how pleasant the journey there is when one doesn’t have to avoid a minefield of rustling packages on the way.

We reach the door to Jake’s bedroom, where my host stops and stands in the way, obstructing my view of the chamber. He looks at me for a moment with a proud smirk, and after a second of what I assume he must think is anticipation, he swings around into the room, like a door on hinges, and with his outer arm he indicates broadly the sound system that I discovered on my unsolicited visit to his home. 

Much to his expectations and the convenience of my veil, I am breathtaken – but it is not the sound system that impresses me so. Instead, on the disclosure of a space whose sole image I know from silhouettes of the night before, and whose prominent influence on my nerves has left a lasting impression of those very silhouettes imprinted on my eyelids, I am grasped by immediate and delightful shock when I see that the floor of my neighbour’s bedroom is clear of any debris.

‘It’s amazing,’ I mutter involuntarily, and I know that my neighbour only smiles more broadly to hear it.

All the beer bottles from next to the mattress – the mattress remains, of course, notwithstanding any other improvements; it, I suppose, is immortal – are cleared and gone, and all the packets which in the past spilled from the hallway into the room – or vice-versa – are nowhere to be seen. Even the guitar, which I can now see is electric and a vibrant, polished bright red, once tossed carelessly onto the ground, is adjusted to rest neatly on a stand next to one of the speakers.

My host lowers his hand and moves deeper into the room, closer to the connecting wall to allow himself a better view of the whole apparatus. I follow him closely behind, never quite severing my attention from the minute improvements the room has received. Everything is so neat and tidy – even the speakers seem to have been attended to recently, and moved to a more central position.

‘It can do everything,’ begins Jake from beside me, ‘it can play from any device, any port, vinyls at the top there. Full range of audio, HiFi, the whole thing. But most importantly…’ – my host leaves my side, and walks up to the stand holding the guitar. Picking it up, he finds the cable and connects the instrument to a port on the front of the hub connecting the two speakers. Then, he stands a little bit back, so that from where I’m standing the two black rectangles may frame him from both sides, ‘it can do this.’

With a forceful blow, which I, still mesmerised by the changes the room has undergone, do not prepare myself for in the slightest, my neighbour strikes his guitar with his right hand, strumming every chord along the way. Once my mind realises what he’s doing, it attempts to spare my ears, rushing to cover them, but it is too late – my hands only make it halfway when the speakers erupt.

I brace myself, expecting the worst, but to my surprise, I do not feel any pain in my ears, or anywhere else in my person. In fact, when my body allows itself to relax from the initial shock, I realise that the speakers are set to a significantly lower volume setting – certainly magnitudes lower than what I had been hearing through the wall – so much so, that the sound it produces does not become an immediate riot, and could almost even be considered pleasant: if the sound, of course, wasn’t a dreadful racket to begin with.

My senses relatively untouched, I manage to quickly return my eyes to my neighbour’s face. A proud smirk curves his wicked lips.

‘What do you think about that?’ he asks, joining the strings in the tail of their diminuendo.

‘Impressive,’ I answer, no longer entirely present with my company. From the moment I realised that the music was not as loud as it had been the nights prior – combined with the notable changes to the apartment’s appearance – a spark of inspiration ignited within me, and now I cannot let it go.

My neighbour lowers the instrument alongside his shoulders and takes it back to its rack beside the audio setup. Once the guitar is replaced, he drifts his way back towards me, and an uncertain silence takes place between us. A sudden realisation overcomes the both of us: the conversation does not have a natural progression from here.

We sit in the silence long enough for it to become awkward. Ultimately, it is my neighbour who breaks it.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘thank you for dropping by.’

‘Yes,’ I agree, ‘I’m glad we could come to an understanding.’

‘I’m happy we could talk things through,’ he adds with a smile.

‘Yes,’ I repeat. ‘I do too.’

Like a polite host, Jake walks me back to the entrance of his apartment. He swings the door open for me, and when I step out, he begins to repeat our first farewell.

‘Enjoy the rest of your afternoon,’ he wishes.

‘You too,’ I echo, and walk back to my own apartment.

The whole way back, I ponder what I have just gone through. All the way to my desk, I process the events that have just transpired before me, and only once I place myself down, does it click entirely. When it does, I burst into rapturous laughter.

After less than a second, I catch myself laughing so loudly, and quickly cover my mouth with my hands to prevent myself any further, reducing my lips to only a delighted smile.

‘It works,’ I whisper from behind my hand. ‘It works. I just need to adjust it some more.’

My hands fall from my face and gently land on the black box. The moment they touch it, pure ecstasy shocks my fingertips, propagating throughout my entire body. My eyes close from the joy, and for an instant, I escape into pure bliss. When my eyes open again, they centre on the black rectangle before me. It appears majestic between my mortal hands.

Immediately, I place the nodes onto myself and begin tuning the device once more. The method I had intuited for the calibration of the machine’s inner workings revolves around baseline adjustment: in effect, the device I have created aims to operate on an individual’s pleasure centres in the brain, those which tell a person what they do and do not like. Ideally, I would simply go ahead and make my neighbour dislike loud music – the experiment, of course, to which my neighbour was the subject, revolved around helping my neighbour overcome his nasty habit for abhorrent sounds – but, as it turns out, it is unfortunately impossible, at least from my deductions, to make someone dislike something. It is, on the other hand, possible to help them like something, to varying degrees, and thus, the epiphany that propelled this entire project forth, was one of realising that if I could help my neighbour like that which is not loud, cacophonous screechings – namely silence – I could in turn allow him to dislike, by proxy, the loud noises which he so unfortunately insists on creating; but, and this part was the one that required utter magnificence of the mind to solve, I had initially a very difficult time knowing how it was that I should adjust my device to achieve such an effect. It was only once I realised that by adjusting the parameters to my own specifications – that is, adjusting them to myself – and therefore specifications whose preferences aligned with those of silence and most peaceful quietude, I could from there find those parameters which were most effective with aligning another with those same preferences and, therefore, the precise parameters I was looking for. As such, I simply needed to place the nodes on myself, and from there, turn the machine on, but slowly and only to a low power setting so as to not affect myself, while still noticing its pulses, and move the other two dials until the pulses aligned neutrally with the chemistry of my own brain, therefore matching my own mental signature. The process was not a trivial one, and it had been imperfect the first time round – hence my neighbour’s playing the music at a lesser volume, but not ceasing to play it entirely – and thus some more fine adjustments would have to be made, and now, operating under the certainty of the efficacy of my procedure, I could finally assist my neighbour in making a full recovery from his most pernicious habit.

The process itself does not take me too long, being not only somewhat acquainted with it from my first attempt, but also being much more alert to the sensations of the procedure, now that I am no longer under the duress of my neighbour’s acoustic oppression. After about three minutes of paying careful heed to the buzzings resonating from each of the rubber pads, I assert that the device is tuned as perfectly as I can adjust it, and I detach the apparatus from my own head to tie it neatly atop the black box once again. With that, I equip myself identically to my preparation the night before, and I sit quietly and wait patiently for the evening to still itself completely, so I might repeat my operation for the final time.

Not late after I decide to begin my patient waiting, my neighbour begins to play his evening tunes – notwithstanding that it’s no longer a weekend night, but I digress – however, much the same as his earlier instrumental showcase, the volume levels are much more agreeable, and I can barely even hear the music through my bedroom wall – in fact, was I not on the course of a major scientific discovery, or if instead this had been my neighbour’s initial adjustment of the sounds, I would not object to the playing of the music at such a level, but seeing as how the completion of my project to its ultimate end coincides both with a magnificent scientific climax as well as my own peace and satisfaction, I am inclined to pursue my course regardless of the notable improvements it has already produced.

As the hours pass, the afternoon passes indifferently into the evening. The music wanes somewhat into the later hours, then picks up some more right before around eleven at night, where it ultimately collapses into a peaceful silence. I remark the favourable change in hour for the beginning of my plan, enjoying the opportunity to go into bed slightly earlier tonight – although I still function, I carry with me the encumbrances of the night before, as no night’s sleep can truly compensate for a nocturnal disruption so significant – but before I can fantasise about that, I know that I must first follow through with the final steps of my procedure.

I wait some more time to allow myself to become fully certain that my neighbour has fallen asleep. I do not truly know what to expect with this new schedule, whether to expect a quicker or more delayed departure from consciousness, but I determine to wait somewhat longer to allow for any available possibilities as consequences of the machine. It is therefore around half past midnight when I decide to make my move, and although I am still confident in the reasoning surrounding my approach, there still remains some uncertainty in my steps, which I cannot fully control.

I leave my apartment, device by my side, and enter the corridor, identically to the night before. I wander over to my neighbour’s door, which, recalling somewhat the gestures from my first picking, I manage to unlock without much trouble. The entrance swings open gently, and my ears become taught to the sounds coming from around me. The night is mostly silent, but I believe that beneath it there is a faint din of snoring I can hear from my neighbour’s room. This relieves me enough to propel myself into the apartment with ease, pushing the door back – but not entirely closed – behind me.

With the way now cleared for me, I do not hesitate to navigate my way over to my neighbour’s bedroom, wielding a familiarity with the apartment that I have gained over my recent visits. When I reach the bedroom, I pause, listen attentively to the pace of my neighbour’s breath, and when I convince myself that there exists no other option but that of my host’s slumber, I brave a peek around the doorway and into the room.

There I see him, lying on his mattress, but there is something quite odd about him that I notice right away. His posture on the rectangular surface is not so chaotic and relaxed as he was on my first visit. Instead, the blanket is very evenly covering him and his sides, his pillow is aligned perfectly with the centre of the mattress, and in line with all the pieces, almost like a corpse, there lies my neighbour, perfectly supine, his head neatly on the pillow, his hands crossed over his belly, snoring away without bother through the night. It is a curious change, but amidst all the others my neighbour has undergone as a result of my device, it is certainly not unexpected, and my initial surprise dissipates as swiftly as it appeared.

Seeing that even in this pose, my neighbour is certainly fast asleep, I make my move inside the room. Beginning to tiptoe as I get closer, I near the same spot relative to the mattress which I held on my first visit, lowering myself carefully to the floor when I reach it. There, I place the box on the ground, and prepare to repeat my actions from the night prior.

The first thing I notice when I go to start attaching the nodes, is that in this new position, my neighbour’s three points of interest – the two temples and the nape – are much more easily available, comfortably exposed by his supine posture, even his nape, which on his somewhat firm pillow remains just barely accessible with a careful two fingers underneath the neck. This makes the whole ordeal a lot simpler, and when I reach to take the wires, I take both those for the two temples at the same time, coming in with both their nodes at once and attaching them simultaneously, leaving only that for the nape, which too only takes a moment to connect to my neighbour’s sleeping head. With everything confidently attached, I pick up the device, and just like the night before, I begin slowly turning the big dial in the middle of its front, listening to its clicks as it progresses along the way.

The process is swifter this time, my movements coming more confident, and my neighbour refusing to stir but a single time. In fact, he is so silent, so solemn in his rest, that for a brief moment in the night, I feel a kind of admiration overcome me, and I almost think I relate to him, no matter how different we might be. When that moment comes, I notice that for some time now, sitting there behind him, I haven’t felt any resentment for my neighbour. It mightn’t have been love either, or anything, really – we simply are, in the same room, beside one another, different yet alike. For an instant, I even feel something, like an invisible force, pushing against my pinching fingers, whispering to them to stop their action, to cease turning the dial, but above such a force I know that if I were to stop now, in the middle of the process, the changes would be unpredictable, and so far in, I must bring the procedure to its completion.

Once again, just like the previous night, I turn the dial all the way to the notch I marked before leaving my apartment, and once I am certain that the device has settled, I gently remove the nodes from my neighbour’s head as trivially as I attached them, and without any further ceremony, carry myself back into the hallway. Before heading all the way out, I take a quick glance back into the room to see my sleeping neighbour, finding him no different than exactly as he was the moment I found him that night. I realise that without as much of a fight this time, the visit felt… somewhat empty; so trivial, it might almost be considered negligible: insignificant. But notwithstanding any such feelings of facility, I recognise quickly that my operation tonight has been one of substantial scientific progress, and once that realisation hits me, I become immediately lit up with joy, a bright smile spreading across my lips. Giving him one last gentle nod of gratitude for being such a faithful subject, I briskly turn back into the hallway, and without but a second to spare, remove myself to the corridor, locking the door behind me, and replace myself back into the comfort of my own apartment.

I traipse through my hallway almost aimlessly, destined for my bedroom, but somewhere along the way, a monstrous pang of hunger hits me like a truck, and nearly knocks me down to the floor. In an instant, I realise that throughout my scientific endeavour, where I was so oppressed by utmost cognition and meticulous calculation, I managed to suppress my corporeal faculties to such a potent extent, that I hadn’t had a single bite of food to eat in the last forty eight hours. Only now, when the enterprise could be considered somewhat concluded, did those suppressed necessities resurface, and with the depth of their submission, they rebounded tenfold in the instant of their resumption, like an inflated ball being held deep underwater and then being suddenly let go. 

Toppled and assaulted by my realisation of fatigue, I battle through the agony occurring within my stomach, crawling over to the storage closet in my hallway where I keep all my food, and upon opening it, I helplessly scramble some of its contents from the lowermost shelf onto the hallway floor. I rush to rip open one of my MREs, tearing first through the overall packaging, then systematically through every item it contains, devouring them one after the other like a vacuum with no regard for the sanctity of my gastrointestines. I manage to eviscerate two and a half packages this way, until through the depths of my hunger I feel that I can take no more, and my gag’s cries for mercy become too loud to continue to ignore, for its threats become a reality. Satiated to the extreme, I lift myself crookedly from my knees, and in a half-limping amble, make my way to my bedroom, leaving the dismantled packagings on the floor – a problem for me to clean later, once my body is allowed to recover to its natural state.

In my bedroom, through a stare both groggy and tired, I find my bed. Fulfilled with thoughts of scientific discovery, I close my eyes to venture into a genial sleep. It is only once in the night, right before succumbing, that a pernicious thought nags me – that invisible force, it halts me, and I almost begin to wonder. But science does not yield to capricious considerations and foolish musings. My mind knows this, and it carries me back to sleep.

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