White Noise

You start it by concentrating on the fan. Your dad told you to turn it on because there’s a lot of noise coming from the next room. Neither of you say it but you both know that the couple in the next room is screwing. “Turn on the fan,” is all your dad says. Then he rolls over and goes to sleep. He drove twelve hours to reach you today, his monthly visit, and in two days he’ll drive away again. You go to the air conditioner console and press the button that turns on the fan. You can still hear the bed bucking and the muffled voices in the next room but now the sound is camouflaged with the hum of the fan. And then, even though you sort of want to hear the couple fucking in the next room, your mind starts concentrating on the fan all by itself, as if your mind knows what’s best.

The hum of the fan becomes the engine drone of a plane and the plane is going wherever you want it to go. Hong Kong? Underneath you is an empty sky and under that lies the ocean filled with unknowable darkness, down to the soggy core of the earth. Moving at nearly the speed of sound, yet not enough to escape the engine drone. The engine out the window hanging from the wing. The wing trailing a little plume of mist as if cutting through some cloud you can’t see because you’re in the middle of it.

And then this: the engine drone becoming the hiss of the steam wand on the espresso machine at the coffee shop where your step-father, every Sunday morning, plays chess with the old Indian while you make drawings on the backs of out-of-date fliers harvested from the littered window sill. Behind the counter the steam wand hisses. Milk bubbles in the creation of someone’s cappuccino. A blonde woman in a black dress stands waiting at the counter and she glances at you and gives you a wan smile that says she knows you’re cute even though she’s too tired and stressed out to make more of an effort than the smile costs her. But pretty. In the way you hope your girlfriends will be, one day when you’re old enough to have them. Will you fuck them in motel rooms? Now there’s an idea for a drawing. (How to begin?)

Still the steam wand hisses but now it’s more of a hum becoming the rain falling on a roof somewhere, the sky through a slice of window, a foreign shade of gray, exactly the gray of African rain clouds which gather and boil and blister for months at a time off the coast before finally avalanching across the continent in a storm so violent it scours the land away and leaves only sand, then the sound of the sand scouring the roof and the walls of the house where you lie staring at the shadows on the wall, the coppery tang of lonesomeness on your tongue but you chose to be here. You chose to be here. You have gone away, like your father did, to a far away place of your own making. You’re alone. No one has told you to come here or to do the things you’ve done and no one will tell you to get up and turn on the fan to camouflage the sound of whatever’s happening on the other side of the wall, something that’s starting to sound like the whisper of sheets.

She rolls over, offers you her back. Her black hair spills onto the pillow and a single strand tickles your lip. The smell of her wafts to you, warm and minty. And also your own smell, the traces you’ve left on her. She turns again, sliding like liquid between the sheets, flowing her arms and legs around yours, pressing her warmth onto your skin, this woman without a face who you haven’t even met yet but who is at this moment lying in her bed, some other bed, somewhere on earth, and even now, in this same night, she’s entwining herself in the ghost of you as the sheets whisper and the fan purrs, beginning to sound like the hiss of tires.

The highway unwinds. You’re lying in the back seat in the dark and the stars wheel above the window and you don’t even know where you’re going but the road hums and hisses and flashes underneath you invisibly. Your dad is driving. You’re headed home to the house where you live with your mother but only he knows exactly where you’re going, meaning only he is choosing the exact roads and the exact exits and the exact speed and the exact degrees of probability by which you interact with all the other cars on the road which could potentially smash into you or just as potentially hiss right by. Only he is making those exact decisions. Someday you will drive and make those exact decisions, just like someday you will order cappuccinos and pay for them, you will buy plane tickets to Hong Kong and fly alone across oceans, you will lie alone in rooms you have paid for and suck on your own solitude, you will meet women in black dresses with tired faces and you’ll fuck them in motel rooms where you’ll make the bed buck so much the noise will be like a storm and it can’t be camouflaged by a simple ventilator fan that hums hums hums all night long.

In the morning, you get a look at that couple next door when they’re both standing at the soda machine loading quarters into the slot. He’s stooped over in a dirty t-shirt and leather pants. She’s in cut offs and a tube top, sunburned and tired and smoking a brown cigarette. There’s a blurry blue tattoo of an eagle on her shoulder and a red welt on the side of her neck. She catches your eye and gives you a wink. You hope they keep up the fucking again tonight. You’re beginning to get a glimmer of just how much fun fucking can be.