Wes sung…or screamed…every word for the next hour and a half.
At the end of the night, Wes went outside of the club to hail a cab. He hadn’t driven; he knew that it was likely to be a buzz night, and he lived close enough that a cab ride was far more desirable than the chance of a DUI.
When he climbed into the yellow car, the cabbie asked “good show?” and Wes could only mumble, “Yeah…it’s all a blur…and a buzz.”
“A buzz?” the cabbie asked.
“Yeah…my ears feel like they’re in the middle of a hive,” Wes grinned. “Everything’s buzzing.”
The cabbie grinned. “You better get some sleep.”
In moments they’d pulled up to the curb of his place. With an unsteady gait he approached his front door and remembered the cabbie’s advice. “I intend to,” he mumbled. “I intend to.”
* * *
What he hadn’t intended, was to be awoken by the buzz in his brain. He’d barely gotten his clothes off before falling onto the sheets, but within minutes the alcohol blur shifted, and Wes found himself staring at the ceiling as in his head, a drone whined like wind through a tin whistle. The noise in his head shimmered and buzzed like a living thing, sinuous and insistent. It didn’t let up. And it wouldn’t let him fall asleep.
At one point he rolled over and stared at the blue LED of his clock radio. 3:34. “Fuck,” he moaned, rolling over and punching a pillow over the offending ear canal. “I’ve gotta be up in 3 hours.”
* * *
“How was the show?” his workmate Trent asked, as Wes slouched down the hallway to his office.
“Loud,” he complained, holding a palm over his ear. “I can still hear it.”
“Kiddin’!” Trent laughed. “Oughtta wear earplugs to those shows.”
Wes nodded. “I know.” He stopped a moment at Trent’s doorway and shook his head, trying to clear the still annoying hum from his eardrums. “I’ve woken up with my ears buzzing from a show before, but never this loud still. I should have stuffed some cotton.”
Trent shrugged. “Hindsight and all that.”
“Yeah. Ears are old. Can’t take rock and roll the way they used to.”
“You call that rock ‘n’ roll?” Trent shook his head. “I call that shit…shit.”
“Bite me,” Wes said and stepped past the doorway and into his own cube. He punched the computer on-switch, and almost sighed with relief when the machine whirred to life; its hard drive spun at just the right rpm to whine a sympathetic tone to the one frying Wes’s brain right now. The effect was that he didn’t notice the buzz in his head as much, since the same sound was sawing away outside of his head as well.
He did his best to ignore the steady drone in his ears that first day, but when it kept him awake again that night, and was no better the next morning, Wes began to seriously worry. He knew the story of Pete Townshend and how he had to live with tinnitus, a constant ringing in his head from loud shows. His stomach turned cold and hard at the thought of permanent hearing damage, and he did searches on tinnitus on the Internet, praying that he just had gotten what one Web site called “temporary threshold shift (TTS)” from the overexposure to the Eardrum Buzz’s amplified guitars. His life had become a fuzz of constant humming distortion.
“Often TTS dissipates within hours or days, as the ear re-acclimates itself,” one page read. “But in full-blown tinnitus, the patient can suffer the constant ringing and buzzing sound in the brain for the rest of his or her life. This can often lead to depression and, sometimes, suicidal impulses.”
Wes thought about the latter idea as he tugged hard on the skin of his earlobe, trying to open his ear canal wider, and perhaps “pop” it so that the sound would go away. Nothing happened, except for the feeling of a bruised pinch on his already sore-from-pulling lobe.
“I can’t live with this,” he whispered, staring at the words on his computer screen and not comprehending them. “I can’t concentrate.”
He put both palms against his ears and pushed, toilet plunger style. Maybe he could push air into the ear to stop the buzz.
The result was a pressure pain in the bowels of his brain and he reluctantly gave up. Placing both palms on the desk, Wes took a deep breath and forced himself to stop focusing on the problem. He needed to forget the locust hum and read the words on the screen.
“Fly with the swarm,” he read, and shook his head to clear his vision. That couldn’t be right. He stared harder at the lease paperwork. “Fryer with warming console,” it read. Wes put his head on the desk and closed his eyes. He needed sleep.
And silence.
* * *
On the fourth day after the concert, Wes yawned ceaselessly. His eyes were shot through with red and his head lolled periodically, as his body tried to shut down, regardless of its position.
“You need sleep, man,” Trent observed. “Tried taking any sleeping pills?”
“No, but that’s a good idea.”
“Remember, if the dose looks like it reads 22, that’s just because you’re seeing double.”
“Thanks. I think 22 might be the only thing that could put me out.”
After work, he stopped at the supermarket to pick up a frozen dinner and some sleeping pills. The buzz had subsided some, but it was still there, coiled and hissing in his brain. It had snaked into his consciousness like a viper and it would not leave its lair.
“I can’t live with this,” he mumbled in the analgesics aisle, and his eyes welled up. He was at his end. “I don’t want to live with this,” he whispered, and read the back of the bottle to see if it warned against a lethal dose.
When he looked up, the piercing icy eyes of the skank who’d blown him off at the Eardrum Buzz party were staring back at his over the low aisle shelf.
She looked startled when he caught her glance over the top of the Bufferin boxes and turned away.
“Wait,” he said. “You can do that to me once, but not twice. I’m Wes.”
“Jen,” she said. Her voice was brittle, with a melting point that Wes wasn’t likely to reach.
“Sorry I spooked ya, Jen,” he said. “But I saw you recognized me.”
“We’re both part of the swarm,” she nodded. He noticed that her eyes looked as bloodshot around the edges as his own. And her perfect gloss hair from a few nights ago had a frizzy, static-cling look to it now. She was windblown, or buzz-blown, around the edges.
“How are your ears?” he asked, not knowing quite what to say.
She jerked. “What do you mean?”
“Mine are still buzzing from that show last weekend,” he complained.
“I’m fine,” she breathed and pulled something from the shelf to throw in her cart. “Spread the word.”
And she walked away.
* * *
The next day, Wes saw the grizzled, mutton chop Metallica guy from the Eardrum Buzz party standing around the newsstand he stopped at each morning. As Wes paid for his paper, he saw the guy staring at him from over the top of a newspaper he was pretending to read.
Two in two days, he thought. Some coincidence.
Normally Wes did all he could to avoid trouble. But over the course of this week, his patience had grown thin. He didn’t care about consequence anymore.
“Why are you spying on me?” he asked, walking up to the older man. From where he stood, the man sidled backwards, as if trying to be unseen.