“Listen … the old clock on the wall … All right, quickly, then.
“There was a picnic. Patients and their guests, staff and their supposititious husbands.
“By now the whole town was talking. The grapevine of cripples had put out the word on me and Miriam and the enema man. In the drugstore the pharmacist jokingly offered to sell me enema poison.
“‘I have no enemamies,’ I told him, and it was as if I had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, goodsportwise.
“So the day of the picnic finally arrived and all Morristown turned out. The crème de la crème. The blindees, the deafoes and dummies — see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The amputees, the orphans, the folks of ruined blood, as well as your general all-purpose invalids. All of them loved to crash the other guy’s picnic. So that Morristown had a season: summer. The deaf would eat the blind man’s chicken, and see the colors of the blind man’s fruit, and the blind heard the fsst of the deaf man’s beer. The amputees licked the orphans’ candy canes. But our picnic was even more heavily attended than one could have expected, and it may have been our scandal that made the difference.
“I had been blithe for the man at the drugstore, and now I was blithe for Morristown.
“‘Mr. Desebour, I’ve heard so much about you,’ giggled Mr. Latrobe, the blind kennel master of the guide dogs at the institute.
“‘Nice to see you here, sir,’ I told him.
“‘Misrer huff De-se-booorgh, huff huff,’ growled the deaf Mrs. Garish in that machine-like, exhalated voice of the trained mute, ‘I’ve beeenn huff look-ingg forwardt huff to meering you.’
“‘Good talking to you, ma’m. I’ve heard so much about you.’
“‘Hi, Mr. Desebour,’ said Paul the orphan.
“‘Hello, son.’
”I entered all the contests and potato-raced my heart out, finishing in the money. No mean feat, for a lot of these fellows had been born with only one leg and until you’ve potato-raced against a congenital one-legged man in a sack you haven’t potato-raced. I won at chug-a- lug and lagging pennies and swamped them at horseshoes and wheelchair racing, and in the invalid decathlon I was best. Cheating, entered as a patient but using my health, earnest, shooting to kill like a father burning them in to the other guy’s kid in the PTA softball. Flinging off my passivity for once, I pushed past the others in the human wheelbarrow, my hands and arms furious as pistons, nearly pulling the poor guy over who held my legs. Concentrating, concentrating, steady as a surgeon I balanced the peas on my knife as the peas of the spastics went flying off in all directions. There, I thought, dusting my hands, nonpareil at the picnic, take that and that and that.
“Only Miriam knew my real situation — unless, of course, in the throes of passion with the enema man she had disclosed our secret— but the invalids themselves, thinking I was one of them, would have made me their champion then and there. I could have been their Thorpe, I tell you.
“And a strange thing happened. I sensed that they had begun to turn against the enema man, against Miriam. I saw the enema man — I had beaten that constipate in hard-boiled-egg eating — sitting off by himself on a blanket beside the horseshoe pits, a book in his lap, and looking full, stuffed, his face flushed, his skin itself gorged, oppressed by the ruthless satiety of his life. I went over, blithe but burning.
“‘Reading?’
“‘Yeah. Pass the time.’
“‘What have you got there?’ I bent down and read the book’s title. ‘Ah, poetry. A few voitches, is it?’
“I drifted off toward the lake and began to walk round it. Miriam caught up with me. ‘Where are you going?’
“‘All that exercise. It’s hot.’
“‘Yes. You were very determined.’
“‘Give ’em something to talk about.’
“‘When will you leave?’ she asked after a while. This is getting crazy.’
“‘When I unlock the secret of your voice. First I have to unlock the secret of your voice.’
“‘You keep saying that. What does it mean?’
“‘How you talk. How peaceful it makes me.’
“We had stopped following the lake and had turned on to a footpath that led into the woods. It was very cool among the trees but in a few hundred yards we came to a clearing in the center of which was an enormous stone mansion. It was strange to come upon it like that.
“‘What the hell is that? Who lives there? My God, you don’t suppose we’ve found the leper colony, do you?’
“‘Mrs. Garish,’ Miriam said.
“‘What?’
“‘Mrs. Garish lives there. It’s the Institute for the Deaf.’
“It was very hot in the sun. ‘It looks cool.’
“‘It’s open to the public. Do you want to go inside?’
“I shrugged but followed Miriam into the large central hall of the building.
“Miriam told the woman who came out to greet us that we were from the home. ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s important to understand the other fellow’s problem. Look around. Be sure to see the dead room. You’ll want to see the dead room.’
“‘The dead room?’
“‘We call it that. We do experiments there. It’s 99.98 per cent free of reflected sound. The telephone company built it for us. It’s supposed to be the quietest place in the world.’
“Miriam and I walked through the various classrooms and poked desultorily at some of the special equipment. Then, at the end of a long, carpeted hallway, we came to the ‘dead room.’
“We pulled open the heavy door and went inside. It was the strangest room I have ever been in. It may have been about twenty-five by thirty-five feet — about the size of a large drawing room — though it was difficult to tell, for no two walls were exactly parallel. The walls and ceiling were broken up in a zigzag pattern and honeycombed with cells of differing shapes and depths like thousands of opened mouths. We walked on a spongy, corklike substance thicker than any carpet.
“The silence was astonishing, a hushed chorus from the mouths of the walls. It was like a darkness. Have you ever been in a room that is totally dark? Late at night, say, and awakened in a strange place, and for a moment you don’t know where you are or how they got you there, and you’re groping for the door? Well, the things you brush past there in the dark — a chair or a wardrobe — these are like blind spots. But you can hear them, hear the blind spots, as if all objects give off this signal, the sonar of material reality felt, sensed in the extinct ear, held in the vestigial eye, prickling across the bone of your forehead like the electric touch of a girl you wish loved you. Well, it was something like that, the silence. Wait, double it!
“For the first few moments neither of us spoke or even looked at each other, as people do who spot a marvel. It was all either of us could do to take it all in, all we could do perhaps to get over the inevitable touch of the sad in the presence of all that black mufflement.
“I spoke first. I don’t remember what I said, but my voice was small, squeezed, not unloud so much as descreet, anechoic, so that sound as such — walking, the noise of our clothes, our breathing — was meaningless, probably unidentifiable, swallowed in the room’s million mouths. Only words, however clipped, maintained their existence in this room of aural blind spots and thick silence, only the ideas behind words. In that sense the room was intellectual, a place for concepts. Here no teacups could ever tinkle, no spoon rattle in a glass; there could be no chatter, no din, and the report of a gun would be as insignificant as the clink of two glasses touching politely in a toast. There was no hacking or rustle or hiss or whoosh or crackle or crepitation or affricative churn, no tocsin, no knock, no thump at the door or rain on the roof. All that was not language died at its source or was reduced to harmless velvet plips. God might have made the place.