“Colin, if you hear all that, all the time—Do you hear it all the time?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do you keep it all sorted out in your mind? Doesn’t it… confuse you? All those noises at once like that?”
“Sometimes. But now they’re in rows.”
“Rows? What do you mean?”
The child stooped and brought up his box of crayons. On the bedspread beside Marianne he laid out a row of six crayons. In front of them he arranged five more, then two, then one in front of that, to which he pointed. “See, Grandma, that’s you talking now. These two are Tim singing and the radio in the apartment out the window. This row is other stuff I hear but it’s not in the front. Then this far stuff, back here.”
Selective filters for background noise. She said, “Could you always do this, Colin?”
“I don’t know.”
Probably not. Marianne remembered Connie’s desperate frustration during Colin’s first three years of life. “He just cries and cries!” Connie had said, crying herself. Had the baby been unable to filter out the constant, multisonic noise that swamped him? But somewhere he had learned to do so. Noah, when he started school and well into the second grade, had been dyslexic, unable to see the difference between “was” and “saw.” The problem had disappeared halfway through Noah’s testing. “Sometimes,” the tester had said, “bright children just learn to compensate.”
Colin said, “Will you take me to the zoo to hear an elephant?”
The Bronx Zoo no longer had elephants, nor much of anything else. Funding cuts. But there must be an elephant somewhere.
“We’ll see. But Colin, I’d like to have you do another ear test. It will—”
“No,” Colin said instantly. He stuck out his bottom lip. “It’s stupid.”
“But it—”
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” he said, abruptly sounding very adult, “but no. I hated that doctor. And it’s stupid.”
“This won’t be a doctor. It’s a man who builds bridges, and he has special machines to hear bridges. You can touch the machines.”
“Really? Well… what about the elephant?”
They had reached a delicate stage in the negotiations. “Yes, but there aren’t any elephants in New York. If we go see the bridge man, then I promise you an elephant someplace, but it might take a while.”
Colin considered. “Okay.”
“You said that sometime you hear mice in the ground. When was that?”
“Only one time. In the old house. Not in the house, outside near the swamp. Daddy didn’t believe me. But I did hear them! I did!”
Internet reports of surviving mice sometimes included pictures. But the pictures could be pre–spore cloud and the sightings were as yet unsubstantiated by any scientifically reputable source. Still…
“Come eat before I throw it out!” Tim called.
“Careful, Grandma! Don’t step on my picture!”
“Never, sweetie,” Marianne said. She moved carefully around Colin’s drawing of an elephant with huge, floppy ears.
CHAPTER 18
S plus 6 years
On Saturday Grandma took Colin and Jason to the bridge man. That was where the wonderful thing happened, although not because of the bridge or the man.
They went in Tim’s blue car and they drove a long way out of New York, to a big field surrounded by a high fence with sharp wire on the top. The field had things all over it: machines that weren’t working right now, long steel bars, heavy bags, pieces of wood. It had a big trailer and a lot of trash, but it was still a field and there were patches of grass and dirt and wildflowers. In the river stood a big cement rectangle with part of the bridge built on it. Grandma and the bridge man, whose name was Rudy, hugged and said all the things grown-ups say, “Good to see you again” and “How long has it been” and all that stuff. Colin and Jason didn’t really listen. Tim checked out everything, looking for bad guys because that was his job.
To Colin’s disappointment, they couldn’t go onto the bridge. “Not safe, son,” Rudy said. “Not at this stage of construction.”
Instead they went into the trailer, which was just as messy as the field. Computers, dirty coffee cups, paper, machines, pizza boxes. Colin thought that Grandma didn’t approve, but she didn’t say anything.
“I appreciate your doing this, Rudy.”
“I’m not even sure what ‘this’ is. You want me to test this kid like he’s a bridge?”
“Yes.”
Jason said, “Can we go outside and look at the bridge?”
“You can, with Tim. Colin stays here.”
“No fair!” Colin cried, while Jason smirked.
“You can go outside too as soon as we’re done,” Grandma said. “Oh, there you are, Tim. Will you give Jason a tour of the construction machinery?”
Colin said, “I want to go, too!”
“Soon,” Grandma said in her no-fooling-around voice. “Rudy, you have both a laser vibrometer and an ultrasonic treatment evaluator? The new portable kinds?”
“Of course, but—”
“Can you use the vibrometer to find the lowest frequency he can hear and the evaluator for the highest?”
Rudy stared, shrugged, and laughed. “You always were weird, even when we were in high school and I had that terrible crush on you. Well, okay. Why not? You want some coffee first?”
“After. So we can talk.”
“Whatever you say, Marzidoats.”
Grandma smiled a tiny bit. “No one has called me that for forty years.”
“Time someone did. Okay, son, sit there. I’m going to point this thing out the window, at the bridge, and you raise your hand if you hear any noise. Like at the doctor, okay?”
“Yes,” Colin said. At least this time there weren’t earphones, and nobody was calling him “pumpkin.”
A computer screen lit up, and a low rumble sounded. Colin raised his hand.
Again.
Again.
Rudy stared at the computer screen, at Colin, at Grandma. He shook his head and started to say something but Grandma said, “Wait, please,” in her same no-fooling-around voice and Rudy closed his mouth.
First a lot of low sounds with one machine, then a lot of high sounds with a different machine. They were both pointed at the bridge, and Colin wondered if it could hear the noises. No—bridges weren’t alive. But the bridge was making noises—they were clear to him, different from the noises the machines made, and not very interesting. Colin got bored.
When they finally, finally finished, Rudy had a funny look on his face. Grandma said, “I’ll have that coffee now. Here come Tim and Jason. Colin, you can go outside with Jason, but you both stay where I can see you through this window here, which means you can see me.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
Tim said, “Hi, kid, tour in a minute,” and went inside the trailer.
Jason said, “What did they do to you?”
“I heard the bridge make noise.”
Jason nodded. He didn’t think Colin was weird. “Cool. Hey, let’s go climb on those big bags!”
“Grandma says we got to stay by the window.”
“Oh. Well, then—I got an idea—let’s pick some of those flowers for Grandma!”
“Okay.” The flowers were blue, just like Tim’s car, with petals sort of like squares. Rudy probably wouldn’t mind if they picked some because they looked like weeds. Colin grabbed the stem of one and pulled.
It was really tough! No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break the stem. He tried another one, but that wouldn’t break. Jason couldn’t do it either.
“Stupid flowers!” Jason said. “We need a scissors.”