Dear Other People…

I don’t know whether you have ever begun a day at half past four in the morning at the summons of a fifteen-pound cat and ended it contemplating amateur ear surgery with a coffee stirrer. If you have, come and sit by me; we shall say nothing, and understand one another completely. If you have not, I must ask you to attend closely, because the day I am about to describe was constructed by some higher intelligence with real architectural flair, and I feel the design deserves a public reading.

It began, as I say, with the Master of the House. He weighs fifteen pounds, he answers to no one, and at half past four he had stationed himself outside my bedroom door and commenced an aria on the theme of loneliness — a small animal producing the grief of a large opera. I wear earplugs, of course; one does not sleep on the outskirts of coyote country without fortifications. The aria came through the fortifications. And once a man is awake at that hour, nature, who has evidently been waiting in the wings for exactly this opening, presents her invoice.

Now, I have a policy regarding the nocturnal visit, and the policy is illumination. A gentleman of my years does not undertake precision work in the dark; the consequences for the tilework do not bear discussion, and I refuse to spend my Thursdays on my knees with a scrubbing brush doing penance for Tuesday’s optimism. So I reached for the switch, and flicked it, and here the day produced the first of its little masterstrokes.

Nothing.

Not a flicker. I went to the hall. Nothing. I looked for the small red eye of the television, that faithful pilot light of civilisation; for the constellation of standby lamps that drain the grid and my bank account in equal measure while performing no known service. Nothing. The house had gone dark in the complete, upholstered, biblical way — the darkness of the abyss, if the abyss had scatter rugs. And through this darkness I now had to navigate, on urgent business, while the Master of the House — who had achieved his objective and was in tearing spirits — wove himself about my ankles in figures of eight, in the manner of a creature who has taken out a substantial insurance policy on me and grown impatient about the settlement.

I completed the mission. I shall say no more about it except that it was completed, in conditions no professional would have accepted, and I returned to bed by dead reckoning, taking soundings off the furniture with my shins.

And then, lying there, I reached for the telephone — not from need, you understand, but from that modern reflex, the desire to confirm that the world had not ended while one was unconscious, that the Rapture had not come and gone and left one behind with the cat. And the telephone delivered the second masterstroke. No power, hence no wifi — this I had braced for. But in the corner of the screen, where the little bars of signal ordinarily stand like a well-tended hedge, there were no bars. There was a word.

SOS.

I want you to appreciate the economy of it. The instrument itself had assessed our situation — one man, one cat, a dark house on the edge of the city, coyotes filing their nightly reports from the hillside — and had chosen, from all the words available to it, the international signal of maritime distress. I could not have put it better. Indeed for a moment I put it exactly the same way, aloud.

And then — and this is the part of the morning I ask you to remember, because it is the hinge on which the whole essay turns — something curious happened. The distress passed through me and came out the other side as peace. No power. No wifi. No signal. Which is to say: no email, no bulletins, no notifications, no possibility of any human being reaching me by any channel yet devised. I lay in the perfect dark, in the perfect silence, unreachable as a man at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and I realised that I was experiencing the rarest luxury remaining on this continent. Solitude used to be free. It is now the most expensive item on the menu, and the outage was serving it gratis. I slept three further hours, without a single care, the sleep of the blessed and the disconnected.

I woke to find the power restored and the internet still deceased. The telephone still cried SOS, and a tour of the property established that the twenty-first century could be received in exactly one location: the front porch, in direct sun, with the temperature already climbing through the upper twenties and my first engagement of the day bearing down on eight o’clock. A message from the provider awaited me there — an outage in your area; we are working on it — which is the modern equivalent of a note pinned to an empty stable. So: the espresso was made, the Master of the House was fed and reviewed his breakfast with the expression of a food critic who intends to be cruel, and I showered and drove myself, a refugee, to the Starbucks.

Let it be minuted that I know what I was doing there. One does not go to such a place for the coffee, which is mud that has been introduced to water and disliked it. One orders the smallest and cheapest item on the board as one pays a toll: the beverage is rent, and what one is renting is a chair, a table, and a connection to the world. Around me the citizenry ordered breakfast in the form of beverages — great architectural confections, calories in the guise of liquids — and I did not begrudge them a drop of it. I wanted only my table, my inbox, and to be left alone.

And for three minutes — I timed them in retrospect, the way one reconstructs the final moments before an accident — I had all three. A shaded table outside. The neighbours quiet and, on visual inspection, civilised. And overhead, on the establishment’s speakers, in a touch I can only call operatic foreshadowing, the Beach Boys were performing “Caroline, No.” Pet Sounds, at eight in the morning, in the shade. The world had returned to its orbit. Peace and harmony prevailed.

Then came the Laughter.

I must be precise here, because words like “laugh” will give you entirely the wrong picture. This was not the discreet giggle of a geisha behind a fan in Gion. It was not the hyena, which at least has the decency to confine itself to the Serengeti and the hours of darkness. This was a detonation of biblical proportion, the kind of event that shows up on seismographs and is later attributed, in the official report, to settling of the local fault line. It was half past eight in the morning, and a woman two tables away had produced, unprompted, enough energy to light Las Vegas for a month. And I say this as a man who loves happy people — minuted, again, for the record. But this was not happiness. Happiness does not require that volume. This was a chain reaction — some hydrogen-bomb collaboration between whatever was circulating in her bloodstream and whatever triumph had triggered it, as though she had just been informed, after years of correspondence, that she had won her lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church, or had that very morning succeeded, on the first attempt, in folding a fitted sheet.

She seated herself beside one of the solitary elder ladies — at a range from me, I need hardly report, of rather less than six feet, there being a whole empty terrace available; the geometry, as ever, is the crime — and commenced what was billed as a dialogue. It was not a dialogue. It was a monologue with a hostage. And it was conducted in that dialect in which every statement arrives dressed as a question — the upspeak of the Valley girl, preserved perfectly in a woman whose Valley girlhood must have run concurrently with the original recording sessions for Pet Sounds. It occurred to me, listening, that the song overhead might not be coincidence at all; that Brian Wilson, all those years ago, had perhaps met this very woman, and had written not a lament but a prophecy. I very nearly rose and asked her whether her name was, in fact, Caroline. I shall always regret that I did not.

The repertoire was as follows: her morning; her husband; the search for a new cleaning lady, a crisis apparently approaching the scale of the succession question in a middling European monarchy; the price of everything, itemised; and then the gossip — a census of mutual friends so extensive that I gave up keeping the register somewhere north of a dozen names. And through it all, on schedule, every thirty seconds, with the punctuality of the Tokyo subway, came the Laughter. The Animal Sound. You could have set navigation by it. Ships in the fog off the coast could have set navigation by it.

And here is where I must lodge my formal complaint against modern engineering, because I came prepared. I own the noise-cancelling headphones — the good ones, the ones whose price suggests they were developed for a space programme. And they are miraculous, within their jurisdiction. With these instruments upon the head, a man may lie down beneath the landing path of a major commercial airport and meditate; I have effectively done so. They erase engines. They erase traffic. They erase the entire mechanical output of the industrial age. But they are helpless — helpless, I say — against the Animal Sound. The engineers, it turns out, cancelled the wrong noises. They solved the aeroplane and left the human being fully operational. Somewhere in a laboratory there are men who can silence a jet turbine at forty paces and not one of them has addressed the laugh of a Caroline at six feet, and I intend to write to them, individually.

The thesis, then — for I owe you one, and this morning handed it to me twice, once in the dark and once in the shade. Silence has become the supreme luxury of the age, and it cannot be purchased. That is the whole scandal of it. Everything else can. The mattress of memory foam: bought. The espresso: bought. The porch, the shade, the table, the headphones from the space programme: bought, bought, bought, bought. But the silence itself arrives only by accident — by outage, by act of God, by the failure of the very infrastructure we spend our lives maintaining — and is revoked the moment the world resumes service. At half past four, ruined and unreachable in the dark, I was a rich man. At half past eight, connected and caffeinated in the shade, I was a pauper with an inbox.

I had, in my extremity, begun to consider the remedies. The surgical option: a call to my physician, an emergency severing of the auditory nerves, an end to the whole business once and for all. The field option: the coffee stirrer, applied directly to the tympanic membrane, both sides, done and done. I do not say I would have gone through with either. I say the stirrers were within reach, and I had begun to look at them the way a man looks at the lifeboats.

And then — divine intervention, there is no other reading — Caroline was needed elsewhere. The farewells were performed, fortissimo, with two encores. The pedicured feet bore her across the car park to a Lexus the colour of a pearl, and she drove off into the sunrise, leaving behind her a silence so sudden and so total that the Beach Boys could be heard again, and the elder lady sat blinking in the stillness like a survivor being handed a blanket.

I get to hear another day. I am not entirely sure I still want to. But the ruling, I suppose, stands: the aliens, when they come, are said to communicate by telepathy, and there are no sounds at all in the vacuum of space. People keep describing this to me as an invasion. I have begun to think of it as room service.