# The Clamor Fades The sound stopped, but in my ears it went on ringing—a high, insistent note that wouldn't fade. I pressed my palms against my temples, as if I could squeeze it out like water from a wrung cloth. Nothing worked. Outside the window, the street had emptied. Where minutes ago there had been crowds, now only dust hung in the air, suspended in the slanting afternoon light like some kind of fog. A child's shoe lay overturned on the pavement. Someone's basket, its wares scattered—onions, mostly—rolled slowly in what breeze remained. I had been at my desk when it started. The papers in front of me had lifted, as if touched by an invisible hand, and the pictures on the wall swayed and came crooked. That was the worst part, I think—the crooked pictures. They made everything feel tilted in a way my eyes couldn't quite adjust to. The sound had come last, or perhaps it had been there all along and I had only then understood it was sound, that it had form and direction. My neighbor hadn't returned. Her door across the landing stood open. I had watched her leave, just once, during the noise—her face the color of old newspaper, her hand gripping the stair rail as if it alone tethered her to solid ground. I tried to work again, to return to the words I'd been arranging, but they looked foreign to me now, like someone else's handwriting. What did words matter? What did any of it matter, when a sound like that could unmake the small orderliness you'd spent your life assembling? The ringing continued. I stood and looked down at the street again. The shoe was still there. The onions had settled. Someone would come, I thought, and sweep them away, and tomorrow the street would be clean and ordinary again. The knowledge brought me no comfort. The ringing had become part of me, I realized. It was no longer sound from outside, entering my body. It was generated from within—from the chambers of my heart, perhaps, or from the hollow spaces in my skull where thoughts live. It was mine now. I went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. My hands were steady. That surprised me. I drank the water, and it tasted like it always did—cool, without flavor. Simple things persisted. The water was still water. The glass was still glass. I was still myself, more or less. When I returned to the window, a man had appeared on the street below, picking up the onions one by one and placing them carefully in a new basket. He moved without hurry, with the deliberation of someone performing a ritual. He did not look up at the buildings. He did not look shaken. Maybe, I thought, if you do small things long enough, the big things lose their power over you. I watched until he'd gathered them all and moved on. Then I went back to my desk. The papers were still there, still slightly askew. I straightened them. I picked up my pen. The words were still foreign, but I began anyway, one letter after another, trying to remember what I had meant to say before the world had rocked and rung. The sound faded by evening, though not entirely. It became something I carried with me, the way we all carry small hurts and unexpected mercies. By the time darkness fell, I could no longer tell if I was still hearing it or merely remembering it. The difference, I had learned, was not as large as I'd once believed.