White Sound 12 Ways

I spent the better part of Saturday night trying to drown out the vital sounds of the person for whom I care the most in this world; the person with whom I spend the most time; my interlocutor of choice, who doesn’t actually engage in dialog, but is a taciturn and patient listener when we’re both in the same room and he has no pressing reason to leave, which makes it almost voluntary; the one who cooks the evening meal on weekends and shares it with me (he gets a chance to listen to me the most at this time); the one who does the washing up, although I dry, during which time he gets to listen to me some more. And yet I spent the better part of Saturday night—let me be accurate and say I labored the better part of the night away trying to drown out the sounds of his breathing as he slept.

Wearing earplugs, which has always only served as my first gate of noise control, did not help. The heavy-duty, big-bruiser, never-fail disperser of not just unwanted, but all sound, is my white sound machine with twelve settings and adjustable volume, so I should have been able to manage it, although I also wondered whether I should be trying so very hard to accomplish so monstrous a thing. There he was, my most valuable—significant, I guess, is the current term, my most significant other (MSO?), lying not ten feet from where I lay (separate berths), slack and helpless and raw as a soul on its way up to heaven. Breathing. Audibly. Very audibly. Lustily. Poignantly. Plaintively. Ever changing in tone and pitch. Mournful and getting ever more mournful with every generous lungful of air he drew and discharged. And I was working as hard as John Henry to drown it out.

In my knowledge, there are mothers of young children who buy expensive devices, read manuals figuring out how to use them, hook them up in the child’s room, and trail an extension of the device into whatever room that particular mother is having friends in for an evening, just so she can listen to her child’s breathing. I had what I hope will prove to be a rare experience of spending just such an evening in a room with a small collection of decorous adults where two extensions of two such devices had been set up on opposite sides of the room by the wary mothers, who wanted to keep the breathing sounds distinct, I guess—that made sense, anyway; so we all had a kind of surreal dialog, conversing as if everything was normal against the horrific backdrop of the magnified noise of the breathing of their two infants. Add to that the jarring interruptions the mothers occasioned when one or the other suddenly froze, imagining she had heard not-breathing for a moment too long, jumped up and sprinted out of the room to make sure the infant had in fact taken its next breath, which by that time was on its third, fourth, or fifth next breath of which all of us left behind in the room were fully aware. No one complained. A nice evening was had by most. I did eventually venture to say, first explaining that I had no children and apologizing that the method was completely new to me, that it seemed kind of Hitchcocky. My statement resonated with no one, and the evening lurched on.

In shameful contrast, I, the motherless, spent a lousy night not long past trying to drown out the breathing noises of my sleeping MSO, my beloved (MB). And I had twelve options, as aforementioned, for doing so, which means I should have been successful, but wasn’t. For some reason his breathing was unusually sonorous, plaintive, and forlorn with intermittent expressions of preternatural woe, nearly verbal choruses divulging—to those with wit to listen—the secrets of the shadow world, all of which should have alerted me, made me concerned or anxious, at least given me that wit to listen in on the rarely audible: an otherworldly exchange, rather than ever more determined to drown it out.

However, I had eaten six chocolate chip cookies a little too soon before going to bed, each cookie having weighed an average of 28 grams, to which I can attest because I weighed the cookie dough for each cookie before placing it on the cookie sheet to make sure the cookies were of the same size so they would all be done when I took them out, which in my baking history has not always been the case. So that means I ate 168 grams of a dessert, which, although it may seem like an awful lot when you’re eating cookies that aren’t that crisp, is not, in and of itself, an enormous dessert. But it was a little too soon before I went to bed because I did not eat them all at once, but serially, one after the other, stopping after each one to see if I was okay or if maybe I wanted another one, and I kept wanting another one and then thought about having another one, knowing that I probably shouldn’t, so that although the first one was eaten well before bedtime, the sixth one was eaten, as has been said more than once already, a little too soon before bedtime. So the fact that my MSO, MB, was working his lungs like nobody’s business, emitting the wailing tunes of a Genie shut up in a brass spittoon, is perhaps just part of the reason I had so much trouble getting to sleep.

Of course, I was well aware that drowning out all sounds of my vibrant MSO was potentially dangerous for him. What if he was as feverish as he sounded, his breathing gradually got worse, something popped deep within his anatomy causing a severe paroxysm rendering him unconscious, and he swallowed his tongue? What then? Shouldn’t I be pleased to monitor the breathing of MB and, like the devoted mothers, wallow in the blissful reassurance that he was functioning, knowledge that could easily have soothed me to restful sleep? No. Instead, I cycled through the twelve sound options of my white sound machine, which are grouped according to three completely arbitrary, but likely sounding categories, four sounds in each, as the device is box-shaped and the settings are placed geometrically and symmetrically across its rectangular face in order to make it look like a solid, well-thought-out design, therefore reliable, therefore a good investment: Relax, Sleep, Renew. Relax contains Ocean Surf (substantive), Thunder Storm (substantive), Serenity (abstract substantive), and Unwind (exception to the substantive, introducing an imperative). Sleep has White Noise, Rain, Celestial (neither substantive nor imperative), and Summer Night. Renew is the most imaginative with the tendency towards the imperative breaking through with Stream (substantive as in “forest stream,” i.e., no imperative), Meditate, Focus, and Rejuvenate, the last being pretty much the same as the category itself, but I can understand that they ran out of names, just as they ran out of substantives.

There are disadvantages to each sound. With Ocean Surf you begin wondering if the waves are rolling in just a little slower than they were before, that is to say, if they’re stuck, so when the next wave does come crashing in, it can initiate a moment of real anxiety. White Sound actually has a glitch in the track so all you do is wait for the glitch to come around again. The abstract ones like Meditate and Focus are so bizarre that it depends on your frame of mind and to what pitch you are wired as to whether they are effective or not. Listening to Celestial, for example, you may feel like you’re buzzing around in outer space, which is kind of neat and probably the effect intended, or, alternatively, that you’ve been bound and are poised to have your toenails pulled out. The biggest disadvantage of all, with twelve options, is that you keep flipping through to find the best sound for your exact mood for that night and that moment, wondering in the meantime what your exact mood actually is. Oh, I forgot about the headset.

The headset is to keep MB from hearing any of the weird noises he thinks I really like and which I’m sure he secretly considers one of the kinkiest facets of my character. (It is kinky.) The headset is bulky and doesn’t work right because I thought I could get a really good, really comfortable headset through eBay at a really good price. Wrong on all three counts. What I didn’t realize at the time and certainly do now and will never forget is that a person who sells a headset through eBay does so because the headset is defective. Anyone given the chance to listen to some tunes through that headset would have immediately noticed that, while the tunes travel up into the right earphone just fine, the tunes supposed to travel up into the left earphone don’t make it unless you poke the wire up into it and hold it there. (This does give the wearer an aspect of enraptured listening.) Not knowing this, I got locked into bidding for that headset against an unknown number of ardent competitors, which pumped up my adrenaline like a poker player’s. The super rush of victory faded like it never was and I ended up paying about three times what a new headset would have cost.

So the headset is a slight disadvantage, too, but I only wear it when my best buddy visits me—which is once a week, during which time, so we can each have our own untrammeled sleeping space, I sleep on the floor (ten feet away), possibly another reason I don’t sleep my best that night of the week—and he’s over there snorting and puffing and blowing in his sleep like a man trapped at the bottom of a well. It doesn’t happen very often. On the other hand, I did sleep exceptionally well the following night, Sunday night, the night before the workweek. How often does that happen? And I now know that no matter how many options my white sound machine has, it will never be able to drown out the doleful sounds of a Genie shut up in a brass spittoon wailing his heart out to those with wit to listen that he is magic carpet material.