The Hyperion Chronicles

The Hyperion Chronicles
“Hello Darkness, my Old Friend”

[Author’s Note: Last week I started a campaign to go 100 hours without speaking. I made it—actually 114 hours between words coming out of my mouth. I wrote progress (or lack of progress) reports, which you can read in the Alligator Pit if you’re so inclined.]

#396 The Sound of Silence

I thought the worst part about not talking would be missing out on conversations with people I cared about, and that was very hard. But it got trumped—so very Ace of Trumped—by the act of getting horribly sick.

Before I started Silence I wondered if I would get ill over the experience. I’ve read of people who go on a fast for a week, drinking only liquids and taking vitamins (and course enema after enema after enema). At the end of the second day they get very sick, as the toxins in their colon start seeping out through their skin, the same way alcohol comes out after a night of binging.

I wasn’t giving up food, but I was giving up speech, which for many of us is just a big a part of our daily routine, and to some, just as essential. I know it seems new-agey, but I honestly wondered if it might not happen.

Anyway, two days in I started to get a bad headache. Now, I get lots of headaches, pretty much every day. Over 10 years you learn, you adapt, they rarely phase me. However, I have learned the hard way over the last few months that when a headache comes on and I’m having trouble with light, that’s a very bad sign.

That’s what happened. I started getting this bad headache, and the mid-morning light coming through the partially opened blinds worried me. I didn’t know what to do, though. Medicine wasn’t touching it, and I’ve also learned the hard way that if I go to sleep with a bad headache, it’s usually worse when I wake up.

What happens to me when I get a headache is that if it comes on very fast I usually have to throw up. Now, I hate throwing up. Just hate it. HATE IT. I hate throwing up like Yoko Ono hates a successful band making great music for years to come. I can’t breathe after I throw up. I start choking. My eyes get all bloodshot and bulging, to the point I fear I’m going to blow blood vessels. My throat is scratched raw like a night of screaming at a Boy-Band concert, and I get dizzy and the chills.

However, there is that point when you’re feeling so bad that you make the decision that not throwing up is worse, and once you actually do throw up, you might start to feel better. You’ve all reached that point.

(Except, I forgot the biggest component: I wasn’t actually sick with the flu. My nausea was a manifestation of my headache, which means throwing up would do NOTHING for me but the agony of throwing up. Sadly, this became a minor concern as events progressed.)

I went into my dad’s bathroom upstairs, afraid to be more than three feet from the toilet. Dizzy, I sat on the edge of the tub. It was at this point I started to realize how big a disadvantage not talking was.

First, there’s the act of telling people what’s wrong with you. My mom, like most moms, wants to help, but she doesn’t know what do to. All I can do is this pantomime where I pat my head and rub my tummy (or is it rub my head and pat my tummy?), and fling my fingers from my open mouth in a “throw up” motion.

Secondly—and this is going to sound lame—when I actually do decide to purge for the good of my body—I like to talk to myself. I’m like some macabre football coach exhorting his players.

“Okay, Men! You know what to do. Now, get out there and do it! Do it! DO IT! Shooting Stars, Rockets, Comets, Come on Team, VOMIT VOMIT!”

Okay, that’s not how I do it, but I do like to look in that bathroom mirror and get tough, convince that coward that if Supermodels, the Olsen Twins, Lindsay Lohan—hell, half of Hollywood—can throw up, so can I.

But the worst part was that I couldn’t moan. I never realized how important moaning was to the upper-echelon pain levels. You rock back and forth in rhythmic like way and moan. It’s almost like a chant, a mantra. I’ve had pain in the past that gets so bad that you lose all perspective and actually start thinking about what it’d be like to be dead and not feel the pain anymore, and I’m telling you that moaning an rocking thing is a real life-saver.

I didn’t realize all this until I couldn’t do it anymore.

After an hour of sitting on that tub I realized it wasn’t going to happen. “A watched pot never boils” or something like that. I made it back downstairs and was going to try to lay down, but every time I made it to my room I’d rush back to the bathroom, convinced this would be it. I felt like I had Braxton-Hicks Nausea.

It was at this point a new development arrived on the scene, one that threatened to overwhelm my coping power, which was already hanging on by a thread.

Like I said before, when my body gets hit by a headache that gets really bad really quickly, I purge. This usually means I have to throw up, but if the headache continues, my body likes to purge another way. I felt the orchestra warming up in my lower gut, to go with the already raging symphony in my upper gut.

I feared this development greatly. The agony and incapacitation of having to throw up, of kneeling over a toilet for great chunks of time wishing it’d all be over doesn’t compare to the agony and incapacitation of being turned around on that same apparatus.

What’s worse, you all know Murphy’s Law. I just KNEW that the moment I committed, so to speak, to this war on a second front, the enemy would come charging up my throat, and there’d be no battlefield.

I panicked a little bit—and finally decided if worse came to worse there was a tub in this bathroom too, although it was 8 feet away. (I was wishing I was in that upstairs bathroom, which has tub and toilet conveniently adjacent for full-service sickness, but whaddya gonna do?)

Things were coming to a head rapidly, so I sank down, knowing I’d just have to take my chances. I was so dizzy and with the headache—now at near-migraine level—and I could no longer see clearly. I held on to the wall and swimmingly looked around for a moment.

Nothing had happened yet, but I was on the launching pad. If I were a space shuttle you can imagine someone with a Texas twang counting backwards somewhere at “8,” while smoke billowed out my…well, that’s a bad analogy, but you get the idea.

It was this moment that I happened to notice the toilet paper holder on the wall. This was strange because normally I don’t notice it.

Because normally the device is covered up with a roll.

It took a second to pierce the fog of my addled brain, but I immediately began rummaging the small cupboard, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing.

My parents were upstairs, and would never hear me.

My sister was downstairs asleep, and if I somehow managed to wake her up with banging on the wall, she wouldn’t know what I needed anyway, BECAUSE I COULDN’T TALK!

Friends, these are the times that try men’s souls.

Thankfully, in a crisis I’m usually calm and quick-thinking, and the thought-process of my lack of options took no more than a second or two. Unfortunately, the countdown had reached “4” and I had a split second decision to make.

Further complicating matters was that at that moment, my stomach decided it’d had enough, and launched it’s own offensive.

What I said a few seconds ago? Forget that. THESE are the times that try men’s souls.

With superhuman will I clenched up tighter than I would in a Turkish prison. I also took a huge breath and then closed my mouth, knowing the moment it opened again I’d lose that battle. I stumbled up the stairs, holding on the wall to keep from falling, into the upstairs bathroom, grabbed the white rolled manna, and back down the stairs. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs I had to start hopping, and please don’t make me explain the physics of why I had to keep my legs together. (It was on the way back down that I noticed I wasn’t wearing anything but a shirt, but there was no time to wonder where on earth my lower attire had gotten to. I had a horrible image of my mother—MY MOTHER!—finding my pants and underwear in a heap in the upstairs hallway, but I’d have to deal with that later.)

I made it back to the downstairs bathroom—and saw my pants!—and leaned over the tub, opening my mouth and spilling up more than I’d eaten in three days. (I’m fairly certain a few organs had to be in there too. You can live with only one liver, right?)

Three geysers took about ten seconds, and then I hopped back over to the toilet to complete the transaction.

And though I admit a certain “retch” sound did come from my mouth upon spewing into the tub, at no time during the entire ordeal did I utter a word. At no time did I ever seriously consider breaking the fast. I would have died first. If I had to go to the hospital, it would have been with pad and pen.

Because that, my friends, is the Sound of Silence.

Hyperion
July 20, 2006

BACK TO THE CARNIVAL OF THE MUNDANE

GO TO THE HYPERION INSTITUTE HOME PAGE