A Very Quiet Symphony

Not long ago, a friend was visiting from out of town. On her last evening in New York, we still had catching up to do, so we met early for dinner to cram in every update we could. We kept talking as we headed to the subway, and didn’t stop until we were forced to by the noise of the rattling train, whose screeching brakes defeated us. I smiled and shrugged at her, knowing that our next sentences would have to wait until we got off—that there would be a gap in our conversation and that whatever we were about to say would probably be forgotten forever. And while we were silent, I noticed a group of three young women who had stepped into our car and were talking and laughing together. The noise hadn’t stopped them: they were speaking visually, in American Sign Language.

I had rarely considered when it might be useful to have a way to communicate without sound. ASL was standardized at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1820s, from three community-based sign languages that had developed in Martha’s Vineyard; Henniker, New Hampshire; and the Sandy River Valley in Maine. Sign has other advantages than the one I noticed on the subway. Babies can sign before their voices have developed enough to talk, and deaf children learn spoken and written language more easily with sign as a mother tongue. Oliver Sacks reported that an old Vineyarder’s hands moved as she napped: she was dreaming in sign.^* Nevertheless, starting in the late 1880s, ASL was suppressed in favor of lipreading. That began to change in the 1960s, when the linguist William Stokoe proved that ASL wasn’t mere choreography but a complex living language. In contrast to recent advances in technology such as speech-to-text transcription, hearing aids, and cochlear implants, ASL’s renaissance is a reminder that deafness isn’t something to be overcome. There are possibilities in silence.

The protagonist of Eliza Barry Callahan’s first novel, The Hearing Test, a composer also named Eliza, gains her knowledge of these possibilities when her hearing all but disappears for a year, before just as mysteriously returning. What would twelve months of known sounds warping, breaking, and evaporating do to a person—particularly a person who works with sound for a living, as Eliza does? The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all. The defining mystery of The Hearing Test, for me at least, is the reader’s sadness when Eliza’s hearing returns. For sound to be restored would be the expected happy ending, but, marvelously, in this book it is not.

In real life, Callahan was diagnosed with sudden deafness and then with autoimmune inner ear disease in early 2019, at the age of twenty-four. Her illness went into remission after about a year, and her hearing has since returned. Callahan is an artist who works with sound and images as well as with words—she writes and performs songs with Jack Staffen as Purr.

Across The Hearing Test a sentence recurs, as a motif does in music: “I kept score.” It is a reminder of the text’s origin as a sort of diary, but it also takes on many shapes and tones as the story proceeds. For Eliza, the autofictional document we’re reading is a score in the sense of a film soundtrack, an analogue to lived experience, a trauma remembered by the body rather than the mind, a set of instructions written for another musician to play, a notch on a table or even on a bedpost. The book is a record of “how I took one long walk around myself,” as she puts it. We don’t always understand an experience while it is happening; its meaning becomes clear only once the events are safely behind us.

The novel begins swiftly, when Eliza wakes up the summer day she is due to fly to Venice to see a friend get married and registers a “deep drone” in her ear. At the emergency clinic, her ear looks clean and intact. This, it turns out, is not a good sign, as something more obviously broken might also be more easily mended. Eliza is diagnosed with sudden deafness: “The term sounded so severe that it verged on comedic for the wingspan of one moment.” She has been plunged into an alien soundscape where some noises have vanished, others are distorted, and further loss is imminent. The doctors suggest injecting steroids into the ear, but they don’t have much more to offer. (The treatment does nothing.) “We can get to the moon,” one doctor says, “but we can’t get to the inner ear.” Eliza is admirably restrained when another doctor simply says, “Bad luck.”

She retreats to her Manhattan studio apartment, which is in the building that inspired the fictional one in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954)—fittingly, because the real is no longer real. Noises Eliza knows are loud, such as cars passing, now seem to have the volume of bees buzzing, and to be coming from the stove. She comforts herself with the idea that her own voice “would always be the one thing I could hear.” Scale and distance aren’t what they were. For one, her thoughts are louder: “I had become nearer to myself.”

This seems at first to be a metaphor of self-discovery, but as the novel progresses Eliza has the sensation that she is doubled, interviewing herself, homesick for herself. Her life becomes secret, even sinister. “In deafness, life is…implicit,” she reads on an online message board for the hard of hearing, after noticing that most of her time is spent “looking through the space that divided the kitchen area from the living area.” Eliza is turning in on herself, and even if she does reach out, she might not be able to decipher the response. Her relationship to the world is becoming more like a reader’s to a printed book: if the text is an articulation of the self whose recipient is far away in space and time, the reader is deaf in a way too.

As silence invades more of her personal soundscape, Eliza finds it everywhere else as well. The words jump off the page at her while she’s reading. Silence is an ex-boyfriend’s current mode of communicating, after a mutual decision not to be in touch. It is the Fifth Amendment, which allows people to remain silent rather than bear witness against themselves. It is John Cage’s most famous work, 4ʼ33ʼʼ, which gathers a concert hall audience to watch a pianist sit unmoving at his instrument for nearly five minutes. How might she begin to weigh silence differently? It’s coming in any case—must it be an entombment?

When Eliza, at her mother’s request, calls a family friend who is dying of cancer (she can still make out speech, though a voice at normal volume sounds like a whisper), they talk about Cage. For him, silence was “a state of mind—a question of intention and non-intention.” It was

nothing but the things we choose to ignore and exclude…he left empty space in the music so he could show the listener that it was not actually empty, just subject to the whims of chance.

Bad luck or good luck? Eliza starts to value silence for its cleanliness, odorlessness, barrenness, efficiency.

When Eliza is home alone, her isolation barely troubles her. But early in her year of quiet, as if she were testing the limits of her hearing loss, she decides to go out to watch a movie, following a recommendation from her ex, who has broken the silence. The movie isn’t named, but it is likely by Yasujiro Ozu, perhaps his last one, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), about a widower whose daughter is getting married. Called The Taste of Mackerel in Japan, the film, Eliza notes, “was meant to convey the quiet flavor of the fish.”

Calming eye-level shots are so unmoving they could be still lifes. Men drink sake and talk of the past to no particular purpose. How subdued can a movie be until it isn’t a movie anymore? On the subway home from the theater, Eliza notices a woman with a rip in her pantyhose: “A small silence had broken her outfit.” Don’t nuns live in silence? Poetry has gaps between the stanzas. The self-proclaimed busiest women, Eliza’s mother used to say, are the ones who don’t have jobs. Silence can also be an echo chamber in which a sensitive character thrills to her own despair.

The Hearing Test unfolds with the ease of a diary but has, on second and third readings, an artful shape. It is separated into four movements like a symphony, full of loops, repetitions, and motifs, yet at just over 150 pages it is a very short and very quiet symphony. Eliza, in her new, implicit world, begins to notice strange coincidences: August 29 is both the day she woke up to the drone in her ear and the day 4ʼ33ʼʼ was premiered. These are cherished accidents, signs that there is a secret arrangement underneath what’s happening to her, fairy-tale epiphanies that are as much a part of twenty-first-century womanhood as tarot readings and manifestation. Chronological time has been displaced by “sick-time”—a princess put to sleep for a hundred years feels like she’s taken an afternoon nap—and to experience it is to be “acutely outside of time but acutely aware of its passage.”

This feels like pandemic time too: a year or so outside of the normal procession, when there was barely a person not alienated in some measure from life as it was. The Hearing Test doesn’t declare itself a pandemic novel, and neither sanitizer nor N95 masks are mentioned. Nevertheless, to read it is to be inside those strange compressions and dilations of time again. (The author was diagnosed a few months before the pandemic began.) Eliza cannot speed up or slow down the rate of her hearing loss; there is no cure.

In her emotional life, too, the past and present are misaligned. Her ex-boyfriend moves to the West Coast but keeps turning up in her inbox, in her text notifications, at her door to say good-bye for the second time. Without a viable path forward, it is as if the ex must remain in play, as a person who remembers her as she was. When she tells him she feels like she is haunting herself, he says that “love…is obviously a form of haunting.” Is love when you can’t leave each other alone after you break up? Or is your true love the one who won’t leave your side, who never lets themselves become a ghost in the first place? When Eliza is invited to a clinic in Los Angeles, she stays with her ex and his new girlfriend and has an opportunity to discover which sort of ghost he is.

In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart and his girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, look out on his neighbors. In particular, they notice a couple like themselves, only the woman is sick and the man is well. As soon as Eliza arrives in LA, where the copy of her New York apartment can still be found on the Paramount lot, she notices doubles everywhere. The ex’s new girlfriend, who picks her up at the airport, takes her to a yard sale at the house of a pop star. Browsing the clothes racks, Eliza recognizes another, cooler singer, who reminds her of “a version of myself I’d once thought was possible.” Successful singer vs. cool singer. Ex-girlfriend vs. current girlfriend. Past hearing person vs. current deaf person. Despite herself, Eliza comes to like her double, the new girlfriend, rather a lot:

She said she understood why he had loved me. She said that she read his emails but it was okay, he knew that she did this. Her hand rested on top of mine while she spoke and eventually she started drawing figure eights with her pointer finger between my knuckles. I told her that I was falling asleep. For me, it was 3:00 AM.

The girlfriend is there, caressing Eliza’s bones, and the ex is nowhere. Perhaps a double is more like a twin than a rival, like sign existing alongside written language. Doubling is also how a lone cell grows into something more complex, and in a similar way Eliza sees sound in sights and sights in sound. The interior of the pop star’s house is “a syncopation of ceiling heights and changing axes.” Later, talking with the ex’s new girlfriend as he makes tea, Eliza has a thought: “When someone speaks to you it is like they’re touching you.” As if she could hear Eliza’s thoughts, the girlfriend “placed her lips on my lips and left them there for a moment.” Talk has of necessity become touch for Eliza, but there are moments when even the hearing prefer gesture to speech. The tea goes cold, and Eliza feels a “familiar hand. Something searched me, as if for a ring down a drain. Something pushed me. Something kissed me. Something held me. Something left me.” Callahan has written the gentlest, quietest, calmest multipartner sex scene there could be.

It feels appropriate somehow that deliverance comes not as a burst of joy but as a sly admission. Near the end of the book, Eliza has begun learning ASL, and her ex has returned to New York. His girlfriend ended things, he tells Eliza, because “chronology mattered and…it was clear now that I preceded her and always would.” In the middle of his let’s-get-back-together monologue—employing the metaphor of a pair of stars in a death dance—he pauses, and she tells him what she had been avoiding saying: “I had just entered an unexpected remission.” She had not wanted to say it, I imagine, because a new life was in sight. “I had the sense,” she thinks, “that I had outrun loss for a very, very long time.” It is a weirdly good feeling to withstand a necessary loss, to welcome the grief you had been holding at arm’s length.

The subtlety of The Hearing Test, in its tone and argument, is generative in the sense that Cage’s 4ʼ33ʼʼ is generative, allowing the hidden to be heard. Cage’s silences are bursting with incident: people snuffling, rain on windowpanes, AC units humming. When the proportion of silence in Eliza’s life increases, she discovers this paradoxical truth for herself. It reenchants the world for her, as it does for the readers of Callahan’s novel.

One idle day after her return from LA, Eliza looks up Johannes Kepler, who in the early seventeenth century imagined the speeds of the planets as tones that would blend into “a continuous song…to be perceived by the intellect not the ear”: the Shakespearean music of the spheres. She finds that someone online has taken this literally and made a multihour composition, which you listen to, hearing or deaf, by placing the speaker on your sternum:

As I listened I confirmed for myself that I had found a well of emotion I hadn’t known was there, like coming upon water in the middle of a desert—depression, the source itself—inexhaustible, sustaining, pitch. A drone droning.

From a planetary point of view, human problems appear tiny, manageable. The drone has become the music of the spheres. “Such harmony is in immortal souls,” Lorenzo says to Shylock’s daughter in The Merchant of Venice. “But whilst this muddy vesture of decay/Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.” Eliza won’t get to listen to Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn in the same way once her hearing has returned.

If there is a weakness in The Hearing Test, it is that articulating this paradox can at points tip over into unearned profundity. “I decided that silence is having too much time on your hands,” Eliza observes early on, “now that I had absolutely nothing to do other than live.” That Eliza might simply be saying she is bored gets obscured by the concepts of time, life, and silence mingling in the sentence. (Later in the book a single page refers to Antonioni, Rothko, Kepler, and Bernd and Hilla Becher: at least one too many.)

As summer comes around again, the ex has become the modern sort of ghost, one that doesn’t reply to your e-mails. His ex-girlfriend, by contrast, has begun texting Eliza, first the address of a shop, then pictures. Eliza stops noticing the subtleties in silence a month before what would have been the anniversary of the onset of her deafness. To celebrate her remission, and perhaps also the arrival of her grief, she finally goes to Venice. On the morning she is due to return to New York, from her open window she notices a man tolling a handbell: “I could hear the bell very clearly.”