The silence was an enormous relief-sort of like coming out of that cave into the sunlight when I was ten. I peeled the headphones off my ears and pulled out the toilet paper plugs. They were stuck; it hurt to remove them.
I heard someone-Joe maybe-say, “Can you hear me?” His voice was hollow, as if he were down a well.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can you hear me?” he said again, a little louder.
Finally I caught on. I shouted, “Yeah!”
“Good,” he shouted. “I think my ears were damaged by all that noise.”
“Yeah, mine too,” I yelled back.
“How you feel?”
“Not good,” I yelled.
“Darren?” Joe yelled.
Darren looked up, but didn’t reply.
“You okay?”
Nothing.
“Darren! You okay? What’s wrong?” Joe lit the candle.
Darren’s face was scarlet. He stared sightlessly at a point about halfway between Joe and me. Joe reached out and put a hand on Darren’s shoulder. Darren batted Joe’s hand away and turned on him, screaming, “What’s wrong? I feel like I’ve been thrown into the gorilla cage at the zoo, and they’ve been using my head as a goddamn volleyball!”
I felt pretty much the same way. Plus I was worried about my family. But screaming wouldn’t help anything.
Joe stood up, walked behind Darren’s chair, and started rubbing his shoulders. Darren seemed to deflate, collapsing with his head down on the kitchen table. Joe stood behind him, trying to comfort him.
Finally Darren looked up from the table and muttered something I couldn’t hear.
“It’s okay,” Joe yelled. “I’m going to see if there’s anything on the radio.” He picked up the candle and used it to find a clunky old boombox on the counter. He carried the radio to the kitchen table and blew out the candle, plunging us again into total darkness.
After a while I heard a soft hiss of static waxing and waning as Joe dialed through the stations. I imagined he had the volume cranked up to the max so we could hear anything at all, but still the static sounded faint and hollow. We bent forward, pressing our heads together close to the radio, and listened to static for about an hour.
Every now and then, I could hear a roll of thunder coming from outside-not the painful continuous booms we’d been suffering through, only a natural clap of thunder sounding soft and echoey in my messed-up ears. The sulfur stench was stronger. I could smell it everywhere now, not just near the windows and doors.
“I’ve been through AM and FM three times each. There’s nothing!” Joe shouted.
“Why?” I yelled.
“I don’t know. I was getting all the usual stations on it yesterday. Maybe the ash somehow interferes with radio reception.”
Darren flipped open his cell phone. The bluish light from the screen illuminated his face, hanging ghost-like in the gloom. “Cell phone still doesn’t work.”
Joe held down the button on his watch and used its faint light to stumble to the house phone. “It’s dead, too,” he yelled.
“How long is everything going to be down?” Darren asked.
“I don’t know.” Joe shook his head slowly.
“Why’s the water work?” I shouted. “Everything else is down, why should that be any different?”
“Good point,” Joe yelled. He lit the candle and we went upstairs, cleared the bedding out of the Jacuzzi and filled it with water. The water trickled slowly out of the spigot. It smelled funny, too, a bit like rotten eggs. I tried a sip-it didn’t taste too bad.
After that, we got an armload of towels and walked around the house by candlelight, jamming them under the doors and along the windowsills. It didn’t help, though-the rotten egg smell kept getting worse.
As the afternoon and evening wore on, the thunder outside got louder. I didn’t know if the storm was getting worse or if my ears were getting better; the latter, I hoped. Joe wanted to cook some of the stuff in the freezer for dinner, but the gas cooktop wouldn’t light. He sniffed it and said there was no gas, although I didn’t see how he could tell-I couldn’t smell anything but sulfur. So we ate bread again, this time with some lettuce and fresh peaches. Darren wanted salami and cheese, but Joe overruled him. He said we needed to save the food that would keep the longest.
As we were finishing dinner, I said, “Thanks for taking me in and feeding me and all. I really appreciate-”
“Don’t be silly,” Darren said. “That’s what neighbors are for.”
“Well, thanks. You guys are great neighbors. At least that’s what Mom always-” Thinking about Mom got me choked up, and I had to stop. We sat in silence then, waiting for nighttime, although we could have gone to bed whenever-it was still pitch black and had been all day.
Then the explosions started again.