One day a man started listening. He didn’t mean to. He was sitting at the kitchen table eating his corn flakes while his wife was talking. All of a sudden he found himself listening to her. He heard her words and what they meant and why she said them. He even heard what she was really saying, the words behind the words she spoke.
The listening thing puzzled him for a few minutes, but he brushed it off as gas or acid reflux and went to work. When he got home that night, it happened again, but he didn’t tell his wife. It would mean admitting he hadn’t heard anything she’d said for seventeen years. No sense confirming what she already knew. So during dinner he pretended not to hear her. He even let her answer her own questions, like “Why did I bother marrying you?”
The next morning he left the house early to avoid the listening thing, but part way through a meeting about some marketing problem Miser Industries was having, he started listening to Mavis Trueblood.
She confronted him afterwards. “Are you okay?”
“Sure.” He tried to walk away.
“Wait. I saw you in the meeting. Your eyes stopped being dull, your face flat. Did you start listening?”
He nodded quickly and went into the men’s room and sat in the third stall and tried to compose himself. What was he going to do? He’d built his whole career at Miser Industries on being oblivious, on nodding and smiling and staying in his cubicle. No one bothered him, no one noticed him. The papers someone used to dump on his desk came by computer now.
He stayed in the stall until lunch time, then went back to his cubicle and ate his tuna sandwich. He filled the rest of the afternoon working on the paperwork that didn’t come on paper anymore.
At 5:01, he left work and went home and sat in the kitchen while his wife made spaghetti and talked. When she said something interesting, he commented on it. When she made one of her silly jokes, he laughed.
She turned to him with an angry look. “Have you been drinking?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did Harvey give you more of that stuff he smokes?”
“No. Why are you asking me these things?”
“Because you’re acting strange. Have you been in my happy pills?”
“NO!”
For a while, the only sound was the bubbling water. When the noodles were ready, she mixed in her special sauce and set out their food and they ate. Nothing broke their dinner silence except their slurping. When they finished, he washed the dishes while she sat at the table. He was starting to leave the kitchen when she grabbed his arm.
“Are you seeing someone?” she asked in an anguished voice.
“Of course not. There’s no one else, there never has been.” He put his arm around her until she stopped crying. Then they went into the living room and watched TV. They went to bed at 9:00 the way they always did.
All night the man tossed and turned. This listening thing was nothing but trouble. Too much stuff coming at him: things he had to do, things he had to care about. Too many questions about how he looked, what he’d been doing, how he felt. There was no good outcome that he could see if he kept up this listening stuff….So he stopped.
It took a few days and a lot of concentration, but by Friday, he was his old self again. Happy, quiet, and oblivious.
Normal.