The Listening Man
Teil Barnaby Readle saw the clock and it was past 5 now. The air seemed stiffer to him in the afternoon, and with shadow soon to cover Nickletown, his chest heaved with the weight of feeling trapped. Across the main dirt road that cut Nickletown in half, Teil Barnaby Readle made out the thin, ephemeral silhouette of Mayor Major. The Mayor’s cigarette smoke crossed one of the last rays of light. His boots were shiny velvet purple, his belt buckle a smiling Siddartha. He exhaled, and his stare bore into Teil from 30 feet.
“You’re the man, Teil Barnaby Readle,” he said. Crushed the cigarette under the velvet boot heel. Walked away with the gait of a man who knows the future.
Five, six, seven. Shadow overcame Nickletown and the whispers began again on its thick air. Everywhere doors were bolted shut, socks stuffed in the gaps and rags tucked in at the foot. Drapes blocked every window. No howls of coyotes. No barks from the dogs. Nothing but Teil Barnaby Readle in the middle of the street besieged by shadow’s burden.
No one went outside anymore in the darkness before daybreak. Errors from the past were no longer memories easily forgotten, or otherwise immortalized in commissioned bronze; now, they withstood time and the human mind’s inclination to forget; now, they were manifest on the air and tortured their patrons whenever shadow fell. That’s what they called night now: shadow. Shadow’s falling, dear, come inside and out of the whispers.
Most kept these sour reminders at bay, but not Teil Barnaby Readle. Shadow was an ocean of remorse and Teil Barnaby Readle its willing pariah lost at sea.
Why was a mystery. Nickletown all knew of Teil Barnaby Readles’ stubborn fearlessness, which was the generally accepted interpretation of whatever it was that made this man submerge himself in the whispers. But no one knew why he went out there. They called him the listening man, but they could just as easily have called him insane.
The whispers was a misnomer, a euphemism. You’d hear the whispers sure enough, but it was not a question of hearing them as you would a child’s ill-kept secret; they made you listen to their haunting choruses, and what choruses they did sing! They were the audible culmination of not only yours but others’ past horrors, a ceaseless bombardment of the deepest shame that had gone unconfronted, or scarring guilt from a terrible deed, the monotone deception of apathy or some traumatizing memory; whispers so dark and mortifying that to be exposed to them was akin to tampering with the fatal fabric of your being. And Teil Barnaby Readle tampered every night.
“What’s it like?” they’d ask Teil Barnaby Readle. But he had long since stopped speaking about it. “I’ve known Teil Barnaby all his life. He’s a wanderer in one town. I wouldn’t put it past him that he’s started to enjoy the infamy you people give him,” the Mayor said.
Years before but still well into the established routine of blocking shadow out from their homes, the townspeople gossiped about a conversation that Elda Groundsing had overheard just outside the barber shop between Teil Barnaby Readle and Mayor Major concerning the whispers. Back then, everyone had been exposed at one point or another, but they hadn’t waited around long enough to find out any more than they already knew, and their guttural screams all but drowned out any critical thought that they might have occasioned to use during the experience. Teil Barnaby Readle had more self control than anyone else, it seemed, and that way earned his nickname. “They’re not words as you hear them from me,” he’d told Mayor Major beside the barber’s pole. “It’s sound, convoluted, wounded. Oppressed. It’s not what you hear but how. Doesn’t matter if it’s yours or someone else’s. It’s the essence that you experience in the whispers. Why they chose me I’m not sure...”
At that point Major Mayor had noticed Elda’s eavesdropping and the conversation ended. But not before she’d heard that last part, which in the coming months would become a rumor tangled in the whimsy of anyone who tried it out on their tongues, which typically happens with incomplete information.
Elda Groundsing had resolved that Teil Barnaby Readle had gone completely mad, but no one agreed with her. Teil Barnaby Readle did nothing to indicate insanity (apart from the obvious tempting of shadow), and the people worshipped him, Mayor Major most of all. All Elda Groundsing had to go on was a lonely sentence that she picked out from a passing conversation years ago. A minor perverted detail. And the rumors had buoyed Teil Barnaby Readle’s legend. Still, the stubborn woman had decided that Teil Barnaby Readle had more secrets than he let on, and she was as sure as the changing seasons that one day Nickletown would learn it.
Teil Barnaby Readle inched through shadow throwing short, uneasy stares at the midpoint between his face and wherever he looked, as though he could see the air. Streets deserted. Sky black and starless. The only light came from windows whose drapes were too thin to hide a candle’s glare. Whispers.
Whispers.
Whispers.
(end part 1)