The Noise

Dr. Kabat looked at Barnaby Hackett with the calm, masked gaze of the psychiatrist.

"You've told me a great deal in a very short time, Mr. Hackett," he said, "and I may say I have rarely heard so complex a matter so lucidly stated. One thing you didn't tell me: when did you first notice this phenomenon?"

"The first time I noticed it I did tell you," Hackett said. "That was when I was in the second grade in Kill's Bluff, when Miss Grench had Tommy Barstow bent over the desk and she was beating him with the pointer and suddenly I knew what she was thinking. That was the first time I noticed it. But my mother told me that when I was 18 months old my nurse noticed it. She said she was standing there watching me and she said to herself, 'If that child throws another spoon of Pablum on the floor I'm going to belt him one good lick.' I threw up my arms in front of my face and began to cry. Mercy-Helen, that was the nurse, was very upset by it. She never had hit me, never would."

"I see," Dr. Kabat said. "Then you noticed it first when you were seven. Now you are 32 and you feel that the faculty is strengthening. Or that the sensitivity is increasing. Or at any rate that the frequency of the phenomenon is increasing."

"That's right," Hackett said. "It used to happen perhaps once a week. Then it became two and three times a week, then every day, then a couple of times a day, usually these were unusual incidents, small but striking things, like I told you, maybe I'd be trying to get a girl to go to bed with me; she'd be saying no and all of a sudden I'd hear her talking to herself telling herself what she was going to do when she was in bed with me, things like that, and then it became more and more frequent, and six months ago the whole thing began to accelerate until now I can't differentiate between incidents at all, it happens constantly and steadily and all the time, and the worst part of it is what I call the static, the unregistered stuff ----"

"Let me interrupt you," Dr. Kabat said. "The word 'unregistered'?"

"I mean bits and pieces. It's getting so I can't stand to walk down the street. To come here today, for example, I walked down Fifth Avenue from 59th Street to here, four blocks, and that's not the most crowded part of Fifth either, but I only just made it. What I want to do, I want to scream as loudly as I can, just in the hope that if I do that I won't hear the unregistered bits, the fragments, the half-thoughts and half-sentences. They're the worst, you see. And it's very loud, that it's always been, very loud, like a radio turned right up all the way, whole pieces or unregistered, and of course I remember everything, as I told you, I never forget anything. I have absolute recall, so when I walk down the street I have to hear, and store away, stuff like this, and I'll just shout it at you because I want you to know how it actually is with me, Car isn't a black one I know I'm ... take his goddam two bits ... toys not like when I was young then ... look at the set of jugs on that blonde ... no he never did graduate that year or marie ... $29.75 is how much if ... to paint like that painting she ... room 308 room 308 room ... anyway he'll die before ... son of a bitch tried to ... god our father intercede in this ... I'll never make it I'll never I can't hello tom I ... don't win them ... if I don't find a place to pee ... he always did hate roasts but she oh she ... all right so I'm a louse the lowest the worst but by Jesus I won't ..."

Dr. Kabat lifted his hand. "I understand," he said. "I see how it is. Yes."

Barnaby Hackett shook his head slowly. He was sitting on the end of his spine in the soft leather chair, looking up at Kabat. His eyes were luminous and brown, light brown, a tawny shade, he was blond. It was a pleasant face, lean, almost bony.

"No," he said, "you don't really, Doctor, because I have to give them to you one at a time. You can't appreciate the full effect that way. You see, for me they all pile in at once, on top of each other, sentences shouting out every which way like a pile of straw, or sticks, spears, I usually think of, spears, guns, with bayonets piled up, something like that, you have to understand that distance is the governing factor apparently, I think about 15 or 16 feet, I don't receive beyond that, but within 15 or 16 feet I get it all at once and ..."

"I understand," Kabat said. "Very painful, obviously."

Neither of them spoke.

"Still there must have been times when the faculty was useful to you," Dr. Kabat said. "The example you mentioned, the girl you wanted to go to bed with. It was helpful there: you knew you were going to succeed, even though she was saying no."

"That's true," Hackett said. "As long as it was intermittent, I didn't mind it, I enjoyed it. It's only the increasing frequency that has me frightened."

"I should think it would be very handy in business," Dr. Kabat said. "What is your business, by the way?"

"Automobiles," Hackett said. "I started out as a car salesman, and of course I always knew which was a shopper and which was a hot prospect, and so I made a lot of money. I bought the business in a couple of years. Now I've got a whole chain of dealerships all up and down the East Coast: Volkswagen, Renault, Fiat, Jag, Mg, Saab -- only the good ones. My faculty, as you call it, was an advantage in business, sure, but now I've got all the money I'll ever need, and I can't get myself interested in being a tycoon, you know, hotels, steamships, oil, all that jazz, I think people who get on that kick are sick-sick, one way or another." He sat straight up in the chair. "Look, Dr. Kabat," he said, "I was perfectly happy until about three months ago, when I began to hear more and more and now I hear everything -- and something worse can happen."

"Worse?"

Hackett nodded slowly and slid back down in the chair. "Worse," he said, "and I tell you frankly, I'll have to kill myself if it happens, and I think it is happening: I think my range is increasing. I told you the limit was around 15 or 16 feet. Well, yesterday I was walking in Central Park, that's a good place for me, you see, lots of open space, and I sat down on a bench near the lake. After a while a cop came along and he stood for a minute looking out over the water. I began to pick him up, and I didn't think anything of it, it was a very ordinary thing, he was giving himself a fantasy about how one of Mayor Wagner's kids was skating there in the winter and fell in and he rescued the kid and they made him a first-grade detective right on the spot, a real dull bit, and he went away almost at once, but then slowly I realized he'd been a longish way from the bench, I got up and paced it off, and it came out at a little more than 18 feet, maybe almost 19, and then I remembered a couple of other things like that, and I do think I'm picking them up farther away now. Well, if this increases as fast as the rest of it has I'll be reading them half a mile away pretty soon, and you understand no mind could stand that, that's when I'll have to go, because remember that would be a radius of half a mile or whatever, I don't read them just in front or in back of me, but all around, and if you just think for a minute of standing, say, by the flower beds in Radio City and getting every thought within half a mile, that would run I should think, easily it would run 100,000 people in that circle, every one of them putting out a solid stream of crap steadily every second, because even the dumbest brass-head you ever knew thinks; what he thinks might curl the hair on a musk-ox, but he thinks; it's going on in there all the time, and ..." Hackett's eyes suddenly spread wide, his eyelids popped like window shades run up and he pressed both hands into his head and began to moan and he swung his body back and forth in the chair.

Dr. Kabat stared at him and his hand moved slowly to the center drawer of his desk. On the left side of the drawer he kept an assortment of tranquilizers ranging from little more than aspirin strength to something that would stun a Miura bull; on the right side he kept an eight-ounce flathead blackjack. One never knew. But he hadn't decided even to open the drawer when Hackett jumped out of the chair and went out of the office like something just uncaged, leaving the door swinging behind him. Kabat heard him in the hallway, yelling, and he ran for the door himself. Hackett was shouting, "Madam! Madam! Just a minute ... What have you got there? What is it?"

When Kabat got his head around the corner of the hall door he saw Hackett standing by the elevator, holding it open, talking with someone. He turned slowly and came back and his eyes, dead and flat, were the eyes of a man on his way to the gallows. He pushed past Kabat and went back into the office to slump down in the chair.

"It's all going fast now," he muttered, "very fast."

"What was that about, Mr. Hackett?" Kabat asked. "Why did you run out to the hall?"

Hackett didn't answer at once. His head was bowed in his hands.

"I picked up something," he said. "Just when I was telling you how people think all the time I picked up this unregistered bit, it was, 'If she doesn't stop squeezing me so hard I'm going to leak on her' and I knew, I can't tell you how, that it was animal, not man. It came through in an altogether different way, high-pitched, strident, and kind of fuzzy and coarse and rough around the edges. I was terrified, terrified! So as soon as I could get a grip on myself I ran for the hall, because that was where it had to be, and I just saw this woman getting into the elevator, carrying something hairy and small, and so I ran for her because I had to see what it was, you know, I had to know." He began to rock in the chair again.

"Stop that!" Kabat said. "Take your hands down. So what was it?"

"A dog," Hackett said. "Little dog. Pomeranian. It's as I said, Doctor; this thing is growing very fast now. The range is increasing and I'm reading animals. If I had any sense left I'd go out that window right now. I can see where it'll end: I'll be reading every living thing in the entire world, from fish no man has ever seen, on the black bottom of the oceans, to baboons sitting in their Sputniks 1000 miles out in space, and my God, after that, after that, is there any reason to suppose I won't be reaching out to the limit of our galaxy, and then beyond that, and beyond that ..." He lay back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was very pale.

"Take it easy," Dr. Kabat said. "None of this has happened yet. It may not come to pass at all. We have to think about your present condition, see what we can do about that. We have to make a beginning."

"The noise," Hackett said, "can you imagine what the noise is going to be, Doctor, listen to me, every living thing in the world, billions and billions of living entities, every one of them screeching down a funnel into my head, can you imagine what a thousandth part (continued overleaf)Noise(continued from page 34) of that noise would be like, well, can you?"

"I'm not going to try," Kabat said, "and don't you try, either. Let's stay with the present. Let's stay with reality, and see what we can do."

"You don't think there's much you can do," Hackett said quietly. "When I first started to tell you about it, you thought I was obviously delusional, schizophrenic, probably paranoid tendency. Then, when I'd told you more, you began to think it was a real far-out kind of ESP. And since then the only constructive notion you've had is that you want to talk to somebody named Gardner Murphy about it."

"You're a convenient kind of patient," Kabat said. "I don't have to tell you much. Yes, I want to talk to Gardner Murphy about it, since I think he knows more about extrasensory perception than anyone else in this country. And I have one more idea."

"I'm a good subject," Hackett said. "I've been hypnotized before, you know, just for kicks."

"Good. Well, then ..."

"I know," Hackett said wearily. "Your next patient is out there. A woman. Problem, frigidity. She's trying to read the December '57 issue of Fortune but she can't keep her mind on it because she's developed a rather direct concept of a solution to her problem. It involves you in a fairly personal way and ..."

Dr. Kabat held up his hand. "Please," he said. "No more. I can see you tomorrow at three, if that's all right?"

"If I last that long," Hackett said. He hauled himself to his feet. The next patient, he noted on the way out, was a flaming redhead, lean and hungry-looking. He wasn't surprised. He remembered a Chicago social worker, a girl about 30, plump, placid, bovine, he had sat next to her on a bus lurching north on Michigan, and after he'd read her a little bit he followed her off the bus at Goethe Street, mostly because he couldn't believe what he heard. She had been violent, incredibly inventive and truly, totally insatiable. Since then, nothing had ever surprised him. He rather expected an elderly usher in a church to be seething with black murder as he benignly passed the collection plate. It almost seemed the normal thing now. Barnaby Hackett did not often think of his fellow man as clothed in nobility.

He stuffed some lunch into himself, reading a newspaper, forcing the meaning of it through and over the howling bedlam in his head. Afterward he picked up a car and drove to Connecticut. Near Westport there is a reservoir bisected by a long causeway. Hackett drove to the middle of the causeway, parked the car, and there in blessed silence went to sleep.

• • •

Hackett had been right: he was an excellent hypnotic subject. Kabat tried nothing radical. He induced a light sleep in Hackett, then a deeper sleep. He produced a glove anesthesia, amnesia, and posthypnotic suggestion. He taught Hackett autohypnosis and then he got down to business.

"You will hear nothing but the sound of my voice," he told Hackett. "You will hear nothing but the sound of my voice. There is a clock ticking on my desk. You will not hear it. You will not hear the clock ticking. You will hear no sounds from the street. You will not hear the elevator when it passes this floor. You will hear nothing but the sound of my voice. Until I tell you that you may, you will hear nothing but the sound of my voice. You will hear nothing else, nothing at all. I will count slowly to five, and when I reach five you will be able to hear nothing but the sound of my voice. One, two, three, four, five. You can hear nothing but the sound of my voice. If you hear anything but the sound of my voice, lift your right index finger."

Flat on the couch, his every muscle limp as boiled spaghetti, his eyes closed, his breathing slow and even, his hands folded on his chest, Hackett moved nothing.

"You can hear nothing but the sound of my voice," Kabat said. "I have simply turned off all other sound in your mind. You can do this yourself. You will be able to do this yourself. You will be able to stop any sound you wish to stop, instantly, at wilL During the rest of today, and tonight, and until you see me again tomorrow, you will be able to stop all sound. You will hear nothing that you do not wish to hear. When you hear a sound that annoys you, you will close your eyes, you will relax, you will produce an instant hypnosis, you will tell yourself that you cannot hear that sound, and it will stop. It will stop instantly. You will not hear it ..."

At the end of the hour, sitting on the edge of the couch, rubbing his eyes, slowly waking up, Hackett looked around.

"Things are very quiet," he said.

"I have a patient waiting," Dr. Kabat said.

"A man," Hackett said, "hideously upset." He made a grimace and shook his head. "He let his sister drown; he thinks he let his kid sister drown, 31 years ago, and ..." He stopped and closed his eyes. His hands went limp on his knees, his shoulders slumped and slowly he began to smile. He looked up at Kabat. "I shut the son-of-a-bitch up!" he said. "I turned him off, the bastard! I did it, and it was easy!"

"Of course it was," Kabat said. "I'll see you tomorrow. And keep trying. Every time you do it, it will be easier."

Hackett was full of gratitude when he appeared next day.

"You're right, Dr. Kabat," he said, "it gets easier and easier. I just shut it off and shove it back at 'em. It's easier every time. And I don't know how to thank you. You've saved my life. You've cured me of something that was obviously incurable."

"I don't know if 'cured' is the precise term," Kabat said, "and I don't know either if you're altogether out of the woods yet. But you're on the way, certainly."

Kabat's eye fell on the pencil on his desk. He noticed that the point was broken; he opened the desk drawer to get a new one, and it was at that precise moment that it happened to him for the first time. His mind went totally blank. He found himself staring into the drawer with its neat array of pencils, rubber bands, paper-clips, the assortment of medicines on the left, the blackjack on the right, but nothing registered. He knew he had a purpose, he could see, as through a gray and oily fog, a goal to reach, but he could not move toward it. He felt no sense of panic. He felt nothing at all. He just sat there, immobile, until Hackett said, rather loudly for him, "What's the matter, Doctor?"

Kabat blinked and looked around. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all. I was thinking of something." He took up the pencil he wanted. "Shall we go ahead?" he said. As quickly as he could -- 30 seconds -- he put Hackett into a light sleep, and then worked him into a deep stage. He wanted a drink, but he settled for a cigarette; he moved quietly to the window and stood there looking through a narrow slot in the leaf-thin metal blinds. The air-conditioner hissed quietly and behind him he could hear his patient's steady breathing. He was very frightened.

Forty minutes later, when Hackett had left, Dr. Kabat opened the door to his reception room, slowly and with dread. He was sure he knew what he would find. Mr. Holvak, his four o'clock, was sitting there, a magazine on the floor at his feet, his hands limp between his legs, his eyes staring, a small shiny rivulet of saliva running from the corner of his mouth. Kabat started the sweep-hand of his wrist-watch and waited. It was most important, he felt, that he know the interval. Four minutes, 16 seconds later Mr. Holvak stirred, shook himself, blinked. "I guess I was daydreaming," he said through his sad, (continued on page 93)Noise(continued from page 36) thin smile. He stood and walked into the office.

It was Holvak who first noticed the noise. Dr. Kabat, preoccupied with the horror of what he now knew, and trying hard to pay attention to Holvak's dreary monolog of self-pity, had not noticed it.

"Every horn in the street seems to be blowing," Holvak said diffidently. It was true. A tremendous cacophony was rising in the air. Kabat went to the window and cranked it out. As far as he could see down Fifth Avenue the street was solid with automobiles, nothing moving. Fifty-ninth was blocked all the way to the Coliseum. Most of the pedestrians on the sidewalks were standing still; those who were not moved slowly and uncertainly. An aircraft was crossing Fifth Avenue at about 50th Street, a Constellation west-bound out of Idle-wild, its four engines thudding under climbing load, and as he watched, its engines suddenly shut down; it fell off on one wing in the maneuver that used to be known as a falling leaf, lifted its tail and bored straight in. A surly-looking wisp of oil-black smoke began to rise somewhere near 10th Avenue. Kabat closed the window.

"Mr. Holvak," he said, "I'll have to ask you to excuse me. We just won't count this session. Please come on Tuesday at the regular time. I'm sorry, but you must leave me now, something has come up ..." He hustled the man out and grabbed the telephone. Hackett's apartment didn't answer, and at two the next morning Kabat gave up without having reached him. He appeared promptly at three in the afternoon, as usual.

Kabat looked across the desk at him, a nice young man slumped happily in a big leather chair. He closed his eyes for a moment, thought of a blank ash-white wall. Blankness, he said to himself, blankness, blankness, nothing.

"I suppose you saw the papers this morning?" he said aloud.

"About the traffic jam yesterday?" Hackett said. "Yes, I read about that."

"Odd, wasn't it?" observed Kabat.

"Not at all," Hackett said. "I did that, and you know I did it."

"I think so," Dr. Kabat said. "When you said yesterday that you could not only stop the voices but you could drive them back, I had a notion something like this might happen. We really have a problem now. A certain number of people died yesterday."

"Forty-six in the airplane," Hackett said slowly, "nine in the house it hit, 14 pedestrians and those two window-washers at 720 Fifth. Seventy-one altogether."

"There are certain other considerations," Kabat said. "You realize that all thought stopped for several minutes when you passed. Leaving aside the obvious, say a team of surgeons in an operating theatre, we do not know what losses that may have produced."

"True, I suppose," Hackett said, "but my God, Dr. Kabat, I couldn't help it, I didn't know, I didn't realize, all I thought of was that you and I were beating this thing, that I was winning, that I was being cured, I could go on living ..."

"I'm not suggesting you are at fault," Kabat said. "I'm saying that we must reach a compromise here, you must somehow learn to control yourself so that you can stop thought transmission coming to you, but not drive it back because obviously when you do that you stop all thought of any kind, I think for four or five minutes. And what do you think is your range now?"

"A mile," Hackett said slowly. "A mile, at least. That airplane was over 5000 feet up."

They sat in silence for a moment. Kabat closed his eyes and bent his mind to the white wall, trying with every fiber in him to keep an image from forming, an image that Hackett could read. He was brave enough, but he had no wish to die.

"It won't work, you know," Hackett said. "The whole secret of what we've done so far lies in a violent effort to push it back. Even if I could achieve the kind of delicate balance that would only stop it, not drive it back, I couldn't hope to do it with more than one person, one living thing, at a time -- the way I do with you -- because, don't you see, they're all different? If you think of it as a stream of radio signals, every one comes in at a different strength, and an effort that would merely stop one would let 20 others get through. The only solution is to resist with a force that will stop the strongest -- and that means driving all the rest of them back. No, it won't work."

"It has to work," Kabat said quietly. "You have a virile imagination. You can see what will happen. Minimally, an increasing accidental death rate, the cessation of the creative process, plague, savagery. Maximally ..."

"I know," Hackett said. "I thought of that. For instance, that Connie could have been a B-47 with the big boy aboard ..."

"Let's try," Kabat said. Hackett moved slowly to the couch and lay down.

No aircraft fell the next day. An electronics engineer had suggested the possibility that some kind of man-made interference emanating from a New York laboratory had caused simultaneous engine failure in the Constellation, and traffic was routed around the city. But 22 pedestrians walked into the path of automobiles with fatal results; vehicular collision was estimated at $1,500,000 and on the West Side an upset kerosene stove burned a square block of tenement buildings to ashes. Nine of the firemen who did reach the scene were killed. An elevator in Radio City dropped 42 stories to the basement and in the UN building the delegates nodded in their seats or stumbled, unseeing, through the corridors.

Herbert Kabat didn't sleep that night. He canceled his other appointments for the day and waited, white-faced and taut, for Barnaby Hackett. "If God is good," he thought, "the man has cut his throat." But at three the soft door-gong sounded.

"I don't want to talk about it," Hackett said. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair. He threw himself down on the couch. "Let's not waste any time," he said. "Nothing but hypnosis has done any good so far, and if there's a solution that's where it lies."

"You know," Kabat said softly, "you could go away. You could go say to Australia, in the outback ..."

"Nonsense," Hackett said. "No man can live alone, truly alone. Besides, this thing is growing, a mile today, five next week, 10, 50 ..." He folded his hands on his chest. "I'm ready now," he said.

Kabat held tight to the edge of his desk and stared hard at the wall across the room. No image, he told himself, not now, in this last minute. He began to speak softly. "Your eyelids are growing heavy," he said. "Very heavy. You are becoming drowsy, very drowsy. And drowsier. And drowsier. You are going into a deep sleep. Very deep. A very deep sleep. And deep. And deep. And deep ..."

He stood by the window, looking down. There wasn't a car moving, nor a human being. "Deep," he said. "And deep ... deep ... deep ..."

He waited. Then he took the little box out of the drawer and dropped it into the pocket of Hackett's coat. He let the time pass.

"When you wake," he said, "you will feel refreshed and happy. You will go directly to your apartment. You will hurry. You will hurry because you have something important to do when you get home. In the right-hand pocket of your jacket you will find six pills in a small plain box. You will take these pills, quickly, one after the other, with water. Then you will lie down. You will feel fine, relaxed, content. When you wake up now you will remember nothing of what I have said to you, nothing at all. You will hurry home, and when you get home you will reach in your pocket and you will find the pills. You will want to take them. You will take them quickly. I am going to count to five now, and any time after I reach the count of five you may wake up. One, two, three, four ... five."

Hackett came slowly to his feet, rubbing his eyes as he always did. He stood up. He looked around the room. "I ought to give you a check today," he said, "but I don't think I'll take the time ... I'm in something of a hurry ... I'll see you tomorrow." He opened the door and turned to nod.

"Goodbye, Mr. Hackett," Dr. Kabat said. "Goodbye."