Don circled the block twice, simply enjoying the silence of his car. Just as he'd walked into the hardware store, the CD had cut to a track of someone shouting the alphabet song. At the same time, an over-eager store employee had tried to strike up a conversation about the weather ("Hot enough for you?"). Their exasperating three-way conversations—Don listening to the nagging voices and trying to answer the employee's questions—had ended with Don losing his cool and storming out of the store. Moreover, he'd been so distracted that bought nails instead of screws. Well, he'd just have to use nails: no way was he going back.
On his second loop around the block, Don saw his father pulling out of the driveway. Charlie was at the kitchen door, barely visible behind three bags of groceries, trying to pull his house keys from his pocket without spilling everything.
"Hey, what's up?" Don asked, opening the door with his own key and catching a package of tomatoes as they tumbled out of one bag. "Where's Dad going?"
Charlie staggered into the kitchen and piled the groceries on the table. Don placed the tomatoes on the very top of the pile and stepped back to gauge the effect. Charlie dropped into a chair to catch his breath. "He went to another supermarket—our third!—because they might have cheaper pasta. This after we'd been all over town looking for some special…I don't know, some kind of radish!"
Don rolled his eyes. Now that Alan was doing most of the cooking, his father's inner gourmet was often at odds with his natural thriftiness.
"He dropped me off so that the ice cream wouldn't melt," Charlie explained, raking his hair out of his eyes. He dislodged a small avalanche of tuna fish cans in his search for that ice cream. "Also, I got the feeling that he wanted me out of the car. I was explaining to him that the supermarket was 10 minutes from the house in a car that gets 28 miles to a gallon, so unless the pasta is at least 15 cents cheaper than at the other places, he's not really saving any money. Not with the price of gas these days."
Don pulled off his jacket and unsnapped his holster, draping them over a kitchen chair. It was weird hearing Charlie complain about gas prices. He noticed that the holster was wearing a thin patch into the lining of his jacket; eventually, the whole thing would start to unravel from the inside out. Damn: he lost more clothing that way…
"What's with the CD player?" Charlie asked as Don pulled it out of the hardware store bag.
"Part of Terry's latest project." Don explained the details and Charlie was, of course, fascinated.
"So what causes the hallucinations?" he asked
"Stress, usually," Don said, untangling the headphones cord, "And since lots of stress can cause violent outbreaks, the voices can sometimes be a warning sign. Or at least something to take into account if you're, you know, talking someone down from a bridge."
"Do that much?"
Don turned to see Charlie had paused at the fridge with an armful of broccoli, looking curious. "Uhm, no. No, they don't usually call the FBI for stuff like that."
Charlie shrugged and continued putting away groceries. Don wandered into the hallway to pick through the junk drawer in the hall table. He thought there was a small hammer in there, exiled when Charlie turned the garage into Math Central. There were a few disjointed shouts from the CD player, but they quickly subsided into mumbles.
"It must be a problem with the cochlear nerve," Charlie called from the kitchen.
"What must be?" Don asked
"The cause of the hallucinations. Sounds are transmitted as waves," Charlie explained, looking up from the cereal box he was holding, "like all energy. Those little bones in the middle ear act as a transducer, changing the air waves from outside the ear to fluid vibrations in the inner ear. The cochlear nerve picks up those vibrations as electrical impulses."
Don pulled off the headphones and watched his brother step across the kitchen as though he were following the energy changes: from sound source to middle ear to inner ear to nerve.
"That's what it means to 'hear' something: you register those electrical changes in the auditory cortex of the brain. An auditory problem isn't a problem with your ears; it's just the brain picking up electrical impulses and decoding them as though they were from sound waves, when really they're just random disturbances. It would be like…well, if we thought there was a thunderstorm going on just because the kitchen lights flickered but actually the flickering might be from a wiring problem in the house."
"How do you know this stuff?" Don asked. He thought the thunderstorm analogy was not the clearest example Charlie had ever come up with but, judging from Terry's talk, the idea of having an electrical storm in your head was actually not a bad description for schizophrenia.
"Well, acoustics is just physics, and physics is really just—"
"Math," Don fishished.
Charlie grinned self-consciously. He had now made a full circuit of the kitchen and was still holding the cereal box. "Yeah. Besides, Larry knew some people who were working on celestial acoustics. They used to think there were no sounds in space because there was no atmosphere, no elastic medium for the energy waves to travel though."
"So, in space, no one can hear you scream?" Don joked. His brother just looked at him, puzzled. Don shook his head: trust Charlie to know everything about acoustics and yet never have seen Alien. Charlie wouldn't recognize Sigourney Weaver if she introduced herself by name at a math conference.
"In fact, not only are there sounds in space, celestial objects actually create sound. Each planet, for instance, has its own distinct sound. The Earth vibrates at a 7.2 hertz frequency, which is very low in the key of G." Charlie's hands opened and closed, wishing for some chalk, a diagram. "One of Larry's friends says the earth sounds sad."
"How can something inanimate sound 'sad?'" Don asked.
Charlie looked baffled, like the question had never occurred to him. "I don't know," he said finally, "that's just the word he used."
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