YOU MIGHT NOT BE AWARE OF THIS, BUT THE WORLD IS full of untraceable hums and drones afflicting thousands every day, driving people to madness and despair. I wasn’t. I had no idea. Not before I became one of the legions affected, and found the chat rooms and message boards filled with people pouring out their plight, long having lost hope in doctors or science or the media to help make sense of their suffering. Hundreds of neighbourhoods around the world seem to suffer from various local sources of noise pollution. Irresponsible industry, lack of government oversight, sloppy urban planning. Except, as much as I searched, I never found anyone living in my area who described my sound. I was sure a few sensitive souls in Auckland or Bristol weren’t being kept awake by the same hum that I was, and yet, I still found solace in reading their posts. Yes, I began to take comfort in the company of anonymous lunatics. But then why else was the Internet invented? Cat videos, and the comfort of anonymous lunatics. I found myself spending hours getting lost in different theories of possible sources. The electric grid, wind turbines, submarines, insect noise, meteors, wind passing through underground caverns, the vibrations of waves slamming into the continental shelf, the mating calls of midshipman fish, government mind-control technology, alien transmissions, distant volcanic eruptions—the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 left the Earth vibrating for days on end. The US military, of course, was a favourite culprit, and many posts talked at length about the very low frequency radio signals used to track vessels deep under the ocean; sonar from which nothing could hide, which turned the ocean inside out like a pocket. And of course there were those who bypassed geology and meteorology altogether and headed straight to God. In the end times the stars will sing, and the great horns of heaven will sound! We were the harbingers of revelation.
Before this, I had never considered all of the unknowable sounds in the world. Sounds we could only see graphed or measured. The deep sounds of the Earth that no one hears. The eruption of volcanic vents thousands of metres below the water. The scraping of icebergs along the ocean floor. The mysterious bursts and burbles of the Earth that even science couldn’t fully explain. The skyquakes that boom like cannons on calm summer days over the Bay of Fundy, or cause kitchen plates to rattle on Lough Neagh in Ireland. Or the gas escaping from vents, from vegetation rotting at the bottom of lakes or released from limestone decaying in underwater caves; the explosive and volatile digestive system of the Earth, bubbling, burping, expelling. The concussing of continental shelf fragments calving off into the Atlantic abyss. The roars from solar winds. From magnetic activity. From avalanches. From distant thunder that, through some anomaly in the upper atmosphere, managed to throw its voice across valleys, across mountain ranges to different cities and different states.
Before this, sound was something I took for granted. It was always there, providing pleasant texture and useful information to my day-to-day life. I liked music, but I have never been an aficionado like Paul. I could never tell the difference between the sound quality of a CD and a record. But once this all began, all I could think about was sound. And not just my sound—for I came to think of it as ‘my sound,’ as if I owned it, or it owned me—but the mysterious dimensions of sound more generally.
One night, after Paul had already gone upstairs to bed, I was sitting with my laptop in the dark of the living room. I googled ‘most beautiful sound in the world,’ and spent an hour listening to frogs singing in a Malaysian swamp, the cascades of the Neretva River, the chirruping of thrushes at dawn, the wind whipping itself against an ocean cliffside in Sonoma. But when I thought of it, the most beautiful sound I had probably ever heard was a lawn mower. When I was a girl, lying in the hot summer grass of my grandma’s bungalow, listening to the sound of her neighbour cutting his lawn in the distance, I remember feeling like I would live forever. The purr of that lawn mower, three or four houses over, was like the sound of eternity itself. Sitting there in the living room, it occurred to me—the entire story of my life could be told through the sounds that have surrounded it. A continuous forty-year playback. A biography of room tones, bird calls, pop songs, voice messages, laughter, train whistles, dog barks, and wind moving through innumerable leaves.
Once I returned to work, I pretended to no longer hear the hum. It was a convincing performance. Paul let me sleep in our bed again, like a dog being let back into the house if it didn’t piss on the carpet. Ashley stuck her tongue out at me at her games and poked my bum as I passed her in the halls. I got through my lessons, cracked jokes in the staff lounge, and colleagues resumed sharing the minutiae of their marital dysfunction with me. In other words, things were back on track.
Fast-forward two weeks. About forty-five minutes after the final school bell of the day one evening, I locked my classroom door, walked through the halls nodding goodbye to the cleaning staff, and stepped out into the staff parking lot, which was all but empty. The yellow school buses were gone. A few kids were still waiting across the street for the city bus, smoking. I got into my silver Toyota, drove three blocks, rounded the corner, and pulled over beside a small, shady park. The park was connected, by way of an overgrown path, and the adjacent elementary school’s playground, to the back field of the high school. I pretended to be looking for something in the glove compartment so as not to seem suspicious, even though there was no one around. After about five minutes, Kyle appeared in the small park with his hood pulled up, crossed to my car, and climbed into the passenger seat. We drove without talking for a few moments, scanning the nearby streets, before he took off his hood, and we eased into our usual dynamic.
Kyle and I had started meeting up after class. At first, it was just to talk and share experiences. And then, we began to share theories. Neither of us was prepared to believe the sound was in our heads. We figured there must be a source, and if there was a source, then it must be possible to find it. We compared articles we found online, combed through comment threads, and drafted up a list of possible culprits, which we plotted on a map of the neighbourhood—nine computer pages of Google Maps satellite views that we printed out, taped together, and laminated. Before long one thing became abundantly clear—if we wanted to track down the source, we would have to leave the classroom.
We pulled off onto the gravel shoulder of Ranchlands Road, alongside the perimeter fence of the industrial park. We were about as close as we could get to the Grenadier factory without having an employee’s pass. I checked my mirrors for passing cars or onlookers and gave the all-clear. Stepping out of the car, I was immediately struck by the din coming from the factory; though I wasn’t quite sure the sound was low or reverberant enough to be our hum. Between the gravel shoulder and the fence was a shallow ditch choked with scrub grass and wildflowers. The cicadas screamed as we waded through the overgrowth, burrs sticking to our jeans, until we reached the chain-link fence on the other side.
Kyle removed his phone from his pocket and brought up his audio app. We stood quietly for a moment while he took a measurement. He squinted against the evening sun, small beads of sweat clinging to the translucent hairs above his lip. The air was thick and still. I looked out over the badlands that stretched beyond the industrial park, still untouched by developers. A landscape of horizons and subtle gradations of light. A landscape like an Agnes Martin painting, pure form and colour. The purple geometry of mountains in the distance, and lines receding into oblivion.
The cicadas are throwing it off, Kyle muttered. I noticed a car appear in the dancing heat to the south. I turned my body away from the road. Kyle did the same.
The factory had been on our list of possible sound sources from the start. Grenadier was a major defence contractor, manufacturing aerospace and military parts. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of production activity went on there, but Kyle had read that some industrial furnaces can cause low-frequency rumbles and pressure waves. For now, it was as good a lead as any, even if it didn’t quite square with our hum, which, if anything, only grew louder at night, when the factory was closed. And it didn’t explain why we only began hearing the hum recently, despite the factory operating since before our neighbourhood was built. Nevertheless, we were too early in our mission to rule out any possibilities.
Kyle looked up from his phone. Seventy-eight hertz, he said. And thirty-two decibels, from about two hundred metres away.
That’s a pretty low frequency, I replied, recording the measurements in my notebook, beside the words ‘Grenadier plant, Ranchlands Industrial Park.’ But we both knew, without having to say it, that it was not low enough. Our theory—well Kyle’s theory, really—was that the hum must be an extremely low frequency, just on the threshold of human hearing. Most humans could just about register sound at twenty hertz. It seemed possible that we were simply hearing a sound lower than most people are able to perceive.
Lots of animals can hear and make infrasonic sounds. Some are even thought to be able to perceive infrasonic waves travelling through the Earth in the wake of natural disasters and use these waves as a kind of early warning system. Like the rats and snakes deserting the ancient Greek city of Helike, before it was devastated by an earthquake. Or the animals that fled the areas affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami, hours before disaster struck. I once read that some church organs can produce infrasonic bass notes that induce feelings of transcendence by increasing heart rates and releasing endorphins, causing congregants to tear up, shiver, or feel as if they’re communing with God. It wasn’t far off the effect the hum had on me, to be honest. The crying and shivering at least.
Once back in the car, I pulled out our map of the neighbourhood. Laying it across the dash, I placed a small yellow sticker over the pixelated aerial view of the industrial park and jotted down the measurements with a thin-tipped black marker. Red stickers would indicate sites producing sounds over a hundred hertz, yellow stickers would indicate sounds over fifty hertz, and green stickers would indicate sounds in the sweet spot—sounds which could be our hum. Hopefully a pattern, or hot spot, would slowly emerge. I folded away the map and shifted the car into drive as we set off towards our next site—the electrical substation on San Mateo Road.
I still think we should visit Harding, Kyle said, pulling out his vape from his pocket.
Hey, what did I say? Not in the car.
I thought it was fine if the window was down.
I bit the inside of my cheek. Sometimes he really tested my patience. I couldn’t stand the smell of his flavoured vape: a sickly sweet cherry, which reminded me of childhood cough syrup. The windows were automatic, so I turned the key in the ignition.
Who knows what kind of aircraft or low-frequency weapons they’re testing over there, he said, blowing a little aromatic cloud out the window.
We’re not driving to Harding, I said. He knew this and didn’t press it. The military base in Harding was almost a two-hour round trip. Driving around the neighbourhood together was risky enough, though at least I could always concoct some half-viable excuse that I was dropping him off at home, he having missed his bus, and it being on my way, or some such thing. I’m not quite sure how I rationalized it to myself at the time; particularly as our drives grew gradually longer each passing week, as we expanded the radius of our search. Ultimately, it wasn’t about reason. I knew there was no defence of it on professional grounds. But on grounds of emotional welfare and mental health, it was essential. We refused to be victims. We refused to believe we were hallucinating. We were too resourceful, and too proactive to sit back and suffer. If you are being tormented, tortured, you don’t sit around talking about it forever. You take action.
As we drove towards San Mateo Road, I pulled my sun visor down against the evening light, and Kyle plugged his phone into the car’s sound system. It began to play a plaintive, downtempo R&B song I recognized from the radio. It underscored our drive through the neighbourhood like a soundtrack; though what kind of film this was, and what kind of characters we were, didn’t feel immediately clear to me. I couldn’t help but feel, sometimes, like the antagonist of my own story. Covertly undermining all the goodwill and stability I had worked tirelessly, for decades, to accrue. As we coasted down sleepy residential streets, I began turning the word predator over in my mind. Perhaps because there was a seventeen-year-old boy in my car. Perhaps because we were both on a hunt, our senses tuned. Or perhaps because we had both been preyed upon by this noise; torn apart and devoured by it. I was taking a slightly roundabout route through the neighbourhood to avoid passing near the school, or any more heavily trafficked areas like the mall or the arena. The sunset filled the car with warm orange light.
Have you heard the story about the loneliest whale in the world? Kyle asked. I shook my head, smiling. Well it’s not a story, he continued, I mean it’s a true story, it’s not made up. He’s been dubbed the fifty-two-hertz whale. He glanced over at me, but I kept my eyes on the road. He told me about how there was a single lone whale, of unknown species, who had been recorded producing a totally unique fifty-two-hertz call. The call had the sonic signature of a whale, but it didn’t resemble any known species, being much higher-pitched, shorter, and more frequent.
Blue whales and fin whales, for instance, Kyle said, using his hands to shape a small whale in front of him, they vocalize around twenty hertz.
This, I had come to learn, was classic Kyle: riffing on an obscure factoid he had gleaned from the Internet to simulate a far vaster knowledge than he really possessed on any given topic. He told me the migration of the fifty-two-hertz whale through the Pacific was strange, in that it didn’t match the movement of any other known whale species. It was a mystery. But the same, singular fifty-two-hertz call has been recorded every year since first being detected two decades ago. Calling forever into the void of the dark Pacific. Never to find another of its kind.
The loneliest whale in the world, I said, nodding. I looked up into the sky, as if I might find it hiding in the clouds. A moment later, we pulled off onto the gravel shoulder of San Mateo Road, alongside the electrical substation, with its humming transformers and power towers. I checked my mirrors for passing cars or onlookers, and after a deep breath, gave the all-clear.