IT WENT BACK TO WHEN I WAS AN ADOLESCENT, ABOUT THE age at which some leopards die.

My left eardrum was punctured with a thin pointed stick by a five-buck doctor seeking to pierce an abscess that he said might prove fatal if it got to my brain.

He succeeded in piercing the abscess. Pus drained from my ear for a week.

But the damage to the eardrum left me with the shrill ringing in my ear that never went away and made the experience of silence impossible.

In later years, I had far more costly doctors examine my bad ear thoroughly. After a battery of tests, it was concluded that my condition, to which a fancy name was now given, could not be alleviated. When blocked, even by a pillow, it was worse, almost maddening. This is why I always slept on my right side, never my left.

That night, after coming across the letters and looking at my life through enhanced eyes, I lingered awhile, then went to bed.

It took me a few minutes to realize it, but the shrill ringing had become something like the sound of a rushing freshet.

Almost peaceful, almost lulling, after what I had heard within my damaged ear for the past fifty years or so.

“The river,” I murmured to myself as I fell asleep, “the river.”

I felt a smile on my face. I could not remember the last time I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

When I woke the next morning, the shrill ringing was still gone. I could still hear the soft-running river. It was like a miracle, the inflection, the modulation of the sound in my inner ear.

I told myself that it was nothing more than a miraculous respite, a passing blessing. But the banshee stayed away. The river kept flowing.