When someone’s standing at a bus stop with a human head wrapped in a shawl or tucked in a bag, it’s easy enough to stop them from boarding a bus. Simply move away from your coffee at the table on the bar’s patio. Catch the bus driver’s eye as you walk. He will either keep the door closed or start letting people board but will not drive away, whichever is less likely to cause suspicion in the mind of the young woman who is carrying the head. Tap the ear bud hidden behind a curl of your hair—sweat and grime work their way around the thing sometimes, loosening it—and speak clearly as you walk; the receiver in your watch will transmit your voice. Call the police. They’ll arrive quickly, so there will probably be no need for the gun you’ve been issued, but keep your free hand on it, just in case.
Everything is in the eyes. The exchange of split-second glances between you and the bus driver; never losing sight of the woman as she moves through the line; the rest of the people in line at the bus stop and the looks they give—no matter how hard they try not to—the woman with her bird-like eyes, the bulging package, and to each other once they realize there is a smell and where that smell is coming from and what it is. Sometimes there is also a kind of glancing exchange between you and the head. If, as the woman struggles with the police, the head does not remain fully covered or does not become completely unwrapped and thuds to the ground, one vacant eye often peeks through a little, staring you down. Here is my head; where’s the rest of me?
Arthur leans against the greasy, dust-streaked glass of the bus shelter. The police have come and gone, the bus has departed. I’m sorry, but I don’t know, he addresses the head, a sort of reply. That’s all he can ever answer them. The dusty ground whispers and creaks, exhausted from bearing the weight of a bus and the gossip about the arrest.
Arthur’s boss mentored him when he first started his job, but even she, a skilled patroller in her own right, did not possess Arthur’s depth of talent, and he mentally added a few chapters (such as, for instance, to expect talking heads) to her training manual.
Arthur hears voices—a voice—in everything. They generally last only a few days before dying, dying, he decides, like the roses he cuts from his garden and sets in vases around the house. These voices are traces of the person who last touched the object. Arthur wants to be a noise left behind: the tinny drone vibrating from a fork after he is done eating, the muffled sobs issuing from a wastebasket full of soggy tissues when he has a cold, the scuff and crackle of a carpet in winter after he has just shuffled across it. The idea intrigues Arthur: to hum on, to be the bodiless presence of a body already gone, to prolong life for just a little while longer, and then fade away.
In addition to counting on the heads calling out to him (the heads must be fresh enough to work the healing magic their dying buyers hope for), Arthur also depends on his hatred of the head trade to focus him.
When Arthur was a child, his father became gravely ill. For a long time, a string of doctors came and went through the house where his father lay bedridden. None supplied a cure, though all attempted through a variety of medicines and diets. In between doctors’ visits, Arthur sat with him. Another child may have found the atmosphere in the bedroom creepy, heavy with the smell of medicine and unwashed bedding and troubled with a shivering skeleton of a man who was more often than not fitfully asleep. But Arthur loved sitting with his father. Before getting sick, his father had been a busy man, never home a lot and, when he was, never lingering long over any one object. Confined to his bed, Arthur’s father touched the same objects over and over, layering them with noises. Arthur heard each one and came to know through them his father’s routine and emotions.
In a final attempt to save her dying husband, Arthur’s mother bought a human head. The trade was then more widespread than it is now. Though his mother courted danger by carrying out this illegal transaction through a slit in some back-alley door in the middle of the night and in the bowels of the city, she, a mainstream, well-to-do woman, had no problem finding that back-alley. Arthur watched her walk through the city. He followed her on his bicycle, leaving the house when she did, thinking at first she was going to drown herself in the river like the old mayor had when his wife was sick. As they moved deeper into the city, he realized what she was actually doing. Perched on his bicycle, around the building from where his mother stood whispering through a hole in a door, Arthur pictured the transaction the way a boy imagines buying marbles from a dime store: the passing of coins across a counter, a package changing hands, a done deal.
Now only the most well-connected can arrange such deals. The price, though, remains the same now as it was back then: Someone must first lose his head. The homeless, estranged from concerned friends and family, are often preyed upon. Those who lose their heads are innocents: robbed of their lives in one last desperate deal struck by someone else’s desperate husband or wife or parent, a deal which, more often than not, will nonetheless fail to save the ailing loved one. The magic of the sacrifice is not nearly as strong as some hope it will be.
Arthur’s father died, and, as quickly as the object noises faded from his bedroom—the sighs from his pillowcase, the scratchy swish from his toothbrush, the gentle murmurs from his notebook—Arthur realized another person had faded away, too. From his experience with his father, Arthur had learned how meaningful it could be to spend time with someone before that person’s death, and he understood that the victim’s family had been robbed of this experience. His devastation over this never abated.
Arthur moves away from the bus shelter, retreating from the intensifying afternoon heat to sit inside the bar. He fills a tiny plate with a couple of rounds of crusty bread and sweaty cheese from the platters that have been set out. He pulls the toothpick out of each item and leaves them in a small pile next to his plate—a game of pick-up sticks that will, at the end of his meal, determine the total he owes the bartender.
The bar top, its lacquered surface visibly scratchy with evidence of people—the keys, pocket knives, and coins that have been dragged across its surface over the years—is nonetheless silent, indicating that no one else has sat there yet that day. This gives Arthur a rare moment of quiet, which he appreciates; not all echoes are pleasant. He squints out the bar window at all the mid-afternoon noises he’s left outside with his chained-up bicycle, which he rides to and from work (and after work) every day.
At the end of each evening, Arthur sits at his computer, still winded from his after-work ride, kneading his palm into his left thigh, which aches even after months of exercise. Logging onto one particular bicycling website is part of his routine. After registering a few bits of personal information, he is now allowed to record and post how many miles he rides each day. The computer ranks the registered participants daily. Arthur joined because each participant’s name hums with a little echo of its human counterpart. The Web, to Arthur, is one huge, ever-changing, ever-vocal object noise.
“Tread” is the name that stands out to Arthur. Tread is ranked number one both for miles ridden this year and miles ridden this month. Arthur is ranked 285th. Tread is female, and she rides a bike that is very old, a bike that she bought for five dollars from a friend, but that is light and sleek. Even its color seems slick to Arthur: silver. Tread uses the computer at the public library to log onto the bicycling site. She has curly blond hair and a set of scars on her left cheek from when her alcoholic mother burned her as a child. The scars look, if one looks at them while thinking about bicycling, like a very thick tread.
Those details are all things Arthur learned about Tread by reading the short notes she sometimes attaches to her mileage. The notes section was designed to record weather, nature observations from your ride, or an interesting explanation for why you rode so long or so short, but Tread seems to use the space just to talk.
Of course Arthur can look closer and sense things other than just the posted messages. Tread’s name has a very gentle hum. The noise makes Arthur think Tread is a kind person. He knows, from past experience, the noises unkind people emit. Arthur once went on a date with such a person.
It would have been a date, actually, had the woman had more time before catching her bus. He had met the woman at a bar, the very bar he now sits in, gently chewing on a toothpick. She came in to use the restroom, and when she exited, crumpling brown paper towels in her hands, she walked toward Arthur. He thought she was smiling at him, but, as she neared, he saw she was really smiling at his plate of food.
“I’m starving,” she said, sitting on the stool to Arthur’s left. She pounded her open palm on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Omelet and potatoes,” she said.
“Kitchen’s closed for the midday,” he said, “but you can help yourself to the snack platters … ”
The woman interrupted him with a snort. “I don’t want the snack platters. What kind of a ridiculous restaurant closes its kitchen?”
“This is a bar. Never claimed to be a restaurant.”
“Fine.” The woman grabbed a plate and, using her fingers instead of the toothpicks, grabbed several items from each platter. She took a bite out of one, mashed another with her thumb, and dropped a couple on the floor. As she stood, she slapped Arthur on the shoulder.
“Enjoy yourself in this hole, buddy. I have to catch a bus.” And then she was out the door.
Arthur was not used to connecting with people, and he was startled to hear a scream when the woman’s hand connected with his shoulder.
Tread’s name on his computer screen does not scream. Arthur could never picture her taking the bus anywhere.
Arthur knows his desire to become an object noise is melancholy and old-fashioned—perhaps even romantic—but also genuine and well-intentioned, the only way to feel wholly human. He thinks from her noises that Tread would understand. He hopes to meet her someday. Arthur looks around and wonders about the possibility of Tread coming into this particular bar. He twirls a toothpick between two long fingers. Who are you, Tread? Where are you? Here is your mileage; where’s the rest of you?
The next day Arthur has to take the bus. His leg completely cramped up during his after-work bike ride the day before, and the ache never really went away, as it usually does. He wakes early enough to bike to work, but his leg collapses as he steps out of bed. He limps to the refrigerator for orange juice, and, when he’s still limping to the bathroom to brush his teeth, he realizes he must forfeit his bicycle for that day and instead take the bus to work.
The bus, always buzzing with noises audible only to Arthur, is not his favorite means of transportation. Though Arthur lives for object noises, he appreciates moments of quiet. The search for a little bit of silence is what prompted him to start riding his bike, rather than taking the bus, to and from work. His hands grip his own bike’s handlebars, which quietly echo nothing but Arthur riding his bike, softly folding into the reality of Arthur riding his bike. He pushes through the wind and, except on the rare occasion that it carries with it the lingering strains of a backyard barbeque or a kite-flying competition, it is mercifully silent.
Arthur winces as he steps onto the bus. The pain in his leg is sharp, as are the wheezes coming from the fare boxes. Fare boxes always sound desperate and tired and a little bit sad and angry—all that hard-earned money people pour into something designed to take them to and from work, where they just earn more money that ends up going to the bus.
Arthur shuffles down the aisle, touching the backs of seats as he walks, hearing the sticky slurp of the legs of past occupants suctioned to the vinyl and the impatient tap of long-gone fingers. These are not noises he wants to listen to for the duration of the commute; he keeps walking.
At the back of the bus there is an old man, cradling a bag on his lap. To the others on the bus, if they noticed at all, the bag might contain a melon or ball used for sport. But to Arthur, the bulging bag suggests something else entirely. He forgets the senses most ordinary people employ —doesn’t it smell yet? Everyone is staring out the windows, picking sprinkles off their breakfast, flipping pages in the newspaper. Arthur doesn’t really know how the package looks or smells to others; he just knows how it sounds to him. He feels his heart beat faster as he turns on the receiver in his watch, then reaches for his gun. He won’t be able to be discreet this time; the man before him clearly has heard him call the police, yet he doesn’t move.
The bus has stopped; Arthur will be able to hear the police siren any minute now. He opens the bag. The head is on its side, but one eye appears to be looking slyly through blond ringlets at Arthur. The thick, ridged scar on her cheek is clearly visible.
As always, everything is in the eyes. Arthur looks at the head and asks the unanswerable: Here is Tread; where is the rest of her?
Arthur speeds up as he approaches the crest of the hill, then swoops, coasting down it, curving with the winding road, skidding a little when his front tire hits a bit of gravel that has strayed from the shoulder. It’s wonderful to ride Tread’s bike, which Arthur got from the police once they were done with it. The bike would have been sold in one of their auctions anyway, and, since they know Arthur, they just gave it to him.
The wind gently tugs his hair, still thick after all these years. Having learned from the police Tread’s real name, which is—amazingly, perfectly, simply—also her password on the bicycling website, Arthur has already logged on under her screenname. When he takes his own bike out, he records his score under his own name, but, more often than not, he rides Tread’s bike and records under Tread’s name. And though Arthur feels a little bad about being responsible for Tread’s ranking having plummeted to 159th, he will never stop riding that bike. He loves feeling in himself the echo of a person long gone, a person once bodiless and now, strangely, whole.
By Kristin Thiel