Noise Quota
A tick sound beats repetitively. Tick tick tick.
The toes on his left foot twitch, tapping to the rhythm.
He’s waking up.
Tick tick tick. Boom.
“Arghh!” He shoots up from the bed with a roar deep from his belly, eyes stretched open with fright, and then he stills, his breath rattling, his hands clasping at the empty air in front of him until all is silent again.
Other than the ticking.
“Hello?” He attempts to call out the word, but the sound remains lodged in his throat. He tries again. Nothing. He tries for a third time, bearing down, hands clenched, eyes popping with the effort. But nothing comes out. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s used up his daily quota of noise with that waking roar. He won’t be able to speak again until tomorrow.
He relents, his pulse settling to a less frenetic pace as he looks around the space. He’s actually doing well. Better than most. I check the clock and calculate it’s only taken him a three minutes and twenty-six seconds for the initial panic to subside, and make a note on the screen in front of me.
The room he’s in is designed to look exactly like his bedroom at home, down to the tinniest details. The mold growing in the dried remnants of the coffee cup slash petri dish next to the dying spider plant. The crumpled pile of clean laundry, looking like nothing more than rags because he never puts it away. The wank tissues overflowing in the bin. Clearly a sorry excuse for his kind.
The only thing that’s different to his real home is the sound. Or lack of sound. There’s no ambient background noise here at all. No distant laughs from children playing in the park. No cars rumbling along the road. No hum from the fridge freezer.
There’s only that incessant fucking ticking.
He, however, is oblivious to all this. Of course he is. I’ve questioned many times why those in charge bother creating familiar spaces for the guests, when the guests don’t remember who they are, but it’s just one of their quirks. Like they get pleasure from knowing their secret game.
The man turns his attention to his body, and more specifically the various tubes poking out of him. There are six in total. Two in the back of his left hand, they will likely be stinging the most, two leading to veins in the crook of his right elbow, one straight into his jugular, and lastly, a larger one than the others, acting as a drain from his abdomen, yellow fluid trickling down the clear tube. He surveys them all, one by one, gently tugging on them, testing their resistance, tracking what they’re attached to. He’s relatively calm at first. His approach is methodical. But when he reaches the last tube, the largest one, panic appears to be infecting his actions. A tremor in his hands. His mouth soundlessly morphing into elongated shapes of confusion.
Bless him. I think he’s ready for the next stage. I press the blue button in front of me, opening the ‘door’ to his ‘bedroom’.
Time for test number 1.
