Static in the Signal

Alexis had learned, in the three years since Diane died, that silence was not empty. It had weight. It pressed on the ears the way deep water presses on the chest, and it filled a fourth-floor apartment the size of a shoebox with the unmistakable texture of one person living in it.

So he made noise. He was forty-two years old and he had a standing date with sound. He ran a late-night shift at the station, six days a week, splicing and cleaning audio for the talk programs, and when he came home at two in the morning he did not turn the lights on. He turned the radio on. A voice reading the news, a voice reading anything, was company the way a photograph is company. Technically present. Functionally useless. Better than nothing, which is a low bar, but he had learned to clear it nightly.

He told himself this was a habit and not a symptom. He was a man of forty-two and he was allowed his self-deceptions, most of them, anyway. The expensive ones he rationed.

The cello started in October.

It came through the wall of his bedroom, of all places, which meant it was coming from the neighboring unit, and it came at hours no reasonable person chooses. Eleven at night. One in the morning. Once, gloriously, four fifteen on a Tuesday, a single sustained note like a cat being questioned by police. Alexis lay in the dark and listened to it and did not know whether he was being tortured or serenaded.

The strange part, and he admitted this to no one, was that he did not mind. A body in the next room, making something, breathing somewhere. It was the closest thing to a heartbeat the building had. But a man cannot confess to enjoying a noise complaint he intends to file, and after the fourth night of the four a.m. note he put on his robe and knocked on her door, mostly to be a good neighbor and a little bit because he wanted to see who was doing it.

She opened the door on the second knock, and she was not what he expected. He had been expecting a conservatory kid, twenty-something, apologetic in the brisk way of people who have never actually inconvenienced anyone. What he got was a woman of twenty-nine, dark-haired, barefoot, holding a wine glass by the stem, with the particular loose calm of someone one glass of wine into the evening and not ashamed of it.

"Oh," she said. "You're the wall guy."

"I'm the wall guy," Alexis agreed.

She was apologetic, genuinely so, in a rambling way that suggested the wine had loosened her internal editor. She was a session cellist, she explained, recently relocated, and the building's management had promised her the unit next door was vacant. She practiced when work called for it and work, lately, called at ugly hours because the sessions she got were the ones nobody else wanted. She talked with her hands, the glass traveling with them, and Alexis noticed that even her apologies had a kind of precision to them. Her movements were small. Exact. A woman who counted things, maybe, or who had been counted on to hit marks her whole life.

"I'm Alexis," he said. "Next door. Obviously."

"Tina." She said it like a confession. "I'll wear headphones. I'll buy one of those terrible mutes. I'll practice in my car if I have to."

"You don't have to practice in your car," he said, and heard himself say the next part before his brain could file an objection. "I'm a sound editor. Late nights too. I'm probably the only neighbor in this building who won't actually die about it."

Her eyebrows went up, interested. "A sound editor. So you've been listening critically."

"Professionally," he said. "Personally I've been lying there thinking, wow, that note at four in the morning has real commitment."

She laughed, and the laugh was warm and a little too loud for the hallway, and he went back to his apartment feeling something he had not felt in a long while, which was the specific itch of wanting to know more about a person.

He told himself it was professional curiosity. He was a man who spent his life inside other people's recordings, and a cellist next door was, what, a resource. He said this to himself with a straight face, which is the hardest way to say a lie.

She knocked on his door two nights later. She stood in the hall in a long coat and asked, casually, the way you ask someone to help move a couch, whether he wanted to come hear something she was working on. A glass of wine. Ten minutes. She had a piece she couldn't get right and a second set of ears was a second set of ears.

He said yes. He told himself, again, professionally curious, and this time the lie had a slight wobble to it that he chose not to examine.

Her apartment was the mirror image of his, which meant he kept instinctively walking toward walls that in his place held shelves and in hers held nothing yet. Boxes everywhere. A music stand. A couch that was clearly newer than everything else in the room, bought in a hurry by a person who prioritized the cello and the bed and considered furniture a rounding error.

She played him the piece.

It was a contemporary thing, all long tones and silences, and she played it with a rawness that unsettled him. He had spent twenty years cleaning audio, smoothing the crackle out of other people's grief, and here was a woman in her socks dragging sound out of an instrument like she was pulling a splinter. The piece had a break in the middle where the phrase just stops, and when she hit that break his chest did something he hadn't authorized. He thought of Diane's last voicemail, which he still had, which he still could not play, which he kept on a drive in a drawer like a landmine with a bow on it.

She finished. The room went quiet. The bad kind, the pressing kind, and Alexis sat there not knowing what his face was doing.

Tina set down the bow and looked at him and burst out laughing.

"Okay," she said. "That bad, huh?"

"It's not bad," he managed. "It's, I don't know what it is. It sounds like something that cost you something."

That stopped her laughing. She looked at him for a beat, wine glass halfway to her mouth, and something moved across her face that she filed away and did not share. Then she shrugged and refilled his glass and asked if he wanted to hear something worse, and he, not knowing what worse meant for a woman like her, said yes.

Worse turned out to be her disappearing into the bedroom to change, which he understood only in retrospect.

She came back out in a silk robe. Deep green, the color of expensive bottles. It was tied loosely at the waist and it was doing a lot of