Noise. It is ubiquitous. It is in everything.
It never goes silent, never knows tiredness. I still don't know whether it's us living with the Noise or Noise living with us…
City streets are never empty, not even in the darkest hours of night. The city is an eternal flow of faces and identities. Not all of them know where they are headed to, what they are searching and yearning for. But all of them are firmly convinced of the opposite. They are engulfed by the Noise. It is ubiquitous. There is no shelter from it. There is nowhere to run from it. A never-ending flow of colors, voices, faces, events, streetlights, flowers, puddles, roads, sidewalks! All of this unites into one disordered whole without shape or color. It is a mass that devours everything on its way. It is the all-consuming Noise, the soul of the city which killed its every star.
The stars. Countless guns loaded with bullets of artificial light were aimed at them. They have been trying for long, very long to stay away from the bullets and fight for their lives. A myriad electric moons polluted their nocturnal souls until no one could see the stars anymore. In the end, they could no longer handle this futile battle. The stars preferred getting a bullet fired through their frail bodies to spilling their useless light on this hysterical, sleepless city. Faded.
Alas, the Noise is heartless and perfectly indifferent to the mass suicide of stars in the darkening skies. He is the soul of the city which killed its every star, and this soul is wounded. The Noise’s body is slowly gnawed on by the teeth of Emptiness which came to temporarily fill a few decayed parts his soul, lost by him forevermore. After all, it's better to be bitten and scarred than to feel nothing, and the Noise knows this simple fact not only of the spirits, but of human lives. Bites are still bites on a body that's bloodless and lacks tangible substance that forms it, but at least the pain is there, the pain that's close to human. To say the truth, the Noise is awfully lonely. And so it haunts every corner of this city and every face contained within it in hopes of finding some company. He is just like a drunk walking down the street late at night, step-by-step coming back home knowing that no one is waiting for him.
The Noise levitates above the street, watching, observing. Of course, you cannot find human company without a disguise comprehensible to the human mind. Time for a quick and simple metamorphosis: what face will the Noise choose today? A video ad unexpectedly screaming from a stranger's phone, an Instagram post eager to yell about how to finally live a great life that nobody has, the grey scratches of a glitching TV screen, or the never-ending hissing of a boulevard? Let's go with the hissing. Hiss, hiss, hiss, honk, hoooonk! Cars passing by, a lazy metal bloodstream. The city mind is, of course, accustomed to all of this hissing - no way anyone will notice a spirit hiding behind the hisses of this snake named Boulevard. Perfect face, perfect disguise. Like this, at least some late-night passerby will take Noise home with him, routinely listening to this machine-driven lullaby. Poor passerby! The Noise will dwell in his head, overfilling it with an infernal cacophony of images. The poor soul will think that he has - yet again - drunk to excess, and will try to silence this torturous flood with water, or medicine, or more to drink. It will not go, and the Noise will keep on dwelling in this clouded mind.
But the Noise is not malicious, not at all. It only tries to understand what it means to be human. And so it lives in the minds of people, fills them, makes them lose sight of their paths, and leaves them unable to continue moving through the mundane restlessness of life. The Noise removes all else except itself. Isn't it true that by forcing all the contents of the mind out, one could discover what is inside? Isn't this the way to know the abyss of human thoughts and emotions?
And again, no matter how much the Noise would try filling people's heads and dwelling in them, it will never understand human life. The Noise, it was born dead, and how can the dead understand the living?
The Noise. It is terribly lonely and fills everything with its own being, without ever experiencing any connection with this world or its dwellers.
The Noise. It is just an illness of the sleepless city that cannot be cured with sleeping pills.
The Noise. It is ubiquitous.
~From the short story collection “City Dwellers”