Somewhat Silent

I remember when I first got my contact lenses, and the eye doctor dropped them onto my eyes. I blinked a few times, saline clearing out of the way and the contact making contact with my eye- each blink brought a new level of clarity, like a camera focusing. Full into 20/20 view. I remember stepping outside and seeing the definition of each leaf on the trees, and each pebble that made up the walkway, and the little twigs that were mixed in. And staring with fascination at the world that I had been missing.

When I recieved my hearing aids, at 21 years of age, part of me expected the same experience, although I was pre-warned that it wouldn’t be the same.

Contacts are these thin little slivers of plastic, concave, complete in their simplicity and almost as complete in their correction.

My new hearing aids sat on a tray in front of me, beige plastic outer shell concealing electronics. Little switches and knobs sticking out, and a wire trailing from one to the computer where the audiologist was programming it against my audiogram. A little computer for each ear, custom-programmed.

The rubber was cold and hard in my ears, I hit the switches on each. There were three beeps and the sound of the silence of a soundproof booth washed over me with shill and crashing fury. The paper I was playing with rustled angrily, my fingernails scratching against it like nails on a chalkboard. The audiologist spoke, the crackling of the microphone and her voice cut through the air and through my ears and my head.

My first thought? “I hate this.”

I spoke, my own voice alien in my ears. I talked as if I was walking on a tightrope, hesitating at every syllable and every sound.

I jumped through the hoops of testing, and nodded a brave smile “I love this!” I said through my teeth. Resolved to make it work.

She said I might not want to wear them outside just yet, and I ignored her, stepping out into Manhattan, the sounds hitting me for the first time, though I had lived there for a year and a half already. Walking back to the subway I heard for the sounds of the cabs, the brakes on the cars screeching, the honking from several blocks away, people walked by screaming into cellphones, their clothing rubbing noisily against itself and their shoes smacking into the ground. A hellicopter hovered somewhere above sputtering and coughing, and beating its arms against the air with an effort that one can never see. A siren first from one direction then the other- honking preceding it in every direction. Birds screeched from trees, so different from the idyllic twittering I’d sometimes hear. And the leaves crashed against themselves and the trunks when the wind blew. And the wind? It howled in my ears like a hurricane, though it was just the slightest breeze.

Three visits, three levels of adjustment, each louder than the one before. And already, the first level hellish in its amplification, and laughable when plotted against the “normal” audiogram.

How can people stand this? This barrage of sounds? This loss of illusion? Where everything is so sadly and pathetically mechanical for the racket that it makes?

I stood waiting in the subway tunnel, and for the first time the preliminary puff of air as the train came floating into the station was accompanied by the sounds of the train and the people waiting to get onto the train. Shrill chattering clattering, nothing like the silent sea of humanity that I’d wash along with onto the floating train in virtual silence and demure murmurs.

I rode the subway home to hear for the first time the alien voice of my boyfriend as he babbled loudly in the nonsense that human speech still remained, and I watched his mouth for all the cues of lipreading, my talent of 18 years, improved none by these little noisemakers that perched painfully in my ears.

I was pre-warned that hearing aids weren’t the same as glasses or contacts. No amount of pre-warning can exemplify the difference.