Page 5 of The Sound Of Us

Chapter 3

Eli

Seven months and thirteen days.

Will I ever stop counting? They don’t prepare you for the counting. Yesterday was seven months and twelve days. Next year this time it’ll be one year, seven months and thirteen days. Last year this time, he was still alive. The most alive eighty-nine-year-old to ever live.

Turning away from the floor to ceiling window of my seventeenth floor office, I allow a sigh to escape my clogged throat.

Death should be easier to accept when the person has lived a long, fulfilled, happy life, as my father had. But I don’t know a more devastating feeling, knowing that I’ll never see him again.

Never again. The finality of it all cuts today as much as it had seven months earlier when my mother and I had watched them lower him into the ground.

Flanked by friends and family, holding us together like glue while we fell apart, mourning the death of a man everybody had loved as their own.

My eyes drift across my office, inherited from my father seven months earlier. His beloved bookshelf is exactly as he’d left it—an old, tattered children’s book of fairy tales still lies face down on the third shelf. He often read from this book long after I’d grown up. A way to reminisce about the days he’d read to me when I was a child. Books had been my father’s life, after his family and his work.

Trailing my fingers over the oversize oak desk, I bring to remembrance the old days, when I would sit next to him right here, pretending to do important work with his discarded notes and papers, and then at the end of the day he’s say, well done, Mr. Saxon. Good work today. Not long after that, he’d had to sign those words, and I’d sign back, Thank you, Mr. Saxon. You’re a great boss.

My eyes settle on a frame on the left wall, a little bigger than the size of a regular piece of paper. It’s new amongst the various other frames my father had collected and hung up over his fifty-year reign over Saxon Intel Inc..

Robert Saxon foresaw the need for qualified cyber specialists when computers were still making waves as new technology and had dedicated his life to preparing Americans for the kind of cyber security now required to protect our interests in cyberspace.

I studied hard alongside him for as long as I can remember. His prodigy, he’d called me so many times as I grew. He had so much faith in me and that the need to excel under his instruction fed my obsessive need to study.

Nothing was going to stop me from walking in my father’s giant shoes. I’d spent my life growing, learning from him, emulating him.

Slipping my hands into the pockets of my black dress pants, I stand in front of the framed picture in the middle of the wall. This is the only change I made to this office, moving some paintings around to make space for this one.

It’s a handwritten note. Wrinkled and yellowed with age at the edges. The fold lines are visible, but the handwriting is still crisp and clear, as it had been twenty-seven years earlier, when it had been written.

You’re a good boy, Eli. If choosing children was an option, I’d choose you over and over again.

The words of a father, written on a piece of paper, dated the year I turned five. The year I lost my hearing. Profound deafness as a result of bacterial meningitis.

I don’t remember much of it, the time I lost my hearing. I have one vague memory of sticking my fingers into my ears and shaking them incessantly. But nothing more than that, no matter how hard I tried to remember. And I wanted to remember. Not the time I lost my hearing, but the time when my father had been an energetic sixty-one-year-old and age had not yet become a thing that would tear us apart.

Even when they told me I’d never hear again, I hadn’t quite grasped the idea that I would never again hear the rough, gentle voice of my father saying I love you, as I had every single day of my life until then.

Never again hear, why grandma, what big TEETH you have, followed by a loud ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU, MY DEAR, and then screams of laughter as a little boy tried to get away from his father’s tickling fingers. I mean, I was already nearly five by then and had wanted to move on to other books, but my father loved Little Red Riding Hood because then he could make all those growling sounds.

Sounds. Now I hear them in my head, and when it comes to my parents, in my heart. My ears are now just for aesthetic appeal.

Tracing the calligraphy with my fingers, I reach for the memory of the day my father had written this note. He’d folded it and placed it at the back of a picture frame of the two of us and took it out again for the first time when I was an angry thirteen-year-old, ranting in sign about some hearing idiots at the bowling club who’d laughed when I tried to speak to them with my voice.

Till today I don’t know what they’d said exactly, but their pointing and laughing had been enough.

I don’t remember what my voice had sounded like, but even if I had, it would have been the voice of a child. I don’t know what I sound like as a man. Sometimes I think I would sound like my father.

I still remember all the words from when I was a kid, but practising them had become second to learning to lipread. My lipreading skills are higher than the average deaf person and I'm better than most at inference and context clues. So lipreading is easier for me than most. Unless the speaker is mumbling or has speech issues, I can lipread with relative ease. Being able to hear until the age of five makes it easier, too.

My internal vocabulary is something to be proud of, but forming words with my voice quickly enough for hearing people is difficult and frustrating. So, even though I know the words, it’s hard to speak them. And hearing people aren’t always very patient. It’s faster and easier and far less chaotic to navigate the hearing world using sign language. So, I don’t speak.

My eyes are drawn back to the framed note. After all my years of study, my life will now be dedicated to filling my father’s enormous shoes.

Already, words used to describe him over his fifty years in business are being transferred onto me: strong, calm, diplomatic. Grounded. Empathetic.

But the one I hold most dearly to me is strength of mind. He has strength of mind, just like his father, they’d said.

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