Pulse-Listening

Most people walking through the city hear traffic, voices, advertising. A very few hear the city itself.

The earth-pulse moving, the old temples murmuring, old objects talking, the yaoguai on the reverse side of the city speaking up—these sounds have always been there; the daytime noise simply covers them. The people who can hear them usually assume at first that their ears are ringing, that their nerves are wearing thin, and a doctor finds nothing wrong. The doctor asks a few questions, takes a blood pressure reading, writes down stress-induced auditory anomaly, prescribes something to help with sleep, and asks him to come back in 3 months.

The sound comes without warning, usually on a bus or in front of the refrigerated case at a convenience store, once or twice a week, very light, very close, pressed against the inside of the outer ear. Close enough to catch the rhythm of the other one's breathing. It seems to be speaking Chinese, but every word has been broken into incomplete syllables and blown into the ear from different directions, and it will not go back together into the sentence it was.

In different mouths this is a different thing. The hospital calls it a stress-induced auditory anomaly and files it under sleep disorders. The older generation at home puts it far more simply: this one is a hearer. A family usually produces one per generation, it can skip a generation, and there are men too, only fewer than women. Nobody has ever laid the two accounts side by side, because the people who can hear mostly do not dare tell either side the whole of it.

The knack grows on its own. At the start all it can tell is that there is a sound; later it separates into layers—the strike of a heel on concrete, the echo the corridor wall folds back, the background voices from the classroom next door: three layers that can be pulled apart and listened to one at a time. When the mouth stays shut, the room the ears have to work in gets larger—nobody teaches this; the ones who can hear work it out for themselves.

But it comes at a cost: the longer and the deeper the listening goes, the longer those sounds that belong to someone else, those personalities left behind in the corners of the city, stay in the head. No sleep at night, half-dreaming through the day, and once the days come apart, more comes through. Anyone who can hear the city has to learn one thing sooner or later—which sounds to answer, and which ones never to look back at.