Flash fiction
“What made you realise you had a problem?” the audiologist asks me.
I tell her of the time I was explaining the difference between beef stew and boeuf bourguignon. It is not the quality of the wine: a Barossa pinot noir and a rich Bordeaux taste basically the same after you have boiled off the alcohol. Nor is it the cut of beef: don’t waste your money on fillet or wagyu; chuck and flank grow tender and toothsome with slow cooking. The key elements are butter, for a dark and complex Maillard reaction. And anchovies.
“Wouldn’t anchovies make the ragu taste like marinara?”
Not at all—the tiny shiny fillets melt into the mirepoix and contribute an indefinable umami to the sauce.
My 5-year-old grandson piped up “What is anchovies, Grandpa? Are they like the baby chickens in your cupboard?”
“No, no,” I laughed condescendingly, “Anchovies are fish. What makes you think I keep fish or chickens in my cupboard?”
“I can hear them singing,” he said, and held his hand behind his ear in the universal mime of listening, “Cheep, cheep! Cheep, cheep! Can I play with the anchovies, Grandpa?”
The cupboard to which my grandson referred is the location of the house security control panel. When we are away, movement sensors trigger the alarm and alert the Chubb office wherever it is— Singapore, or the Philippines, who knows? When I opened the cupboard to prove to my grandson the absence of marine life, I noticed an exclamation mark flashing on the screen. The manual informed me this flashing fault signal should be accompanied by a high-pitched beeping.
“Can’t you hear the anchovies?” laughed my wife. “You really are going deaf. Perhaps it’s time for hearing aids.”
I denied it. I told her I do not miss the higher frequencies—I prefer tubas to piccolos, Barry White to Mariah Carey. But once the problem was brought to my attention, I began to notice other things. The cat now digs her claws in my ankles to gain attention rather than mewing; I find messages on the answering machine when I hadn’t heard the phone ring; and the neighbour’s leaf blower no longer drives me into a homicidal rage. But the tipping point comes when I join a writers’ group and cannot tell who is reading aloud.
While the audiologist feeds random electronic beeps and whistles into the headphones, I tell her, “Normally, I get along just fine. I don’t really need hearing aids.”
She raises an eyebrow, “What’s normal for you, then? In bed with your head under the pillow? Your auditory range is on par with poultry.”
“Is that bad?” I ask
She pulls down a chart that graphs the hearing acuity of a range of sentient creatures. Dolphins and bats are at the top—their hearing is so acute they use ears rather than eyes to navigate. Whales and elephants can hear the low frequency rumbling of earthquakes a thousand miles away. Tuna have the worst hearing, possibly the reason cans of their cousins take up so much space on supermarket shelves. Humans are in the middle of the scale.
She shows me a print-out of squiggly lines: “The way you’re going you’ll soon end up among the sardines.”
I give up the struggle, “OK. What will it cost me?”
“To bring your hearing back towards normal, after government subsidies and insurance will cost around $5,000 for an Auditory Augmentation Device—hearing aids to you. The good news is that I can get you into a clinical trial of a revolutionary Auditory Proxy Device. It bypasses the ear drum and interfaces directly with the temporal lobe of the brain.”
She takes out a green shell-like box with a logo of a fish on the lid. Inside are two small, shiny, crescents that reflect rainbows as she tilts the box. I reach in tentatively and touch one—it twitches and appears to cough,
“Ugh! It’s alive!”.
“As I said, APDs are a revolutionary approach to audiation, but I must warn you that once fitted, there’s no going back.”
I am intrigued. I pick up the tiny devices and hold them close to my ears, “They seem to be making a whistling noise. How do I…?” Before I can finish the sentence, the APDs wiggle out of my fingers and slither into my ear canals. “Ow! They tickle!” I laugh.
“Please sign this.” The audiologist pushes across an End-User License Agreement (EULA) between [affix name here] and The Babelfish Corporation of Australia. “You consent to blah, blah, blah… no liability, blah blah, blah…” and a lot of legal mumbo-jumbos I can’t bother reading.
I sign. Immediately I become aware of sounds I have never been conscious of before: the ticking of the audiologist’s wristwatch, the beating of her heart, the laments of a goldfish in her aquarium, whispered conversations in adjoining rooms, the engines of electric cars in the street, the masticating of termites in the wall. The experience is so overwhelming that for a while I fear I am going mad. I should have read the EULA more closely. I discover that The Bablefish Corporation is a shell company set up by the Security Service and I am legally obliged to use my augmented hearing to spy on foreign agitators, climate activists, and opposition supporters. The police recruit me to eavesdrop on the murderous plans of criminals. The Murdoch press pays me to stickybeak on the adulterous whisperings of celebrities. In Ukraine I monitor the attack plans of Russian generals 10 kilometres away. Finally, I suffer auditory overload—the cacophony in my skull brings on a nervous breakdown. A psychiatrist sends me to a remote beach resort, where the only sounds are the meaningless swish of waves and the chatter of crabs, whose poetry never rhymes.
My grandson joins me and asks, “What are you singing, grandpa?”
“I’m not singing,” I reply.
He peers in my ear and says, “It’s those anchovies from your cupboard. I remember the song.”
Ian Hart, 2024