The Voice That Pulls Me Forward

August 6th, 2017

It seemed like such a routine day when I first heard the screaming. I woke up just like any other morning, showered, brushed my teeth, got in my car, and stopped for coffee and a bagel on the way to the lab. I walked over to my station at the far end of the 50ft x 100ft room where all the audio people were set up. I was the first one in that day, so the normally buzzing bank of computers along the wall had that almost-startling sense of quiet that morning people so love. It is an amazing thing to think about: that if I had shown up fifteen minutes later my life would still be normal. Oh well, dwelling on past failures never accomplished anything. That’s not why I’m doing this.

I walked down to my station and booted up my computer. That’s when I remembered my problem from the day before. You see, I work identifying and classifying audio samples. The thing that makes my job unique, and why I was paid far more than your average Mechanical Turk drone, is that I had to do my analysis entirely through sonograph waveforms without any access to the audio itself. The computers didn’t even have speakers.

When I answered the listing, which they claimed was for a project analyzing anomalies in deep ocean background noise, they told me the frequencies I would be assessing would cover a spectrum that exceeded the capacity of the human ear. That was why I would have to rely on the waveforms alone. They said that any attempt to listen to the sound files would bias their results. At the time this did not strike me as abnormal. I had spent my adult life up to that point working as an audio engineer in a small recording studio, and I had no idea how the “serious science” game worked.

The thing was, after two months on site, I started to realize that all of the waveforms that got any attention from the boys up top were pitched right in the range of human hearing. They tended towards the high end, but they certainly weren’t the kind of thing only a dog could pick up, and all the background research I did on my own time indicated that deep ocean analysis was done on frequencies below the human hearing threshold.

I had left the office the day before with a number of conundrums about the sample I had been looking at. I won’t bore you with the details, save the fact that I felt that if I just listened to the sample I would be able to sort everything out. I thought about this little dilemma, and I figured that while I would technically be breaking the rules, since the sample was entirely in the range of my hearing it would be one of those situations where everyone’s life would be easier if I just ported the source audio onto my phone, found out what I needed to know, and then never mentioned it to anyone. Obviously if they found out it would harm the integrity of their data, but if I kept my mouth shut we would all win. I transferred the file and put my headphones on.

I’ve been struggling to put into words exactly what it was that I heard that day. I can tell you with complete confidence that I have regretted ever purchasing my set of audiophile quality {brand redacted} headphones, but any other attempt at description falls flat. That being said I’ve never been one to avoid attempting the impossible, so I’ll try to give you what I can.

There was no reason for me to assume that the entire mass of awful noises came from a single person, yet from the moment I heard that sound until now there has not been a single second where I doubted this. Despite the fact that it fluctuated rapidly between high pitched wails and low pitched moans, and even seemed to somehow cover more than one pitch at the same time, I just intuitively knew that it was produced by a single throat.

I am also in possession of a single-minded certainty that whatever that woman was experiencing, it was far beyond the scope of any suffering recorded in our history books. In our time we humans have devised some very inventive ways to inflict misery on our fellows: the brazen bull, drawing and quartering, scaphism, the list goes on. The thing is, despite that little voice in all our heads that says we humans have shined light into the dark corners of our hearts, illuminating the place that compels us to do those awful things, we haven’t changed a bit. A trip to Liveleak is at it will take to rid you of that little delusion.

I’ve spent some time there since this incident trying to dig up the worst shit I could find, and compared to what I heard that morning, the screams of ISIS burning a person alive or a man who just had his limbs torn off in a machine accident sound like the laughter of a child at an amusement park.

I’m sorry I have to keep telling you what the scream isn’t, but every time I try to describe even a small portion of it: the rapid oscillation of her uvula as her voice rises in agony until it cracks at the limits of its productive range, the way her gasping sounds come so quick and steady that they almost seem to work like backing percussion, or the way her low wails seem to briefly trail off as if she had been provided just enough respite (no more than a few seconds) to make sure she never got used to her torment; I just feel like I haven’t done even the slightest bit of justice to the anguish I heard that morning.

I am tempted to say that I made the two greatest mistakes of my life within ten minutes of each other on that cursed morning, but with what I know now, I cannot help but think that as soon as I heard those miserable screams my fate became the plaything of some great hand reaching from beyond the veils of our understanding. Given everything I have discovered, perhaps it is better to say I was fucked from the start, and it was only on that morning that I first realized it.

Metaphysical speculation aside, as soon as I heard that scream a compulsion arose within me to transfer as many of the files as I could onto my phone: a desire that I immediately succumbed to.

At the time, I told myself that I was doing it for the sake of that poor woman. That perhaps the company that hired me was a front for some high class torture porn production firm, and that I might be able to put a stop to a major sex slavery ring if I brought those recordings to the proper authorities. Even then, despite my conviction that the process of sober scientific inquiry could shed light into the darkness around us, I knew that what I was hearing fell well beyond the jurisdiction of any government agency. And besides, I wouldn’t be so cruel as to pull a Typhoid Mary and spread my own horrible fate to as many innocent bystanders as possible.

I went through the archive and transferred some samples, making sure to draw from as wide a source pool as possible. While I did grab a couple standouts that had perplexed me in the past, all in all I think it was a reasonably representative sample.

It became clear once my coworkers started to pile in that I was in no shape to focus on my work. By 10:00 I had been asked by three different people if I was feeling sick and by 11 I decided to just roll with that as an excuse to get out of there. I wasn’t able to make much progress on my work anyway, as ever since I heard the scream I could see nothing but the nuances of pain in my samples. I headed home oddly curious about the new additions to my audio library.

When I got to my apartment I threw myself into the recordings. Like the initial file, they were all composed of a single person’s ululations, but the subject changed from one sample to the next, and it seemed to include people of nearly every age group: from teenagers to the elderly. While each lament was unique, they all had in common the gasping sobs, shifts from high to low, and the occasional brief pause in the torment.

Each one shook me more than the last, but I was so transfixed I did not stop to question why I would feel so compelled to listen to them again and again. It wasn’t until I got to a file named 2016-07-01_c that I gained barest of ideas about what I had stumbled into.

Even back when I first looked at it in the office, I noticed some odd quirks in comparison to the standard waveforms. There seemed to be a focused static to it that piqued my interest and planted the file in my memory. I wish I could say that listening to it sated my curiosity.

It started off similar enough to the rest, a man who sounded like he was in his mid-forties weeping and screaming from some unknown anguish. Then I began to notice a different sound. It was close to heavy breathing, but deeper and not steady like a human being’s lungs, and it came into the recording right where the sonograph anomalies appeared.

Suddenly the man’s voice changed. At first it was a mild stuttering that was almost drowned out by his torment. However, it slowly and steadily increased in intensity, until he found just enough strength to cry out:

“Please stop. I beg you. Anyth…” A fresh howl from his own throat cut him off. The breathing sound in the background began to take on a pattern like the panting of an excited dog, but less steady and controlled. In contrast, the cacophony of sobs and wails returned to its semi-coherent pattern of rises and falls. Then clear voice ripped through everything:.

“Listen, curious one . Listen to my music and dance.”

The first thing I did after I ripped out my headphones was to check the date of the recording. I confirmed that it was as old as I thought and then spent the next five hours swirling through the impossible implications in my mind. I was consumed by two firm beliefs: a complete conviction that my very existence depended on my ability to never listen to those files again, and an even deeper compulsion to return to my nightmarish vigil. Perhaps, if right then and there, I had found the strength to smash my phone, things would have turned out differently. But as I said before, there’s no use dwelling on past mistakes.

If my desire to never listen to those horrors did not provoke any drastic action, it did at least keep me away from them for a little while. I locked my phone in my apartment mailbox and went to work the next morning. People still asked me if I was feeling alright but I was able to brush them off.

You may be wondering why I returned to the place that was responsible for my misery and why I didn’t try to do something more productive, say informing the authorities or getting myself committed. But what kind of person would make such a decision? A clear and rational one? One evening with those audio files was enough to destroy all those foolish ideas about a rational universe. It was simply habit and muscle memory that brought me into the office that day. But when you have nothing else to guide you, those two things can often have quite a bit of power.

Looking back, the only thing that surprises me is that my boss never reamed me out over the shitshow of a performance I gave that day. Perhaps he knew more than he let on about our little project. Perhaps he sat in his office watching me through the camera and taking copious notes. With hindsight, I see these last two days as my final desperate attempt to restore normalcy to my life by acting out the exterior motions as if nothing were wrong. You readers with some grasp of psychology probably know how well that works out.

At first, I held out some hope that, through an act of will I might be able to overcome the urges burning within. But soon I realized that my struggle would be futile. That the urging of my heart would never be quenched by playing make-believe. At around 1:00 I simply walked out the door.

When I got home I spent a few hours browsing the dark corners of the internet, thinking that I might be able to escape my fate through some facsimile of the voices, but I had no luck finding anything that came close. After a while I gave up and got my phone. Somehow I knew exactly what recording to put on. Maybe I had known from the beginning. It was a young girl, no more than twelve. Even after listening to all the others I still found myself disturbed by her song of trauma. The heavy breathing was there too, and after playing me a forty minute symphonies of human torment he came onto the stage to address the audience, just like I knew he would:

“I’m waiting for you, curious one.”

What’s fragments remain of that rational part of my brain tell me that whatever suffering I know here and now will only grow stronger should I heed his call, but such tiny convictions cannot be trusted. The five story drop from my window makes a compelling argument that even now, I might still have one avenue of escape, but the visions dancing within me speak stronger. All that remains of what I was is some small fragment of that human desire to have the sum of one’s existence add up to more than a simple wall of cacophony whose waveform can be studied by clear minded, hard hearted empiricists, and so I will let those urges flee into my keyboard, so that nothing will remain but a vessel of those voices, an unmolded lump of clay ready to be brought to life by the careful shaping of a master artist.