Not A Sound

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The furnace squats in its own little room, hemmed in tight by the ductwork and the too-close wall behind it. It’s a big old furnace, converted not long ago to hot air so we don’t have those cast iron rads all over the house clanking and hissing, the water inside forcing a few air bubbles around the system so that, on winter nights, you often wake up and find you’ve been dreaming about rivers. Or waterfalls. Or broken pipes.

The furnace room is lit by one old light, the fixture coloured dull brass and screwed in place, cobwebbed, fabric-wrapped wires running in and out – and only one electrical outlet, old enough for a Bakelite cover and slots for the plugs that don’t look quite the right shape. The plugs are probably not grounded – probably not really safe, either.

They’re probably hooked up inside the walls to those heavy old copper wires that are just waiting, packing enough amperage to knock you to your knees with just one careless mistake. A short-tempered short-circuit.

I thought it would be easier to work down there, to get away from the noise and constant banging around of everyone else in the house – in the basement with the white noise of the dryer vent-pipe and the occasional whirr and grumble of the furnace turning on.

The furnace has a big rumble when it gets going, a deep noise, the kind of noise you feel right down in the pit of your stomach – but the kind of noise that’s so familiar once you’re used to it that you always know exactly what it is, even when you’re sound asleep.

Like the pipes – they clang and ring and clack as they heat up and cool down, but after the first week or so, they’re as familiar as your heartbeat. You probably never hear it, aren’t even aware that it’s in there beating, unless you’re trying to fall asleep or fall in love or something, and you’re lying there listening to everything – the first birds outside, maybe, those first trial, indelicate fractured bird songs, or the fridge coming on and shutting off. Or maybe it’s someone right next to you, sleeping with those overlarge, drawn-out breaths of the sound sleeper – too long going in, a long pause, then too long rushing back out again. That loosening sound of the water, the pipes radiating out all at once, the sound of a tap turned on somewhere else in the house.

Sound is a curious thing: always there, but at the same time, something far easier to shelve, to push away, than taste or smell or bright light. I mean, think about the smell of someone burning letters into the lid of a cedar box at a gift shop – that can stay in your nose all day, tainting everything, like the individual smoke molecules are caught up there in your sinuses or the smell receptors or something.

Sounds seem to be able to just fade into the background, once you’ve heard them enough to place them implicitly, for them to work themselves into being part of the furniture.

There had always been a chair in the furnace room – one single chair. Well, there was a chair there when we moved in, the only piece of furniture left in the whole house.

Heather had wanted me to throw it away, said it was really just junk. And she was right, except that when I’d put it out in front of the house with the garbage, I noticed that there was a bar between the two front legs, no more than a fat piece of dowelling, really, but a piece of dowelling that was worn flat all along the top edge by someone putting their feet up underneath themselves again and again.

As if they’d been keeping some sort of prisoner down there, given only a chair to sit in and only the furnace for company. Only two places to put his feet, either down on the floor or up on that dowel.

I kept it then, took it right back into the house because it had earned some kind of history – one I didn’t know anything about, sure, but a history just the same. I see or hear part of a story, and I just want to know how it started, how the rest of it turned out, even if I have to make it up in my own head.