The Man Who Heard Nothing

As Joseph crossed Grand St., walking on Thompson, he spotted a couple walking, hand-in-hand, in his direction. Half a block away, Irene and Christopher noticed a shady twenty-something coming their way.

As they passed each other in front of a restuarant called "Naked Lunch," Lorrie pushed the door open to serve Adam, the bespectacled man seated outside, his reuben.

Joseph stopped walking. Irene and Christopher stopped as well, their hands falling to their sides. Lorrie let the reuben fall and Adam took his glasses off.

"Did you hear that?" Lorrie was the first the speak. None of the others said anything. She pulled open the door of the restaurant and asked again, "Did any of you hear that?" The patrons of Naked Lunch shook their heads and went back to their meals.

Turning back to Thompson St., Lorrie examined the dumbstruck foursome. Irene was whispering excitedly to Christopher.

"You heard it, didn't you?" Lorrie ventured a third time.

"I heard it," Joseph said. Adam nodded. Christopher shrugged and Irene turned to Lorrie.

"What did he say to you," Irene asked.

Joseph's head was still ringing. He'd never heard such an infernal sound; like an infectious white noise that had dampened his mind. To his surprised, it was only his head that hurt, and not his ears.

"Well, what did he say to you?" Irene asked again.

"It's... it's hard to put into words. He, he said everything, I think."

"He told the story of the cosmos from its very inception," Adam stated plainly, placing his glasses back on his face, "Everything up to this moment, and everything after."

Irene's breath puffed out of her and she gave a smile of relief. Lorrie smiled, as well, and Christopher shrugged again.

"And he said that he is the one true God. But... he didn't speak with words..." Lorrie stammered.

"His words were breathed into us. We has been blessed," Adam added, eliciting a "pssh" from Christopher.

"Bullshit. Total fucking bullshit," he said. Walking over to Joseph, he said, "Hey man, back me up on this. We didn't just, like, hear the voice of God."

Joseph agreed readily. The terrible noise had jarred him enough; he didn't need a religious freak-fest to go down right in front of him.

Irene cocked her head intimidatingly, in that way only New York women can do. "So what, then? You didn't hear anything?"

"No, I heard it, like this huge voice, but all that one true God shit is bullshit. There's no fucking God."

Adam stood up, nearly stepping in his sacrificed reuben. "You just hear the entire story of the cosmos in the span of a second and you're going to tell me that it wasn't the voice of God?"

The patrons of Naked Lunch had begun to file outside to see what the shouting and cursing was about. A man asked Lorrie what had happened.

"Well, I was walking out the door..."

The story spread quickly through the crowd and the murmuring grew to a rabble. Irene shoved Christopher and said, "How can you be such an atheist?" while Adam began an account of the event worthy of a National Geographic narrator.

The crowd's noise swelled and Joseph reeled. The mingling and mixing of voices sounded all too much like the mind-dampening fuzz he had heard just a few minutes before.

A hand holding a pen shot up in the air. "I'm a reporter for the Post. Who was present when this voice was heard?" Lorrie pointed at herself and Adam, and Irene said, "My boyfriend and I were."

Joseph wondered if he could slip away unnoticed, but Irene pointed at him and shouted "You! You were here!"

The reporter rushed up to Joseph. "Sir, would you please describe to me what just happened?"

"I... uhh..."

"What did you hear?

Joseph didn't know what to tell him. He wasn't sure himseld what he had heard, though it was most certainly not the voice of God. It had felt like a shock to his central nervous system, like a violent kick to the left temple. He tried to think of something to say, and he said what came to mind.

"Nothing."