The Gravity of Words

The day that gravity stopped working for words, Shawn climbed the fire escape to the roof of his walk-up apartment and screamed at the top of his lungs. He could feel the vibration of the sounds leaving his throat, but the scream never reached his ears. The heads of the pedestrians on the street below did not turn. No one could hear him screaming.

Shawn had a deadline on his new EP. He was determined to record two new tracks for his album that afternoon, but it seemed that the world had other plans. How does one make music, when they can’t hear a pin drop?

The talking heads on cable news had gone mute. No one could tell anyone what had happened. Closed captioning was now being forced through every transmission. People were turning away from visual media, turning to chatrooms, and Reddit ruled supreme. YouTube had become like Silent Films from the Great Depression Era. A universe of creators now had to learn how to communicate visually without speech. All of this happened in moments as people worldwide grappled with their new reality.

Shawn had studio time with his producer Rami in an hour. But they couldn’t lay down any tracks. Shawn trudged down the fire escape, with heavy footfalls. Why were his legs so heavy?

Once, back in 2011, Shawn had been working in an office tower in New York City when an earthquake hit Manhattan. Everyone had rolled out onto Wall Street and crowded in throngs in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Dogs barked from every direction. Flocks of birds twirled in circles in the sky and crashed into buildings. Pigeons lost their sense of place and bobbed their heads as they circled bits of food on the sidewalk. They careened about, bumping into things, like children putting their heads on sticks and playing at Dizzy Bat Race.

The shake of the buildings was imperceptible from the ground but had been very noticeable and alarming from twenty stories up, as the metal and concrete swayed and rocked, creaking and moaning, the skyscrapers exposed as being no more rigid than reeds in the wind. Everyone remarked how they felt woozy. It was just like that. Woozy. Heavy legs. Like a never-ending vertigo.

Flipping through the subreddits, Shawn learned that some scientists who worked at the Large Hadron Collider had been experimenting with something called the Higgs Boson. Apparently, all around us is something called the Higgs Field. It is like an electromagnetic field that tells objects to take on just the right amount of mass. Acceleration or inertia are like two sides of the same coin. Energy is converted to mass at higher speeds. E=mc². But what if the mass that pulls on us is increased? Across the board? That was what they were saying happened. The mass of the Earth and hence its gravity had increased.

Shawn raised a newly cracked Red Stripe he’d pulled out of the fridge. He raised it to the heavens. He toasted God and his ironic sense of comedic timing. Here’s to the scientists putting the genie back in the bottle, Shawn thought. But he had as much confidence in that happening as he had in the second coming.

What had not been anticipated is that sound waves have negative gravity. The increased gravity all around the planet was repelling sound to the heavens. Like an avalanche of prayers. In reverse. Great walls of white sound crashing upward like waves being sucked into the sky, where they ricocheted in the thin atmosphere and faded into oblivion. Only God could hear what anyone said. Every word that was uttered off of anyone’s lips simply traveled upward floating like balloon letters in a weird alphabet soup.

Shawn went into his home studio, a small room of about 100 feet by 100 feet, with padded walls to absorb the echoes of sounds, and started tapping out a beat. Nothing. The bass came out like baby farts. They puffed out like popping bubbles on contact with the air, caught in the net of the soundproofing foam on the ceiling. Shawn, whose entire life revolved around the spoken word was now thrust into a soundless world.

Shawn texted Rami that it was best to stay home. And Shawn drummed his fingers on his desk, but did not hear a thing.

Shawn was no scientist. But he had a terrible thought. Sound is just one kind of wave. Heat is another one. Infrared. Shawn turned the electric coiled burners on the stovetop range to high, and he watched as the coils that usually heated to red in moments took about thirty seconds to get warm. Heat too was being pulled away from the Earth. Soon the temperature would drop a degree or two around the globe. What would that do?

Shawn then thought about his microwave. He pulled a cold slice of pizza, plopped it on a plastic plate, and put it in the microwave. The glass turntable inside the microwave oven spun. But the heat was leaking out. And the pizza was still cold after a minute.

The news indicated that millions of cars were crashing around the globe. People couldn’t receive verbal cues, hear their tires rolling, be alarmed by a car horn, or sense pressure waves of cars stopping short. The transit system was in gridlock.

Shawn retrieved his composition notebook, having a strange revelation. Mankind had twisted words and speech to its breaking point. And now they were suffering a curse. A curse of silence. All the lies and propaganda were smothered and muffled. Discarded. Like the butt of a cigarette crushed under one’s heel.

In that moment, Shawn realized his brain could still hear sounds. He began tapping his foot. He nodded his head. He began moving to the beat. Rhythm still exists, even in a vacuum. So Shawn started dubbing over the silence, and he began to hear an even richer tapestry of pitches and beats. A soundtrack to a soundless world played in his head, and Shawn began his cypher.