The sound in the ceiling

It's not really about squirrels.

“there’s someone upstairs”

At first it started off as a quiet scratching. Actually, that’s not quite true. It started off as a thing that woke him up in the middle of the night — it sounded like a person moving around in the ceiling, maybe someone in the attic. Only the next morning did he realize that it would have had to have been a person in his attic at three-thirty in the morning, so though seemingly loud to the half-awake ear, it had to be the sound of some rodent or something he imagined. He said nothing about it to his wife at breakfast, but later she brought it up. “Was it a rat? A bird? A squirrel?” No one knew, how could they?

The next few days passed, there was no sound in the ceiling, all was calm and good. One morning it happened again, this time near first light, and looking out of his bedroom window onto the roof, he saw a squirrel fleeing, and that settled it — it must be a squirrel. He thought for a moment about calling maintenance to take care of it, but then realized that it was only one squirrel, and if the animal just made noise every once in a while, what harm could it really cause?

A few days later he woke to loud scratching, running, bumping in the ceiling. It sounded like there could have been as many as a hundred squirrels — all above his bed, playing, fighting, mating, attempting to bury things. The sound was unbearable and continued into the daytime, even into the afternoon, where he could see a line of squirrels, one after the other, each taking turns to enter the space above his ceiling. Finally, he called maintenance. Two holes were found in the roof where the squirrels were entering. They were immediately patched, mothballs were scattered about the attic, and just like that the problem disappeared.

The first day of fall was close. The air felt as though long-held dreams were about to vanish. There was a sense that peace and resignation were near. The radio was on quietly as usual, the streetcar passed every so often, interrupted by occasional large vehicles passing close enough to make the building shake, sometimes sirens from ambulances or police cars, or people screaming intoxicated and laughing, but with the kind of volume that only internal hostility dying to come out can muster — like people who whistle to fake being happy when they’re really pissed off, or women who walk down hallways heavy-footed — almost stomping like horses — because they’re angry they never found the right person. But none of this was his fault, so why the need to blame him by making all that damned noise? And that’s when it hit him: the arrival of fall, with its cooler temperatures, might cause the squirrels to aggressively pursue a return to the ceiling.

He could hear the clock ticking, but couldn’t decide whether that meant the clock was too loud or that he was listening too intently. The volume of the ticking was the same level as the radio, but that didn’t mean anything, because maybe the radio was loud or maybe it wasn’t. Across the hall he could hear that couple — loud and hence un-in-love — coming in from another night out of wasting time. Stomp stomp stomp went that cow of a so-called woman, and bang bang bang went that loser of a drunk fiancé who was never going to marry that pig, even if he was undesirable to every woman on earth. None of this really mattered except that he’d had two cups of coffee shortly before bed. His heart was beating too fast. There was anxiety in the air. The kind of panic one feels when they worry they might start to care again, to yearn for dreams whose death they have accepted.

And then it happened. A light scratching, just once. Was it the building settling? But then it happened again. It couldn’t be a squirrel, it wasn’t loud enough. And the ticking of the clock was louder than this occasional light trickling of a tick tick tick. “It could be nothing. Or it could be something. Right?” He wasn’t completely sure. He got scared. The anxiety returned, the stuff that no amount of wine could erase. He covered his ears with the blanket and rocked back and forth in an attempt to make the sound disappear. Then he stopped to think about how terrible that was, so he pulled the sheets away to listen, but the trouble was that he was too scared to listen — “What if I hear something? What if the squirrels have returned? Or what if it’s some type of new animal I don’t know about, one likely to chew through the ceiling, fall through and land on me while I’m asleep? What if it bites me and gives me an illness that leads to slow death?”

He jumped out of bed, turned off the radio, and stood there listening intensely. His wife woke up and asked “What’s wrong?” He jumped on the bed, covered her mouth, “Shhh...I’m listening. Have you heard anything tonight?” She indicated that she had not. “I’m sorry, I must have imagined it.” He turned the radio back on and climbed back into bed. But this time he turned it just a little quieter, just in case the squirrels were on to him. He lay there listening and heard a distinct click — not a tick but a click! He followed the sound to its origin, into the living room, where it happened again. It was the thermostat. He returned to bed, relieved. And with each new sound, provided it was as loud as the ticking of his clock or quieter, he was able to invent explanations that would convince most people that the cause of the sound was not a squirrel or other animal.

The trouble though, especially with squirrels, was that they were smart. They knew how to scare people, they knew how to cause anxiety. They knew how to get into buildings, and how to stay there once they found their way in. You could never really keep them out forever, they would always find a way in. So many sounds, so many possibilities, how to separate the safe ones from the dangerous? It could take hours. “This is what heroin is for,” he thought. “No one on heroin has ever been frightened of squirrels. No squirrel ever dared to stalk a dope fiend,” he thought.

Heroin might well be a way of escaping sounds in the ceiling. People and their ceilings, really, that was the trouble with people. They denied the existence of the possible, always preoccupied with nonsense like “Well sure, that could happen, but most likely, it won’t.” Was it any wonder that their lives were mundane? They had no appreciation whatsoever for the emergence of patterns, for the connections between things that lay somewhere beneath the tidy surface. The way that such patterns if detected early enough could be used to prevent terrible things from happening, or the way that connections between the seemingly unconnected could explain things that curious thinking people need to know about. There were no squirrels in their ceilings, that’s for sure. No, their ceilings were of a different sort.

They had certain ideas, you see, about possible and impossible, likely and unlikely, about when to worry and when not to, about right and wrong, and all, seemingly, for no apparent reason. They could quickly tell you which types of sex and drugs ought to be permitted and which works of art should be banned. They could easily tell you the kind of thinking that was acceptable and the kind of speech that should be prohibited. But try asking one of these automatons about the difference between a click and a tick, or about how to distinguish a sink with a minor leak from one on the verge of exploding, and then brace yourself for an overwhelming wave of silence that drowns all hope for real human contact. Because they can’t afford to think about these things. I mean, what would happen if some barely perceptible sound in the night, or some seemingly insignificant event in the day, was really the first in a series of accelerating developments that left the perceptible universe in pure chaos?

“These fucking squirrels are getting out of control,” he thought.