omni magazine

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INTERDEPENDENCENo living thing on Earth is an island. Life is interdependent and all of the planet’s existence is essential for survival. There are many well-known examples of life’s interdependence, such as the exchange between bees and flowers or tropical fish and sea anemones. Humans also take part in many complex relationships every minute of every day without paying much notice. This first issue of Omni Magzine takes a look into some of theses inderdependencies. Derrick Jensen’s interview with Paul Stamets unearths fungi’s effect on its environment. Courtney Humphries questions the nature of a human “being” with her exploration of the bacteria that reside within each of us. Kevin Brockmeier’s short story “The Year of Silence” proves the importance of a carefully balanced lifestyle, both in and outside the psyche. These along with other stories and works of art hope to inspire readers to rethink their relationship with this planet and to question the boundaries between nature and culture.

6 NATURE / CULTURE 7SPRING 2010 • INTERDEPENDENCY

JENSEN: Can you give some examples of

these partnerships?

STAMETS: A familiar one is lichens, which are actually a fungus and an alga growing symbiotically together. Another is “sleepy grass”: Mesoamerican ranchers realized that when their horses ate a certain type of grass, the horses basically got stoned. When scientists studied sleepy grass, they found that it wasn’t the grass at all that was causing the horses to get stoned, but an endophytic fungus, meaning one that grows within a plant, in the stems and leaves.

Here’s another example: At Yellowstone’s hot springs and Lassen Volcanic Park, people noticed that some grasses could survive contact with scalding hot water—up to 160 degrees. Scientists cultured these grasses in a laboratory and saw a fungus growing on them. They thought it was a contaminant, so they separated the fungus from the grass cells and tried to regrow the grass. But without the fungus

the grass died at around 110 degrees. So they reintroduced this fungus and regrew the grass, and once again it survived to 160 degrees. That particular fungus, of the genus Curvularia, conveyed heat tolerance to the grass. Scientists are now looking at the possibility of getting this Curvularia to convey heat tolerance to corn, rice, and wheat, so that these grasses could be grown under drought conditions or in extremely arid environments, expanding the grain-growing regions of the world.

Other researchers took a Curvularia fungus from cold storage at a culture bank and joined it with tomatoes, expecting that it would confer heat tolerance. But the tomatoes all died at 105 degrees. They discovered that the cold storage had killed a virus that wild Curvularia fungus carries within it — which was odd, since you’d think cold storage would keep the virus alive. When they reintroduced the virus back into the Curvularia cultures and then reassociated

the fungus with tomato plants, the plants survived the heat. So this is a symbiosis of three organisms: a plant, a fungus, and a virus. Only together could they survive extreme conditions.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. They show the intelligence of nature, how these different entities form partnerships to the benefit of all.JENSEN: Of course this raises the question of

boun daries: Is that tomato-fungus-virus one

entity or three? Where does one organism

stop and the other begin?

STAMETS: Well, humans aren’t just one organism. We are composites. Scientists label species as separate so we can communicate easily about the variety we see in nature. We need to be able to look at a tree and say it’s a Douglas fir and look at a mammal and say it’s a harbor seal. But, indeed, I speak to you as a unified composite of microbes. I guess you could say I am the “elected voice” of a microbial community. This is the way of life on our planet. It is all based on complex symbiotic relationships.

A mycelial “mat,” which scientists think of as one entity, can be thousands of acres in size. The largest organism in the world is a mycelial mat in eastern Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is more than two thousand years old. Its survival strategy is somewhat mysterious. We have five or six layers of skin to protect us from infection; the mycelium has one cell wall. How is it that this vast mycelial network, which is surrounded by hundreds of millions of microbes all trying to eat it, is protected by one cell wall? I believe it’s because the mycelium is in constant biochemical communication with its ecosystem.

I think these mycelial mats are neurological networks. They’re sentient, they’re aware, and they’re highly evolved. As you walk through a forest, you break twigs underneath your feet,

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and the mycelium surges upward to capture those newly available nutrients as quickly as possible. I say they have “lungs,” because they are inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, just like we are. I say they are sentient, because they produce pharmacological compounds—which can activate receptor sites in our neurons—and also serotonin-like compounds, including psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in some mushrooms. This speaks to the fact that there is an evolutionary common denominator between fungi and humans. We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. The fungi took the route of producing these underground networks that are highly resilient and extremely adaptive: if you disturb a mycelial network, it just regrows. It might even benefit from the disturbance.

I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s “natural Internet.” I’ve gotten some flak for this, but recently scientists in Great Britain have published papers about the “architecture” of a mycelium—how it’s organized. They focused on the nodes of crossing, which are the branchings that allow the mycelium, when there is a breakage or an infection, to choose an alternate route and regrow. There’s no one specific point on the network that can shut the whole operation down. These nodes of crossing, those scientists found, conform to the same mathematical optimization curves that computer scientists have developed to optimize the Internet. Or, rather, I should say that the Internet conforms to the same optimization curves as the mycelium, since the mycelium came first. 0

THEY’RE SENTIENT, THEY’RE AWARE, AND THEY’RE HIGHLY EVOLVED.

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6 NATURE / CULTURE 7SPRING 2010 • INTERDEPENDENCY


these partnerships?




Other researchers took a Curvularia fungus from cold storage at a culture bank and joined it with tomatoes, expecting that it would confer heat tolerance. But the tomatoes all died at 105 degrees. They discovered that the cold storage had killed a virus that wild Curvularia fungus carries within it — which was odd, since you’d think cold storage would keep the virus alive. When they reintroduced the virus back into the Curvularia cultures and then reassociated








I think these mycelial mats are neurological networks. They’re sentient, they’re aware, and they’re highly evolved. As you walk through a forest, you break twigs underneath your feet,

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and the mycelium surges upward to capture those newly available nutrients as quickly as possible. I say they have “lungs,” because they are inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, just like we are. I say they are sentient, because they produce pharmacological compounds—which can activate receptor sites in our neurons—and also serotonin-like compounds, including psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in some mushrooms. This speaks to the fact that there is an evolutionary common denominator between fungi and humans. We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. The fungi took the route of producing these underground networks that are highly resilient and extremely adaptive: if you disturb a mycelial network, it just regrows. It might even benefit from the disturbance.

I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s “natural Internet.” I’ve gotten some flak for this, but recently scientists in Great Britain have published papers about the “architecture” of a mycelium—how it’s organized. They focused on the nodes of crossing, which are the branchings that allow the mycelium, when there is a breakage or an infection, to choose an alternate route and regrow. There’s no one specific point on the network that can shut the whole operation down. These nodes of crossing, those scientists found, conform to the same mathematical optimization curves that computer scientists have developed to optimize the Internet. Or, rather, I should say that the Internet conforms to the same optimization curves as the mycelium, since the mycelium came first. 0

THEY’RE SENTIENT, THEY’RE AWARE, AND THEY’RE HIGHLY EVOLVED.

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INTERVIEW

GOING UNDERGROUNDby Derrick JensenPaul Stamets on the vast, intelligent network beneath our feet.

FEATURE

THE BODY POLITICby Courtney HumphriesThe deep symbiosis between bacteria and their human hosts is forcing scientists to ask: are we organisms or living ecosystems?

FICTION

THE YEAR OF SILENCEby Kevin BrockmeierShortly after two in the afternoon, on Monday, the sixth of April, a few seconds of silence overtook the city.

ART

GLOW LURE TEARSby Christine GrayDistortions of the everyday offer a look at the cultural mythologies that misrepresent nature and our relationship to it.

FICTION

GRIEFERby Austin BunnAs a man struggles with the loss of his online friends, he tries to learn how to create human bonds offline.

VOICES

SPECTRAL LIGHTby Amy IrvineWhen the boundaries between predator and prey, wild and tame, black and white, become blurred.

SPRING 2010 • INTERDEPENDENCE

1SPRING 2010 • INTERDEPENDENCE

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GOING UNDERGROUND

For several years people from different places and backgrounds kept recommending the same oddly titled book to me: Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Ten Speed Press). Everyone told me it was one of the most mind-bending texts they’d ever read. With so many recommendations, I perversely hesitated to pick the book up, and when I finally did, I prepared myself to be disappointed. I wasn’t. Stamets fundamentally changed my view of nature—in particular, fungi: yeasts, mushrooms, molds, the whole lot of them.

When we think of fungi, most of us picture mushrooms, those slightly mysterious, potentially poisonous denizens of dark, damp places. But a mushroom is just the fruit of the mycelium, which is an underground network of rootlike fibers that can stretch for miles. Stamets calls mycelia the “grand disassemblers of nature” because they break down complex substances into simpler components. For example, some fungi can take apart the hydrogen-carbon bonds that hold petroleum products together. Others have shown the potential to clean up nerve-gas agents, dioxins, and plastics. They may even be skilled enough to undo the ecological damage pollution has wrought.


Since reading Mycelium Running, I’ve begun to consider the possibility that mycelia know something we don’t. Stamets believes they have not just the ability to protect the environment but the intelligence to do so on purpose. His theory stems in part from the fact that mycelia transmit information across their huge networks using the same neurotransmitters that our brains do: the chemicals that allow us to think. In fact, recent discoveries suggest that humans are more closely related to fungi than we are to plants.

Almost since life began on earth, mycelia have performed important ecological roles: nourishing ecosystems, repairing them, and sometimes even helping create them. The fungi’s exquisitely fine filaments absorb nutrients from the soil and then trade them with the roots of plants for some of the energy that the plants produce through photosynthesis. No plant community could exist without mycelia. I’ve long been a resident and defender of forests, but Stamets helped me understand that I’ve been misperceiving my home. I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.

Stamets became interested in biology in kindergarten, when he planted a sunflower seed in a paper cup and watched it sprout and lift itself toward the light. Somewhere along the way, he developed a fascination with life forms that grow not toward the sun but away from it. In the late seventies he got a Drug Enforcement Administration permit to research hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms at Evergreen State College in Washington. Stamets is now fifty-two and has studied mycelia for more than thirty years, naming five new species and authoring or coauthoring six books, including Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (Ten Speed Press) and The Mushroom Cultivator (Agarikon Press). He’s the founder and director of Fungi Perfecti (www.fungi.com), a company based outside Olympia, Washington, that provides mushroom research, information, classes, and spawn—the mushroom farmer’s equivalent of seed. Much of the company’s profits go to help protect endangered strains of fungi in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. I interviewed Stamets in June 2009.

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JENSEN: How many different types of

mushrooms are there?

STAMETS: There are an estimated one to two million species of fungi, of which about 150,000 form mushrooms. A mushroom is the fruit body—the reproductive structure—of the mycelium, which is the network of thin, cobweblike cells that infuses all soil. The spores in the mushroom are somewhat analogous to seeds. Because mushrooms are fleshy, succulent, fragrant, and rich in nutrients, they attract animals—including humans—who eat them and thereby participate in spreading the spores through their feces.

Our knowledge of fungi is far exceeded by our ignorance. To date, we’ve identified approximately 14,000 of the 150,000 species of mushroom-forming fungi estimated to exist, which means that more than 90 percent have not yet been identified. Fungi are essential for ecological health, and losing any of these species would be like losing rivets in an airplane. Flying squirrels and voles, for example, are dependent upon truffles, and in old-growth forests, the main predator of flying squirrels and voles is the spotted owl. This means that killing off truffles would kill off flying squirrels and voles, which would kill off spotted owls.

That’s just one food chain that we can identify; there are many thousands more we cannot. Biological systems are so complex that they far exceed our cognitive abilities and our linear logic. We are essentially children when it comes to our understanding of the natural world.JENSEN: In your book you say that animals

are more closely related to fungi than they are

to plants or protozoa or bacteria.

STAMETS: Yes. For example, we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; so do fungi. One of the big differences between animals and fungi is that animals have their stomachs on the inside. About 600 million years ago, the branch of fungi leading to animals evolved to capture nutrients by surrounding their food with cellular sacs—essentially primitive stomachs. As these organisms evolved, they developed outer layers of cells—skins, basically—to prevent moisture loss and as a barrier against infection. Their stomachs were confined within the skin. These were the earliest animals.

Mycelia took a different evolutionary path, going underground and forming a network of interwoven chains of cells, a vast food web upon which life flourished. These fungi paved the way for plants and animals. They munched rocks, producing enzymes and acids that could pull out calcium, magnesium, iron, and other minerals. In the process they converted rocks into usable foods for other species. And they still do this, of course.

Fungi are fundamental to life on earth. They are ancient, they are widespread, and they have formed partnerships with many other species. We know from the fossil record that evolution on this planet has largely been steered by two cataclysmic asteroid impacts. The first was 250 million years ago. The earth became shrouded in dust. Sunlight was cut off, and in the darkness, massive plant communities died. More than 90 percent of species disappeared. And fungi inherited the earth. Organisms that paired with fungi through natural selection were rewarded. Then the skies cleared, and light came back, and evolution continued on its course until 65 million years ago, bam! It happened again. We were hit by another asteroid, and there were more massive extinctions. That’s when the dinosaurs died out. Again, organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded. So these asteroid impacts steered life toward symbiosis with fungi: not just plants and animals, but bacteria and viruses, as well. They are ancient, they are widespread, and they have formed partnerships with many other species.



these partnerships?




Other researchers took a Curvularia fungus from cold storage at a culture bank and joined it with tomatoes, expecting that it would confer heat tolerance. But the tomatoes all died at 105 degrees. They discovered that the cold storage had killed a virus that wild Curvularia fungus carries within it—which was odd, since you’d think cold storage would keep the virus alive. When they reintroduced the virus back into the Curvularia cultures and then reassociated








I think these mycelial mats are neurological networks. They’re sentient, they’re aware, and they’re highly evolved. They have external stomachs, which produce enzymes and acids to

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digest nutrients. As you walk through a forest, you break twigs underneath your feet, and the mycelium surges upward to capture those newly available nutrients as quickly as possible. I say they have “lungs,” because they are inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, just like we are. I say they are sentient, because they produce pharmacological compounds—which can activate receptor sitesin our neurons—and also serotonin-like compounds, including psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in some mushrooms. This speaks to the fact that there is an evolutionary common denominator between fungi and humans. We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. The fungi took the route of producing these underground networks that are highly resilient and extremely adaptive: if you disturb a mycelial network, it just regrows.

I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s “natural Internet.” I’ve gotten some flak for this, but recently scientists in Great Britain have published papers about the “architecture” of a mycelium—how it’s organized. They focused on the nodes of crossing, which are the branchings that allow the mycelium, when there is a breakage or an infection, to choose an alternate route and regrow. There’s no one specific point on the network that can shut the whole operation down. These nodes of crossing, those scientists found, conform to the same mathematical optimization curves that computer scientists have developed to optimize the Internet. We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. Or, rather, I should say that the Internet conforms to the same optimization curves as the mycelium, since the mycelium came first. 0


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by Courtney Humphries


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THEY ESTABLISH INCREASINGLY COMPLEX communities, like a forest that gradually takes over a clearing. By the time we’re a few years old, these communities have matured, and we carry them with us, more or less, for our entire lives. Our bodies harbor 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering our human cells 10 to one. It’s easy to ignore this astonishing fact. Bacteria are tiny in comparison to human cells; they contribute just a few pounds to our weight and remain invisible to us. It’s also been easy for science to overlook their role in our bodies and our health. Researchers have largely concerned themselves with bacteria’s negative role as pathogens: The devastating

effects of a handful of infectious organisms have always seemed more urgent than what has been considered a benign and relatively unimportant relationship with “good” bacteria. In the intestine, the bacterial hub of the body that teems with trillions of microbes, they have traditionally been called “commensal” organisms — literally, eating at the same table. The moniker suggests that while we’ve known for decades that gut bacteria help digestion and prevent infections, they are little more than ever-present dinner guests.

But there’s a growing consensus among scientists that the relationship between us and our microbes is much more of a two-way street. With new technologies that allow scientists to better identify and study the organisms that live in and on us, we’ve become aware that bacteria, though tiny, are powerful chemical factories that fundamentally affect how the human body functions. They are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. Through research

that has blurred the boundary between medical and environmental microbiology, we’re begi- nning to understand that because the human body constitutes their environment, these microbial communities have been forced to adapt to changes in our diets, health, and lifestyle choices. Yet they, in turn, are also part of our environments, and our bodies have adapted to them. Our dinner guests, it seems, have shaped the very path of human evolution.

In October, researchers in several countries launched the International Human Microbiome Consortium, an effort to characterize the role of microbes in the human body. Just over a year ago, the National Institutes of Health also launched its own Human Microbiome Project. These new efforts represent a formal recognition of bacteria’s far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. “This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease,” said microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston last June. But the


emerging science of human-microbe symbiosis has an even greater implication. “Human beings are not really individuals; they’re communities of organisms,” says McFall-Ngai. It’s not just that our bodies serve as a habitat for other organisms; it’s also that we function with them as a collective. As the profound interrelationship between humans and microbes becomes more apparent, the distinction between host and hosted has become both less clear and less important — together we operate as a constantly evolving man-microbe kibbutz. Which raises a startling implication: If being Homo sapiens through and through implied a certain authority over our corporeal selves, we are now forced to relinquish some of that control to our inner-dwelling microbes. Ironically, the human ingenuity that drives us to understand more about ourselves is revealing that we’re much less “human” than we once thought.

TO FIND A BIOLOGICAL ANSWER to the question “Who are we?” we might look to the human genome. Certainly, when the Human Genome Project first produced a draft of the 3 billion-base-pair sequence, it was touted as a blueprint for human life. Less than a decade later, however, most experts recognize that our genomes capture only a part of who we are. Researchers have become aware, for example, of the influence of epigenetic phenomena — imprinting, maternal effects, and gene silencing, among others — in determining

of genes we define as ourselves. Indeed, several scientists have begun to refer to the human body as a “superorganism” whose complexity extends far beyond what is encoded in a single genome.

The physiology of a superorganism would likely look very different from traditional human physiology. There has been a great deal of research into the dynamics of communities among plants, insect colonies, and even in human society. What new insights could we gain by applying some of that knowledge to the workings of communities in our own bodies? Certain body functions could be the result of negotiations between several partners, and diseases the result of small changes in group dynamics — or of a breakdown in communi-cation between symbiotic partners.

Recently, for instance, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. In ongoing work that is part of the Human Microbiome Project, researchers in Jeffrey Gordon’s lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis showed that lean and obese mice have different proportions of microbes in their digestive systems. Bacteria in the plumper rodents, it seemed, were better able to extract energy from food, because when these bacteria were transferred into lean mice, the mice gained weight. The same is apparently true for humans: In December Gordon’s team published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities. And these bacteria, they discovered, are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body.

Even confined in their designated body parts, microbes exert their effects by churning out chemical signals for our cells to receive. Jeremy Nicholson, a chemist at Imperial College of London, has become a champion of the idea that the extent of this microbial signaling goes vastly underappreciated. Nicholson had been looking at the metabolites in human blood and urine with the hope of developing personalized drugs when he found that our bodily fluids are filled with metabolites produced by our intestinal bacteria. He now believes that the influence of gut microbes ranges from the ways in which we metabolize drugs and food to the subtle workings of our brain chemistry.

Scientists originally expected that the communication between animals and their

symbiotic bacteria would form its own molecular language. But McFall-Ngai, an expert on animal-microbe symbiosis, says that she and other scientists have instead found beneficial relationships involving some of the same chemical messages that had been discovered previously in pathogens. Many bacterial products that had been termed “virulence factors” or “toxins” turn out to not be inherently offensive signals; they are just part of the conversation between microbe and host. The difference between our interaction with harmful and helpful bacteria, she says, is not so much like separate languages as it is a change in tone: “It’s the difference between an argument and a civil conversation.” We are in constant communication with our microbes, and the messages are broadcast throughout the human body.

THE FIRST STUDY of a microbial community living on the human body was made back in 1683, when Antony van Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to the Royal Society including his observa-tions through the microscope of his own dental plaque, in which he described seeing “many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.” But despite this very early interest in the microbe communities on the body, over the next three centuries, microbiologists focused mainly on “isolating” bacteria: removing them from their natural contexts and growing them in culture dishes in the lab. This approach was the only way to observe and understand bacterial cells in great detail. But it also created huge gaps in knowledge about bacterial life. It focused on the fraction of microorganisms that can be grown in culture, and it overlooked the highly complex and diverse ways in which they actually live together — an approach akin to studying humans by confining them in prison cells while ignoring the cities and communities that make up their natural habitat.

This narrow view of microorganisms began to change when new genetic sequencing technologies — which fished the genes directly out of water or soil samples — made it possible to collect information about microorganisms without having to isolate them. These studies revealed an incredible amount of genetic abundance and diversity; the microbial world was a far bigger and denser landscape than anyone had previously known. A further leap in technology has been the ability to sequence large numbers of genes rapidly. Even

how genetic material is ultimately expressed. Now comes the notion that the genomes of microbes within us must also be considered. Our bodies are, after all, composites of human and bacterial cells, with microbes together contributing at least 1,000 times more genes to the whole. As we discover more and more roles that microbes play, it has become impossible to ignore the contribution of bacteria to the pool

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without “seeing” the organisms themselves, scientists can now sequence tens or hundreds of thousands of genetic fragments from an environmental sample. The resulting science of metagenomics eschews traditional ideas about studying the natural history of a particular organism in favor of a global view of the genes that exist in a community.

Using these new metagenomic methods, environmental microbiologists have delved into uncharted territories — acidic lakes, deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, and frozen tundra, to name but a few — to see what life might exist there. Gradually, some have applied the new tools to explore the “environments” of humans and other animals, with recent surveys, for instance, of the bacterial communities in

various microclimates of the human body, from rear molars to intestines to nasal passages. And with these studies and the launch of the Human Microbiome Project, the fields of medical and environmental microbiology have begun to merge. The resulting hybrid discipline embraces the complexity of a larger system; it’s integrative rather than reductive, and it supports the gathering view that our bodies, and the bodies of other animals, are ecosystems, and that health and disease may depend on complex changes in the ecology of host and microbes.

In 2007, Cornell University microbiologist Ruth Ley coauthored a paper arguing that human microbiome studies could bridge the divide between biomedical and environmental microbiology. Like Jeffrey Gordon, her coauthor and mentor, Ley studies bacteria in the human gut. But while Gordon, Ley, and their fellow microbial sleuths might have hoped for a core set of organisms that would define the human microbiome, so far the reality is proving far more complicated. While only a few major groups of the world’s bacteria live in the human body, within these groups are countless bacterial species that vary greatly from person to person. “The more people look at it, it seems like an endlessly diverse system,” says Ley. The landscape of the

body presents a wide range of habitats. In the nutrient-rich land of the intestines, communities appear to be fairly stable over time, while early indications show the harsher environment of the skin attracting itinerant communities that come and go. Communities can be as localized as the neighborhoods of a city; the inner elbow contains a different group of residents than the forearm.

Furthermore, in contrast to habitats such as the deep sea, where emigration and immigration are rare events, many microbial communities associated with humans are affected by constant interactions with microorganisms coming in from the environment. Microbes in the gut, for instance, encounter bacteria that ride in on the food we consume. These visitors introduce a huge, unpredictable component that makes any determination of a core microbiome all the more difficult. In order to develop well-framed research questions, it’s crucial that microbi-ologist learn how to differentiate between co-evolved species and these itinerant “tourists.”

What we do know, however, is that our own personal microbiomes tend to be partly inherited — most of us pick up bacteria from our mothers and other family members early in life — and partly shaped by lifestyle. Ley, who has surveyed the gut bacteria of several species, says

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that diet is an important factor in determining the communities that live in an organism. Even with our processed foods and sterilized kitchens, Ley says, humans are not radically different from other animals that share our eating habits.

The individuality of each person’s microbiome might complicate the project of studying human-microbe relationships, but it also presents opportunities — for instance, the possibility that medical treatments could be tailored to a person’s particular microbiota. Much like a genetic profile, a person’s microbiome can be seen as a sort of natural identification tag. As David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, puts it, “It’s a biometric — a signature of who you are and your life experience.” With support from the Human Microbiome Project, Relman is currently developing novel microfluidic devices that can isolate and sequence the genomes of individual bacterial cells. (Extracting genetic information from a complex sample normally mixes together hundreds if not thousands of unique species, so this single-microbe technology could well revolutionize the speed and scope of the entire field of metagenomics.) Personal microbiome information will also have implications for practical concerns, such as how we deploy antibiotics. Might those

antibiotics we down at the first sign of an upset stomach be waging an unjustified civil war? Where do the massive quantities of antibiotics we feed to our livestock ultimately end up, and do they disrupt delicate ecological balances? We have lived with microbes for our entire evolutionary history; how has the widespread use of chemicals that kill them changed those long-forged evolutionary relationships?

FEW PEOPLE ARE more familiar with life’s interdependence and the blurriness of its distinctions than microbiologists. The recent metagenomic studies have revealed a daunting amount of diversity in microbial life, with none of the clear divisions we’re used to in the “macro” world. Among bacteria, the entire concept of species breaks down; it’s difficult for scientists to even categorize what they are seeing. Microbes offer a picture of life that is fluid and ever changing.

To come to terms with this diversity, microbi-ologists are today relinquishing the desire to name names. When studying a community, they no longer focus on developing a roster of who is there; instead, they ask what kinds of genes are present and what their functions are. In the human microbiome, which species we harbor may be less important than what they are doing.

William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin–Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. “We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as human,” he says. Bacteria have been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. But now, he says, it appears that “we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn’t thought about.” It will take a major cultural shift, says Karasov, for nonmicrobiologists who study the human body to begin to take microorganisms seriously as a part of the system. 0


THE YEAR OF SILENCEby Kevin Brockmeier

THAT THE CITY’S WHOLE IMMENSE CAROUSEL OF SOUND SHOULD STOP

AT ONE AND THE SAME MOMENT WAS UNUSUAL, OF COURSE, BUT NOT

EXACTLY INEXPLICABLE.

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SHORTLY AFTER TWO in the afternoon, on Monday, the sixth of April, a few seconds of silence overtook the city. The rattle of the jackhammers, the boom of the transformers, and the whir of the ventilation fans all came to a halt. Suddenly there were no car alarms cutting through the air, no trains scraping over their rails, no steam pipes exhaling their fumes, no peddlers shouting into the streets. Even the wind seemed to hesitate.

We waited for the incident to pass, and when it did, we went about our business. None of us foresaw the repercussions.

2.

THAT THE CITY’S whole immense carousel of sound should stop at one and the same moment was unusual, of course, but not exactly inexplicable. We had witnessed the same phenomenon on a lesser scale at various cocktail parties and interoffice minglers over the years, when the pauses in the conversations overlapped to produce an air pocket of total silence, making us all feel as if we’d been caught eavesdropping on one another. True, no one could remember such a thing happening to the entire city before, but it was not so hard to believe that it would.

3.

A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE were changed by the episode, their lives redirected in large ways or small ones. The editor of a gossip magazine, for instance, came out of the silence determined to substitute the next issue’s lead article about a movie star for one about a fashion model, while her assistant realized that the time had come for her to resign her job and apply for her teaching license. A lifelong vegetarian who was dining in the restaurant outside the art museum decided to order a porterhouse steak, cooked medium rare. A would-be suicide had just finished filling his water glass from the faucet in his bathroom when everything around him seemed to stop moving and the silence passed through him like a wave, bringing with it a sense of peace and clarity he had forgotten he was capable of feeling. He put the pill bottle back in his medicine cabinet.

Such people were the exceptions, though. Most of us went on with our lives as though nothing of any importance had happened until the next incident occurred, some four days later.


4.

THIS TIME THE SILENCE lasted nearly six seconds. Ten million sounds broke off and recommenced like an old engine marking out a pause and catching spark again. Those of us who had forgotten the first episode now remembered it. Were the two occasions connected, we wondered, and if so, how? What was it, this force that could quell all the tumult and noise of the city—and not just the clicking of the subway turnstiles and the snap of the grocery-store awnings, but even the sound of the street traffic, that oceanic rumble that for more than a century had seemed as interminable to us as the motion of the sun across the sky? Where had it come from? And why didn’t it feel more unnatural?

These questions nettled at us. We could see them shining out of one another’s eyes. But a few days passed before we began to give voice to them. The silence was unusual, and we were not entirely sure how to talk about it—not because it was too grave and not because it was too trivial, but because it seemed grave one moment and trivial the next, and so no one was quite able to decide whether it mattered enormously or not at all.

THE TRUTH WAS THAT WE ENJOYED THE SILENCE, AND MORE THAN THAT, WE HUNGERED FOR IT.

5.

A STAND-UP COMEDIAN performing on one of the late-night talk shows was the first of us to broach the subject, albeit indirectly. He waited for a moment in his act when the audience had fallen completely still and then halted in mid-sentence, raising one of his index fingers in a listening gesture. A smile edged its way onto his lips. He gave the pause perhaps one second too long, just enough time for a trace of self-amusement to show on his face, then continued with the joke he had been telling. He could not have anticipated the size of the laugh he would receive.

6.

THE NEXT MORNING’S NEWSPAPERS had already been put to bed by the time the comedian’s routine was broadcast. The morning after that, though, the first few editorials about the silence appeared. Then the radio hosts and TV commentators began to talk about it, and soon enough it was the city’s chief topic of conversation. Every family dinner bent around to it sooner or later, every business lunch, every pillow talk. The bars and health clubs all circulated with bets about the phenomenon: Ten dollars says the government had something to do with it, twenty says it will never happen again.

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When two full weeks went by without another incident, our interest in the matter threatened to shrivel away. It might actually have done so had the next episode not occurred the following Sunday, surprising us all in the middle of our church services. There was another silence, more than ten seconds long, just a couple of days later, and a much shorter silence, like a hiccup, the day after that.

Every time one of the silences came to an end we felt as though we had passed through a long transparent passageway, a tunnel of sorts, one that made the world into which we emerged appear brighter and cleaner than it had before, less troubled, more humane. The silence siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

7.

THE TRUTH WAS that we enjoyed the silence, and more than that, we hungered for it. Sometimes we found ourselves poised in the doorways of our homes in the morning, or on the edges of our car seats as we drove to work, trying to hear something very faint beneath the clatter of sirens and engines. Slowly we realized that what we were waiting for was another incident to take place.

There were weeks when we experienced an episode of silence almost every day. One particular Wednesday saw three of them in the span of a single hour. But there were other weeks when what the papers took to calling a “silence drought” descended upon the city, and all our hopes for a cessation went in vain. If more than a few days passed without some minor lull to interrupt the cacophony, we would become irritable and overtender, quick to gnash at one another and then to rebuke ourselves for our failures of sympathy. On the other hand, a single interlude of silence might generate an aura of fellow feeling that could last for the better part of a day.

The police blotters were nearly empty in the hours following a silence. The drunks in the bars turned amiable and mild. The jails were unusually tranquil. The men who ran the cockfights in the warehouses down by the docks said that their birds lost much of their viciousness after the great roar of the city had stopped, becoming as useless as pigeons, virtually impossible to provoke to violence.

And there was another effect that was just as impressive: the doctors at several hospitals reported that their mortality rates showed a pronounced decline after each incident, and their recovery rates a marked increase. No, the lame did not walk, and the blind did not see, but patients who were on the verge of recuperating from an injury often seemed to turn the corner during an episode, as if the soundlessness had triggered a decision somewhere deep in the cells of their bodies.


Surely the most dramatic example was the woman at Mercy General who came out of a prolonged coma in the space of a five-second silence. First her hand moved, then her face opened up behind her eyes, and soon after the noise of the hospital reemerged, she moistened her lips and said, “Everything sounded exactly the same to me.”

The doctors had a hard time convincing her that she was in fact awake.

8.

THE SILENCE PROVED SO BENEFICIAL to us that we began to wish it would last forever. We envisioned a city where everyone was healthy and thoughtful, radiant with satisfaction, and the sound of so much as a leaf lighting down on the sidewalk was as rare and as startling as a gunshot.

9.

WHO WAS THE FIRST PERSON to suggest that we try generating such a silence ourselves, one that would endure until we chose to end it? No one could remember. But the idea took hold with an astonishing tenacity. Local magazines published laudatory cover stories on the Silence Movement. Leaflets with headings like promote silence and silence = life appeared in our mailboxes. The politicians of both major parties began to champion the cause, and it wasn’t long before a measure was passed decreeing that the city would make every possible effort “to muffle all sources of noise within its borders, so as to ensure a continuing silence for its citizens and their families.”

The first step, and the most difficult, was the dampening of the street traffic. We were encouraged first of all to ride the subway trains, which were appointed with all the latest noise-alleviation devices, including soft-fiber pressure pads and magnetic levitation rails. Most of the cars that were left on the road were equipped with silently running electric engines, while the others had their motors fitted with mineral wool shells that allowed them to operate below the threshold of hearing. The roads themselves were surfaced with a reinforced open-cell foam that absorbed all but the lowest frequency sounds, a material that we also adapted for use on our sidewalks and in our parking garages.

Once the street traffic was taken care of, we turned our attention to the city’s other sources of noise. We sealed the electrical generators behind thick layers of concrete. We placed the air-conditioning equipment in nonresonant chambers. We redesigned the elevators and cargo lifts, replacing their metal components with a clear durable plastic originally developed by zoos as a display barrier to prevent the roars of the lions from reaching the exhibits of the prey animals. Certain noises that weren’t essential to either the basic operations or the general aesthetic texture of the city were simply banned outright: canned music, church bells, fireworks, ring-tones.

10.

WE WERE EXULTANT when the roads fell silent, and pleased when the elevators stopped crying out on their cables, but by the time the cell phones and the pagers ceased to chirp, we were faced with a problem of diminishing returns. The greater the number of sounds we extinguished, the more we noticed the ones that remained, until even the slightest tap or ripple began to seem like an assault against the silence.

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One by one, perhaps, these sounds were of little account, but added together they grew into a single vast sonority, and no matter how many of them we were able to root out, we kept discov-ering others. Now and then, while we were working to eliminate the noise of a match taking light or a soda can popping open, another episode of true silence would occur, a bubble of total peace and calm enwrapping the city in its invisible walls, and we would be reminded of the magnitude of what we were striving for.

How inexcusably flimsy, we realized, was the quiet we had managed to create. We redoubled our efforts.

11.

WE WERE MORE RESOURCEFUL than we had imagined. It seemed that for every noise that cropped up, there was at least one person in the city who was prepared to counteract it. An engineer bothered by the medical helicopter that beat by his office a dozen times a day drew up plans for a special kind of rotor blade, one that would slice through the air as smoothly as a pin sliding into a pincushion. He handed the plans over to the hospital. Within a few weeks the helicopter drifted so quietly past his window that he was surprised each time he saw it there. A single mother raising an autistic son who was provoked to fits of punching by the tone of her doorbell devised an instrument that replaced the sound with a pulsing light. She said that her son liked to sit on the floor watching now as she pressed the button again and again, a wobbly grin spreading over his face like a pool of molasses. A carpenter designed a nail gun that would soak up the noise of its own thud. A schoolteacher created a frictionless pencil sharpener. An antiques dealer who liked to dabble in acoustic engineering invented a sonic filter that could comb the air of all its sounds before releasing it into a room.

Eventually every noise but the muffled sigh of our breathing and the ticking of our teeth in our mouths had been removed from the inside of our buildings. The wind continued to blow, and the rain continued to fall, and no one had yet proposed a method to keep the birds from singing, but as long as we did not venture outside, we remained sealed in a cocoon of silence.

A clock ticking inside a plastic casing.

Water replenishing itself in a toilet tank.

A rope slapping languidly against a flagpole.

A garbage disposal chopping at a stream of running water.

A modem squealing its broken tune.

A deodorizer releasing its vapor into the air.

An ice maker’s slow cascade of thumps.

THE GREATER THE NUMBER OF SOUNDS WE EXTINGUISHED, THE MORE WE NOTICED THE ONES THAT REMAINED, UNTIL EVEN THE SLIGHTEST TAP OR RIPPLE BEGAN TO SEEM LIKE AN ASSAULT AGAINST THE SILENCE.


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12.

THERE WERE TIMES when the silence was close to perfect. Whole minutes went by after the early morning light breached the sky when the surging, twisting world of sound left us completely alone, and we could lie there in our beds simply following our ruminations. We came to know ourselves better than we had before—or if not better, then at least in greater stillness. It was easier for us to see the shapes we wished our lives to take. People changed their jobs, took up chess or poker, began new courses of exercise. A great many couples made their marriage vows, and not a few others filed for divorce. One boy, an eight-year-old who attended the Holy Souls Parochial Academy, left school as the rest of his class was walking to the lunchroom, rode the subway to the natural history museum, and found his way to the dinosaur exhibit. He waited until the room had emptied out and then stole beneath the tyrannosaurus, using the giant ribs of the skeleton to climb up to the skull. He was found there late that evening by a security guard, sitting hungry but uninjured on the smoothly curving floor of the jaw. The boy had left a note in his teacher’s paper tray explaining himself. He had dreamed that the dinosaur was still roaring, the note said, but so weakly that the sound could only be heard from directly inside its head. He wanted to find out if it was true.


13.

THE BOY WHO CLIMBED the tyrannosaurus was not the first of us to feel that his dreams were blending together with his reality. There was something about the luxuriousness of our situation that made it tempting to imagine that the space outside our heads was conforming to the space inside. Yet we did not really believe that this was so. It was just that we were seeing everything with a greater clarity now, both our minds and our surroundings, and the clarity had become more important to us than the division.

14.

THE SILENCE was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured. Every so often another natural episode would take place, and for a few seconds the character of the silence would change slightly, the way the brightness of a room might alter as some distant roller in the current surged through a lightbulb, but the quiet we had generated was so encompassing by now that only the most sensitive among us could be sure that something had truly happened.

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15.

IN THE ABUNDANT SILENCE we proceeded into ourselves. We fell asleep each night, woke each morning, and went about our routines each day, doing the shopping and preparing our tax returns, making love and cooking dinner, filing papers and cupping our palms to our mouths to check the smell of our breath, all in the beautiful hush of the city. Everywhere we could see the signs of lives in fluctuation.

A librarian who had worked in the periodicals room for almost three decades began displaying her oil paintings at an art gallery—hundreds of them, all on lending slips she had scavenged from the library’s in/out tray, each tiny piece of paper flexed with the weight of the paint that had hardened onto it. The fliers at the gallery door proclaimed that the woman had never had the nerve to show her work before the silence was established.

A visiting gymnast giving an exhibition on the pommel horse at the midtown sports club fractured his wrist while doing a routine scissor movement. But up until the moment of the accident, he reported, the audience in the city was the most respectful he had ever seen, barely a cough or a rustle among them.

16.

GRADUALLY, as we grew used to the stillness, the episodes of spontaneous and absolute silence came less frequently. There might be a three-second burst one week, followed by a one-second flicker a few weeks later, and then, if the episodes were running exceptionally heavy, another one-second echo a week or two after that.

One of the physicists at the city’s Lakes and Streams Commission came up with what he called a “skipping-rock model” to describe the pattern. The distribution of the silences, he suggested, was like that of a rock skipping over the water and then, if one could imagine such a thing, doubling back and returning to shore. At first such a rock would land only rarely, but as it continued along its path, it would strike down more and more rapidly, until eventually the water would seize it and it would sink. But then, according to the paradigm, the rock would be ejected spontaneously through the surface to repeat its journey in reverse, hitting the water with increasing rarity until it landed back in the hand of the man who had thrown it.

The physicist could not explain why the silence had adopted this behavior—or who, if anyone, had thrown it—he could only observe that it had.

17.

SOME EIGHT MONTHS after the first incident took place, it had been so long since anyone had noticed one of the episodes that it seemed safe to presume they were finished.

The city was facing an early winter. Every afternoon a snow of soft, fat flakes would drift gently down from the sky, covering the trees and the pavilions, the mailboxes and the parking meters, the streets and the sidewalks. Recalling the way the snow used to soften the noise of the traffic made us experience a flutter of helpless nostalgia. Everything was different now. The sound of our footsteps creaking over the fresh accumulation was like a horde of crickets scraping their wings together in an empty room.

Not until we walked through the snow did we really discover how accustomed we had grown to the silence.

THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THE LUXURIOUSNESS OF OUR SITUATION THAT MADE IT TEMPTING TO IMAGINE THAT THE SPACE OUTSIDE OUR HEADS WAS CONFORMING TO THE SPACE INSIDE.


20.

THE CRYPTOGRAPHER’S theory bore all the earmarks of lunacy, and few of us pretended to accept it, but it was, at least, a theory. Every so often another event would transpire, interrupting the stillness with a burst of shouts and rumbles, and we would stop whatever we were doing, our arms and shoulders braced as if against some invisible blow, and wonder what was going on. Many of us began to look forward to these eruptions of sound. We dreamed about them at night. We awaited them with a feeling of great thirst. The head of the city’s notary public department, for instance, missed the noise of the Newton’s Cradle he kept in his office, the hanging metal balls clicking tac-tac-tac against each other as they swayed back and forth. The cabdriver who

began his circuit outside the central subway terminal every morning wished that he was still able to punch his horn at the couriers who skimmed so close to his bumper on their bicycles. The woman who ran the Christian gift store in the shopping mall designed a greeting card with an illustration of a trio of kittens playing cymbals, bagpipes, and a tuba on the front. The interior caption read make a joyful noise unto the lord. She printed out a hundred copies to stock by the cash register, along with twenty-three more to mail to the members of her Sunday school class.

18.

WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN content to go on as we were forever, whole generations of us being born into the noiseless world, learning to crawl and stand and tie our shoes, growing up and then apart, setting our pasts aside, and then our futures, and finally dying and becoming as quiet in our minds as we had been in our bodies, had it not been for another event that came to pass.

It was shortly after nine a.m., on Tuesday, January the twenty-sixth, when a few seconds of sound overtook the city. There was a short circuit in the system of sonic filters we had installed in our buildings, and for a moment the walls were transparent to every noise. The engine of a garbage truck backfired. A cat began to yowl. A rotten limb dropped from a tree and shattered the veneer of ice over a pond. Ten thousand people suddenly struck their knees on the corner of a desk or remembered a loss they had forgotten or slid into an orgasm beneath the bodies of their lovers and cried out in pain or grief or sexual ecstasy.

The period of noise was abrupt and explosive, cleanly defined at both its borders. Instinctively we found ourselves twisting around to look for its source. Then the situation corrected itself, and just like that we were reabsorbed in the silence.

It seemed that the city had been opened like a tin can. So much time had gone by since we had heard our lives in their full commotion that we barely recognized the sound for what it was. The ground might have fallen in. The world might have ended.

19.

FOUR DAYS LATER another such incident occurred, this one almost eight seconds long. It was followed the next week by a considerably shorter episode, as brief as a coal popping in a fire, which was itself followed a few days later by a fourth episode, and immediately after by a fifth and a sixth, and early the next afternoon by a seventh.

We were at a loss to account for the phenomenon.A cryptographer employed by the police force announced his belief that both the episodes of

silence and the episodes of clamor resembled communications taking the form of Morse code, though from whom or what he could not say. A higher intelligence? The city itself? Any answer he might give would be no more than speculation. His hunch was that the sender, whoever it was, had resorted to using noise because we had ceased to take note of the silence. He said that he was keeping a record of the dots and dashes and hoped to be able to decipher the message very soon.

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23.

THE CITY COUNCIL DRAFTED a measure to abolish the silence initiative. After a preliminary period of debate and consideration, it was adopted by common consent. The work of breaking the city’s silence was not nearly as painstaking as the work of establishing it had been. With the flip of a few switches and the snip of a few wires, the sonic filters that had sheltered our buildings were disabled, opening our walls up to every birdcall and thunderclap. Scrapers and bulldozers tore up the roads, and spreading machines laid down fresh black asphalt. The cloth was unwound from the clappers of the church bells. The old city buses were rolled out of the warehouses. A fireworks stand was erected by the docks, and a gun club opened up behind the outlet mall. A man in a black suit carried an orange crate into the park one evening to preach about the dangers of premarital sex. A man with a tattoo of a teardrop on his cheek set three crisply folded playing cards on a table and began shuffling them in intersecting circles, calling out to the people who walked by that he would offer two dollars, two clean new, green new George Washington dollar bills, to anyone who could find that lovely lady, that lady in red, the beautiful queen of hearts.

24.

IN A MATTER OF WEEKS, we could hear cell phones ringing in restaurants again, basketballs slapping the pavement, car stereos pouring their music into the air. Everywhere we went we felt a pleasurable sense of agitation. And if our interactions with each other no longer seemed like the still depths of secluded pools, where enormous fish stared up at the light sifting down through the water—well, the noise offered other compensations.

21.

IT TURNED OUT that in spite of everything the silence had brought us, there was a hidden longing for sound in the city. So many of us shared in this desire that a noise club began operating, tucked away in the depths of an abandoned recording studio. The people who went to the club did so for the pure excitement of it, for the way the din set their hearts to beating. Who needed serenity, they wanted to know? Who had ever asked for it? They stood in groups listening to the club’s switchboard operator laying sound upon sound in the small enclosed space of the

room. The slanting note of a violin. The pulse of an ambulance siren. Gallons of water geysering from an open hydrant. A few thousand football fans cheering at a stadium.

Afterward, when the club’s patrons arrived home, they lay on their pillows unable to fall asleep, their minds spinning with joy and exhilaration.

22.

THE EPISODES CONTINUED into the spring, falling over the city at intervals none of us could predict. Whenever we became most used to the silence, it seemed, the fundamental turmoil of the world would break through the tranquility and present itself to us again. More and more people began to prefer these times of disruption. They made us feel like athletes facing a game, like soldiers who had finished their training, capable of accomplishing great things in battle. A consensus slowly gathered among us. We had given up something important, we believed: the fire, the vigor, that came with a lack of ease. We had lost some of the difficulty of our lives, and we wanted it back.

IT TURNED OUT THAT IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING THE SILENCE HAD BROUGHT US, THERE WAS A HIDDEN LONGING FOR SOUND IN THE CITY.


We became more headstrong, more passionate. Our sentiments were closer to the surface. Our lives seemed no less purposeful than they had during the silence, but it was as if that purpose were waiting several corners away from us now, rather than hovering in front of our eyes.

For a while the outbreaks of sound continued to make themselves heard over the noise of the city, just as the outbreaks of silence had, but soon it became hard to distinguish them from the ongoing rumble of the traffic. There were a few quick flashes of noise during the last week of May, but if they carried on into the summer, we failed to notice them. In their place were dogs tipping over garbage cans, flatbed trucks beeping as they backed out of alleys, and fountains spilling into themselves again and again.

The quiet that sometimes fell over us in movie theaters began to seem as deep as any we had ever known. We had a vague inkling that we had once experienced our minds with a greater intimacy, but we could not quite recover the way it had felt.

25.

EVERY DAY the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behind, like the imprints of vanished shells in the crust of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation. That and a short item published in the Thursday, July the eighth edition of the morning newspaper, a letter detailing the results of the log the police department’s cryptographer had been keeping, a repeating series of dots and dashes whose meaning was explicit, he said, but whose import he could not fathom.

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Dot, dash, dot, dot. Dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot. Dash. Dot. Dash, dot. Dot, dash, dash. Dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot. 0


DERRICK JENSEN

Derrick Jensen is the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, and A Language Older than Words. He writes for Orion, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.

COURTNEY HUMPHRIES

Courtney Humphries is the author of Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan...And the World, and a contributing editor for Harvard Magazine. She has tackled topics from the inner workings of a synapse to the psychology of shopping looks for stories that show the hidden meanings and paradoxes in our world.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of Things That Fall from the Sky, and two children’s novels, City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories.

CHRISTINE GRAY

Christine Gray was born in Fairfield, CA in 1980. She lives in Richmond, Virginia and is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her most recent body of work focuses on the American myth of the seeker, traveling alone through untouched landscapes in search of a revelatory experience of the divine.

AUSTIN BUNN

Austin Bunn’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the anthologies The Pushcart Prize, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Best American Fantasy; The New York Times Magazine; and elsewhere.

AMY IRVINE

Amy Irvine is a sixth generation Utahn and now lives in southwest Colorado. Her second book, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, won the 2009 Orion Book Award and the 2009 Colorado Book Award.

EDITOR Tory Fabian

ASSISTANT EDITOR Emmit Mone

DESIGNER Shea Cadrin

COPY EDITOR Luke Russell

PHOTO EDITOR Anna Tetreault

ILLUSTRATOR Owen Ackley

INTERN Micaela Sweeney

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