Raymond Antrobus

What you need will come to you at the right time says the tarot card I overturned at my friend Nathalie’s house one evening. I was wondering if she said something worth hearing,What? I’m looking at her face, trying to read it, not a clue what she said but I’ll just say yeah and hope. Me, Tabitha, and her aunt are waffling in Waffle House by the Mississippi River. Tabitha’s aunt is all mumble. She either said Do you want a pancake? or You look melancholic. The less I hear the bigger the swamp, so I smile and nod while my head becomes a faint foghorn, a lost river. Why wasn’t I asking her to microphone? When you tell someone you read lips you become a mysterious captain. You watch their brains navigate channels with BSL interpreters in the 
corner of night TV. Sometimes it’s hard to get back the smooth sailing and you go down with the whole conversation. I’m a haze of broken jars, a purple bucket and only I know there’s a hole in it. On Twitter @justnoxy tweets I can’t watchTV/ movies / without subtitles. It’s just too hard to follow. I’m just sitting there pretending and it’s just not worth it. I tweet back you not being able to follow is not your failure. It’s weird, giving the advice you need to someone else, weird as thinking my American friend said I move through London like a Hotep when she actually said I’m used to London life with no sales tax. Deanna (my friend who owns crystals and mentions the existence of multiple moons) says I should write about my mishearings, she thinks it’ll make a good book for her bathroom. I am still afraid I have grown up missing too much information. I think about that episode of The Twilight Zone where an old man walks around the city bar selling bric-a-brac from his suitcase, knowing what people need — scissors, a leaky pen, a bus ticket, combs. In the scene, music is playing loud, meaning if I were in that bar I would miss the mysticism while the old man’s miracles make the barman say WOAH, this guy is from another planet!

1 My ear amps whistle like they are singing to Echo, goddess of noise, the raveled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs of dull doorbells, sounds swamped in my misty hearing aid tubes. Gaudí believed in holy sound and built a cathedral to contain it, pulling hearing men from their knees as though atheism is a kind of deafness. Who would turn down God? Even though I have not heard the golden decibels of angels, I have been living in a noiseless palace where the doorbell is pulsating light and I am able to answer. 2 What? a word that keeps looking in mirrors like it is in love with its own volume. What? I am a one-word question, a one-man patience test. What? What language would we speak without ears? What? Is paradise a world where I hear everything? What? How will my brain know what to hold if it has too many arms? 3 The day I clear out my dead father’s flat, I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl. I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf, smudged green label Raymond Speaking. I play the tape in his vintage cassette player and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob and dad’s laughter crackling in the background not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus” and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids. Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — Antrob Antrob Antrob 4 And no one knew what I was missing until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos and said to put a brick on the table every time I heard a sound. After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary, call it the reason I sat in saintly silence during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached the good news, I only heard as Babylon’s babbling echoes. 5 And if you don’t catch nothing then something wrong with your ears — they been tuned to de wrong frequency — Kei Miller