Microbial Hearing

"Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say," I muttered under my breath. My therapist pulled out a pen and furiously wrote on her pad.

The room was clean and simple. There was white furniture in the room. We sat across from each other in chairs. She had on her desk one of those bird toys, the one with the long stick for a neck, and it drops its head down as if to catch worms or water. The toy was bopping its head back and forth.

I said, "No sound can travel in space, I know that. You know that. But sonifications can give us new insight and new ways of experiencing data. Sonifcations can make it possible for blind people to listen to astronomical images."

My therapist, Dr. Wendy Turmaine, put her pad to the side. She was a therapist employed by NASA. She said, "Andrew, I am amazed by your journeys into space, really. Your service as an astronaut is incredible and inspiring. But I know, and you know, that you're just trying to distract me. So let's dial things back and start with the tinnitus. When did you start having tinnitus?"

I slumped in my chair. I took a big gulp of water. When I set the glass down, it made a nice crisp sound. I said, "We've gone over this a lot, but it started when I was in space, on that mission."

"Tell me the story again."

I said, "There was a wire on an outside panel that was loose. A repair needed to be made. I went out to fix it and tighten some nuts and bolts. While I was out there, I could hear my own breathing and my fellow astronauts on the radio. It's not completely silent when you're in a spacesuit. You're not in a vacuum of space."

Dr. Turmaine shuffled some papers. "You had perfectly good hearing up to this point, correct?"

"Yes, that's right, my hearing was perfect," I said. "Everything was standard procedure before I did basic maintenance on the outside panel. Elaina said something on the radio, but I couldn't catch it. Her signal went in and out. I think she was trying to warn me that we were heading into some rubbish."

I took another gulp of water. "There was something brown and small, like clumps of dirt that were floating around the shuttle. There were clumps of paper. A banana peel. I think someone at some point had tossed the contents of a trash can outside. I remember tilting my head to avoid a stapler."

I swirled the water in my cup. "Anyway, for whatever reason, while we were going through that section of trash, my ears started hearing tones. They were long-sustaining tones, sometimes low in pitch, and sometimes really high. It was stronger in my left ear. I didn't think much of it at the time. I fixed the wire and then went back inside."

"And that's when it became clear to you that something wasn't right with your hearing, correct?" Dr. Turmaine asked. She pushed her glasses up to rest higher on her nose.

"I wasn't paying attention to it at first. I was focused on our mission. I had a conversation with Elaina when I got back on board. Everything seemed normal. I momentarily forgot about my ears."

Dr. Turmaine crossed her legs. She always wore clothes in white, black, or brown. Today it was brown. She pushed her glasses up again. "So your hearing issue stopped?" she said.

"No, I think I tolerated it," I replied. "I do remember that it got progressively worse over the next two weeks. I had ringing in my ears. Sometimes one or the other ear would be overwhelmed by a blast of tones, as if I had submerged my head into a bell, if that makes sense. Other times it sounded like crinkly wind."

"Okay... and how was Elania at this time?" Dr. Turmaine popped her knuckles.

I sat my cup back on the table. "Elania said she felt stretched. She was worried that she had spent too much time in space, and it was too much on her body. She'd been on the shuttle for about six months, I believe."

"What about Joanna... can you describe her relationships with the rest of the crew?"

I moved forward in my chair. I rubbed my temples. "Yeah, she was for the most part likable. Joanna got along with Elania. They both grew up in Oregon, so they could bond over that. James and Joanna seemed cordial; they didn't really talk much. Svet was flirtatious with her. Conny was funny and got along with everybody."

Dr. Turmaine had a serious look on her face. Granted, she normally looks serious. "So there was no ill will from the crew?" she said as more of a statement than a question.

I said, "NASA does a lot of tests to make sure people get along up in space. You have to have the right team synergy."

"And you got along with Joanna?" Dr. Turmaine asked in her definite statement way.

I nodded my head in agreement. "I very much enjoyed Joanna's company."

The doctor took her pen and put it between her fingers. She tapped it in quick succession on her pad. "Could you rank people by your most favorite to least favorite?" She said this as more of a demand than a question.

"Yeah, let me think for a moment." I dropped my head in my hands and massaged my forehead. "Okay, Elaina was my favorite. Joanna second. Conny third. Svet fourth. And James fifth."

"Interesting," she said while fidgeting with her pen. "So you liked your female colleagues more than your male colleagues?"

"Well, the women were pretty focused and agreeable. You could depend on them. Svet doesn't have as much experience. James is really smart but a loner. I mean, James would keep to himself, so he wasn't a bother. I liked everyone. Just because Svet and James have my lowest rankings doesn't mean I disliked them or suspected them of wrongdoing."

Dr. Turmaine wrote furiously on her pad. She looked up from her notes. She said, "Can you walk me through what was your mission?"

I leaned back in my seat. I wanted to make myself comfortable because I was certain the therapy session was going to be a long one. I said, "We were on a mission to work with robots to mine asteroids for materials. It takes about 30 to 35 days to get from Mars to the Asteroid Belt. We'd work to find asteroids that we wanted to mine and have robots go to them to take samples. The spacecraft acted as a loading dock for the robots. We'd take what we'd find and bring it back to the base on Mars. Our spacecraft was in a safe spot away from the Belt but in close range for the bots."

"Do you think anyone had ill will toward Joanna? Did anyone become burdened by the mission?"

I sighed. "No, we're all professionals. We're trained to spend a lot of time in space. We're trained to combat loneliness. We've all grown up as children of astronauts who made it to Mars. I don't think anyone was emotionally or mentally burdened. If we ever needed to turn back home, it would take about a month." I paused. I thought about each crew member's face. "There was no ill will toward Joanna on that ship."

The doctor pulled out an audio recorder. "Do you mind if I record this part of the session?" She asked in a kinder way than her usual stick-to-business approach.

"Yes, that's okay."

Dr. Turmaine hit the record button. She asked, "How do you think Joanna died?"

I took a deep breath. "I don't think she was murdered. I think whatever it was... it was related to my tinnitus. It was also related to Elania's severe osteopenia. It was related to James' evergrowing loneliness."

Doctor Turmaine asked, "How do you determine that? Why would Svet and Conny not have issues?"

I rolled my eyes and sighed. "Maybe they had no distinguishable issues. Maybe their issues were below the surface."

The doctor scanned papers in front of her. "You think everything was connected?" She asked as more of a statement.

"I know everything was connected." I was getting really tired of this questioning.

"Could you explain?"

"Let's go back to what I said at the beginning of our chat. Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space. But did you know things can live in the vacuum of space?"

She shook her head. "That sounds impossible."

I straightened up in my chair. I said, "Tardigrades. They're known as water bears or moss piglets. They're eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They look like larvae ghosts. They eat lichen and mosses. They can only be seen using a microscope. They work as a pioneer species because they develop new environments. They amazingly can survive microgravity and cosmic radiation exposure. But they need food to set up shop."

"So you think tardigrades were the cause of all the problems?" One eyebrow on the doctor's face shot up, indicating she was very confused.

"No, not even remotely," I said while shaking my head. "My point is that tardigrades prove that animals can exist in the vacuum of space. This leaves room for the possibility that there are all kinds of microscopic things living in space. Or things we just don't know are there and not necessarily microscopic." I paused for a moment to drink some water. "Multiple tests have been done to see what can live in space. I'm talking bacteria, archaea, fungui, algae, lichens, viruses, and yeasts. A field of cells is a field of communication."

"What do you mean by a field of cells is a field of communication?" The doctor was genuinely confused, but she spoke in a clinical tone.

"Let's talk about trees for a moment," I said. I got up and walked over to a computer-generated painting on the wall. It was of a forest. "You see, a tree has a better shot of living in a network of trees than alone. More than a century ago, ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered that trees communicate their needs and send each other nutrients through a complex network of latticed fungui buried in the soil. Trees talk to each other to live. And when they all live together, it invites more organisms, just like in this painting where you have hidden animals everywhere—birds, foxes, rabbits, frogs, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, badgers. If the appropriate latticed fungui network is there, everything falls into place."

The doctor turned ever so slightly to face the painting. She ever so subtlely studied it with her eyes. "So there is a latticed fungui network in the Asteroid Belt?" The doctor said as a statement even though, yet again, she had phrased it as a question.

I studied the images in the painting. It was a dark forest with many hidden objects. "What I know is on a microbial level, cells communicate with each other. Normal adults have ten times as many microbial cells as they do human cells in their bodies. Whatever happened in space was part of a communication network on the cellular level. The big question is whether the cells communicate in and of themselves or if a consciousness outside of them is what calls the shots."

"And you think this led to Joanna's death?"

I slid my hand across the painting."Imagine someone taking a paint scrapper to a canvas and slicing off large sections of the painting," I said. "There was a communication chain reaction among cells that caused Joanna to explode from the inside out. It happened when the other passengers of the spacecraft were asleep. Joanna was on duty watching the robots. It was her shift. She didn't kill herself and her crewmates didn't kill her either."

The doctor stared at me. "So then why did her crew eject her body from the ship?"

I sat back in my chair. "Joanna exploded," I repeated. "We carefully gathered her remains, put them in a spacesuit, and ejected her body. We were afraid she was contaminated. NASA ordered that we clean and sanitize everything. We waited until the robots were finished with the asteroids and got back on the ship before we returned to Mars."

Dr. Turmaine opened her briefcase and pulled out a folder. "I have printed screenshots from the video feed of when Joanna died. Will you take a look at them? I think you need to see something."

I started to feel a tension headache forming. I said, "Yeah, just... when I start thinking about Joanna my ears start ringing really loud and the headaches return."

"I know it's a trigger for you, and we can stop our session at any time you want. If I can understand this situation better, I can help you come up with a treatment plan and ways to manage your symptoms," the doctor said kindly but firmly.

"I think I'd rather talk about tinnitus than look at pictures of Joanna... How is it that scientists have figured out how to get people as far as the Asteroid Belt, but we still don't have a cure for tinnitus? Ringing, whistling, clicking, roaring. Are these really malfunctioning hearing symptoms or are they auditory illusions?"

The doctor leaned forward in her chair. "Are you hearing things now?"

"My ears have been buzzing this entire session. How can hearing loss be associated with hearing things that aren't actually there? It's so freakishly loud! Sometimes it makes a song. There is one hum—it's this loud distinct pitch. I've tried to find it on my piano at home, but it's a stubborn note. I can't find the pitch, not in traditional music. But this one note... I hear it all the time."

Dr. Turmaine stood up. She went over to an air purifier and turned it on. She also picked up chimes off her desk. "I think you needed more white noise. It was too quiet in here, so the noises in your ears were more noticeable." She sat down in her seat. "I am glad that you've been working with an otolaryngologist."

"I didn't really have a choice. NASA wants to closely observe my ears after that mission," I said.

The doctor stroked the chimes as if she were petting a cat. "Do you want to go back into space?"

"I think NASA would be happy if I did. I'm not ready. I've been having nightmares. I wake up in the middle of the night with my ears tingling." I massaged my temples.

Dr. Turmaine stroked the chimes again. "It's Joanna, right?"

"Yeah, it's Joanna. I'm having a hard time accepting that she's dead. She was a bright, cheerful person. My brain can't understand the juxtaposition of her being so excited, curious, and full of life... and the next day... she's slime." I shuttered. "I don't get it, and a part of me thinks she is still alive and what I saw wasn't her. I know it was her. She exploded."

Dr. Turmaine slid a box of tissues toward me. "No one is immune to grief. It can do incredibly strange things to us. Grief puts our minds into a heightened state of awareness."

"Grief is a field of communication," I said. "Grief lights up all the microbes in us. It's like a black hole in the gut. Grief swamps the labyrinth of our guts."

The doctor bit her bottom lip. She held the chimes tightly so they wouldn't make a sound. She said, "That's an interesting way of looking at it—grief as a field of communication. As your ear doctor has noted in your file—anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbances are all present in those who suffer from annoyingly strong tinnitus."

"We know why I'm anxious, and yeah, my hearing issues suck. But it's better than being on a fast track to osteoporosis in your 30s. Elaina had to retire. She's going through all sorts of tests to regain her bone density. That mission fractured every person." Tears started pouring down my face. It hit me like a lightning bolt. Memories knocked me around. "Nothing... nothing of her beautiful face was left. Doc, everything above the neck was destroyed. Fluids were floating in the air. Her hands... her hands!"

The doctor set the chimes on the coffee table between us. She came over and pulled me into a hug. I cried on her shoulder. I blurted, "Her hands were floating!"

The doctor pat my back. "Try to take a deep breath. Ground yourself. You're not on the spacecraft anymore. You're at Dr. Turmaine's office. You're with Wendy Turmaine, your therapist."

I kept crying. I said, "No one heard her scream. Nothing. It was so messy... I can still hear the vacuum we used to suck up her remains. I can't get that noise out of my head!" Tears and snot were coming down fast. The doctor handed me a tissue.

I wiped my face and then I discarded the tissue on the table. I put my hands on my ears. I slid down onto the floor; I was on my knees. "That awful sound won't go away! The whir of the vacuum we used won't leave me alone... I can't stop thinking about her face." I pulled more tissues from the box on the table and cried.

Doctor Turmaine said, "The situation really was horrible, and there is still so much we don't understand. Your feelings are valid; don't push them down. You went through something terrible."

"The whole thing makes me feel sick. Sometimes I throw up in the middle of the day." I wiped tears off my face.

"Do you need to lie down? Are you feeling sick now?"

I didn't answer her.

"Come with me then." She had me move over to the couch. It was comforting to lay down. I covered my face with my hands and wept.

"You've had a really big breakthrough today," she said. "This is the first time you've been able to talk in detail about Joanna. I'm proud of you. You're making progress. I want to help you calm down before we end this session."

"How can you possibly calm me down?" I asked. "I can remember the smell of that spacecraft after she died. The horrible month as we trekked back to Mars. I can't look at people without thinking about them exploding. And you wanted me to look at pictures of the scene?"

Dr. Turmaine stood next to the couch. "You're not ready to see them yet. One day you will be. I hoped bringing them up would get you talking."

"But why would I ever want to see them?"

The doctor handed me pillows and a blanket. "There is something your mind is refusing to let you see. You're protecting yourself. Your brain is creating auditory illusions to protect your secret."

I sat forward to face the doctor. "Answer me this, doc. Why do all these sounds in my head sound digital? High pitched tones, electrical buzzing, and incessant ringing?"

"I'm not your ear doctor. I'm your therapist. I think your answers will come by managing your symptoms and also by labeling them. You can't understand what happened because it happened in a third space, one your mind created. Your mind filled that third space with the sounds you'd expect to take that place. You're stuck in the McGurk Effect. Your sensory integration is off because you're trying to protect yourself. The other astronauts heard Joanna scream, but you say you didn't. You were tuned into something else. You were having sleep disturbances in the days leading up to Joanna's death, correct?"

"Yes, sleep paralysis. I felt like I was awake, but I couldn't move and these barely visible shadows would loom over me."

The doctor walked over to the windows. She closed the curtains. She said, "I think we can help you find a sense of calm and ways to navigate this terrible episode in your life by having you listen to music based on auditory illusions. I think this could effectively release you from the brainwashing your ears have done to you."

I squeezed my hands into fists. "I'm sorry, are you implying Joanna didn't die?"

"She in fact died. But you weren't asleep when it happened. You saw it happen. That's all I'm going to tell you for now. Your brain is protecting you from seeing certain parts of this episode."

I rested my head on a pillow. "Should I really test the waters to try and unlock that vault?"

"The problem, Andrew, is if you don't have a good handle on your vault, it could torture you in different ways. You might reenact things related to the event. You might have a fugue. Your brain may overwork itself to protect you. Your thoughts could be intrusive and prevent you from going forward. It's best if we can find a way to reach that core memory."

"That makes sense to me."

"Good, it's not the easiest thing to understand. I want you to know that I do believe you. I believe all of this is connected." Dr. Turmaine paused as if she was hit by a sudden realization. "Tell me, where are your thoughts presently?"

I mumbled, "I'm trying desperately to only focus on your words, but I keep replaying scenes from the mission."

"Okay then." She sat in a chair; it was clear that she was trying to decide what she wanted to say. "Have you heard of the Shepard–Risset tone or scale?"

"No? What's that?"

"It's an auditory illusion," she said. "It's kind of hard for me to explain. It's named after Roger Shepard, a cognitive scientist who lived more than a century ago. If I remember right, it's a sound with a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves."

"Okay, that's something I can follow from physics classes and music training."

"Great," the doctor said. She got up and walked to her desk. "When played with the bass pitch, the tones move up and down. The illusion is that a tone is continually ascending or descending in pitch... but in actuality, it is never getting lower or higher. I think it's like your tone that you can't find."

I could feel myself sinking into the couch. "You can help me find the tone?"

"Yes, I think so." She rummaged through her desk. "21st-century composers played with the idea of Shepard tones. I'd like for you to listen to a song from one of them to see how you respond to it."

Dr. Turmaine picked up a small music device with speakers. "I'd like to play a song for you now."

"We can give it a try." I felt like the couch was about to swallow me.

Dr. Turmaine went through her music library and selected a piano song. "This is Sumo Kobayashi's 'Unreal Rain.'" She placed the device on the end table next to the couch. "Close your eyes, relax, and consider what visuals you would put to this song."

++++++

I did as she told me. There were the slightest dings of a piano. I had my hands over my eyes. My eyes were closed too. I randomly cried. I kept replaying a vivid memory. I distinctly remember Joanna's spacesuit full of her remains. I remember watching it drift toward the Asteroid Belt. We, the astronauts, used an expensive spacesuit as a body bag.

The dings of the piano. The fluttering of it was hard to ignore; it was impossible to concentrate on anything else. My mind was flooded with images of a small white ball bouncing down a spiral staircase. Then there were the woods. It was an idyllic snowy woodland. The ball rolled down a path of ice. I looked up to the sky, and there was an aurora borealis. Colors everywhere in the sky: neon green, magenta, cyan, and silver.

The ball went down a cone of ice. It made indentations in the ice as it traveled in circles, descending lower and lower until it went out a small hole at the bottom.

I followed the ball down the hole, and when I came out the other side, I was in another cone. I was in an hourglass made of ice. The other side was much bigger, like a spacious snow globe. It was daylight on the other side.

Animals frolicked in the snow. They looked like creatures who had escaped impressionist paintings. The red fox moved from spot to spot as if the wind carried him. He was elegant, and his tail was bushy.

I lay in the snow. High above me, birds were flying in a perfect circle. All of the birds were different colors and sizes.

The clouds were cascading. Their forms looked like waterfalls. The clouds were descending and ascending forever. It was both beautiful and terrifying.

I stood up, and the birds circled around me. They moved fast. I could barely discern their different wings, beaks, and claws. A cacophony of colorful feathers was all around me. When I opened my hand, the ball was resting on my palm.

The birds formed towering walls of stained glass. The stained glass went up forever. There were thousands of detailed images on the glass, but it kept growing up and everything was moving so fast, that I couldn't discern the images.

There were rays of color everywhere as light went through the glass. I felt like I was trapped in a cylinder, or I was at the bottom of a well. There was a circle at the end of the cylinder. I could see the clouds, and the moon—it came into alignment with the opening.

Cards fell from the sky. They were Poker cards, the kind where no matter which direction you pick vertically, the court cards always look up and down. The real image and the mirror image—sewn together.

Flowers popped up out of the snowy ground. Flora was everywhere. Vines were forming at a quick speed. Everything was growing fast and in a chaotic, directionless way. The stained glass cylinder started breaking down into shards, and those shards looked like constellations and galaxy clusters.

The flowers and vines overtook everything. Then trees popped up out of the ground. Snow was coming down hard. The whole terrain was growing in size. The ball that was in my hand floated above me.

There was one massive tree that came up out of the ground. It was both tall and wide. It was bigger than any tree I'd ever seen. There were windows built into the tree. There were ladders going in directions that I couldn't discern. There were ladders all along and around the tree. A cat with one eye appeared before the monstrous pine.

The ball bounced along a path. The cat took the ball and put it where it had a missing eye.

The cat waited at the entrance of the towering tree. It was flicking its tail, and I could never tell which way it was flicking its tail.

Then with the last section of piano notes, there were all these visuals that moved too fast and were too hard to discern. They were in colors I had never seen. Everything was spiraling and standing in place all at once.

At that point, I had a very strange thought—it was a thought that I still don't fully understand. I thought in my lucid state: "The Shepard tone does exist, and if it's in an hourglass then it exists at the inverse of peak performance. But where does the inverse of peak performance exist in the Asteroid Belt which is a giant ring and not two cones that point at each other?"

++++++

"I think I need more music," I said to the doctor.

During the song, Dr. Turmaine walked away from the couch to the door. I had been in such a trance that I didn't notice. Her voice gave away her location. "I'll leave you with the sound device. I'm going to leave now, but you can stay in here as long as you like. Just when you leave, make sure to close the door real tight." She turned off the lights and left with her briefcase.

I stayed on the couch with my eyes closed. I played Sumo Kobayashi's "Unreal Rain" on repeat. I was only just beginning to remove something that didn't belong with me. The music was helping me to fight a war against something. I'm not sure the nature of the thing I was fighting, but I know it took Joanna.

I wiped my face with tissues as tears formed. Grief was taking me into uncharted territory.

++++++

Image Links

• Astronaut cover photo: Mikhail Nilov, Pexels
• Tardigrade SEM image: Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al. (2012)
• DeepDream Forest: VillageHero from Ulm, Germany