The Hum

For the longest time, I thought cancer was as bad as it got. Objectively, I know there are more terrible things in the world by comparison, like genocide and sex trafficking, but those evils felt more like figments to me, like barely-audible ghosts that only stalked news outlets and human rights blogs. To me, they were no more real than all the other depressing and violent shit I saw daily; it was just background.

But cancer, that shit was real. I saw my dad waste away from the inside out. In six months, he went from the vibrant spaz of a high school math teacher trying to get kids excited about algebra to a gray husk barely able to feed himself. By the end of it, when the cancer finally took him under, I just stared at his body in the hospital room until they took it away. He didn't even look real; he looked like a latex rendering--like some cheap Halloween store body. His eyes were the worst part, though. They had always been this very specific shade of hazel I had never seen anywhere else. The instant his life left him, those eyes changed into empty globes staring listlessly up at the popcorn ceiling. They seemed almost black, and they didn’t sparkle. After that day, nothing sparkled.

Soon everything became cancer. Pain in my back--probably cancer. The strange-looking mole my hip--definitely cancer. Anything and everything was probably, most certainly, cancer. I spent my nights obsessing over articles and books, convinced that if I didn’t know all the signs, all the rarest forms, and how it snuck into you, I’d end up vanishing too.

I became a hypochondriac, like, full-on crazy. I saw my doctor nearly every week, and four times I had actually convinced him to run me through a series of CAT scans for various imagined emergencies. The scans always came back negative, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the black, bloating cells that drifted through my fears caught up with me.

When I woke up to the hum I knew that that time had finally come. All the other times I’d rushed to the doctors, I knew that, on some level, I was being unreasonable. I mean, I wasn’t pretending; I just spiraled out. I obsessed about something until the only way to put my mind at ease was to know for sure. The hum was completely different, though--it was this low-frequency rattle that started somewhere at the base of my spine. Throughout the day, it worked its way up, so that when I tried to sleep, I could feel it pulsing right between my eyes.

I didn’t even wait to get an appointment with my doctor. That’s how certain I was that this was the end. I lied to the emergency room nurse and said I fell off a ladder and knocked myself out. Shit like that always prompts a fast response.

Sitting in that bed while the magnetic coils whirled around me was probably the most agonizing forty minutes of my life, and I’m including the six months I dealt with my dad. The worst thing though wasn’t the fear; it was the thought that once I knew that I was going to die, I really didn’t have anyone to tell. I didn’t have a girlfriend or really anyone close to me. My family was estranged for various reasons, and the only people I really associated with were a few friends from college who I would occasionally catch the game with. I didn’t even have a pet to tell that I was going to die. Suddenly I could feel my body begin to panic. No one would care when I was gone. Once I had died, when I had turned all gray and collapsed into myself, the world would go on just as if I were never here. I broke down once I got out. Sitting in the waiting room, I just ugly-cried.

When the doctor said there was nothing wrong with me, I became furious, I mean, like irrationally mad. I argued with him and regurgitated all of the articles I had ever read. I demanded to see the labs and the scans. I took them home and posted them on chat forums and medical advice sites. I even paid a private doctor to look them over just to see if anything had been missed. But everything was normal--actually, I was better than normal. With the exception of a higher-than-average BMI, I was as healthy as an ox. There was no explanation for the hum--I just kept getting worse. I burned through all of my sick leave and vacation days searching for some sort of explanation.

Over the course of a month, I spent thousands of dollars talking to specialists. Each of them gave me a handful of different plausible explanations, and all of those plausible explanations branched off into other paths, to other hospitals, to other specialists, like some sort of fucked-up fractal.

While I was busy worrying about the hum, the world around me was changing. Toward the end of my four weeks in utter hell, the news broke out about a high school student named Samantha Gill. She had been an amateur blogger--you know, a wannabe YouTube influencer, like everyone her age. She had gotten fame alright, but not from her videos. Some drone enthusiast had happened to capture her death on film. We really don’t even know anything about who they were, just that they uploaded the video of her death to the Internet and let the millions upon millions of retweets and re-blogs do their work.

Immediately the predictable parade of denial started. News outlets, prodded by government agencies, claimed the video was a fake. Some special effects guys in New York City even tried to take credit for it, but the cat was already out of the bag. As soon as the video hit the Web, every right-wing conspiracy theorist nutjob swarmed Samantha’s YouTube page to grab her videos before they got taken down, trying desperately to find some explanation for what had happened.

Like everyone else in the modern world, I, too, watched the video, and like everyone else, I knew it wasn’t fake. No CGI or shitty after-effects could capture what happened on that video. But ultimately, it wasn’t the video of her death that I became obsessed with—well, not at first; it was her last couple of vlog posts.

She had called it the “buzz,” but every symptom she described was identical to my “hum.” She talked about how it moved up her spine, how by the end of the night it settled right between her eyes, pulsating in her sinuses like a fucking sonar. She talked about how she couldn’t sleep, how the buzz was the only thing she could think about. That was when I understood that what was happening to me couldn’t be explained by science, that I would end up dying just as she had.

If you haven’t seen the video, you really should, but I'll do my best to describe it. It starts with some generic drone footage, you know, like all trees and hills and shitty houses. But approaching the three-minute mark, the video zeroes in on this skinny teenager in jean shorts kneeling in the middle of a park. For just a moment in the video, you can see she’s clutching at her head. There’s no sound, but you can see she’s screaming, and the drone only gets fractionally closer before the explosion.

I say ‘explosion,’ because there’s not really a word to describe what happens next. There’s no fire, no impact; there’s just this sudden circle of color. It’s as if someone took a firehose and just went to town, spraying down everything within an eighty-foot radius in a perfect sphere of green paint. But that doesn’t even really capture it. It wasn’t just one solid color but a million shades of green, most hues of which I’ve seen neither before nor since—shades of green that still keep me up at night.

Most people focus on the color, on the phenomenon, on what it means, on what caused it. But I focused on what happened to Samantha. In those few seconds before the drone footage goes out, I watched this awkward teenage girl become that color. It’s like God reached down and just stretched her apart. Everything she was, everything that made up her soul had simply burst out like the vivid arterial spray of the Earth.

After people caught on and stopped treating it like a hoax, “going color” suddenly became an act of terrorism--bio-weaponry--and it didn’t stop with Samantha. All over the world, people were just...disappearing into color. A CCTV camera in Mumbai caught Kumar Srinivasan going blue in the center of Crawford Market. The footage leaked online, and it’s nearly identical to Samantha’s: he’s there and then suddenly everything around him goes blue. You can’t really see in the video what happens to Kumar, but you do get to see what happens to the other people. It’s like some wave, like radiation or something holy. All at once everything around him--cars, buildings, traffic signs--fold into variegated lapis lazuli, royal and terrifying. People don’t evaporate or implode, they just abruptly become color, like emotions given form.

I don’t want to die, but I know it’s coming. It’s the way it starts, with the hum. But there’s this clarity that comes with knowing it’s going to happen. It’s like all that anxiety, all that fear I struggled with was just the uncertainty of how it would end. All the other fears attached themselves to that uncertainty and fed off of it, but now for the first time in my life, I’m sure of something, even if that thing is terrible, even if it means there will be nothing left of me to bury. I almost prefer that. I won’t be a void like my father. I won’t be some sickly wax sculpture pushed into the crematorium.

The only thing that really makes me sad is the thought that I might not get to see my own color. What will my insides look like? How will my soul look splattered across the fourth dimension? I hope it’s hazel, that impossibly elusive shade I never saw after my dad shut his eyes for the last time. That would make me happy. It would make me happy to share that color with the world.