White Noise

We ate in silence. Mary ladled thick, steaming globs of lasagna onto everyone’s plates, careful not to let even a single drop of sauce escape and God forbid land on her pristine linen tablecloth. I looked down at my plate and suddenly wished I was very, very far away. Around me the kitchen glistened with the tell tale signs of heavy bleach and OCD. The tiny sounds of forks scraping against bone China filled my ears and made me want to scream.

After mom died Mary made me stop wearing my earphones at dinner. She said it was bad manners. The Plague changed many things but silence was the one thing I could never get used to. When I was a kid I used to fall asleep in my little ground floor bedroom listening to the sounds of night time traffic from the freeway next to our house I remember the noise and blinking lights used to keep me awake for hours when we first moved in to the bungalow. The glowing red from passing tail lights made the plastic dinosaurs on my shelf look stark and menacing.

With time though these things became something I could not sleep without. I would lie in my little bed and close my eyes, listening to the rhythmic waves of familiar sounds until sleep came. In those moments between sleep and reality I felt safe. I knew that night after night, no matter what, I would crawl into my tiny bed in my tiny room on the ground floor of our tiny house, and nothing in the world could hurt me. The constant stream of white noise filled my head with daydreams about spaceships and far away forgotten beaches. And night after night it was always there for me, waiting patiently to rock me into oblivion. As familiar and comforting as an old friend.

When dinner was over everyone put their dishes in the sink and one by one dissolved into the ether of the apartment. Nobody spoke. Not anymore. Not since the Rain started. At first it was only a couple of isolated showers. Nobody paid any attention until panicked news reports started popping up warning citizens not to go outside during rainstorms due to contaminated precipitation. Newscasters warned the public to avoid contact with rainwater and wear protective equipment if going outside was a necessity. It took only two weeks to send the country into panic. After two months the entire world was on lockdown.

They said it started somewhere near the border, but its impossible to know for sure. The original source of contamination was eventually narrowed down to a pharmaceutical laboratory that was working on a new form of airborne pesticide. Official reports claim that a batch of untested pesticides was accidentally released from the facility during a heavy rainstorm and was subsequently absorbed into the atmosphere.

Soon after the reports people started flooding into hospitals with severe chemical burns. Every emergency room in the country was packed with the innocent victims of bad science. The effect of the Rain was horrifying. Nobody was immune. Everyone from newborn babies and sick elderly to firefighters risked disfiguration and agony at the hands of the Plague. In small amounts the chemical destroyed skin and hair cells on contact causing the top layers of the epidermis to die and flake off the body, leaving large bloody and oozing wounds on the victim. Their hair faded to white or fell out completely, exposing more skin. In large amounts the living body of the victim rapidly lost all pigment and coloration as their skin and other organs shut down one by one.

I was lucky enough to survive my first contact with the Rain but it cost me most of my skin and left my hair bleached white for the rest of my life. It took months of skin grafts to sew me back together but somehow I survived. Lying in a hospital bed wrapped head to toe in sterile bandages, with a feeding tube fitted between my bone white lips, doped up on morphine and God knows what else, I listened to the steady waves of rain pummeling against the hospital window and dreamed waking dreams about spaceships and long forgotten beaches.