Big Mike: Wherein I Have A Nervous Breakdown

November 21st, 2009

The noise started a half hour before the old codger came up my driveway, his shaggy dog in tow.

I’d been in the garage yesterday afternoon breaking down boxes from our move. Yeah, yeah, I know — it’s been two months since we moved in to the new Bloomington, Indiana, digs but the task of moving is a miserable ordeal and once you unpack those boxes containing the stuff you really need on a daily basis, you get sick of the whole process and you leave the rest for sometime later (hopefully after you’re dead). So I figure I’m really ahead of the game about now — we only have a dozen or so boxes left to unpack.

Besides — that wok, that antique toaster, the Saudi tea set, the Lazy Susan with one chipped tray, the riding crop, the cutesy little ice cream maker and all the rest — I don’t care if I ever see any of those things again. Of course one day a lightbulb will flash over the The Loved One’s head and she’ll say, Hey, where’s our ice cream maker? At which point she’ll go through the dozen boxes looking for it and, in the process, pull out the riding crop and the Saudi tea set too. Then they’ll sit, collecting dust on the kitchen counter or the mantle, still never having been used.

Anyway, back to the noise. As I was folding the empty boxes and rearranging the unopened ones, I noticed a piercing, shrill, whistle coming from, uh, coming from somewhere. I tried to ignore it but it kept reinserting itself into my consciousness. At first it was annoying; after fifteen minutes it was maddening.

Then the thought hit me — the house across the road is occupied by an elderly couple. Their grown children have to mow their lawn. On those rare occasions when an appreciable snow falls in these parts, neighbors have to shovel their driveway. Whenever people refer to the couple, they add the whispered caution: We really have to keep an eye on them. You never know, something might happen.

Could this piercing, shrill whistle be some type of emergency alarm, one made for elderly people’s homes that goes off when they haven’t made any motion in the house because, you know, they’re not moving? Yikes. I promised myself I’d walk across the road to check on the couple but, next thing I knew, I was back in the mindless rhythm of breaking down boxes. A quarter of an hour later, the hair on my arms stood on end as I thought about the poor old couple laying there with their alarm shrieking and me ignoring it. So I started walking toward their house.

And just like that, the noise stopped. Had I been imagining it? I turned around and went back into the garage and there it was again. But where in the hell was it coming from? Was it a ringing in my ears that’s the first sign of a nervous breakdown? After a few minutes, I semi-shouted “Shut that mother-fucking noise up!”

That’s when the old codger with the shaggy dog came walking up my driveway. Oh great, I thought, whoever this bird is, he’s gonna think I’m a lunatic, shouting at the world, alone in my garage.

He was a neighbor from down the road hoping to meet the new neighbors. We exchanged pleasantries and then I giggled nervously and explained why I’d been shouting at the world, alone in my garage. “I didn’t hear anybody shouting,” he said, obviously lying.

After a few more minutes of chitchat, he suddenly stopped talking and cocked his head. “What is that noise?” he asked.

“Aha! I knew there was a noise,” I said, triumphantly.

“Of course there’s a noise. I’m hard of hearing and I can hear it!” He turned his head to show me a hearing aid that was about the size of a stadium amplifier. “If I can hear it, it must be driving you crazy.”

“Yup,” I said, beaming.

The old codger went on his way before, he explained, the whistle started getting on his nerves. I snooped around the garage, looking for the source of the noise. Finally I concluded it was coming from the garage door opener. I climbed a ladder and jiggled its wires, pressed all the buttons on it and even unplugged it a couple of times. Nothing. No matter what I did, the whistle kept blaring.

It was time for me to pick up The Loved One from work. When we pulled into the garage, the first thing she said as she got out of the car was, “What is that noise?”

“Uh huh,” I said, as if my own personal Theory of Everything had just been validated. “I think it’s the garage door opener.”

After she changed out of her work duds, The Loved One and I took turns climbing the ladder to examine the opener mechanism. We both did everything I’d done previously but the whistle persisted.

“Maybe it’s coming from the attic. Move the ladder over there,” she said pointing to a little access door in the ceiling. “I’ll go up and see.”

The Loved One is a tad jittery about ladders but she gamely climbed up and pushed the door open. She stood on her tip-toes, flashlight in hand and peeked in. “I can’t see anything,” she announced.

Then I climbed up. I could hardly get my shoulders through the little doorway. I saw plenty of insulation and spider webs but nothing from which might emanate a piercing, shrill whistle.

After I climbed down, The Loved One said, “Let’s switch off the circuit breaker and see what happens.”

“Aw, that isn’t gonna do anything,” I said. “I already tried unplugging the opener.”

“Let’s just try it.”

“Knock yourself out.”

With that, she began fiddling with the breaker box. She flipped every possible switch. Finally, she flipped the master circuit breaker. The house went pitch black. Still, the whistle persisted.

“Those damned people,” The Loved One hissed in the dark.

“Who?”

“The old owners. They must’ve had something going on around here and that’s some kind of alarm for it.”

“Whaddya talking about?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She only needed to find someone to blame.

By now, the whistle had been sounding for three good hours. I knew I’d never be able to get to sleep. I pondered our next move. Should we call the old owners? An electrician? The police? The men in the white coats?

“What the hell is it?” The Loved One said through gritted teeth.

At that moment, I imagined it was coming from outside, near the garbage shed where raccoons and opossums create havoc just about every night. Maybe it was a garbage alarm that the old owners had neglected to tell us about. I scouted the area around the house, even pointing my flashlight up into the pine trees. Nothing.

I came back in and — who knows why? — The Loved One and I both started moving toward a table near the middle of the outside wall of the garage as if we’d been hypnotized. Then, simultaneously, we reached for an old computer peripheral, a heavy, white metal box-like thing with heavy duty power cords coming out of it. I remembered pulling it out of one of the boxes and sort of dropping it that afternoon. I also remembered thinking, What the hell do we have to save all this old computer crap for?

The Loved One snatched it out of my hands and flipped a switch on it. The piercing, shrill whistle stopped. It was an alarm indicating its battery was dying. I must have inadvertantly turned on the power button when I almost dropped it earlier.

The silence was deafening, only to be broken when we both started laughing maniacally.

One of my earlier theories had been right — the piercing shrill whistle was indeed the precursor to a nervous breakdown.