Scott Standridge

At the Top of My Lungs

At 9:32 a.m. on a Thursday morning, Ed Prescott began to scream.

For a while his coworkers pretended not to notice. Ed was a supervisor at the Company, and through years of faithful service had earned the large office at one end of the Billing Department floor. It was a corner office with two large windows meeting in the back corner, overlooking the wooded park that abutted the building to the west. Production reports, his children's drawings, and a whiteboard scrawled with multicolored markers adorned the two solid walls, whose thickness along with the closed office door all but soundproofed the room. Still, Ed's long, high wail bled through the cracks under the door and around its jamb, until at last the entire department became aware of it. His subordinates walked by slowly, ears cocked, wondering if they should call someone or even burst in and rescue their boss from whatever demons assailed him. But something in the quality of the scream — frightening but not frightened, despairing but strangely lacking in urgency — made them hesitant to disturb him. For nearly half an hour the department went nervously about its business.

Finally, at ten o'clock, someone called the Manager.

Joe Nesbitt had been working for the Company ten years when he hired Eddie, one of a dozen fresh-faced business majors just out of college and desperate for work. The intervening years had rewarded Joe's choice in Ed Prescott many times over, bringing the Company hundreds of new contracts and helping catapult Joe himself to the lofty position of Manager. When he heard about Ed's strange behavior, Joe went down to Billing himself.

"Hello there, Eddie?" Joe called in his deep, booming voice, knocking once and then pushing the door open. Ed's scream rushed out through the widening gap at ear-splitting volume. Workers stood up in their cubicles, heads popping up over the five-foot gray walls like jacks-in-the-box. Joe smiled and waved them back to their seats, then stepped into Ed's office and shut the door.

He stood still a moment, taking in the scene. The oversized fern in the right-hand corner of the room undulated with the breeze from a heater vent above, and a loose stack of reports on Ed's desk fluttered under a crystal paperweight. Ed Prescott sat behind his desk, staring at his laptop's monitor, pecking at the keys with his index fingers. After a moment Ed reached for his mouse, clicked once, and pushed the laptop closed. Then he looked up at Joe and smiled warmly. Beneath the upturned corners of his lips Ed's mouth hung open, a half-pipe of darkness from which his scream blasted without pause.

"Eddie," Joe shouted. "Ed, for God's sake, what's going on here?"

Ed's brows twisted to a confused knot, and he extended his hands palm upward, questioning. Still he screamed.

"Is something wrong? Are you in pain?"

Ed offered the same uncomprehending look, the same high-pitched wail.

Joe's expression grew stern. Emergencies were one thing, but this — this was beginning to look like plain hard-headedness. "Look, Ed, if there's nothing the matter then you're going to have to stop this! It's disturbing the workers! It's...it's affecting your work!" He pressed two fat fists to the sides of his head, summoning the worst consequence he could imagine. "Ed, it's hurting productivity!"

Ed Prescott hung his head, letting his mouth relax to a forlorn O. He nodded, then resolutely opened the drawers of his desk and emptied their contents. Joe watched as Ed paced the room, pulling the thumbtacks from his children's grade school pictures and home-made father's day cards. He found an empty copy-paper box in one of his file cabinets and started tossing his belongings into it. All the while, Ed screamed.

Joe considered trying to stop him, to remind him of the years he'd put in for the Company, how long they'd worked together, the scant decade Ed had till retirement. But Ed's scream pierced his eardrums and made rational thought difficult, sentimentality impossible. When the box was full, Ed turned to Joe, hand extended, shrieking through his frown. Joe uncovered his right ear and shook hands, then looked after him as Ed strode down the corridor to the elevator. Heads popped from cubicles again, turning in unison as the screeching apparition passed.

"Goodbye, Ed!" Joe bellowed after him, hands pressed again over ringing ears. "Good luck to you!"

Sylvia Prescott had met Ed when they were both sophomores in college. Ed was an English major at the time — he would make the switch to business as a junior, taking two years of overloaded schedules to make up the prerequisites and acing every class. Sylvia was undecided but leaning toward Literature. He had been quite handsome then, with strong shoulders, olive skin and black hair down to his collar, a perfect yin to Sylvia's pale blonde yang. They married just after graduation, two months before he got his job with the Company.

For twenty years Ed had given Sylvia no reason to regret their marriage. He was loving, thoughtful, and always employed; their savings had grown to more than sizable, and their IRAs and personal stocks performed well. He was an affectionate and attentive father to their two children, a satisfying and faithful lover, ambitious at work but not driven to the point of emotional absence. He drank without being an alcoholic; he overate but never grew fat. He quit smoking with her when she'd determined to do so five years ago, and he always bought flowers on important anniversaries. Though he was sometimes morose and withdrawn, she never believed him to be really unhappy. Most of the time he was blandly cheerful, a more or less perfect husband.

So when Ed came home screaming with his box full of workplace knick-knacks, Sylvia couldn't have been more surprised.

"Ed, what's happening?" she asked, speaking as loud as she could without shouting at him. "Can't you tell me what's going on?"

Her husband only walked past her and downstairs to his study.  There he unloaded his box, finding a place for everything on the shelves and dark-paneled walls. When Sylvia came down and demanded again he tell her what the matter was, Ed shook his head and pushed her gently toward the door, shutting it behind her. She stood a moment with her back to the wood, trembling before Ed's keening cry. Then she went upstairs where the sound was dampened and poured herself a drink.

When the children came home from school, Sylvia did her best not to alarm them. Earlier she had called Joe Nesbitt and deciphered from his confused, somewhat flustered report the events of that morning. She'd spent an hour shouting through the door at Ed, telling him that the Company was more than willing to take him back once he'd pulled himself together. The only answer she got was Ed's continued, hoarsening scream. In the hours between then and three she'd practiced what she would say to the kids. She stood waiting for them on the doorstep as the long yellow bus pulled away.

"Your father is taking some time off," she told them. "He's been under a lot of stress at work, and he needs a vacation." Joanna, ten-years old and dark like her father, twisted a braided pigtail around her fingers. Jack, their six-year-old, blue-eyed blond, stared at her seriously, his mouth a thin flat line.

"Are we going to Disneyworld again?" he asked, doubtfully.

"No, sweetie," Sylvia said. "We're going to stay here. Your father just needs to relax, that's all."

"I want to go to Disneyworld," Jack pouted.

The three of them spent the evening watching videos and eating popcorn. During quiet scenes Sylvia still heard Ed crying out from below, his vocal chords ragged with use. She knew the children must hear it too, but they said nothing. She took him his dinner at eight, rapping twice on the door and leaving the plate and glass of iced tea on the bottom stair. At nine o' clock as Sylvia tucked her into bed, Joanna frowned up at her from the folds of her pillow.

"Mommy, is Daddy going to be all right?" she asked.

"I hope so, dear," Sylvia replied, holding back tears. "Good night."

Friday morning Sylvia found Ed's dinner dishes stacked neatly on the floor outside the study. From within she heard her husband still screaming. His voice was stronger now, clearer. She surmised that, at some point during the night, he had slept.

With the kids off to school again, Sylvia spent the morning ticking down her small list of friends who were psychiatrists, behavioral scientists, or clients of someone they might recommend. When she'd finished she regarded an even shorter list of phone numbers and called to request appointments. The doctors were very busy these days, their appointment clerks explained, treating well-paying hypochondriacs and lawyers with troubled consciences.  The earliest time slot she could claim was a week from the following Tuesday. She thanked the receptionist and hung up. Then she retrieved a five-year-old cigarette from a coffee tin on top of the refrigerator and smoked it grimly, tipping the ashes into the running water of the sink.

In the near-silence of their empty house, Ed's muffled screams struck straight at her spinal cord, forcing her teeth to grind and her eardrums to pulse with blood. At last she trudged downstairs and entered the study without knocking.

Ed sat at his desk, his clothes rumpled and slept-in, screaming into the hand-held tape recorder she'd given him three Christmases ago. Until now she'd never known him to use it. He looked up when she entered and smiled, waving the silver-black box at her. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, fighting the urge to plunge her fingers into her ears.

"Ed, I can't take this anymore," she said, careful not to shout. Ed shrieked on, nodding. He removed a spent tape from the recorder and popped in a fresh one. A stack of the tapes teetered at his elbow like a tower of child's blocks. "I'm afraid you've gone crazy, and you're driving me insane as well. I'm going out for a while. I hope when I get back we can talk about this like grown people."

Without looking back she marched out of the study and up the stairs, unslung her purse from where it lay hooked on a dining room chair, and walked out of the house. It was a fresh, sunlit afternoon in early autumn, and the loudest noise was the soft rustle of wind through the branches of their front-yard oak tree. She took a deep breath, feeling expanded, free. Then she climbed into their car and drove to the City Park, where she spent the afternoon walking the trails and feeding the deliciously quiet ducks and squirrels.

Sitting on a hard-angled bench with fifty cents' worth of food pellets cupped in her palm, she thought about Ed and their life together. Where was the quiet, sheepish man she had known for the past two decades? What had happened to the loving father who tiptoed into Jack's room every night before going to bed, stroked his blond hair and whispered a kiss to his sleep-flushed cheek? Who had borne his weeping daughter back to bed after countless childhood nightmares, silently, leaving Sylvia to the warmth and comfort of their bed? Where was the man who had been her quiet, steady rock when her mother had died fifteen years ago, and her father a few months later? Had that inscrutable, shrieking creature, shut away downstairs like a dirty secret, devoured her loving husband forever? Or was Ed still in there, trapped and in need of a rescue she hadn't the wisdom to effect? The tears ran down her cheeks as a hundred other questions passed in and out of her mind, like wisps of smoke from a fire whose source she couldn't discover.

When Sylvia thought to look at her watch, it was half past three.

"Shit!" she said aloud, sending two squirrels scurrying up the nearest tree. She hurled the rest of her pellets in their direction and jogged to the car, then drove back down the highway toward the unfathomable riddle to which she'd abandoned her children.

As she flung open the front door Sylvia heard again the cry from below, unabated and perhaps even louder than it had been when she left. Jack and Joanna's book bags lay in a pile on the living room floor, Jack's shoes at right angles beside them. She dashed upstairs and found their rooms empty, beds still unmade. After searching the rest of the rooms she came down to the kitchen in dread and turned toward the dark stairway the descended like a cave to the howling depths.

At the second step, Sylvia saw that the study door was open.

She leapt over the last stairs and into the paneled office, preparing herself for her children's tears or perhaps only heartbreaking, mute incomprehension. But what she saw stopped her at the door. Ed sat behind his desk in his wrinkled clothes, the tape recorder open and empty in front of him, a pyramid of tapes stacked at his left. He gesticulated wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs, waving his hands like the conductor of an insane symphony. Before him on the floor, Joanna and Jack sat Indian-style, staring rapt at their father.

Sylvia willed her feet to move one step at a time into the piercing din. Neither Ed nor the children noticed her. Ed continued his banshee wail, punctuating its undulation by jabbing his fingers into the air. Jack giggled, clapping his hands, and Joanna smiled too, her pigtails wound around her index fingers. At last Jack glanced at the doorway.

"Hi, Mom!" he called, waving. "Joanna, Daddy — Mom's home!"

"Shhh," Joanna said, releasing her hair to put a finger to her lips. "I want to hear."

"Joanna! Jack!" Sylvia screamed, her heart pounding. "Go up to your rooms this instant!"

"Awww," Jack protested. "Do we have to?"

"Yes! Right now!"

"But Mommy," Joanna whined. "We like Daddy's singing."

Sylvia stared at him as if slapped. "Singing?" she repeated. "Singing?"

"Shhhhhhhhh!" Joanna said again. "We're missing the best part!"

The children turned back to their father, who continued making signs with his fingers while he screamed. Stunned, Sylvia watched them for a while. Jack seemed completely undisturbed by the noise; Joanna's eyes grew wide and then relaxed as Ed's cries wavered, then she applauded and laughed out loud. Standing rigid in the doorway, Sylvia noticed for the first time that Ed's screams did not stay on one, monotonous note. The tone moved constantly, rising now to a trembling vibrato, falling then to a sustained half-pitch. Her husband's fingers moved with the changes, flying up and down as if riding the waves of sound he produced. It's almost...hypnotic, she found herself thinking.  Almost...

Sylvia shook her head, suddenly angry. It was only noise, she told herself. Insane, inarticulate — noise! At once Ed's scream pounded her ears like a hammer, red hot and made of iron. She stumbled backward, almost tripping over the bottom step, and retreated to the relative quiet of the kitchen.

That night Joanna and Jack took their dinner with their father.

Sylvia hid in the kitchen, smoking one cigarette after another from the new pack she'd bought that afternoon. At ten o'clock she went downstairs again. Jack lay toppled on the floor, sleeping, his sock-feet still crossed under him. Joanna was awake but her eyes drooped. Ed stood with his hands on the back of his chair, smiling his open-mouthed grin. His scream seemed a little quieter now.

"Come on, Joanna," Sylvia said. "Help me get your brother to bed."

Joanna rose obediently and nudged her brother, who rolled over and rubbed his eyes. Without a word they went to their father and wrapped their arms around his legs. Each received a gentle stroke of the hair from his dark, wrinkled hands. He bent and allowed them to kiss his cheeks, then gave them a pat on the rear as they walked toward the stairs. Ed looked at Sylvia. He pointed to the tapes on his desk, and his eyes were smiling. His wife nodded uncertainly and tried to smile back.

"I'll see you in the morning," she said, and closed the door.

Saturday morning Ed came out of the basement. He joined his family at the breakfast table, screaming at top volume. The children chattered back and forth over forkfuls of scrambled eggs and cheese, stopping every now and then to listen to one of Ed's particularly interesting screeches. Sylvia's ears rang but she tried to listen, concentrating hard on every dip and flight. Ed caught her staring and winked, his eyes bright brown jewels. Then his mouth stretched to an oval, the scream's sound elongated and muffled as he screamed through a jaw-stretching yawn. Sylvia was the only one who noticed, and a short bark of laughter escaped her throat.  The children stopped eating to stare at her, mouths buttery from the toast.

Sylvia looked at their faces and at Ed's wide-mouthed smile and started laughing in earnest, long peals of laughter that bubbled up from her ribcage like a fountain. Soon Jack and Joanna were laughing too, and even Ed seemed to struggle to maintain his deafening pitch. Sylvia laughed until her sides cramped and her mouth ached, breathless with her unlooked-for mirth. They all finished breakfast with smiles on their faces, and Ed signed that he was going upstairs to shower and change clothes.

"I really like Dad's music, Mom," Jack said. Ed's screams echoed from the tile of the master bath's shower, but Sylvia noted with surprise that its timbre no longer set her teeth on edge. It wasn't what she'd call music, exactly, and yet —

"I know!" Joanna said, jumping up from the table. "Let's go to the park today! We haven't all gone in such a long time!"

"Yeah!" Jack said. "Can we Mom? Please?"

Sylvia's muscles tightened. The thought of going out in public — all of them, together — filled her with dread. What would people say when they heard Ed's screams? What would they think? She felt the negative rising up in her throat. She looked at Joanna, and her daughter read her mind.

"It doesn't matter what people think," she said. "He's our father."

Sylvia let out her breath, humbled. When she opened her mouth, she found she no longer wanted to refuse.

"All right," she said, her smile creeping back. "We'll go."

At the park the children raced ahead of her on the path, pursued by their screaming father.  Sylvia saw that the reactions of others were not entirely what she'd feared. Some of the park's patrons looked afraid — one or two old women stared open-mouthed as Ed passed, pulling their handbags tight against their chests.  A few middle-aged joggers trotted by, their faces sour masks of annoyance. Some merely ignored him, keeping their eyes fixed on the green path in front of them or birds in distant trees. But others smiled as he went by, shaking their heads or even waving at him. Ed waved back, howling.

When they spread their blanket on the soccer fields for lunch, Joanna and Jack chewed peanut butter sandwiches and encouraged Ed to stand up and "sing." He jumped up eagerly and waved his arms, holding forth with renewed vigor. Crumbs and drops of soda sprayed from his lips as he screamed, and his voice echoed across the park. Some picnickers nearby folded up their blanket and left in a huff; a Frisbee-playing youth shouted at him to pipe down, people were trying to enjoy themselves. But Sylvia found herself unconcerned. She listened to Ed scream, sipping her own diet soda and studying the rest of the people around them.

A few children halted their games of tag and stared at Ed. After a moment they edged closer, until finally they flopped down on the ground beside Joanna and Jack. While they listened some college kids strode up as well, girls with midriff shirts even in the fall weather and boys in pants two sizes too large. They sat down too, spellbound by Ed's screaming. When, after an hour, Ed reached a particularly feverish crescendo, the crowd burst into applause.

That night at home, Ed and Sylvia together put the children to bed. Ed lowered his volume a bit, screeching a lullaby or perhaps a bedtime story. Joanna and Jack hugged him tight, and kissed Sylvia warmly on both cheeks.

"I had fun today," Joanna said, yawning as they crept from her room.

"It was the best," Jack said, pulling the covers up to his chin.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Sylvia poured a drink and Ed signed that he was going back down to the study. He had a new package of blank tapes in his hand, and before he turned toward the stairs he looked at her kindly, a question in his eyes she could understand: Is it all right?

Sylvia's nod came naturally, without conscious thought, and Ed's scream became an "E," the long vowel stretched over smiling lips. He bounded downstairs and shut the door.

Sylvia sat at the kitchen table listening to him, smoking leisurely now, calm. It wasn't so bad, after all. Not what she'd call music, perhaps, but now she understood that didn't matter.

She would call on Monday and cancel Ed's appointment with the psychiatrist. Then she would look for a part time job. It wouldn't be too hard. They had money in the bank, after all. They could get by on less. They were a family—everything else was just details.

For the rest of his and Sylvia's happy life, Ed Prescott sang.

February 16, 2010