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the hum The city has a tune all it’s own. The hustle and bustle interspersed with raging sirens and couples shouting at 2 am. Anyone who has lived in this city long enough can tell you it’s this kind of background noise that eventually becomes integral to your definition of silence. You don’t notice the train passing by your bedroom window or the sound of construction thundering on a Saturday morning. You don’t notice, until they vanish. Then suddenly your ears are screaming for an escape from the quietude. You never imagined that the sound of nothingness could make you want to hide in a corner and cover your ears. Because you’re not accustomed to the earth’s hum. So thought Nicky as he recounted the moments that had left him standing at the top of the Empire State Building. Having lived all his life between the avenues of the city that never sleeps, Nicky had never heard the hum. But on one particular Tuesday afternoon, Nicky woke up with a faint sense that something was wrong. As he stumbled out of his bedroom, letting the stench of old Chinese food waft into living room, he felt a tragic sense of loneliness. Stammering onto the street he realized everyone was gone. His roommate, his girl, the dude he exchanged nods with at the coffee shop. Probably even that annoying guy Todd at work. They were all gone. After the initial panic subsided, Nicky took to roaming the deserted streets of a once thriving metropolis looking for someone. Literally anyone. Now, even that annoying guy Todd would have been a welcome companion. Life all alone was a hard pill to swallow. Eventually though, he had gotten used to it. But it wasn’t a life of solitude that had bothered Nicky most. It was the hum. Each day that passed, it grew louder. A distant ringing that was a drill in his eardrums trying
to pierce through to his brain. The hum never ceased. It was there through the night. Only getting louder when he closed his eyes. No variety of earmuffs or expensive noisecanceling headphones could provide Nicky with even a moment’s relief. Maddened by what he could only liken to auditory Chinese water torture, ceasing the hum became his obsession. In an act of desperation, he had tried to deafen himself. Filling his ears with glue or soaking them with hydrogen peroxide. But to no avail. Times ceases to matter when you are all alone, thought Nicky. After many weeks, that felt like months, he had started looking for a more permanent solution. That’s what brought him here. He was staring out of his tenement-building window at a sky setting on a dead city. In the distance Vincent Scully’s “lonely dinosaur [rose] sadly at midtown” and for the first time, Nicky had felt a glimmer of hope. He then set out to climb all 1,576 stairs determined to escape the sound. With each step his heart swelled, epinephrine pumped through his blood. With a joyous leap, Nicky had burst out on the observatory deck only to be welcomed with an even more deafening symphony. “It’s magnified at the top,” he thought, “like the best seat in the house at Carnegie hall.” He realized then that there was no escape and began to clamber over the tall metal railing and plunged over the side. For a brief moment as he fell, the sound of the wind rushing past his ears gave Nicky the momentary escape from the hum he’d been looking for all along. A few mere inches away from the sidewalk below, he let out a sigh of relief. Nicky had found a way to escape the hum. He landed with a thud that reverberated through the streets creating a hum of his own.
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Page 5 and 6: Slowly, over time, the city had cre
Page 7 and 8: Escape the hustle and bustle of the
Page 9 and 10: lunch atop a skyscraper a goliath o
Page 11 and 12: that someone hasn’t tried. Yes, t
Page 13 and 14: Strolling past fortresses that hold

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