When Music Makes You Sick
Before my brain injury, my entire life had a soundtrack. Now, I’m basically allergic to sound.
A few months into my brain injury, my neighbor got a new cat. This new cat quickly became my nemesis.
Or maybe the cat wasn’t new, but I never noticed him before a car accident bashed my head into a queasy daze and sound began to make me feel physically ill. Now I was spending long, silent stretches at home, trying to recover, and suddenly here was this cat: roaming the courtyard at all hours, warbling some deranged song.
I have never heard another cat make a noise like this, an excruciating belch of sonic violence somewhere between a yowl, a bleat, and a moan. It’s the kind of gurgling cry — oohahhoh — that you might hear for half a second on Top 40 radio, the sexy yelp of a diva out of breath mid-verse, but when repeated over and over, at odd intervals, when you are desperate for quiet, this timbre becomes torture. More than one friend has suggested it is the sound of the cat mating, but I have peeked past the blackout curtains shielding my tender brain from the late afternoon sunshine, and I have cracked the back door at two in the morning, driven from slumber to confirm with my own eyes, and I know the truth: there is no feline fuckfest, here. This is just a demon creature, a black and…
