White Noise
Adam Gianforcaro
In the six months it took for the piles of wood to transform into precise spaces for living, Gene and Mario drove to the suburbs each weekend to marvel at the construction. It wasn’t that the house itself was distinctive in any way—it would fit the style of the others in the neighborhood—but its coming together was nonetheless momentous for the two.
If it hadn’t been for both of their jobs at the time—Mario managing a hotel near the airport and Gene working as a proofreader for a bicycling magazine—the couple may have preferred to swing by the site when the builders were there during the week, busy with their own work—the lanky one slicing wood with a circular saw and the beefy guy, shirtless and sweat-glistened, doing whatever the lanky one told him to do.
During their short-lived visits, Mario—the more creative of the two—would uncap his 35mm and snap photos, wanting to create a montage similar to the photographic series illustrating the construction of the Eiffel Tower. And if it only took two years to create something as large and magnificent as the Iron Lady, why did it feel like it was taking ages for the builders to erect something as routine as a Cape Cod? But come March, Gene and Mario would complete their final walk-through and move into their new place in Basalt Township, home to Basalt State College and the Basalt Ospreys.
A brief list of things Mario and Gene didn’t know when they first moved into their house:
How life changing a garbage disposal could be
How immense Basalt State College would become
Why tap water tasted so much better east of the Delaware River
How drastically the dynamics of a house could change—and how quickly
How feelings of unfettered bliss could so quickly turn to hopelessness
Mario got the call late one Saturday evening while he and Gene were hosting a few of their neighbors for the first time. They discussed their old neighborhoods, the churches their parents dragged them to on Sundays, which corners they claimed as their own sovereign territories. By late in the evening, Mario was drunk off gin and ginger beer, which he later threw up after pulling the phone from its receiver and hearing what Gene’s father struggled to say out loud—that Gene’s sister Karen and Karen’s husband Kenny were dead.
A brief list of facts regarding the deaths of Karen and Kenneth Brooks:
Kenny, sober, was driving Karen’s Toyota Cressida a little after 11:00 p.m. They were on the way home from a friend’s Christmas-in-July party.
A Chevy pick-up truck spilled over into their lane and hit the Toyota head-on. The driver of the truck was a teenage girl who left the scene with nothing more than a concussion and broken nose. She was fifteen, a dancer, and a runaway as of ten minutes before the incident.
In some sort of comic relief, Karen and Kenny were both in costume, dressed as elves, when they were ejected from the vehicle.
Lost and heartbroken, with both Karen and Kenny deceased, Gene and Mario adopted their nephew Nicky, Karen and Kenny’s only child and just fourteen months old at the time of his parent’s deaths. Luckily—with what luck had left to offer the family—Nicky had been safe at home during the time of the crash, albeit cranky and impossible to soothe that night, in the care of his agitated and very-ready-for-bed babysitter, a classmate of the girl crying behind the steering wheel of her father’s Chevrolet K10.
Grief. Heavy, heavy grief. And paperwork. Loads of paperwork. That was how the first year with Nicky began.
Everything felt fresh and new and raw—the anguish, the learning, the hows and whys and what nows. And although Nicky was generally a good baby, without any time to prepare for the duties of parenting, the arrangement took a lot out of the fathers—emotionally, financially, everything-ly.
But time passed as time is wont to do. Soon Nicky started preschool. He graduated from kindergarten. The shock of the accident and the newness of parenthood casually crept its way into the background of everyday life. While there was still a heaviness from the tragedy, it became soft and porous over time, allowing love and light to gradually push through.
Nicky went from a nephew with whom the couple had guardianship to Nicky their son, Nicky as one of their own, as if one of his fathers had miraculously carried the boy to term inside his own body. Sometimes Mario would joke with the moms during after-school pick-up that his partner Gene must have given birth to the boy, through his belly button perhaps, since how could Nicky not be his when their noses were nearly identical?
Before the accident, neither Mario nor Gene saw kids in their future.
“Maybe someday,” they would say to those who asked, but the whole adoption process seemed like a logistical nightmare. And where would their free time go? How and when would they ever get time to relax? To be intimate?
And yet, despite the lengthy and invasive processes—and with the one child to care for already, just about to start second grade—Mario and Gene decided to take in two more.
The twins, Beth and Margaret, were almost three by the time they were legally out of the foster care system and under the guardianship of their new fathers. As the twins grew older and started asking questions about their real parents, they much preferred the fairytale beginnings their fathers designed over the true story, a complicated account of substance use and abandonment.
“Could you tell it again?” one of the girls would ask.
“Fine,” Mario would playfully gripe. “Your Pop and I were walking the wooded trail by the high school, and as we were resting alongside the creek, there go the two of you, river rafting inside a basket.”
“And your Dad,” Gene would add, “scooped you from the water just in the nick of time.”
“We had to go to Atlantic City to get you birth certificates,” Mario would say, cutting back into the story. “Remember that, Gene?”
“I sure do. Back in our organized crime days.”
“We used to be cool, you know,” Mario said to the girls. “Now we’re the lame dads with three kids, a Lassie dog, and a TV that plays nothing but Nickelodeon.”
A brief list of animals Mario and Gene adopted over the years:
Rod Stewart, a collie (1990-1999)
Oscar, a guinea pig, who Mario barely remembers having (1992-1993)
Bowie, another collie (2000-2009)
Jazzy, a Maine Coon, who slipped out the back door and never returned (2005-2005)
Q, a bichon frise (2005-2020)
A plethora of stuffed animals—Uma, Monster, Arielle Jr.—each with their own personalities and unusual talents.
As time would tell, the house in Basalt Township was not at all what Gene and Mario had expected when they took their Sunday drives to see the progress the builders had made. In their heads, they envisioned their home to be a sanctuary of sorts—quiet and artsy, decorated with houseplants and gilded frames. It was instead a turbulent flutter of My Little Pony and K'NEX sets, of beaded bracelets and Wrestlemania. But as rambunctious and stress-inducing as it was in those forever-long yet fleeting years of parenthood, their home was something both Mario and Gene had cherished dearly.
Work wasn’t awful either. Mario continued to commute to the Marriott steps away from airport, which only took thirty minutes to get to. Gene was lucky, too. He got a gig teaching history to undergraduates at the college in town, a breezy ten-minute walk from his front door.
Years passed. A decade. In that time, Basalt State College transformed its campus, erecting awkwardly shaped buildings on areas previously used for recreation. The school also changed its name, rebranding to Grzyb University. It adopted the name from Antoni James Grzyb, an industrialist who bequeathed the school milions. A new logo was revealed in addition to the naming of a new mascot, which shifted from the Basalt Osprey to the Grzyb Toadstool, a nod at the translation of the Polish word grzyb, meaning mushroom.
When Nicky went off to a different college and gained his own sense of school pride, he teased his dads about Grzyb’s choice of mascot.
“You know your mascot looks like a dick,” Nicky said one morning as Gene slipped on one of the family’s school-branded hoodies. By then, Gene was a senior-level professor at Grzyb, specializing in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
“So that’s why you didn’t want to apply there,” Mario said, walking into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. “Not because you would still have to live at home but because our mascot looks too phallic for you.”
“You got me,” Nicky said. “My sole consideration when applying to schools was whether the mascot looked like a dick or not.”
“Nicky,” Gene said. “You’re gone one semester and you already have a mouth on you. Sorry we couldn’t have a mascot as cool as Kenny the Keg.”
“It’s Keggy the Keg, for one thing. And you can call me Nick, you know. I’m not ten anymore.”
“Oh, sweetheart. You’ll always be our baby,” Mario teased.
“Our little Nicky bear,” said Gene.
A brief list of reasons Mario and Gene chose Basalt Township over other areas:
Gene was interested in teaching at a college and had heard good things about Basalt State and the surrounding area.
Mario thought he would eventually leave the hospitality business (he never did) and was interested in several non-teaching opportunities the college had to offer.
Even before Gene’s employment at the school, he and Mario liked that the area provided several city-like amenities like easy access to plays and concerts.
In their first two decades as residents of Basalt Township, neither Mario nor Gene had any serious objections about the area. Sure, Mario complained about the traffic and road closures during homecomings and graduations, and Gene thought the town’s shopping centers could use a facelift, but they mostly found it a great place to live and raise a family.
However, Grzyb University continued to expand. While it helped to attract new stores and restaurants, its growth was pervasive. As a result, the sense of community Gene and Mario found in the early days morphed into something unrestrained. Soon they couldn’t remember a time when there wasn’t some sort of construction happening on campus. Though it was small and inconsequential at first—a new gymnasium, an additional parking lot—there seemed to always be some juncture of change in town and on campus. Before long, the university announced a new nursing program. A state-of-the-art engineering center was built. The agricultural sciences department expanded with the purchase of two family farms south of town with plans to open a creamery.
Though the changes had been gradual, the town took on an entirely different identity than it had when they first moved there. And the house they had watched come together like one of their son’s K’NEX sets quickly felt devalued as students infiltrated their neighborhood. Previously, Grzyb students mostly lived in the campus dorms or in the Greek houses on the west side of town, but as the campus expanded and the school began admitting more students, the residential areas quickly shifted into spaces for off-campus housing. It took a while for them to find Mario and Gene’s neighborhood, but soon enough, the first set of students moved in—the same year Gene got sick.
Mario first heard about the students from their neighbor Julie Pham, who lived in the maroon house catty-corner from them. Julie walked over when she saw Mario pull into the driveway to pick up extra clothes and a pillow for Gene. After filling Julie in on Gene’s prognosis—“Please let me know if you need anything,” she said, clutching the cross around her neck—Julie told Mario about the news she heard from her hairdresser Pam earlier that morning. Pam’s husband was friends with a guy called PJ Papadopoulos, who, just the night before, had put an offer on the house up for sale on the corner of their street.
“Wait, which one?” Gene asked when Mario returned to the hospital and told him about the conversation he had with Julie Pham. Gene was sitting up in his hospital bed, waiting to be wheeled away for further testing. Mario was thankful for Gene’s wanting to know more, to have something else to talk about. Anything but what the doctors were hinting at.
“Which what?” asked Mario, eyeing the various medical devices in the room.
“Which house? The one on the right side when you’re turning in or the one that never cuts their grass.”
“The shitty looking one,” Mario said.
“Good,” Gene said. “Maybe it's for the better then.”
A brief list of things Gene hated about his diagnosis:
The way the doctors told him so nonchalantly as if it was poison ivy he had.
How his condition sounded so much like a line of poetry. Leukemia and lymphoblastic lymphoma. All that beautiful alliteration for something so soul-crushing.
How the doctors had to insert a port into the top of his head like he was a science fiction villain.
How, at that point, so much was still unclear. So many questions still unanswered.
Julie Pham and Mario caught up again later that week. As with the time before, Mario was returning home, anxious to squeeze in a nap while the kids kept Gene company in the hospital.
“They didn’t know he was an investor at first,” Julie said, speaking of the sellers. “And they weren’t thrilled to learn it after the fact.”
“It’s kind of crooked if he wasn’t truthful about it,” Mario said.
“What kind of a name is PJ Papadopoulos anyway?” Julie said. “His name alone makes him sound nefarious. Now he’s looking to flip their house into a makeshift dormitory. My hairdresser said he wants to fit as many students in there as possible and charge each of them half a grand a month. Can you imagine?”
That initial sale to an investor sparked a domino effect in their neighborhood. Anytime someone else put their home on the market, it was promptly picked up by PJ Papadopoulos or another investment group. As such, property values in the neighborhood decreased. In the end, lines of single-family homes mutated into weathered student rentals.
As the neighborhood started to feel less and less like the close-knit community it had been from the eighties to early aughts, Gene’s personal sense of community grew stronger in contrast. Through the viciousness of chemotherapy, platelet transfusions, and painful bone marrow biopsies, in addition to the heinous side effects associated with each, friends continued to check in and send their love.
During Gene’s first month in an inpatient setting, several friends stopped by to visit. Some simply sat and talked. Others brought in activity books or playing cards. Three weeks in, Gene was forced to celebrate his birthday from the confines of his hospital room. Mario, whose boss allowed him to take on more of an administrative role so he could work remotely, took the day off to spend the entire day with his partner. In the morning, before chemo—the doctors said they would give him an easy dose that day—Mario escorted Gene through the hospital’s hallways with a balloon tied to Gene’s infusion pump. Gene's parents also stopped by early that morning with small gifts, and the kids came later with Mario’s mom. They brought in a chocolate Bundt cake and sang Happy Birthday with Nicky at the foot of Gene’s bed and both twins struggling to balance at Gene’s sides, doing their best not to tug at any tubes or wiring. At night, despite Gene’s exhaustion and wanting otherwise, several friends stayed until the nurses kindly asked them to leave—it was thirty minutes past visiting hours—as the group tried as quickly as they could to wrap up their game of Golden Girls Trivial Pursuit.
Days passed slowly. Weeks lingered. Months dragged like bags of sand.
Gene, doing better, transitioned to outpatient care. Friends and family delivered lasagna platters and quiche to the home, while others stopped by to help around the house. As for the kids—Nicky now in New York City and the twins away at separate colleges in Virginia and Maryland—they came home as regularly as they could to check up on their fathers and lend a hand wherever it was needed.
And then the day finally came. Following two and a half years of medical procedures and other torments, Gene lifted the mallet at the treatment facility and rang the plate-sized gong, marking his final day of chemotherapy.
Throughout the time it took for Gene to recover, and still long after that, investors worked hard to persuade him and Mario to put their house on the market. PJ Papadopoulos, who eventually owned a majority of the houses in the neighborhood phoned at least once a year to keep on their radar.
“I never want it to seem like I’m trying to push you guys out,” PJ said. “I just want to let you know, you will never have an issue selling your house. My offer is firm, whether it is tomorrow or ten years from now. And if any of my renters ever give you a hard time, you just give me a call. You have my number.”
The students that rented PJ’s properties were usually pretty quiet though. The house across from theirs, the one next door to Julie Pham, that was the most problematic. It was owned and rented by Mark Rush, a surly man who had lived in the house previously, known around the neighborhood for the orange NRA cap glued to his head. Mark moved out the year following Gene’s remission and decided to rent the place out to his nephew and a bunch of his nephew’s friends. Gene, who was more forthright than Mario—his energy and spunk largely restored—tried to reason with the guys living there. The morning after the first uproarious party, Gene knocked on their door to kindly ask them to keep it down at night, to be respectful of the families living in the neighborhood. A young man answered the door in nothing but red basketball shorts, still clearly half asleep.
“No problem,” the boy had said. “We’ll keep it down next time. Our bad, man.”
Not a full week after, there was a quarrel on the boys’ front lawn. Two guys turned into four turned into seven violent bodies. Someone called the police—most likely Julie Pham, Mario thought—and paramedics arrived soon after the cops for the guy who had a bottle smashed across his head.
Mario called Mark Rush the next morning, mostly to get Gene off his back about it, since Gene was the one to walk over and confront the boys last time.
“I’m aware of the situation,” Mark said over the phone, “and it’s being handled.”
“How exactly?” asked Mario.
“I talked to the guys. It’s all good,”
Gene watched Mario hang up the phone.
“Pointless,” Mario declared. “He’s no better than idiots across the street. There’s no reasoning with him.”
What Mario didn’t tell Gene was that the fight the previous night had stirred something in his brain. It triggered something deep inside and released a memory from long before, a time he was forced into an altercation with a classmate of his, Tim Vo. A few other students had locked them both in the boy’s locker room with a group of six or seven spectators.
“Why are you doing this?” Tim had asked the group.
“Because we wanna see which of you pansy faggots is tougher,” one of the faces said.
“I’m not a faggot,” Mario said.
“Me neither,” said Tim.
“Then fucking prove it,” one of the spectators said.
An onlooker shoved Tim from behind, into Mario.
“Just because I don’t wanna fight doesn’t mean I like dudes. It means I’m a pacifist,” Mario said.
The group erupted in laughter.
“Hey, Vo,” a face said. “You better deck the fucking commie or we’re gonna make you put his needle dick in your tiny girl mouth.”
It went on like that for some time. Eventually, Tim felt there was no other option but to lay into Mario. With a distracting left, followed by a full forced strike to the head, Tim knocked Mario out cold. When it was clear Mario had lost consciousness, the hecklers rushed out of the locker room, scampering their way outside and fumbling into the school’s parking lot. Scared, they tried their best to convince each other they did nothing wrong, that Tim was the one who hit Mario, that there was no way that dork could have killed him with a single hit.
Back in the locker room, Mario groaned into consciousness.
“Sorry about that. Figured it would be best to just get it over with,” Tim said.
“Get away from me,” Mario pleaded, still cloudy-headed.
“I was just protecting myself,” Tim said. “I would have gone after them if there weren’t so many. They would have just ganged up on us otherwise.”
“You probably wish they would gang up on you, you queer,” Mario said.
Tim jerked a hand toward Mario, stopping right before contact.
“Let’s go,” Tim said. “I have an ice pack with my lunch box.”
After the altercation across the street from their house, Mario wanted to talk to his partner about the fight from his past and how it still lingered in his subconscious. But wasn’t this something he had told Gene about before? But the memory felt new again, fresh and ripe like fallen fruit.
In part because of the newly triggered memory, Mario began obsessing over unlikelihoods, creating scenarios in his head in which his young neighbors ganged up on him for—what? Complaining too much about their parties? Thinking he was the one who called the cops again?
Gene was an attentive partner and sensed the shift in Mario. He kept an eye on things after that, sometimes making lists in his moleskin, in code. Workshop sealed, he wrote when Mario started bracing the front door, or Yardwork after Mario discussed hiring landscapers so he didn’t have to go outside.
“Landscapers?” Gene chirped. “What about all the stuff you bought last year? All those tools?”
“I don’t like being out there when they’re out there,” Mario confessed.
Gene peered out the window. A small group was throwing a football back and forth.
“Who cares?” Gene said. “You’re fixing up the garden. Maybe you’ll inspire them to clean up their own shit.”
“It used to be relaxing. I’d put love into the soil and it would give love back, ya know? I don’t want to give it any more negativity. The earth is already dying.”
“Sweetheart. If you don’t put on that cute little apron and liven up those flowers, I’m putting your garden set on Craiglist for someone else. Is that what you want?”
“Why does this sound like I’m being punished,” Mario assured.
“Hun. If you don’t go get your hands dirty and turn those mums into perennials—” Gene handed the canvas apron over to Mario. “Here. Now go show those boys who’s boss.”
Some years were better than others. Some worse. With the average turnover rate for off-campus housing at around two years per group per house, both part-time and full-time residents—depending on where they lived and where the rowdy houses were during a given period—could either experience long stretches of fortune or spend years irritated and grumpy, putting up with the carelessness around them.
But the putting-up-with was mutual. On one hand, this was a town connected to a school that was once voted one of the top party schools in America. But for residents like Gene and Mario, that wasn’t always the case. Their neighborhood was different, once peaceful. It wasn’t always an area for off-campus housing and the school in town wasn’t always the behemoth it had grown to be. The town itself seemed like a time machine. It aged some residents while others permanently remained in their twenties.
The August Gene turned 67—“When the hell did I get so old,” he kept asking his partner—some of the couple’s most problematic neighbors moved in next door to them, in a house that was usually occupied by quiet and respectful students.
“Are we being classist?” Gene asked one morning.
“What do you mean?” asked Mario.
“Or ageist?” Gene said.
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“I have so much animosity on these kids. It’s like, if anyone’s renting in the neighborhood, I’m wary of them right away. And the younger they look, the less I trust them.”
“I think we’re just cranky old men is all,” Mario said.
Later that week, Gene asked his kids the same question when he called Nicky, unaware he was hanging out with the twins. Did they tell me they were all planning to see each other?
“You’re on speaker now,” Nicky said. “Repeat what you just said.”
“I said, Do you think it's classist that I have a problem with renters?”
Gene’s phone erupted in laughter.
“It’s not classist,” Beth said. “You hate that NRA guy, too, don’t you? And he owns the one house.”
“He has new people there now. Girls this time. They seem nice this time around,” Gene said.
“So you’re sexist is what you’re saying,” Nicky teased.
“You’re not classist, Pop,” Margarette assured, sounding far away. “Or sexist. You just listen to too much public radio.”
October arrived, and though not many houses in the neighborhood decorated for holidays anymore, Mario and Gene still enjoyed it. They were getting too old to maneuver some of the bigger decorations, but they still draped cotton cobwebs on their bushes and stuck cling-on skeletons to their windows. They were surprised to see that the week after they had decorated their property that the boys who had moved in next door put out their own inflatable ghost, which stayed on their lawn until the following summer.
One afternoon—eerily warm for autumn—while the boys next door were barbecuing for a group of friends in the yard, one of the guys called over to Gene, who had stepped out of his house to pick up the wind chime that had blown over in the previous night’s gale.
“Howdy, neighbor,” a boy called over the fence.
“Howdy,” Gene said, tipping an invisible hat.
“Why don’t you come on over?” another boy said. “We’re making a bunch of girls Jell-O wrestle in a bit.”
“Is it warm enough for all that?” Gene said.
“Who cares,” one boy slurred, obviously drunk. “Harder nipples.”
The group laughed.
“Sounds fun, but I think my husband would be jealous,” Gene said, unsure why he had outed himself to the group.
“Your husband?” the boy at the grill said.
A silence stepped into the yard. Brief and uncertain.
“Tell him to come over, too,” someone called. “We’ll have the rushes give you lap dances.”
“We’ll have them give you blow jobs,” the drunk one called.
More laughs.
“We’re all right,” Gene said with a shy smile. “You all be safe.”
That night Mario and Gene didn’t call the cops though there were many times they wanted to. At one point, from the window in what had been Nicky’s old room, they watched young men sprinkle raw rice on planks of plywood and coerce other young men to balance themselves on top of it on their knees and elbows. The angle of the window and the obstruction from the overgrown evergreens made it difficult to see much else, but the concert of other abuses steadily pushed through their walls throughout the night. Even with the drone of the fan drowning some of the noise, there was a loud and manic energy in the air, an intangible threat seeping through the house like a gas leak.
Earlier that evening, after reconfiguring the wind chimes and following a quiet dinner of barramundi and green beans, Gene took out that morning’s newspaper—he would have taken it out earlier if he hadn’t napped half the day—and jumped into that week’s crossword puzzle while Mario sipped a decaf coffee and flipped through a library copy of Giovanni’s Room. Gene penciled in several answers right off the bat. Over time, additional white squares filled with squiggles of graphite.
“This one’s tough,” Gene said after a while.
“What’s the clue?”
“White noise,” Gene said. He tapped his pencil in concentration. “Seven letters,” he said. “Starts with an S, I think.”
“Sssss,” Mario hissed, trying to sound out the word. “No clue,” he said. “I’m terrible at those things.”
It took a while, but Gene eventually got it. The word was sissing.
“What the hell is sissing?” Mario asked.
“White noise, apparently. That was the clue, at least.”
“I would never’ve gotten that. I don’t think I ever even heard that word before. Sissy, of course,” Mario said with a wink. “But sissing? It sounds more like a verb for people like us.”
Gene smiled. “Sissing. Yeah.”
That’s what Gene thought about laying in bed that night when the music and shouts from next door continued to pollute the tranquility of their bedroom. After peering through the windows some, when they resolved to try and get some sleep, Gene stared holes into the ceiling. So many of the same sounds within a single word, it almost feels claustrophobic, he thought to himself. And then: Leukemia. Lymphoblastic lymphoma. It had been a long time since his remission, but the thought of alliteration brought him back momentarily.
“Sissing,” he whispered.
From that curious and simple ideation, Gene came up with a plan. So simple it was almost stupid. All they needed was to create their own noises to drown out the ones they couldn’t control. Suffocate each unwelcome note, each robotic boom of the stereo. Drown them all in a booming fuzz. Like the blips and beeps of the hospital machines that used to cloud his thinking.
Gene looked over at Mario, still awake and in the process of rolling over to grab his cellphone.
“What if we moved the mattress to the bathroom?” Gene said.
“What?” Mario mumbled. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Hear me out,” Gene said. “We drag the box fan from the closet and place its backside just outside the bathroom door. That way we have its hum without the chill. Then we turn the shower on at room temp and flip the switch for the ventilation fan. A perfect room of white noise. Sissing.”
Mario turned toward Gene.
“Are you sleep-talking again?” Mario asked.
“No,” said Gene.
“Well, I’m not sleeping in the bathroom.”
“That doesn’t sound fun to you?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Mario groaned. After a short pause, something outside boomed, followed by cheering. “I think we need a white noise machine,” Mario said. “Something deafening.”
“I think you mean a sissing system?” Gene said.
“A what?”
“A white noise machine. Or as I like to say, a sissing system.”
“Can we please just go to sleep?” Mario said.
“But what if I’m not tired?” Gene said, dragging his fingers across Mario’s chest.
A brief list of other potential crossword answers for clues containing “white noise”:
Hiss
Whir
Drone
Don Delillo (White Noise novelist)
Michael Keaton (White Noise star)
David Bowie (Black Tie White Noise musician)
Despite both of them having trouble sleeping after being intimate for the first time in months, Mario was up and out of bed by six. He tiptoed down the stairs while Gene lay on his back in a cat-eyes-embroidered sleep mask. Normally, Gene was up by seven, but he slept until quarter to nine that morning, slumping down the stairs in his blue plaid robe and hair like a Silkie chicken. That left nearly three hours for Mario to keep himself occupied. After thirty minutes of streaming NPR’s Weekend Edition, he pulled his headphones around his neck and took in the stillness like a breath of fresh air.
By eight, he was already growing bored, wondering how much longer his partner could stay asleep.
Mario got up from the table and decided the least he could do was be productive. He wiped down the kitchen counter with a soapy washcloth and walked into the family room to dust the TV and surface tops. He peered at the walls, the bric-a-brac on the mantel. He thought about all the things he loved about the house despite its ill-adapted surroundings. There were bits of him and Gene and their children everywhere.
Mario loved the time in the house at dawn. The way the sliding glass doors and kitchen windows brought in such beautiful sunlight. The crisp and restorative air when he cracked them open. And, best of all, the students were passed out on their couches at this time, too early to function, dead to the world, with several more hours of cotton-mouthed dreams.
After some time though, with Gene still in bed, the silence inside the house brewed a restlessness in Mario despite how much he yearned for that exact type of solace in the nighttime. He slipped his headphones on again for background noise, choosing a playlist of Debussy’s Nocturnes, and took an unhurried walk around the perimeter of each room on the first floor of the house. He felt like a museum-goer, as if the photos on the wall were works of art he hadn’t yet seen before, while Muzak filled his head with resonant bliss.
Mario spent nearly twenty minutes in the family room—the final room on his walkthrough—guilelessly standing in one place. He surveyed the wallpaper there. Sure it was stubbornly outdated. Some would call it ugly, yes, but it was a pattern that had been in the background of so many family photographs, so many perfect memories, it was hard not to love. Why update florals that were always in bloom?
“What are you doing?” Gene asked from the kitchen, finally awake.
Mario stood motionless.
“Good morning,” Gene said, louder this time. Then he nearly screamed it: “Good morning!”
“Jesus,” Mario said, pulling the headphones from his ears. “You scared me.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up? It’s late.”
“Figured you needed the rest.”
Mario wished their life was always like this—simple, innocuous. But as always, in no time at all, morning becomes afternoon becomes evening becomes night. The sun goes down. The air gets cooler. The two of them relax, watch TV, play rummy if they feel up to it. However, the later it gets, the heavier the air becomes, the louder the voices, the laughter, an increase in carelessness. It becomes intrusive.
They each struggle with their emotions this way, but they know there is not much they can do. These are kids, after all. Young adults doing what young adults have always done. But this isn’t the life they signed up for, Mario thinks. This was a community for families. For our family. For us.
“Hey, Mar,” Gene called.
But Mario didn’t move. He was in the same place even after Gene had left to put bread in the toaster and use the bathroom.
“Ma-ri-o,” Gene sang.
“I get that things change,” Mario said, still facing the wall, “but it’s changed so much. This doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s like this house was built on a burial ground.”
Gene pursed his lips. “I’m not following.”
“This house,” Mario said. “This town.”
“What about it,” Gene asked.
“It’s changing me. Changing us. You wanted to sleep in the bathroom last night. The bathroom. It’s awful? It’s—it’s just, this is our home.”
“I wasn’t serious. Not completely,” Gene said.
“It just got me thinking,” Mario said. “Overthinking really.”
“Then let’s talk about it,” Gene said. He was like that. Always wanting to talk things through as if decisions couldn’t be made without speaking them out loud. But Mario didn’t want to talk. He wanted to stare longer at the pictures. On the wall, a photo collage of the grandkids that replaced the pictures Gene had taken documenting the construction of their house. And on the mantel, tiny frames holding prominent memories: Nicky and Beth and Margarette on Easter Sunday, Nicky and Beth and Margarette at Disney World, Nicky and Beth and Margarette with Gene and Mario on the day they renewed their vows. Maybe it was less wanting a house in a quiet neighborhood and more wanting a different kind of pandemonium. Wanting his family again. Wanting the twins screaming and pulling each other’s hair, wanting Nicky to terrify the girls with the Jason mask he kept under his bed, wanting the bickering and bantering and get-to-your-rooms-right-now.
Gene could tell, even from behind, that Mario was starting to get emotional.
“Here,” Gene said. “Come here.” But Gene was the one one to step forward, to grab Mario from behind and rest his chin on his shoulder, allowing another moment of reflection.
Later that night, Gene and Mario video chatted with their kids.
“How did you get us all on one screen?” Gene asked.
“You can add callers,” Nicky said. “I’ll show you later.”
“Beth, why are you so dark?” Margarette asked.
“Why don’t we always have multiple screens?” asked Gene.
“Hi, grandpop,” a small voice off-screen said.
“My apartment has no natural light. It’s worse than Nicky’s place,” Beth said.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Gene sang.
“You can always move back home,” Mario said. “All of you.”
“How is the ol’ bungalow?” asked Nicky.
“Funny you should ask,” Gene said. “Your dad and I wanted to talk to you about it. We were thinking—well, we were thinking about calling that investor.”
Beth: “What investor?”
Nicky: “Papadopoulos?”
Margarette: “You’re selling the house?”
“No,” Gene said. “We don’t know.”
“We wanted to see what you thought about it,” said Mario, “since it’s your home too.”
It was hard to converse with everyone talking over each other, but through the craziness, they each followed along, jumping from one topic to another, eventually discussing plans to travel back to New Jersey for a vacation later that summer.
“We can rent a shore house for the weekend,” Margarette suggested.
“Yes. I love that idea,” Beth said. “But I think we should all spend a night back at home beforehand.”
“Yes. Please,” Mario pleaded.
“How would we all fit? What about our kids?” Nicky said.
“Everyone,” Gene said. “Obviously.”
“It’ll be crazy,” Mario said, “but it’s the kind of crazy we like.”
“That seems like a lot,” Nicky said.
“It’s one night,” Margarette said. “Everyone home for one night.”
“They are thinking of selling the house. I think we should do it,” Beth said.
“I think you’re all obligated to,” said Mario.
“Oh,” Gene said, interrupting. “Look at this thing we got from Amazon today.” He held it up to the tablet’s camera lens. “It’s a white noise machine.”
“I think that’s for babies,” Nicky said with a smile.
“It’s an owl,” said Gene. “It’s cute.”
“Your granddaughter has the same one, Pop,” Beth said. “She named her Owletta. I have no idea where she comes up with these names.”
Mario and Gene began browsing listings online and walking through select open houses. Though they couldn’t agree on what they wanted or where they wanted to go, they both knew it was time to leave South Jersey. They thought, now that the kids were spread across three separate states, they could relocate without feeling guilty—to a lakeside condo, or a small mountainside lodge. It could be anywhere with a view, as long as it was no more than a half days’ drive to each of their kids and had a single floor living option now that their bodies were getting more weathered by the day.
Luckily, if they did choose to move, a big hurdle was already behind them. Their house was already tentatively sold.
“Hey, stanger,” PJ Papadopoulos said when Mario rang.
“Are you surprised I’m calling?” Mario asked.
“It was only a matter of time, my friend. The millennials are taking over.” PJ laughed. “I’m a millennial myself so I can say that. But it seems you and your partner seem to be the last OGs standing.”
“OGs? What’s that? Old geezers?”
PJ laughed again.
“No, no, of course not. OGs. As in, the originals.”
After hanging up the phone, Mario felt pensive, as if he had just had his fortune read with indefinite news. Gene put a hand on Mario’s back. His t-shirt was moist with sweat.
“You didn’t promise anything,” Gene said. “You said we were thinking about it.”
“It made it feel real, is all. Like we may actually go through with it.”
“It’s a scary feeling.”
“It’s less about selling the house for me. It’s feeling forced to sell to an investor who’s going to cram in six bedrooms and a closet-sized kitchen. All the love we poured into the house rearranged into—what?”
Gene pressed Mario’s soggy torso to his.
“We don’t have to make a decision right now,” Gene said. “We don’t have to make a decision ever if we don’t want to.”
“PJ called us OGs,” Mario said.
“OGs,” Gene said. “Old gays?”
“No, but that seems fitting, doesn’t it?”
“I like being an OG with you,” Gene said.
“And I like being an OG with you,” said Mario.
The following week, pure unadulterated joy flooded into the house in the form of family. All their kids and grandchildren. So much pride it seemed to insulate the house from the brisk summer eve happening outside their windows. A love so warm and meticulous it was nearly tangible. They ate, they drank, they reminisced. They talked and laughed and bickered some, but it was a playful type of bickering, a kind of play-flighting made wholly from love. Lily, the youngest of the grandkids, was passed back and forth from aunt to uncle, from grandfather to grandfather, until she grew fussy and passed out drunk from a breastmilk and formula cocktail. The younger grandkids, ranging from three to nine, played Hot Wheels and Twister, while the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds built a metropolis from Nicky’s old K’NEX sets that Gene found in the attic while searching for the air mattress.
By ten that night, Nicky and the twins were ready to head out. Each was drained from traveling and occupying their little ones, even if the longest ride had only been from D.C. Though they had previously agreed to all stay one night together in their old house, Nicky, Beth, and Margarette knew it would have been too cramped, and neither wanted to risk losing any sleep. Instead, all the grandkids aside from Lily would stay at Granddad and Grandpop’s, fall asleep watching Moana, gorge themselves on pancakes in the morning, and hop right back into their parents’ cars, where they would follow each other down Route 55 to Cape May, where they would stay the week in a four-bedroom condo two blocks from the beach.
By the end of the week, each person was as sunkissed as they were exhausted, ready to return to their respective homes and routines. Mario and Gene, on the other hand, felt like they could have stayed in that condo forever. Much of that feeling was a byproduct of being with their family again—they could have been anywhere as long as they were together—but part of it was something greater, something unspoken yet mutually understood.
Maybe, Gene thought, the two of them didn’t need to go far. Maybe, Mario thought, they needed chaos after all. So they thought of the ocean. Deep and devastating and yet composing small symphonies with each lapping wave. At once they saw their future, heard the nocturnes that would soundtrack their old age. What they didn’t think about was how fed up they would get with summer crowds or with how depressing winters would be with local shops and eateries abandoned during the colder seasons.
Despite what the future held, the universe would continue to hum, until one moment, long into the future, sound would cease. But at this moment, the orchestra of life went on. Gene cursed the traffic, Mario fiddled with his phone, and from somewhere above, thunder clapped, unheard above the roar of pop music.
Adam Gianforcaro is a writer living in Wilmington, Delaware. His stories can be found in Maudlin House, Lunch Ticket, Soft Punk, The Los Angeles Review, and Coffin Bell. Additionally, his poems can be found or are forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, perhappened, Poet Lore, The Cincinnati Review miCRo series, and elsewhere. He tweets intermittently under the handle @xadamg.