Signal

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THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION

The fart sounded like a question.

Dr. Arin Basu heard it from somewhere behind him in the packed metro car, a wet, interrogative squeak that should have been embarrassing for someone, except that nobody reacted. Nobody even turned their head. It was 8:47 in the morning, the Blue Line between Mahanayak Uttam Kumar and Netaji, bodies pressed so tight that Arin could feel the heartbeat of the man behind him against his shoulder blade.

He shifted his weight. The backpack shifted with him, heavy against his spine, the speaker inside it pressing a hard circle into his lower back. He had packed it himself at four that morning, hands shaking, the apartment still smelling of solder and the instant noodles he had eaten standing over the sink.

18.9 hertz.

In his notebook, he had underlined the number twice. Beneath it he had written: RESONANT FREQUENCY OF THE HUMAN LARGE INTESTINE.

He had been very pleased with that sentence.

He had switched the device on as the train left the station. For the first few seconds nothing had happened, and he had felt the familiar embarrassment arriving, the private embarrassment of having once again believed he had something.

Then the fart.

The man in front of him, wearing a shirt that said DREAM BIG in cracked letters, looked over his shoulder. Before he could finish turning, another one came out of him, long and wet, his expression changing halfway through it. From the left, a woman in a sari answered with a high-pitched staccato burst.

Arin felt it then. A flutter in his own gut. A gurgle that was not hunger.

He had expected this. He had known he would be exposed too. In the apartment, thinking about it, he had decided that a few seconds of discomfort would be worth it.

The train braked. The lights flickered.

And every single person in the car farted at the same time.

Not a cacophony. A chord.

Arin felt it in his teeth, behind his eyes, deep in the bones of his legs. Beneath the ordinary, horrible noises was something too low to hear properly, a pressure that seemed to squeeze his organs together and hold them there.

A few people laughed. One short, disbelieving burst of laughter, because what else were you supposed to do when an entire metro car farted together?

Then the smell hit.

He had expected smell. He had even made a column in his notebook labeled OLFACTORY IMPACT, followed by a question mark. But he had not expected the heat. The air went from human-warm to swamp-hot in seconds. Sweat broke out on his upper lip. The smell thickened until breathing through his mouth only put it on his tongue.

The woman in the sari pulled the end of it over her nose.

Someone said, “What the fuck?”

And then people began to shit themselves.

It started with the man in the DREAM BIG shirt. His eyes went wide. His knees bent, but there was nowhere for him to bend into. Arin heard liquid striking the inside of his trousers, saw the dark patch spread, saw him look down with an expression of absolute betrayal.

For a moment he kept trying to hold it in. That was the part Arin would remember afterward. The effort still going into his face after there was no longer anything to save.

Then the woman. The college kid with the earphones. The old man clutching his prayer beads.

The contractions passed through the car in waves. People stiffened together, groaned together, tried to get their hands behind themselves and couldn’t. Shit ran into shoes. It dripped from the edge of a seat where a man had curled forward with both arms around his stomach.

Someone was crying, “Stop it, stop it,” without knowing who they were asking.

For one dreadful second Arin thought: It worked.

Then his own bowels clenched.

He reached behind him. His elbow struck somebody’s ribs. The backpack was trapped between his back and the man behind him, and when he tried to turn, the strap pulled tight across his shoulder.

He had wanted a demonstration. A crowded car, witnesses, something that could not be dismissed as another claim in another paper nobody would read. He had imagined the recordings afterward, the disbelief, the laughter stopping when people understood what he had done.

In every version he had imagined, he could switch it off.

A cramp folded through him so hard that his knees gave. The crowd held him upright.

He shit himself.

There was no pause in which to be horrified by it. A man was pushing past him, or trying to, and somebody farther down the car had fallen. People were shouting that there was gas, that something was leaking, that somebody had poisoned the train.

Arin got two fingers around the edge of the backpack. He pulled. A strap slid off his shoulder, and a woman screamed because he had dragged it across her face.

The switch was underneath his palm.

He flipped it.

The pressure released. He could straighten his back. Inside the bag, the equipment went dead.

But there was still a faint vibration low in his belly.

He thought it was his pulse.

The crowd kept moving.

There wasn’t room to run. That made it worse. People pushed and found nothing yielding in front of them, pushed harder, felt a little movement and took it for space. The floor was slick. A foot slipped. A body went down. The people behind could not see what they were stepping on.

The man in the DREAM BIG shirt caught Arin’s wrist.

For a second they looked straight at each other.

Then somebody drove into Arin from behind. The man’s hand slid away. He dropped between them, and Arin saw his face at knee height, his mouth open, one cheek pressed against a shoe.

Arin tried to pull his own foot back.

He couldn’t.

The man underneath him made a small sound. Arin felt something move through the sole of his shoe, a hard little shift, and then the sound stopped.

Near the doors, the woman in the sari was standing with her face turned sideways against the glass. Her hand was up beside her head. The fingers kept opening and closing.

“Move back,” someone shouted.

There was no back left.

Her hand stopped.

Arin could still see her eyes. That was unbearable, the eyes remaining open while everything else about her had gone, and he kept waiting for her fingers to move again because if they moved he would not yet have to know what he was looking at.

He had wanted to humiliate them.

The admission came plainly, without any of the language he had used in the notebook. He had wanted strangers to lose control of their bodies so that other strangers would have to admit he was clever. He had called it temporary. He had written reversible beside it.

He had never tested how long it would take a frightened crowd to kill someone.

The train pulled into Netaji.

When the doors opened, the woman fell out.

Arin went with the surge. His feet slipped over something soft at the threshold. Hands caught the pole beside him, caught his shirt, caught anything. Someone on the platform began screaming before they could even see inside.

Behind him, people were still trying to get up.

He could have turned around.

He kept walking.

There was a child’s shoe beside one of the doors, small and blue, lying on its side in the filth. He saw it and stepped over it. Farther along the platform a man was on his knees, trying to reach somebody through the legs of the people coming out.

Arin passed him too.

Nobody stopped him. He was another filthy, shaking passenger with a backpack. Someone was shouting for a doctor. He lowered his head.

He went home.

He showered for three hours.

He washed his legs, his feet, the spaces between his toes. Every time he closed his eyes he felt that little movement beneath his shoe again. He scrubbed the sole of his foot until the skin came away, although he had been wearing shoes, although he knew that.

The water ran pink.

The vibration was still there.

Later, he disconnected the battery. He pressed his hand against the speaker cone. Nothing. The whole thing was an ugly arrangement of dead parts now, wires and screws and the cheap casing he had spent so many nights getting right.

He put it back in the backpack.

By afternoon he was at the Hooghly. He waited until nobody was looking directly at him, then threw the bag as far as he could. It struck the water flat, floated for a few seconds, and sank.

He watched the bubbles rise.

His stomach tightened.

For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. Then it passed, and he stood there for a little longer, waiting for the relief he had expected from getting rid of it.

That night, lying in bed, he heard the hum again.

Not through the window. Not from a pump or a refrigerator or somebody’s television.

He put his hand on his stomach.

The skin trembled beneath it.

He held his breath. The trembling continued. He pressed harder, and something deeper inside him seemed to press back, a slow tightening that stayed after he took his hand away.

In the bathroom mirror his eyes were bloodshot. There was blood along his gums.

He spat into the sink.

The saliva was black.

He stood looking at it. Then he rinsed his mouth and spat again, carefully this time, as if doing it carefully might produce a different result.

More black fluid. A thin red string hanging from his lower lip.

The hum dropped.

Pain went through his abdomen, sudden and deep enough to make him strike his forehead against the mirror. He gripped the sink. For several seconds he could do nothing except breathe in small, useless snatches while something inside him pulled tight.

Then the note rose slightly.

The pain eased.

He stayed bent over the sink.

Again.

Lower. Pain.

Higher. Release.

Something was trying him at different frequencies.

He thought of the woman at the train door, her fingers opening and closing. He had watched her doing that and had not understood how little of her body she could still move.

He got back to the bedroom with a towel held between his legs.

There was blood now. He could feel it running. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to unlock his phone, but the vibration had reached his hands. His thumb kept landing beside the numbers.

He tried again.

A cramp seized him, and the phone fell.

He could see it on the floor. Close enough that he ought to have been able to pick it up. He bent toward it and felt a hot, dragging pain that made him sit back immediately.

Something wet touched the towel.

He did not want to look.

He looked.

A thick red fold of tissue protruded from him. It was swollen and shining, streaked with black fluid. As he watched, it tightened. More slipped out, slowly, dragging against something inside his belly.

He made a sound he had never heard himself make.

He pushed the towel against it. He could feel the movement through the cloth. He tried to hold it in place, both hands pressed underneath him, and another contraction pulled through his abdomen so violently that he bit into his tongue.

The hum steadied.

He was crying now. There was no room in his head for what he deserved, or for what he had done, only the need for this next contraction not to happen. Please let it stop for a minute. Let him get the phone. Let somebody come.

He tried to shout.

The sound caught in his chest.

His belly tightened again, and this time his chest tightened with it. Air came out through his mouth in a low, even note. He stopped trying to shout. The note continued.

He clamped his lips together.

It went on behind his teeth.

He had thought the machine was making the sound on the train. Even after he had switched it off, even with that little vibration continuing inside him, he had kept believing the machine was where it lived.

Now he could feel his ribs moving with it.

The room seemed to thicken around him. The glass on his bedside table trembled against the wood. Water touched the rim, spilled, ran down beside the bed.

Arin tried to take a breath and found that he could, but only when the note allowed it. A short breath. Enough to keep him conscious.

From the flat below came a heavy thump.

Then another.

He listened.

A man coughed. Coughed again, harder. Something scraped across the floor beneath Arin’s bed.

And underneath those noises, faintly, another hum began.

Slightly different from his.

The two sounds moved toward each other.

He wanted to warn them. He wanted, with an urgency that hurt worse than anything else, to tell whoever was downstairs to leave, to get out now, before their legs went, before they found themselves looking at the phone on the floor.

He opened his mouth.

The note grew louder.

Warmth spread beneath him. His hands were still holding the towel, although there was nothing left that he knew how to hold together.

He closed his eyes and listened to the music.