Earworm

Rocky jerked awake.

He felt weak; he felt cold. There was light, but he couldn't see anything. His eyes were gummy. The light faded, flickered... "Can you hear me?" a voice asked him. Rocky didn't understand the words at first. They sounded odd. The man had some sort of accent, but not one that Rocky could place. He had never heard anything like it before.

"Mr. Belzon? Can you hear me?"

Rocky tried to respond, but all he could utter was a faint, rough moan.

"He's coming out of it," someone else said. "He's coming to."

***

"Tell me again," Rocky said after they had revived him.

Rocky was sitting upright in a hospital bed, a heap of pillows stacked behind him, bolstering him. He was sipping at some sort of soft drink that tasted like a sports beverage, only saltier, more bitter. It also tasted chemical.

Rocky tried to set the mug aside. A hand intercepted him, pushed the mug back toward him. "You need to drink it," the nurse said. Her voice, like that of the doctor, was strangely accented.

At least, Rocky assumed she was a nurse, just as he assumed this was a hospital. She looked like a nurse, with the white uniform and the tidy little hat, a hat that look like the sort of carton Chinese takeout came in. The bed and the room, like the nurse, were outdated caricatures; this was not a modern hospital facility.

"We revived you," the doctor told him. His was the strangely accented voice Rocky had heard as he was first coming back to consciousness.

The doctor stood at Rocky's bedside. He wore a white jacket and had a clipboard in his hand. He looked just like a doctor from the 1950s. He fit right in with the nurse and the room.

"Am I gonna make it?" Rocky asked wryly.

The doctor paused, and he and nurse looked at each other – a little anxiously, Rocky thought.

"What is that you're saying?" the doctor asked.

"He wonders if he will survive," the nurse explained.

"But of course!" the doctor exclaimed. "We have done everything correctly to revive you! It isn't a..." The doctor looked at the nurse and said something in that other language.

She responded in kind.

"It isn't an exact science," the doctor said, directing his comments to Rocky again. "But we do know what we are doing."

"Don't worry," the nurse added, patting his hand clumsily – the hand that clutched the mug of vile sports-drink broth. Rocky tried again to set it aside, and the nurse took hold of his hand and guided it back.

Rocky sighed. The people in this throwback hospital had no sense of humor. "What I mean, doc, is where am I? How did I get here?"

The doctor and nurse exchanged another look of alarm. "Do you remember who you are?" the doctor asked.

Asked again, actually. It was one of the first things they'd said to him as he was waking up.

'"I'm Rocco Mancuso Belzon," Rocky said. "I'm an American. I grew up in Idaho. But where the hell am I right now?"

"You are in St. Henrik's Hospital," the doctor told him. "In Helsinki."

"What? How did I get here?"

"The National Archives Institute had you sent here from Vancouver."

"Why? What was I doing in Vancouver?" Rocky paused. Then, tentatively, he answered his own question. "I live in Vancouver. I emigrated there in 2018, after..." He paused, trying to make sense of his fragmentary memories.

"That's right, you lived in Vancouver," the doctor told him. "And you were an engineer. You had your own company. And when the United States annexed British Columbia in 2028, you put yourself into voluntary hibernation. Your company perfected physiological cold storage for complex living beings. For people."

"Wait, you mean I've been frozen?"

"Yes, essentially. Do you recall the technique? We have been following the guidelines your company wrote for revival."

"I put myself under? For how long?"

The doctor shook his head. "Maybe we should first discuss the... the changes in the world since you – "

"Goddammit! How long?" Rocky insisted.

The nurse took the mug out of his shaking hand before Rocky dropped it. Her hand grasped his soothingly. "It has been a long time," she said. "Three hundred eighty years."

"But..." Rocky was flummoxed. "But how it that possible?"

"Do you mean physiologically?"

"I mean, how could any facility stay in operation that long?"

"You have been moved from the original facility several times," the nurse said. "Your facility was very cleverly built to evade detection and maintain its energy supply and operations. We think you intended to be in cold storage only a few decades. But there was the war, and..." She shrugged. "For more than sixty years your facility functioned well. Then, as the reconstruction efforts began and Canada reasserted its sovereignty, engineers found your facility. They studied the construction, the engineering... for another fifteen years you were there while they learned the science of your work, then they moved you and the others to a new facility."

"But only a few times did anyone try to revive any of you," the doctor put in.

"What others?" Rocky asked. "Colleagues? Family?"

"We have a manifest, but it gives only names," the doctor said. "We don't know how these people are related to you, if at all, but it's likely that they were patrons... that you sold them the service. We think that the facility was a kind of..." The doctor looked at the nurse.

The nurse supplied the word: "Panic room."

***

They told him his amnesia was the result of the long period of cold sleep he'd endured. They guessed that after a few months – maybe as long as a year – his recollections would start knitting together, the fragments coalescing and the blank spaces filling in. The notes left by his own company suggested this might happen.

Somehow, that wasn't reassuring.

As for how he'd come to be revived, and come to be in Helsinki, Rocky pieced the story together bit by bit. Evidently, he had founded a company that designed and built medical facilities – everything from hospitals to rehab centers to the sickbay facilities on naval ships. He had left the United States, but still contracted with the U.S. military. He had built a cold sleep facility as a proof of principal for space colonization efforts, but he must have had a presentiment of the wars to come because he concealed the facility and engineered it to run off a series of nuclear reactors backed up with geothermal power. It was a tough facility, built to endure and engineered with as much simplicity and as many redundancies for critical systems as could be managed.

"When they tried to revive one person, she remained dead," the nurse told him. "But then they found your instruction manual. It explained the steps and the process."

"But still, two more did not survive," the doctor said.

"We worked to refine the revival process," the nurse added.

"Okay," Rocky said.

"But they did not fund us very well," the doctor said. "And even the little they gave us was because we argued that one day Finland might take to the stars. The Earth is in poor condition. We need to travel to space, we need to create colonies."

"It's only possible with your cold storage technology," the nurse said.

"I know," Rocky said. "At least... I can imagine."

"So you don't remember?" the doctor asked.

"I don't remember building the facility, or planning to put myself and others into suspended animation for years," Rocky said.

"Do you remember other things?" the doctor asked him.

"Like what?"

"That national hymn of your country?"

"Which one? 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' or 'O Canada?' "

The doctor actually smiled at that.

"You see," the doctor resumed, "they only gave us money for this project with reluctance. But you come from a lucky period of time."

"Like this room," the nurse said.

"Yes, like we prepared for you, with the room and the clothing."

Now Rocky understood why the place looked like such a cliché. "You were trying to make me feel at home? You think this is what things looked like in my time?"

"It is not?"

"I'm afraid you're off by about sixty or seventy years," Rocky said. "But thank you for trying."

"So... you don't know the music of the 1960s?"

"The...?" Rocky was taken aback at the question. "Sure I do. Some. The Doors, The Who, The Rolling Stones."

The doctor and nurse were nodding, offering vague smiles that suggested they had no idea what he was talking about.

"Uh, Frank Sinatra?" Rocky guessed. "Led Zeppelin? Donovan?"

"We don't know any names of the musicians," the nurse said. "But we do know the songs, many of the songs."

"They are very popular," the doctor said.

"Everyone, all the people, they love the music."

"The National Archives music project has much, much more money than we do," the doctor explained. "They gave us the funds to attempt to revive you."

"Okay..." Rocky said, mystified as to how all of this fit together.

"You see, they have spent years reassembling the songs of the era," the doctor said. "And they have recovered or recon... recon..."

"Reconstituted," the nurse said, and gave Rocky a proud smile.

"Yes, put back together again," the doctor said. "Many songs, from diverse sources. Fragments. It's all done with a special computer."

"All right," Rocky said.

"And sometimes they have only fragments for songs, and have to guess how the whole song sounded," the doctor said.

"And there is one song that everyone loves and wants to finish restoring," the nurse said. "We hope you know it. We cannot reconstitute it on our own. We only have the beginning. Not enough to guess the rest. We hope you can tell us how it goes."

Rocky stared at them in a mixture of shock, anger, disbelief, and amusement. "You... you mean to tell me that the only reason you woke me up is because you want me to teach you a song?"

The doctor and nurse, picking up on Rocky's chagrin, had the look, for a moment, of two children caught stealing cookies. Then the doctor brightened. "It's a good song," he said.

***

Nameless officials paid Rocky visits. That is to say, they declined, like the doctor and the nurse had done, to provide their names. Rocky wasn't sure of the purpose of their visits. To decide if he really was a legitimate example of living history? Rocky expected them to pepper him with historical questions, seeking to understand the world as it used to be, and how the people of his own time allowed things to deteriorate so badly. There was a window in his room, and Rocky had glimpsed what it was like outside: The air was filled with a yellowish haze. The sky was the wrong color – darker, threatening.

He wasn't sure if the whole Earth was like what he saw out the window. Were some places in better shape? Were some worse? No one wanted to give him details about the present day, and no one wanted to hear from him about his own time, either.

One official – from the Ministry of Interior, the guy who held the purse strings for the revival project and the National Archives – came into the room to "interview" Rocky, but never said a word to him or asked a question. He never even took off the face mask that covered his mouth –�an affectation, the nurse explained, that signaled an exaggerated fear of Rocky emitting antiquated microbes.

The official spoke English, though – in fact, he made a point of it, telling the nurse that, in his view, Rocky was a parasite from an era of parasites, a selfish and dishonest man from a time dominated by selfish and dishonest men. "And we are to believe anything he tells us?" the unnamed official asked the nurse, his face in a perpetual grimace, heedless of the fact that Rocky could hear everything he was saying. "He can simply invent any story he wants. And he must know how much we have spent on him already, yet he shows no remorse or shame for it... for the way the people of his time left us impoverished..."

The nurse spoke to him in their own language, but the unnamed official simply spoke over her, still in English, and still without addressing Rocky.

"I do not believe for a moment he is an innocent victim," the unnamed official said through his face mask, which writhed and hove over his lips. "He's a con man, a criminal. If he is a refugee, he is a refugee from justice... whether in his own time or our own, this is true. His crimes are the crimes of all his generation..."

After that first visit, the official said nothing at all; not to the nurse, not to Rocky. He simply looked at Rocky – not with curiosity, or even hostility, but rather with an air of vague disappointment or, perhaps, exasperation.

Skepticism, Rocky thought. The man didn't seem to believe that whatever was being spent to revive him would be worth the price tag.

***

That very question began to weigh on Rocky, as he sensed it weighed on the doctor and the nurse. What if he didn't know the song they were asking about? He liked old music and listened to classic rock, but he was hardly a student of music in general, let alone a niche era like the 1960s. And what if this particular song was some sort of rarity? From what Rocky gathered, the Archive's music restoration project used any and all surviving forms of physical media – and not much of it had survived. Still, it was all they had, since digital files had all been destroyed by repeated EM strikes.

The wars and their ensuing chaos had caused immense devastation, and two or three periods of zealous religious persecution had eradicated much of what remained of the world's music, film, literature, and even scientific knowledge. It was like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again, magnified a million times and set on repeat. It made Rocky sick.

Still, mass media had been so pervasive that there had to be some copies of the song left intact, or enough fragments from which to reconstruct the whole thing... didn't there? That's how the Archive had managed to restore so many thousands of songs already.

But the doctor and nurse explained that there were only two known sources for the song, one even more truncated and badly damaged than the other. That only made sense, Rocky reasoned, if it had been a B-side or a bootleg. Maybe it had never even seen commercial release. Who knew but that some amateur hadn't recorded the song in a basement somewhere?

Rocky had to live with a growing fear that he would not know the song. To give the answers everyone wanted would make him a national hero. But if he could offer no illumination? Then what? If they decided he had been resurrected at great expense only to let them down, would they freeze him again? Or would they kick him out into the streets of this vicious, nearly uninhabitable world? The chill air of skeptical indifference with which the silent official had eyed him had left Rocky with a deep-seated conviction that the powers that be would make no effort whatsoever to preserve him if they decided he had nothing they wanted.

Whatever preparations his new friends were making, they were taking a lot of time. A week went by. Rocky could tell that there was growing excitement in the outside world; the staff he interacted with positively glowed, seeming to vibrate with some kind of generalized anticipation. The downside was that no one would tell him anything about the song in question; they played coy, insisting that he wait to hear it from whatever sound system they were setting up.

Rocky asked himself over and over again why someone couldn't just play the snippet to him on their phone or on a boom box, and time after time he came back to the unhappy conclusion that phones and boom boxes – personal luxuries of any sort – simply did not exist in this new world. His room was pleasant, if outdated, but it didn't represent any larger reality. Things were tough out there; maybe even, by the standards he only vaguely recalled, not worth living.

Rocky started having dreams in which he stood on a vast, empty stage, with a crowd of numberless people in the audience, all peering at him. The stage was so huge that the crowd was far off in the distance, miles away, and yet he felt their focus, their anticipation...

Never in the dream did he actually hear the song. Never did he offer a guess. All of that, if it happened, seemed to happen offstage, outside the periphery of his personal awareness.

The doctor, accompanied by a new, effusive official, stopped by Rocky's room one afternoon, twelve days after he had been revived, and beamed at him.

"Yes?" Rocky asked. He'd graduated from sitting upright in bed to perching at a chair across the room, leaning his elbows on the table and trying to read. They had brought him a small selection of books – books on paper, that is. Most of it seemed to be crackpot science ("Worlds in Collision") or romance novels by Danielle Steele and Barbara Cartland. If this was the literature that had survived the various purges and frenzies of the last four hundred years, Rocky thought, maybe it wasn't so strange that there were only two surviving fragments of the song everyone was so keen to hear more of.

"Tomorrow," the effusive official said. It must have been one of the few words he actually knew in English.

"Tomorrow? You mean...?"

"Tomorrow," the effusive official said again, nodding, his eyes glittering with delight.

"Well, all right then," Rocky muttered.

***

No one told him how the day would unfold. That was pretty much par for the course; no one ever told him anything. It added to his sense of panic and anxiety. Would he be taken to some sort of public arena, like the huge stage in his nightmares? Would he be in a television studio or radio station, or whatever the equivalent might be in this diminished world?

That night the dream was back, but this time he knew what the song was. He stood on the vast stage, the crowd watching from a distance, its need and expectation like rays of sunlight that gathered around him. Lifting his hands over heard, Rocky felt those rays coalesce into a burning ball – a ball the flickered and sparked. Thunder rolled from within the ball – thunder he felt, but did not hear. Familiar music passed through him in an unmistakable vibration, the words skittering through his mind as if projected there telepathically. Maybe they were. Maybe all of this – the doctor, the nurse, the effusive official, the cold and skeptical official – maybe all of this was part and parcel to some greater revelation.

The words rang though him:

The sun flashed out its warning...

The ball of psychic plasma in his hands did just that.

"And the sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls..."

Rocky saw them, remembered them... images of a world deeply divided, a world of extravagant, useless wealth and grinding, miserable poverty – deadly wealth, deadly poverty...

He saw those dwellings, the words written across their shattered plaster and their wounded bricks – words scrawled in blood, in smoke, and in bullet holes that gouged atavistic meaning in a violent alphabet no animal could fail to read...

"This is it!" Rocky cried out, though his voice was stilled by the unmoving air. The vast white sky beyond the stage, the hazy sky over the featureless crowd, was breaking apart, black streaks racing through its precincts. The nothingness was out there like a great cosmic fist, clenched, ready to strike; clenched, choking the life and the light out of the disintegrating universe...

Rocky woke up with a gasp. Staring into the memory of the dream, he was convinced he had divined the song he would be called upon to explain. Would he have to write it out note by note, word by word? Did they want him to sing it? God, he hoped not. Rocky had no specific memory of ever trying to sing, but he knew that he couldn't carry a tune. He could hear the song in his mind, however, as crisp and distinct as if it were playing right now.

Rocky though about the lyrics of the song, and its title – "The Sound of Silence" – and wondered if this was all some sort of cosmic joke. What he could remember of the years after his escape to Canada was rife with the same repeated plea that American friends and family relayed to him, that celebrities and politicians resorted to – "If only we could talk to each other, of only people would listen!" For such a popular refrain, it seemed ironically impossible to manage.

But when his benefactors got him ready for the big moment, and when they escorted him through a series of subterranean tunnels – they must have walked miles; Rocky's weakened body was barely up to the task – they still wouldn't tell him anything about the song. "We don't want to spoil it, we don't want to cause you to expect to hear something that's not there..."

It was a lame excuse. And it didn't matter anyway, because now Rocky had "The Sound of Silence" playing on repeat through his head. It was a relentless earworm, gnawing away endlessly, the same music, the same words...

The effusive official was, however, possibly about to give Rocky some clues in his excitement. The nurse, fluent as she was in English, had trouble keeping up with him.

"The song fragment lasts for less than one minute," he was saying. "And it's such bad luck that neither fragment offers us more than that. Also, it's a peculiar coincidence, how the song is truncated at the same place, in the middle of a note."

The nurse was translating for the effusive official; she paused while he chattered on, and then resumed: "I have often wondered if the two fragments come from some third source, If they are second-hand relics resulting from some earlier effort at preservation. This sort of thing is not unknown..."

Rocky despaired: Couldn't the guy simply have given him a few of the lyrics, or hummed a few bars?

They showed him to a small, poorly-lit room where several men fussed over something that looked like a jukebox, if a jukebox and a large aquarium full of crude oil were to be combined into a single piece of monstrous installation art.

"What is that?" Rocky asked the effusive official by way of the nurse.

The effusive official grew even more animated, pointing at the machine, waving his arms, exclaiming excitedly, and grinning broadly.

"That is the liquid acrylic matrix," the nurse explained, and Rocky wasn't sure she was translating correctly. But then, what would technology of this place and time be like? Maybe the translation was just fine and he simply didn't know what she was talking about.

"The record of the song fragment is stored here," she continued to translate, as the effusive official explained.

"Okay," Rocky said.

The effusive official babbled on. Rocky tuned out. Looking around, he saw the skeptical official was already in the room, sitting in a chair off to the side. The man still wore his mask. Rocky wondered if the mask actually had anything to do with him. Maybe the man had to venture out into the yellow haze often enough that he simply never took the mask off.

The effusive official and the nurse led Rocky to what looked like a podium. No, Rocky realized, it was more like a listening booth. The effusive official jabbered and made an exaggerated escorting gesture. "Step in there," the nurse translated.

Hesitantly, Rocky complied. He wasn't thrilled about it. What if they didn't like his answer? Would they simply lock him in? Would they cart the booth off, struggling prisoner and all, and chuck it into a ravine somewhere, or into the ocean?

The effusive official moved away and conferred with the technicians working around the jukebox-looking machine Then he spoke with the skeptical official, whose chilling gaze rarely left Rocky even as he nodded, listening to his colleague's effusions.

And then... it was time. As in his dream, an expectant hush seemed to fall. Also as in his dreams, Rocky imagined he could feel the impatient anticipation of... millions? A whole nation? The entire world?

But then, unlike his dreams, he heard the song begin: A guitar's plucked strings, then a sprightly male voice:

"Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, but she doesn't have a lot to say..."

Rocky grinned. He knew this. Of course he did! It –

Then his smile faded away. Yes, he knew it, and now he knew that he would have no satisfactory answer to give the people of this benighted future. This was a famously incomplete song, ending in mid-note, just as the effusive official had said... because that was how it was recorded. It was a joke, a hidden song that came to life after the last listed track of the final album The Beatles had put out.

But how would he explain this to his benefactors? How would he make them believe him? Everyone would be disappointed, and Rocky could only imagine what the skeptical official would say: He'd repeat his cynical claim that Rocky didn't know; that he was making a story up; that he was making fools of them.

Excited by that momentary grin on Rocky's face, the people in the room were cheering with exuberance.

Now, as Rocky started to sob in terror, their faces fell.

Rocky felt a press of impending oblivion, the fractured silence of his own incomplete life, the gap that loomed as his existence was about to be truncated mid-note...

Peripheral Visions will return with an eighth season in September.

"The Sound of Silence" by Paul Simon, � Paul Simon Music; "Her Majesty" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, � Sony; lyrics used here under fair use, with no copyright infringement intended.