my first year of high school i was in this intensive outpatient exposure therapy program which i attended for the first half of every other weekday, or something. it was in this out-of-the-way room in some sort of hospital; the memories flicker a bit because i've been in a lot of rooms with buzzy fluorescent lights and adults who talk to me like a dog, so they sort of blur together. there are a few things that distinguish my time in iop, though, and one of those is the little boy on the other side of the room, with a different small group of kids and therapists, who screamed endlessly. he couldn't have been much older than eleven. he would come in every day a bit after me and start screaming and i would put my head down on the table between my arms, trying to cover my ears. i never heard him say a word. there was a tiny empty room they sent him to, but it wasn't actually soundproof, just a little further away, so everything we did at the program was accompanied by the background score of a little boy screaming in another room. at the time i found it only a bit more annoying than the slight buzzing of the fluorescent lights, because none of the adults gave any indication that something was wrong here, and all of us kids were crazy anyway. i graduated the summer before my sophomore year, and he was still there when i left. i don't remember his name or what he looked like, and it's not like i could reach back and save him if i did.
i keep wanting to reframe this act as some kind of tiny liberation, but that's a lie, and not a permissible lie like the lies that slip into everything i write from memory no matter how objective i pretend to be. it's the worst kind of lie! it's theft! i spent some time in that room, too, when i became too unwieldy, but i can't cut and fold my memory over him and place the screams in my throat. i can't know why he screamed. i know that i could have, and i think that i probably should have, and i know that i didn't. i spent the first part of my childhood screaming, and then i spent a lot of time in rooms with buzzy fluorescent lights and adults who talked to me like a dog, and i became the only person i can tell this story as: the girl on the other side of the room who listened to him scream and didn't wonder about it at all.
“I was thinking,” I said, “about back then, at Hailsham, when you used to go bonkers like that, and we couldn’t understand it. We couldn’t understand how you could ever get like that. And I was just having this idea, just a thought really. I was thinking maybe the reason you used to get like that was because at some level you always knew.”
Tommy thought about this, then shook his head. “Don’t think so, Kath. No, it was always just me. Me being an idiot. That’s all it ever was.” Then after a moment, he did a small laugh and said: “But that’s a funny idea. Maybe I did know, somewhere deep down. Something the rest of you didn’t.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
The Shout by Simon Armitage
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park - I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm -
I lifted an arm.
He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.
Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
