The Hum

It’s not outside the realm of possibilities that my brother and I will one day collaborate on a book. We discussed it before he left for Iraq. Part of that discussion may have been our need to find some locus of control in a situation completely out of our hands. Perhaps it was our need to have something concrete to look forward to when his tour ended. Whatever the reason, it gave me something positive to concentrate on while he was away.

So, I started up The Longest Year; I scribble away on my whiteboard nightly; and I gut newspapers and magazines for their most poignant articles. I’ve spent the past many months jotting down every miniscule ripple that Andrew’s absence makes in the placid waters of my family. I want to be certain I have something to contribute when my brother returns home with his volumes of gritty and graphic tales that will doubtless hold oppressive reign over family conversations for many holidays to come.

In the beginning of this odyssey, writing topics fell from the sky. There was no shortage of conflict in the early months of Andrew‘s deployment. Of course, it didn’t help that he left just before the holidays, exacerbating the usual winter strife to epic proportions. I certainly didn’t enjoy the drama in our household, but the head-butting certainly filled up the journal pages. But while it was easy to write about the new experiences and new perspectives one gains at the beginning of such an enterprise, once complacency set in -- and it did set in -- it became much more difficult to find a hook or an angle for the domestic side of this tale.

My daily activities have mostly remained the same; the usual cycle of work, TV, writing, TV, Cubs, destitution, work, TV, etc. My parents remain busy as ever; my father with school board, booster club, and laundry; my mother with quilting and whatever evil machinations keep her at school until the wee hours of the evening. The only real change to the standard grind is my mother’s once-a-day e-mails and the occasional package of bric-a-brac that she demands my father and I contribute to (I supply episodes of Lost and 24 while dad handles the overseas postage).

On the surface things appear much as they always have, but life these days is certainly not the status quo. Everybody who loves my brother knows what I’m talking about. It’s that sense of unease beneath the surface of every day. Andrew doesn’t hold total dominion over my every waking thought, yet his absence and the danger he now faces lingers in my subconscious like a virulent infection. I don’t always think of Andrew, but I always feel him.

How can I articulate this sensation -- this fusion of loss, worry, and anticipation -- and the side-effects that manifest themselves in the most peculiar circumstances? I’ve been pondering this question for a while now, as my insights into the domestic side of deployment become less and less compelling. This feeling, this idea, is the key to my side of the story, of my family’s side of the story, but for the longest time I could not articulate it properly.

Then my I-Pod nearly killed me. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I’ve been weeding through my music library looking for the ideal playlist for my workouts. On this particular day I took a walk to the nearest mailbox to send back some Netflix DVDs, and I took along some music to test. Somewhere near St. Pius Catholic Church Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” began to play. This tune is significant in two ways. First, the song itself has a distinct militaristic bent; it begins with a drill sergeant barking orders before a thumping cadence chant begins. Second, the song was used in the trailers for Jarhead -- the closest the cinema has come to depicting America’s military involvement in the Middle East (even if the film deals with Desert Storm). As the song began there was a jolt in my stomach, and suddenly my heart was beating out of my chest. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, so I took a knee in the grass and closed my eyes. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced -- a dangerous amalgam of adrenaline, fear, and panic. It felt as if every fiber in my being were vibrating furiously, pulling me apart in a million different directions. I wasn’t completely confident I’d have the wherewithal to pull myself together.

But I did, and by the time I got back home I had landed on a phrase that perfectly encapsulated both the breakdown on my way to the mailbox and the general malaise that has hung on me since Thanksgiving.

I call it The Hum.

Imagine the sound of a ceiling fan swirling overhead as you go to sleep. It‘s not typical for most of us to sleep through noise, but the fan is steady enough and quiet enough that after a few minutes we forget it’s there; we develop a synchronicity that allows us to slip into dreamland without issue. The fan is The Hum -- a constant presence that, for the most part, can be ignored.

But it’s a fragile relationship between you and the fan. Suddenly there’s an arrhythmic click amidst the steady whirr. The beat you’ve gotten used to is quickly, efficiently disrupted. Your heart starts to race as the anxiety of insomnia builds. You start looking at the clock as your window for a good night’s sleep closes. You can’t fix the click, because you can’t place the problem. Turning off the fan is not an option. All you can do is hope that the clicking will stop long enough for you to escape into sleep. So it is with The Hum.

Like with the bothersome click, it’s impossible to anticipate the next issue that will disrupt the agreement between you and The Hum or how the next interruption will manifest itself. Sometimes it’s through tears. Sometimes it’s through misdirected anger. Occasionally, it’s a nervous breakdown on the way to the mailbox. Still, most remarkably, the majority of the time the catalysts for these shake-ups have only tangential relationships to Andrew.

I’ve had issues with anxiety for a while now, but things have only gotten worse in recent months. For me, it’s a lot like waiting to go onstage on opening night of a play. My whole being is buzzing with the usual stage fright, but I know that once I get out there and into the moment the nerves will subside and I’ll be able to breathe again. Well, The Hum is like that, except I never get on stage. I just have to deal with the nerves. I just have to accept the anxiety. It would be nice to be able to point to this thing or that and say “This is why I feel this way.” That would allow me the chance to remove the disruptive stimulus and get back to normal. Unfortunately, I can’t remove my brother’s deployment from my life. Instead, I have to deal with the possibility that a swarm of electrified butterflies could go racing through my heart at any time -- while sitting at a stop sign, or taking a shower, or enjoying my morning Eggo. That’s just the way life is for the immediate future.

Of course, The Hum doesn’t always manifest itself in such an alarming fashion. Sometimes The Hum can be rather cathartic, as in this experience my father shared with me just the other day:

“I was watching Ladder 49 last night,” he told me. “And it’s not even that great of a movie -- but that scene at the end where they know he’s not getting out and he’s saying good-bye to everyone -- I just started bawling. Your mother came into the room and I had tears rolling down my face and she thought I was crazy.”

I don’t cry very often in the context of my own life. I cried when my brother left for Iraq. I cried after finishing my tribute to my grandmother. But usually I go years without a genuine breakdown. That being said, I’m easily manipulated by my favorite movies and TV shows. I leave the room whenever my dad watches Friday Night Lights, because I turn into a blubbering fool when Tim McGraw gives his son his championship ring. The debut of “Laura” on Battlestar Galactica totally messed me up. And Field of Dreams… we’ll just say it’s shameful.

All of those cases I can admit with a certain modicum of self-respect. Unfortunately, because of The Hum, my judgment of what shows are worthy of my tears has gone out the window. Damn near everything on television can choke me up these days. A few weeks back when they brought out a soldier’s daughters on Deal or No Deal I had to stop my workout and go hide in the locker room for five minutes so I could pull myself together. Movies that I know completely suck can squeeze a drop or two out of me thanks to my sensitivity to The Hum. My dad and I sat in the living room during Leo McGarry’s funeral on The West Wing refusing to look at each other‘s glossy cheeks.

Grown men. It’s really quite sad.

It’s hard to imagine living without The Hum. I’ve gotten so use to it. But this week marks the halfway point in Andrew’s tour, and soon enough that anxiety and urgency that has plagued us since November will be relieved. But even though it occasionally appears at inopportune times and in demoralizing ways, The Hum has a way of energizing me to do things I might not have done otherwise. Even as The Hum initially caused me to balloon to my heaviest weight ever, its constant pestering also drove me to my lowest weight and best physical condition in nearly ten years. Even though The Hum occasionally knocks the wind out of me, it pushes me to keep moving and keep the strength of its tone at bay. And even though it will push me to tears once in a while, there’s something refreshing about engaging emotions that too often stay in check.

It’s ridiculous to compare the trials my brother faces with something as abstract and personal as The Hum, however my brother has one advantage over those of us here at home. He can be proactive in silencing his own Hum. Those of us battling it here must accept it and patiently endure. We can’t stop The Hum ourselves. We can only wait for Andrew to come home and stop it for us.