Ping

There is a noise.  A pinging noise.

There are all sorts of noises here in the Shadetree apartment, many of which do not have any direct analogue to the noises I experienced during the seven years I lived in Sealand.  Gone (thus far) is the howling of the swamp wind, the rattling of the near-paneless window casings, the distant honk of horns and wail of sirens from the cars on Route 33.  Audible instead is a dull intermittent roaring that might be the furnace pumping steam into the radiators, and the hooting of trains as they amble through the crossing in the center of town, and the sounds of teenagers catcalling to one another behind the pharmacy, waiting around for someone who will buy them smokes.  And also a certain amount of door-slamming and conversation from the surrounding apartments, recalling nothing so much as the days I spent in my college dormitory back during the Time of Legends.  The front door of the apartment, for all its seeming heft and size, is apparently hollow, and the antechamber between the four apartments is echoey;  anything that happens out there can be heard clearly in here, as if there was no door at all.  The walls, for their part, aren’t precisely thin, but they’re thin enough that you can hear the television or the stereo or vigorous conversation through them, especially at night.  Jack has come out of the bedroom once already after I’ve gotten him settled, alarmed by being able to hear the voices, and thinking there are people in the room with him.

The pinging noise, though, I can’t figure out.  It doesn’t sound like an alert, such as a smoke detector with low batteries.  It doesn’t sound mechanical.  It sounds distant, as if it is coming from outside the building, outside the entire complex, and despite that, is loud enough to be heard.  It is high, and very clear, and very intermittent;  it pings once-  PING!-  and then the ping fades, and it remains inaudible for a few minutes, whereupon it will ping again.  As if a submarine was cruising at conning depth through the concrete outside, and firing off its sonar occasionally to check its surroundings.

Maybe I’ll put my coffee in a mug and go out and find it.