(Photo by Marcus Ramberg)

I walked outside with my duffel bag, my eyes squinting though the sky was a pale overcast. The steady din of the highway crept between the buildings of the dense apartment complex. It was around noon on a Thursday in early December, and for the past hour or two I had been pacing through my ground level, two-bedroom apartment, gathering necessities for a long weekend trip.

As I set down the bag, I heard a faint noise coming from nearby. At first it was only discernible as a human utterance; I thought it might have been a baby squealing. I moved back towards my entry door and heard it again, in the first floor apartment just north of my own. And now the source was more clear: a woman moaning, loud enough to recognize on the sidewalk outside.

I rushed back through my apartment door and turned into the bedroom, not quite confident in my own auditory acuity. I shut off the oscillating fan and slowly, cautiously, put my ear against the north-facing wall. Already my heart was pounding, as if the vague possibility of hearing a woman in that state had triggered an automatic biological response within me.

And there it was again, a soft, drawn out “ohhhhhhhh,” undeniably the result of sexual arousal. I could see how that might be mistaken for a baby’s cooing. There are obvious parallels between the two – both are powerful, alarming, consuming, but also vulnerable, angelic, transitory. Wars break out over this noise.* It grips men by the throat, explodes their sensibilities – so men try to dampen it, cover it up, or lock it away.

I remembered my animal behavior classes in college, when we studied certain species of monkeys and apes that gather information about sex by watching other individuals in the act.

After all, I was completely controlled by the hormones flushing through my system as a result of these sound waves crossing the drywall barrier. But I liked it, so I kept listening. I’ve been so disconnected from the social realm. Suddenly I felt close to people, admitted into their most private moments. I was startled by the excitement! I heard more from the woman, a repetitive call of “yeah, yeah, yeah, ohhhh.” The man, he was quieter, so I could only hear a low moan behind the more invigorated female calls.

I imagined how they might have been situated. From the frequency of the cyclical clapping sounds, I thought she must be propped on hands and knees, with the man kneeling behind her, thrusting. I remembered my animal behavior classes in college, when we studied certain species of monkeys and apes that gather information about sex by watching other individuals in the act.

Our evolutionary ancestors must have used auditory information as well, I thought to myself. Why else would I be listening to my neighbors have sex?

While thinking about that I began to feel ashamed, partly because of my prudish upbringing – especially the various times I was disciplined over sexual matters: pornographic photos in seventh grade, an explicit story in eighth grade, the single condom in my wallet in tenth grade. I also wondered what my girlfriend would think if she came home from work and saw me this way. Maybe she’d be thrilled, too. If she had come home I would have used telekinesis to dissolve her clothes. I wanted to hear those same noises within inches of my ears, to feel, at the same time, her warm breath on my neck.

So I felt ashamed, but not guilty. It did, however, make me wonder if people have listened to us through the walls – the walls we shared with three other apartments. More than that, I wondered what we sounded like. This sex seemed better than any I’ve had, but I do have what experts might call an “overactive imagination.”

Maybe I should close my eyes more often, and just listen to the sounds, I thought. I wonder if that alone could intensify the tactile perception.

In neuroscience class, I recalled, we learned the vast biochemical differences in sensory processing. That must be why each produces such a distinct kind of stimulation. But this isn’t why most people close their eyes or turn off the lights. Too often it’s an attempt to imagine being with somebody else…

I began to wonder why I wasn’t masturbating. It seemed like other people would have done that. Perhaps I was too frozen, trying not to move in the dim grey light of the room, as our two dogs watched me in confusion from their kennels. Suddenly the woman next door became louder, and her calls shifted in tone to something sharper, a more agitated scream.

It brought to mind my short time living in Chicago three years earlier. Sitting down to eat lunch in the living room on a Sunday afternoon, I overheard my roommate and his girlfriend producing the same clamor in their bedroom. That was the first time I heard other people having sex. It was strange, like the barrier between me and pornographic videos had suddenly been broken. My trauma was worsened because I hadn’t felt the intimate touch of a woman in almost a year.

The sounds from the other apartment quieted down, and in a way I felt disappointed. Listening to the two of them was utterly invigorating. I felt absolutely alive, pulsing with an energy I hadn’t known in some time. Leading up to this, the forces of the world had started to become really overbearing. I’d recently finished grad school, yet had no job nor any real friends. But this was a fresh shot of life!

I heard the shower turn on, and I figured one or both of them must have engaged in this act right after waking up. Then I heard someone open their apartment door, followed by a car door. I lifted a single strip of the venetian blinds and was surprised at what I saw. The woman, who looked to be about 5’3” and in her early twenties, wore jeans and a red pea coat. This brunette looked rather normal, not at all the sexual predator I had conjured in my mind. She lifted a small suitcase out of the trunk of her sedan and walked back towards the door. Winter break had just begun for colleges, so I figured she must be visiting her long-distance boyfriend; hence, the explosive vocalizations that come with delayed gratification.

I tried to compose myself, to finish packing for my own trip. I breathed deeply and reveled in the awareness that such a strange experience had injected me with a new sense of optimism, something I’d been lacking for half a year. More than anything, it made me look forward to the future.

* This sentence was unconsciously adapted from a line in the book Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac. I realized the similarity only after publishing this short story. Still, I felt that an acknowledgment was in line.