AIR PODS PRO

        You wake up to the tolling of digital bells and touch your phone to silence them. The tiny garden of light you tend each evening is in order: iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, everything is in its place on your Logitech 3-in-1 wireless charging pad. It’s the little things, you think, like the absence of wires, that give you peace. Efficiency pleases you. And it starts in your little walled garden.
        You pluck the AirPods Pro, two white lilies-of-the-valley not yet bloomed, from their electric bed. From the moment they are plucked, they are already on, already paired. Still, you squeeze them once before placing them in your ears. It is a ritual, a prayer even, a wish for sound to fill you from the inside out. They nestle in your ear canals like miniature Venetian gondolas. They belong here. You made the right choice.
        You used to make fun of these things. The price, the awkward shape, the alien fashion statement. Now you accept their grace, for who are you to question the design of a thing so efficient? In your life, you too have been odd and unseemly. But you’ve always gotten things done. Eventually, people will take notice. The fashion is changing.
        You grab your phone and take a walk in the park. You listen to Brian Eno’s seminal 1983 album Apollo.  It’s a beautiful day, and everything outside your ears behaves like sky: slow drifts and quiet undulations. You too are like sky. You are silent, serene, all-encompassing, and free. And Apollo is a masterpiece. The people who say it’s too simple, or boring, just aren’t listening closely enough. They aren’t investing the time and care you are, in the same way you invest time and care into cleaning your sneakers or pouring hot water over freshly ground coffee. If they were, then more people would see the perfect sonic tapestry of Apollo for what it is, a backdrop against which all the small, unassuming activities of life, like walking in a park, stand in dignified relief. It’s a shame, it sometimes feels like you and only you comprehend the genius of Brian Eno.
        But of course there are distractions. The sound waves from the cars and the leaves and the wind and the people and their primitive headphones are in your way, aurally. You realize you forgot to turn on Noise Cancelling Mode. Now you do and your AirPods Pro analyze the distracting noises then send the mathematical inverse of their waveforms into your ears to neutralize them. Anti-noise nullifies noise. The distractions vanish.
        You pass a man with AirPods and nod in recognition of his self-isolation. He nods back, though inside he surely envies the slim fit of your Pros next to his amateurs.
        Suddenly, a terrible screeching noise breaks through your sonic defenses. You turn and see a cyclist zoom past, inches from your face. He swerves off the trail and crashes into an oak tree that refuses to yield.
        The cyclist’s helmet cracks mutely on impact.
        You look down at your feet. You are standing squarely in the bike lane. To your right: a nice day in the park; to your left: this man is in pain. He moves his head in a slow circular motion, testing his neck. Then he rises to his feet, wincing. He is livid. From your soundproofed bubble, the desperation on his face looks pathetic, even comical. Another solitary man raging against something mundane, you muse. Except that mundane thing is you.
        And this man is large. It occurs to you that the crash may have been your fault. You didn’t realize you were entering a bike lane. You didn’t realize there was a bike lane. The man storms over, holding his battered bike frame in his strong, calloused hands. The kind that can lay waste to a face like yours. You think that you have, in all likelihood, done something awful. You also think that the bike looks inexpensive—not an elegant 10-speed road bike or a vintage 1-speed—but crass and plain, a stubborn shade of purple.
        This man is yelling. The anti-noise in your ears drowns the yells, making them sound like they’re underwater, but certain things get through. “Attention.” “Stupid.” “Blivious.” You wonder how far he’ll go. A bicycle is a powerful weapon, perhaps even deadly, if one knows how to wield it.
        Though you despise confrontation, you decide it’s safer to enter this man’s fraught world than to avoid it. Ignoring him could be catastrophic. So you switch your AirPods Pro to Transparency Mode. Your internal world follows suit, going from opaque to clear. Now, this man is yelling at you. “Wake the fuck up! Is anybody home?”
        You point at the quotation marks in your ears to indicate you haven’t been listening. But now you are. He explains the situation, how he expected you to stop and look before crossing the bike path, how he yelled warnings you didn’t hear, how at the last moment you stepped right into his path and forced him to veer off course and hit that tree; how this was, in fact, all your fault. Yet as he talks, his anger cools. The red drains from his face, his veins recede, though you are still overcome with fear.
        You offer to pay for the bike, but he doesn’t want that. He tells you he’s not hurt, and that’s the only thing that matters. He wants you, he says, to pay attention. That’s all. You are flooded with gratitude, more than you’ve felt in a very long time. Your ignorance has been forgiven; no gift can compare. And the more you talk to him, the more you actually feel close to this man. You live in the same neighborhood, enjoy the same park, and share the same physical space at this very moment in time. You’re astonished by his grace, how his rage turned so quickly into kinship. Your relief is so great that you want to throw your arms around him, because you are alone, you have been alone for so long, cut off from the world of touch and the meaning of parks, the secret human magnetism that holds all of these strangers, feet apart, together.
        After you say goodbye, something dawns on you. The difference between sound and noise lies with the listener, in their willingness to listen. For the first time in your life you understand why the audience at punk shows, whose violence always seemed uncouth to you, is so quick to lift a body up when it falls.
        You continue your walk, without headphones, listening to the sounds of the park.

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