In the Night of the Heat by Blair Underwood Page B

sight—people shrieking and screaming and eating their young. I’d had the ringing for only a day, and I was halfway to bugnuts myself. Night was hell. Nothing but ringing, hissing, and roaring in my head, keeping me awake. How would I put up with one more night?
    Reggie was my last stop before Panic.
    â€œWhen’s it gonna stop?” I asked Reggie when he straightened up, his exam done.
    Dad wheeled himself closer to hear better himself, and Marcela hovered, too.
    Reggie folded his arms behind his head and gazed down at me, his lips refusing to smile. “Don’t know for sure, man. It probably will—it usually does—but it might not. I gotta be real with you: It might be gone tomorrow, or it might not be gone for a while. Weeks? Months?”
    Marcela muttered in Spanish, shaking her head, maternal worry creasing her brow.
    Reggie went on: “In the short term, there are things you can do: Avoid aspirin, caffeine, alcohol. Studies show that they make the ringing worse. And if it’s bad at night, get a humidifier, an air purifier, something that makes low-level noise. That’ll help mask it.”
    â€œ Mask it my ass, Reggie. How do I get rid of it?”
    That was when Reggie explained there was no known cure. And that the ringing might persist even after the hearing in my left ear returned— if my hearing returned, which was more and more doubtful after sixteen hours, and mine had been gone longer. And he explained that my mission now was to make sure the hearing loss didn’t get worse. And recommended a good otolaryngologist, a specialist at UCLA Medical Center. Recommended some herbs and amino acids I could take.
    In other words, there was nothing he could do. Just like the emergency-room doctor said.
    Reggie’s confirmation exhausted me. I would have lain down on the table, just let the weight of the knowledge sink down into my bones, except I didn’t want to upset Dad. Or I didn’t want to look weak to him, more likely.
    â€œThe gunshot and the ringing are related, but I’m gonna go ahead and look at them as two separate problems,” Reggie said. “It’s rare, but I’ve seen temporary hearing loss up to three or four days. I’m hoping you have what we call a Temporary Threshold Shift—as opposed to PTS, the permanent kind. We don’t know if there’s cell death unless the hearing doesn’t come back, and that only becomes clearer with time. But if you look at your ear’s function as computer hardware, the ringing is more like a software problem.” He smiled as if pleased by the analogy. “It’s a little more complicated. There’s a bigger role that stress plays, for example.”
    â€œSo it’s in my head?” I said.
    Reggie grinned slightly. “In more ways than one, yeah. So…take it easy for a few days. Chill out. Low stress.”
    That would be tough, with April, my job, and my left ear gone in a span of two days.
    â€œ(Twhig hie eeziiee), man,” Reggie said with a smile, slugging my shoulder.
    I nodded, but I hadn’t heard him. Instead, I’d heard a sound like waves crashing over my brain. The noise wasn’t always a ringing. Maybe I would have to get used to that, too.
    When the gun went off, I’d just been relieved that all the blood on my shirt and hand wasn’t really mine—it was only from the squibs. I was so grateful to be alive, I’d made jokes for Chela by the time she got home from school. (“Your turn’s coming, all that loud music.”)
    But that had worn off. All I could think about now was the damage.
    When I tried to ask Reggie to repeat what he’d said, I couldn’t open my mouth.
    Â 
    â€œOne ear’s better’n none…” Dad said, turning on the TV. Pep talk over.
    To Dad, a few words of hard, simple truth and an afternoon of Court TV were the answers to all of life’s problems. Dad had learned