The Other Ear

Brian Evenson

First published in Salt Hill 27 (2011)

István acquired the other ear during the worst days of the war. One moment he was yelling and charging and the next he was waking up in a field hospital that stank of mold and blood, looking up into a field surgeon’s weary face. He had been given something to blunt the pain, but he could still feel something, a tugging, as he watched out of the corner of one eye the surgeon raise and lower a needle and thread. What is it, he tried to say, what’s wrong with me, but was not certain words came out. In any case, the field surgeon did not acknowledge him, and a moment later he was unconscious again.

When he woke again, he was in a dark tent, its canvas wet, waterlogged. He was lying on a cot on his side, his head and leg throbbing with pain. Next to his cot, almost touching it, was another cot, the dim shape of a man in it. It was impossible for István to say if the man was alive or dead. Next to that was another cot, another man, and then, beyond that, the soaked wall of the tent. The sound of dripping water was everywhere.

He tried to speak, only groaned. Neither body in the cots beside him moved. Am I dead? he wondered fleetingly. He tried to turn his head and pain shot through his neck, so he stopped, just lay there and stared at the other cots. The bodies in them remained motionless.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he must have, for suddenly the rain had stopped and light was streaming through the flap. The two cots beside him were empty and stripped of their sheets. A surgeon, maybe the same one as before, his wraps still bloody, was standing near the foot of the bed, just visible out of the corner of István’s eye. The surgeon leaned closer.

“How are you feeling?” the surgeon asked.

“What happened?” István asked. This time he was certain he spoke.

“Mine, probably,” said the surgeon. “Or grenade. You were pretty tore up. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“How bad?”

The surgeon gave him a steady look. “One side of your body and one side of your face. You still look human if that’s what you’re worried about. Your left ear had been torn off but the man who brought you in saw it and brought it back as well. We were able to sew it back on.”

“My ear?” he said. He reached up and was surprised by what he felt there.

The surgeon nodded.

“But I didn’t have that ear,” István said, still feeling the side of his head. “I lost that ear months ago.”

A few weeks more and he was up and about again, one side of his body still stitched through with pain but that, too, with time, beginning to pass. He did not have a mirror nor, did it seem, did anyone in the field hospital, but an obliging nurse scrubbed the rust off a metal tray until it shone and then held it for him, tilting it against the light at his command until he could see, as if through a fog, some watery version of his own face. It did not look familiar to him, the face, and the ear, the new ear, he could never quite bring into focus. He could, with his fingertips, feel its shape out, but the ear was still numb, nerveless or nearly so, still resistant to feeling, so it was hard to tell much about it. There seemed nothing extraordinary about it: it was just an ear. Maybe even a reasonable facsimile of his own ear, the one he had lost near the beginning of the war.

He stared at the wavery image in the tray, fingered his careful way around the ear itself. Who had it belonged to? he wondered. Was its original possessor dead or alive? How was it that the ear had made its way to him?

The stitching all around the other ear, holding to his head, became slightly puffy, swollen. At first he had the impression that if he simply pulled hard enough he could tear the ear free. But as time went on, the ear seemed more and more firmly attached, more and more a part of him.

One evening, near the end of his stay in the hospital, not long before he was sent back to the trenches to rejoin his few remaining companions, something happened. He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling of the tent, when he began to hear, off to one side, the sound of breathing. He turned his head, but the cots there were empty, there was no one there but him. He turned back, but he could still hear it, there, to his left, the sounds of breathing, slow and labored.

He got up and went to examine each cot in turn. There was nothing there. But then there it was, he was still hearing it, louder when he was closest to the cot next to the tent wall. He patted the cot down, looked under it. Still nothing, no one.

I’ve gone mad, he thought.

He went outside, took a deep breath of the still night air. Then he steeled himself and went back inside again.

At first he thought the noise was gone. But then, once he had lain down on the bed again, it began again.

He covered his ears and no longer heard it. Maybe a strange aural effect, he thought, like the way a domed ceiling can make someone from the other side of a restaurant sound like they’re right next to you. But if that was what it was, where was it coming from? From the tent next door?

Very cautiously he removed his hand from one ear, his right one, and heard nothing. Yes, he thought with relief, an aural effect, temporary, gone now.

He removed his hand from his other ear, from the other ear, and immediately heard it again: the sound of a man breathing, slow and labored.

It did not take long after that for him to come to the conclusion that the other ear was hearing things his normal ear was not. Shortly after realizing this, he heard through the other ear the sound of breathing slow, judder, rattle, and finally stop.

In the trenches the other ear began to insinuate its way into his nervous system. He could almost feel the nerve fibers unfurling from it and attempting to knot with the nerves still left on that side of his face. At times, as he shivered in the mud, the ear began to throb, feeling coming back to it but incompletely and inconsistently, only as pain. As time went on, these moments of feeling became more complex: he began to be conscious of something there, in the place of an ear, but it was not exactly an ear. At times, it seemed tight and gnarled, like a fist, and then grew tighter still. At other times, it unfurled like a fan and he could feel it undulating there on the side of his head. But when he reached up to touch it, it always went back to being the same shape beneath his fingers, as always little more than an ear.

Hello, he heard a voice whisper into the whorl of his other ear one night. Hello, are you there?

He lay in the dark, his back against the mud wall of the trench, wondering if he had heard it. In his right ear, he could hear movement in the no-man’s land beyond the trench. An occasional burst of gunfire, a distant mortar. He covered that ear with his cold, damp hand. With the other ear, he heard none of that, only silence. It was as if the other ear were somewhere else. It tingled and again he felt it changing shape, spreading like a fan, then contracting, hardening like a shell.

Hello? the voice whispered again. Can you hear me?

“Who is it?” he whispered.

But the voice did not answer. Indeed, there was only silence. And then, after a moment, a repetition of the appeal.

Are you there? said the voice. Can you hear me?

“I’m here,” he said, a little louder. “I can hear you.”

But there was no answer, at least none the other ear heard. Instead, he felt something shaking his shoulder and looked over to see another solider beside him, the other sentry. István uncovered his good ear, turned it toward the man.

“What are you doing?” the soldier asked. “And who are you speaking to?”

István just shook his head. The sentry regarded him for a long moment but at last turned away. He covered his right ear again, but the voice in the other ear had fallen silent by then, and he did not, that night, hear it again.

A sea anemone, he thought. An animal of some sort, a familiar. There it was, sewn to one side of his head, refusing, at least in his mind, to simply be an ear. His body was likely shivering in the trench, caked in freezing mud, but the ear seemed to flex and pulse and then, suddenly, ramify, spreading like a vine up and over the side of the trench. He let it go on as long as he could bear and then reached up with numb fingers, felt it back into being just an ear. Or his body was up and running through no man’s land, shells exploding all around, while his ear stretched thin and flat and sharp, as if his head were wielding a sort of blade. It was ridiculous, he knew it couldn’t be happening, but yet in a way it was and there seemed nothing he could do. I should cut it off, he thought again, fleetingly, and he crouched behind the stump of a tree, waiting for the firing to slacken, but no, the ear seemed both alien and a part of him now. Cutting it off, he couldn’t help but feel, would mean somehow that the ear had won. Won what? he wondered again as he charged. But he hadn’t thought that far ahead.

And then came a day which, as he rushed forward rifle in hand, he felt he had already experienced. There had been so many days already, so many pushes forward—it could have been any one of these done over again or all of them together. And thinking this, pursuing his thoughts, he felt his screams dry up and dissipate in his throat. And there he was, each thought leading to two others, like a labyrinth, until he was so thoroughly lost in his thoughts that he had almost forgotten about his body, which slowed, stopped and finally stood stock still.

He might well have remained there, motionless, until the enemy drew a bead on him and shot him dead. But as the other soldiers ran on, firing, something came to draw him out of the maze of his thoughts. It was a voice, a whisper, heard only by his other ear. It was impossible to say if it was male or female or even if it was the same voice he had heard in that ear before.

Down, it said. Now.

Though only a whisper, it was insistent, enough so for him to listen.

He threw himself flat on the ground in the mud. A moment later, the brief whistling of a falling mortar, an explosion just before him, a shower of mud. His hands were cut but not badly. Perhaps there was shrapnel in his back as well or maybe he was just bruised. He was confused, unsure exactly where he was. But he was alive.

There, said the voice in the other ear. Now you owe me one.

Owe it one what? István wondered in the days that followed. And when was it planning to collect? And what exactly was it? The ear? No, not that exactly, but whatever was speaking into the ear.

He went back to the field hospital for a few hours while they checked to make sure he was okay. They shined a lamp into his eyes, treated him for potential shock. The voice the other ear could hear seemed to know exactly what they were going to do before they did it. It whispered to him what he should say, how he should respond to the questions the doctor and nurse hadn’t yet asked. I’m fine, he’d hear in the other ear, and then a moment later, to a nurse’s query, would say just that. And once he had said enough they released him, sending him back to the outpost for a day, allowing him to catch his breath before sending him back out again into the field.

“Owe you one what?” he asked aloud as he trudged back to his tent. But there was no answer. He couldn’t speak to it, but it could speak to him. Was it real? Was he imagining it? How worried should he be?

He lay on his back on the cot, staring up at the ceiling of the tent, at the way the canvas bunched near the support. The other ear swelled and contracted, swelled and contracted, as if it were breathing—though he knew that no, really, it was doing nothing, was just being an ear. Or rather, was simultaneously swelling and contracting in his mind and doing nothing in the world. But which thing was more real: mind or world?

Hello, said the voice in the other ear. Are you there?

“I’m here,” he said aloud, but there was no response.

Another night, stumbling in a heavy rain with the tatters of his unit up the lee of a hill. Mud, always mud. And there it was again, a whisper, but insistent.

Jump left, it said, now.

And even though he was tired and exhausted, even though he was confused, his body obeyed. A moment later, the hillside had collapsed and he was buried to his shoulders in mud. For a moment he thought the voice had been wrong, that he had leapt into trouble instead of out of it, but then he craned his head and looked back and saw, where his companions had once been, only a smooth slope of mud, all of them gone, he apparently the only one left alive.

“Thank you,” he said, but the voice did not answer. Still he couldn’t help but think, Now I owe it not one, but two.

It took him a long time, maybe hours, to dig his way free, and the whole time he was conscious of what an easy target he was. But either the enemy wasn’t there or, for reasons of their own, they left him alone.

Once he was free, lying panting on the hillside, slowly slipping down, he wondered what to do. He could go back, that was what he was supposed to do whether his unit was dead or no. But he could not bring himself to move. Instead he lay there, slipping slowly down the hill, the mud building like a sheath around him, and waited for a sign.

It was only near daylight that the sign, or something anyway, finally came.

Up, said the voice in his other ear. Forward.

Who was it? he wondered. What was he hearing? Where was it leading him? And yet, despite these questions, he couldn’t help but listen and obey. He let the other ear—or the voice in the other ear, rather—lead him forward. It watched over him, protected him. It led him, crouched, past one enemy sentry, and brought him quietly up behind another sleeping one. At its command he strangled this latter using the lace from his left boot, and then took the man’s rifle and uniform, went deeper in.

The country on the other side of the trenches, he was surprised to find, was for all intents and purposes identical to the country on his side. He pushed further in. On the advice of the voice he slept by day, travelled by night. From time to time he encountered others, and though his own impulse was simply to slip into the bushes and hide from them, the other ear advised him to kill them, and so he did. Strangling was something the other ear encouraged, though it was not averse to him slitting a throat if need be or even bashing in a skull. These deaths, István sometimes thought, were unnecessary, but still he could not bring himself to feel guilty over them. After all, it was not he who was bloodthirsty, but the other ear. He himself could hardly be blamed.

But although the other ear spoke to him it never responded when he spoke back. Why could he hear it, but it not hear him? He shook the thought out of his head: he had no way of knowing why, nor in all likelihood ever would.

He fled from farmhouse to farmhouse, leaving a narrow thread of murder behind him—not enough to leave a wake, not enough to start someone in pursuit of him, but enough to satisfy the other ear.

The marks of war slowly receded and finally vanished, until he found himself in a place that war seemed not to have touched. Yet still he slept by day and travelled by night. He had been cautious for so long that he could not bring himself to stop. Forward, the other ear said to him, forward.

And yet finally he did stop, for a day came when he heard something, a distant warble at first, which became with time a dull, familiar whisper.

You’re here, it said.

And so he stopped. For a moment he just stood there, still. And then he began to look around him.

A farmhouse, like any other. Or no, not a farmhouse exactly, but a manor house, made of stone. Or perhaps even more than a manor house. It was hard to say: he had been looking at the world through the other ear for so long that he was no longer certain how to interpret what he saw through his own eyes.

A dwelling in any case, perhaps sumptuous, perhaps not. Certainly not impoverished. He started toward it.

No, said the other ear, not there.

He stopped. Why not? he wondered vaguely, confused, but then turned and looked behind him, back at the place he had been standing when the other ear had said you’re here, and saw that it was a graveyard. He turned and went toward it, and this time the voice said nothing.

István passed through the graves, his hand brushing the tops of the stones as if they were children or household animals. For a moment he seemed confused, as if wandering. And then, mumbling, he seemed to find his way again.

He made for a corner of the graveyard, in which was found a weathered crypt. He broke his bayonet trying to force the door, but did at last manage to trigger the latch with the little of the blade that remained.

Surely it was the voice in his other ear that called on him to enter, unless it was a voice he was hearing in both ears now. Even so, he hesitated, swaying at the door of the crypt. But in the end he went in.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016). He has also recently published Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and Immobility (Tor 2012), both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.