Gaslight

Content Warnings: gaslighting, domestic abuse, paranoia, character death

It’s been two days and our fire alarm hasn’t stopped beeping.

Two long, sleepless, monotonous days. Two days of standing beneath the infernal device, pressing the button for ten, twenty, sixty seconds, unscrewing the cover, removing the batteries only to hear the damn noise keep ringing. Two days of covering my ears, ordering increasingly more expensive earbuds with increasingly accelerated shipping when they failed to arrive, two days of hopelessly searching for something that can block it out. I’ve balled up toilet paper and screwed it into my ears, smothered myself with a pillow, played the TV at a volume so high words are reduced to a sheer and unintelligible force of sound, and none of it is enough. It doesn’t drown the sound out, doesn’t even dampen it. It’s still beeping.

My husband doesn’t care. He never cares, not about anything – doesn’t care to visit my parents, doesn’t care to fix our faulty stove no matter how much he says he’s getting to it, doesn’t care to remember my birthday or Valentine’s Day or even our anniversary. But I just can’t wrap my head around how he’s capable of not caring about this.

Worse than that. He pretends he can’t hear it.

When that damn noise started two days – three days? Its hard to tell – ago, it woke me in the middle of the night, jolting me from sleep with the incessant noise. Doing its job, I guess. I panicked. I went to shake my husband awake but he was already up, bleary eyed but quickly coming to his senses. I ran fast as I could, chest tight and painful, head light and spinning, and halfway down the stairs my legs gave out.

And damn, that hurt. But lying at the foot of the stairs as I collected myself gave me the time I needed to realise that our house was most certainly not on fire.

False alarm. Damn annoying, but better than the real thing.

My husband was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down with an expression of concern laced with confusion.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Peachy,” I said. “Looks like a nonstarter.”

He cocked his head.

“What?” he said.

“The fire alarm,” I elaborated.

“What fire alarm?”

I narrowed my eyes. If this was a joke, it wasn’t funny.

“The fire alarm that woke us up.” The fire alarm that’s still ringing right now.

“I didn’t hear a thing.” He said it with this wide-eyed, innocently befuddled look on his face that pissed me the hell off.

“Bullshit you didn’t hear it,” I snapped. “You were awake before me.”

“No,” he said with exaggerated patience, “you woke me up. Maybe you just thought I was awake before you? You were pretty confused. Plus, it’s late. Let’s just come back to bed.”

I growled that I would do no such thing before limping off to shut the definitely ringing alarm off.

There was no point in arguing with him when he got like this. I don’t know why he does it to me – why he’ll look me in the eye and tell me that the sky is green then act like I’m the crazy one for saying he’s wrong. He just gets so obstinate about it. Sometimes its difficult to tell if he’s even lying – sometimes I really do feel like the crazy one.

But not this time. I know I can hear that beeping. It defies all logic and sense – that it persists without the battery power, that I hear it at the same pitch and volume no matter which room I’m in or what I’ve got stuffed in my ears. But I know that I hear it. I couldn’t lie to myself about it if I wanted to – it’s like an unavoidable fact of my reality. Gravity, time, and the beeping. More than that – lately it feels like time has been dissolving through my fingers and that my limbs have grown less and less tethered to the ground, but the beeping remains.

I know it and my husband knows it, no matter what he says. It’s more than that first night, that night it all started I don’t know how many days or weeks or months ago. I don’t see him much these days, locked as he is in the bedroom that he now refuses to let me enter until I ‘give up this silly charade’, but every so often when he comes down to try and cajole me into seeing ‘reason’ I see the truth writ on his face. The subtle wince every time he hears it. The way he can’t look me in the eye. He’s loosing his touch in the face of undeniable truth.

Check the alarm. Check the empty battery cells. Wrest the damn thing from the ceiling and smash it under my heel. Still the beeping remains.

My head hurts. I can’t walk straight, can’t think straight, can’t think of anything except the fucking beep, beep, beep. I spend my days lying on the wooden flooring of our living room and feeling weightless, like I’m adrift at sea.

Or I pace the ground floor back and forth, trying to think of something I can do, something I haven’t tried yet, some way that I can fix this. And logically I know that there must be a plethora of ways out – that sure, my situation is irritating, but its ultimately totally mundane, right? Only I’m realising more and more that I’m thinking of this situation as hopeless. I’m not even seeking a way to get the beeping to stop anymore. I’m just searching for a reason why.

And when I pace through the kitchen one day that could’ve been two days or two years after that night, for the first time I realise that I can hear something else.

It’s quiet. So quiet, so subtle, that in my initial frantic state I completely ignored it. But now that I hear it I can’t unhear it. And now that I hear it I know what it is.

Our stove is a faulty piece of shit. It was the one part of the house that I’ve hated from the moment we moved in. I think of gas stoves as unreliable as a rule, and I’ve been begging my husband for an electric stove for I don’t even know how long, and he’ll sit me down and have this long conversation where he’ll agree to change it out, and then weeks will pass and when I bring it up again he’ll either say that our conversation never happened or that I’d agreed to keep it. I remember being so confused – I remember thinking he wouldn’t lie about that – I remember thinking I was crazy.

I’m not crazy. I can hear beeping and I’m not crazy. But I have overlooked something.

We don’t just have a fire alarm. Upstairs, tucked inside our bedroom’s walk-in closet, we have a carbon monoxide alarm.

When I confront my husband, he collapses in tears. Paws at my knees, says he shook my body for hours, crying my name before he succumbed to the suffocation too.

I tell him I didn’t hear a thing.