Gradually, they became conscious that a neurosis was taking hold: even away from the building the machine din filled their minds. Their problems multiplied: at work, with family, out on the street, and in the cafés. None of them could hold their temper in an argument, could tolerate a single word of disagreement, the slightest skeptical sound. The building’s children fought with their classmates at school and in daycare. Those residents who were managers became more tyrannical, the young women lost patience with their lovers, mothers with sons, and everyone grew used to shouting just to make themselves heard. During the very brief moments when the construction halted or the electricity cut out, passers-by would hear raised voices from the building’s balconies and windows: the voices of grown men and women, of children, of the elderly, seemingly in perpetual dispute. But if they listened carefully, they would have realized that these were perfectly inoffensive conversations bellowed at top volume. The few remaining inhabitants of the rapidly emptying residential building on the other side of the construction site went out of their way to avoid interacting with the neurotics. You could pick them out at a distance: the pecking stride, the darting eyes, the fingers which, close inspection revealed, were always trembling.

All this was true, yet visitors to the building tended to find the inhabitants’ complaints overblown. Initially, at least. In those first moments the din seemed fine. Soon, though, the visitor would begin to sense it emanating from inside them—from their own middle ear perhaps: a growling hum that came from nowhere, it began pitched low and unobtrusive but in mere minutes the body was overrun. Like a dentist’s drill, its point pushing into you forever and ever and ever.

We felt it, too, the day the young man took us—Bahr and I—to the building, then up to his apartment on the top floor. It was the day before we would walk on water. We stepped into an entrance redolent of a former grandeur, climbed a spiraling, high-ceilinged staircase, and no sooner were we seated than the building’s muffled tremor began to claim us.