She struggled to convey what she’d seen in a way that both Blum and Tibbet would understand and believe. Uncertain, she erased a little more and a little more, until she’d edited down the words to what she knew they could accept. Deafness can take many forms.

6/28—Bernie can breathe only twice a minute for several minutes without apparent difficulty.

* * *

So much hearing happens not in the ear, but in the brain. Like a partially blind person, Cora’s brain struggled to make sense of the few clues it was given, to interpolate between distant points. At times, it made guesses and filled in the information it lacked. Hearing thunder (muffled and indistinct), her brain turned the sound into a large dog growling just behind her. She could hear the raspy breathing mixed into the growl. The clap of a book shutting was turned into a gunshot outside, complete with its after-echo off the nearby buildings.

At times her brain got more imaginative.

Like a bird’s body is designed for flight, whole sections of the human brain are devoted to language. Back when she was eight, a few months after the flu took most of her hearing, her brain ached so much for spoken language that, out of sheer desire, it occasionally transformed noise into words.

The first time this happened was one morning when she cranked on the water in the sink. Instead of hearing the squeak of the fixture followed by the rush of water, she heard a voice. The voice was clear and vivid in a way she hadn’t heard in months. The consonants, the emotion, the slight sibilance of dentures. An older woman’s voice said with surprise and interest—She should suggest it.

The words originating from the mouth of the faucet. Cora stood there, staring.

A few days later, walking back from school, alone in her staticky silence, a cocker spaniel barked repeatedly at her from behind a fence, in a sarcastic teenage voice—Right, right, oh right.

Two days after that, the school flag snapping in the wind over the playground called out in a precise BBC accent—Flip it far. Far.

These voices cracked open a profound fear inside of her. So she began to plead with her parents for hearing aids. Although the devices were very expensive, in the face of her desperation, they conceded within weeks. As soon as she started wearing the aids, the voices went away.

But her memory of them didn’t fade. She could recall them perfectly, each of their inexplicable phrases, could replay the tone of each voice in her head at any moment with unnerving clarity. She struggled even years later to make sense of them: why those words, why those voices?

Then in ninth-grade English class, she read the story of Moses hearing a voice from a burning bush, and she understood immediately. She wondered how long he’d been going deaf, if he’d been hearing different voices for years, from the goats and the wind and his own sandals scuffing the ground. She knew this bush had the first voice that said more than a phrase and where the words actually made sense. Perhaps all prophets were hard of hearing. This lack could make them listen with enough attention to hear what others were too busy to attend to. The lack opened up their minds.