When I was a kid, you could hear the Rockies singing at night. There were birds settling on branches, bugs scurrying along the ground, the footfalls of black bears, and the trickle of melting snow. I’d lie there listening to the sounds and fall asleep without ever knowing I’d closed my eyes. Nights like these, I try to remember what the mountains sounded like, soft and quiet, but it’s hard. Mostly I just remember the rattle of trucks and the explosions when my father took me to see the mining. He pulled to the side of the road and we looked out at the yellow machines splattered with mud, the blasted rock, and the slurry pits filled with runoff. “It’s over,” he said. Soon after, he sold our house to the coal company and we moved east to Ohio, where at least the land was naturally flat. He took a job monitoring remote rigs, which seemed like the most boring job ever. I’d see him sitting in his bodysuit in his office, his goggles down, his monitor showing the dark interstate somewhere out west. There were stars and the high beams of the truck he was watching, and nothing for my father to do except monitor the navigation. Not once in all those years was he actually needed, not to dodge a drunk driver or slow the vehicle to avoid hitting a deer, not to pump the brakes for a pedestrian or pick up a hitchhiker. It was just him, listening to the road through his headphones and watching the endless drives all day and night. Sometimes I think it was that job that blunted his hope for the future and helped him feel okay about destroying mine.

I try to imagine the sound of the Rockies but it doesn’t work. It’s four a.m., my head aches, my fingers are jittery, and my lips feel dry and cracked, so I take sleep meds, even though I’ve been taking them way too often. The meds drown out the throbbing, though my sleep is spotty. I have delusional, half-awake dreams of fiber-optic cables, thin as spiderwebs, reaching from the Towers to the powders inside my pills. Thought-bloggers claim that deep within Synapse’s endless user agreement is our approval for mining REM brain waves, but the idea that the Towers are raiding our memories while we sleep is a bit too paranoid for me.