3 - Brownian motion

Cammie thought of her mother telling her that she should never stick anything smaller than her little finger in her ear as she did precisely that and then wiggled it about. It didn't do any good.

"What is that damned noise?" she said out loud.

Steve, her boss and the owner of Juiced, the establishment they were currently staffing, grunted over the sizzle of the onions he was frying in a cast-iron skillet over an open gas flame. While Juiced was, as the name suggested, primarily a Juice bar, it also enjoyed a healthy breakfast business in the mornings. One of the things that both staff and regulars appreciated was that the kitchen was only separated from the dining area by a low bar, so that the sounds and smells of Steve's cooking permeated into the main area, making it feel more like a second home than a place of business. The lounge-like feel of the cafe did nothing to negate this impression, with an array of old couches, rickety wooden tables, plastic hairs and the sort of bric-a-brac only a mother from the 70s would be caught dead putting up.

The cafe was only two blocks from the shore, which was close enough that you could hear the ocean, but not so close that you could see how polluted the water was this near to the city. It was the cafe of choice for a certain very narrow band of vegetarian hipsters who would rather drink a blend of juices than a coffee, but during the summer it got a brisk trade from tourists who were walking the markets and needed something to cool them down after sweating out all their money.

"What noise?" Steve grunted again, not turning away from his noisy concoction as he released a handful of chopped chives into the pan. Cammie's nose wrinkled and she pulled her apron-string down her belly half an inch or so before putting her finger back into her ear.

"That high pitched noise, can't you hear that?" Cammie twisted and turned her head, as if by moving it around she could triangulate the source of the noise, but it seemed to be coming from anywhere.

Steve stopped scraping his spatula across the ridged iron of his skillet and tipped his head to one side, listening.

"I can't hear anything."

Most mornings they kept a low-key trip-hop playlist on random rotation and minimal volume. Most customers weren't aware of the music at all, and Cammie knew the playlist inside out, as despite numerous protestations from most of the staff, Steve hadn't gotten around to changing it in almost a year. She was fairly sure the noise was not coming from the stereo, but she moved her head towards one of the red-and-white chequered teatowels that partially concealed a speaker, to see if the noise got any louder with proximity. It didn't.

"It's...it's just a high-pitched tone, like a keyboard note being playing continuously or something." She leaned forward, putting her head under the counter to see if, perhaps by hiding, she might lessen it. "Can you seriously not hear it? It's driving me nuts."

Steve looked slightly more concerned, and killed the gas. The sizzle of onions died away in a few moments as the energy behind the noise was removed, and he took a step back from the stovetop, listening intently. The double-doors at the front of the cafe were open to the street, but it was after rush hour so there was not a lot of traffic passing by, just the occasional car. It was a hot day so the back door to the garden (where Steve maintained a largely, but not entirely, ornamental vegetable garden) was also open, with a couple of chairs dragged out to sit amongst the carrot rows, but there were no customers outside at the moment. Despite the heat of the sun, there was a soft breeze which swept through the cafe from time to time and kept the occupants comparatively cool. There were only a few customers, a couple eating breakfast in silence, and the man who ordered the vegetarian breakfast, who was now sitting on one of couches amidst a series of paper piles he was removing and sorting, one by one, from his briefcase. Steve could hear the noise from the street, the clink of cutlery, the music, and not much else.

"Don't hear a thing."

"For real?" Cammie's head popper up from under the counter and she gasped in an annoyed fashion. "Maybe it's one of those ring-tones that only young people can hear." She started stalking about the cafe, looking for an errant phone that might have slipped down between the pillows of one of the couches. They were always finding them, and sometimes losing them as well.

"Hey! I'm not that old." Steve half-heartedly complained as he clicked the long-stemmed lighter repeatedly over the gas to relight it. With a satisfying woof, the flame resumed its existence and Steve returned the still-hot pan to the flame.

Cammie smiled. "Whatever you say, old man." She was rooting around beneath the pillows on one of the empty couches, and then moved to the couch the man with the briefcase was sitting on. He carefully laid a stapled stack of papers on the old, broken tiles of the coffee table before him. "Excuse me," Cammie smiled momentarily for the man's benefit before returning her expression to a scowl and overturning the pillows about him. "Where the hell is that coming from?" Cammie whispered to herself in a voice which, had she given it any thought at all, she would have sworn was so under her breath as to be inaudible, but all the same prompted the man to say something so peculiar that she immediately stopped searching and froze in her bent position, turning her head upward at an odd angle to look directly at him.

Like most people who've worked in cafes for more than a week, Cammie was a pretty shrewd judge of character, at least when it came to telling somebody was a creep or was likely to stir up trouble anytime soon. She did not get this vibe off of this man, yet that still did not explain what he had just said.

"Excuse me?" Cammie said again. The man looked at her quizzically for a moment, considering her. There was less than a foot between them. He was neither particularly young nor old from what she could tell, certainly older than her but outside of that she had no idea. Maybe he was older and took great care with himself, or younger and took great care with his vices. He wore brown suit trousers that matched the jacket he had flung over the arm of the couch, and that his arm was also leaning on. He wore a faded off-white shirt that had a repeating line pattern that she had only just now noticed, with the bizarre thought that people didn't really wear patterned shirts or brown suits very much anymore. He looked a few years out of place. "What did you just say?"

He spoke the same words again; his voice slightly louder than it was the first time, as voices are when repeating themselves, but still very quietly:

"Brownian motion."

Cammie unfroze herself and stood up straight. "Yes, I heard what you said; I just didn't know what you were saying or why you were saying it. What is brownie in motion?"

"Watch," he said, softly and very calmly. He shifted one of the piles of paper on the coffee table to one side and pulled his coffee cup toward him over the table, the pottery of the cup scraping across the pottery of the table-tiles in a single long note that harmonized strangely with the tone that filled her ears. He took a pepper shaker and shook a small measure of pepper onto his coffee.

She started to protest that he was ruining perfectly good coffee, but he cut her off mid-what with a finger gestured towards the surface of the coffee. The pepper was moving in small concentric circles, like a Spiro graph drawing, circles in circles, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, some grains bouncing into each other and then moving in the opposite direction, all on the surface of his coffee.

"The random motions of tiny particles," he whispered reverently. "It happens in all sorts of places, with all sorts of things. Water, air, dust, atoms." His eyes widened as he looked from the circle of the coffee cup to the circle of her face. "Fire. They're all governed by this ... unpredictability."

Cammie dropped her voice to a whisper commensurate with the man's own. "So?"

He smiled; a small, sad smile that she would come to know well. "That's what you're hearing. Atoms of oxygen move around randomly, rub against each other, and make a high-pitched tone. A pure tone. Perfect signal, because it's happening right in your ear. It sounds unusual, even artificial, to us, because we're used to signals being corrupted. We're used to noise. You should enjoy it while it lasts."

"Enjoy it? It's almost painful." She sighed exasperatedly, rubbing her ear again, as if to dislodge an unwanted intruder. She sat down roughly next to the man, and he carefully extracted one of the papers she had half sat on. The couch was red leather, old red leather that used to have striated markings, but had long since been worn smooth. It was cracked here and there, and stuffing showed through the gaps in the covering, and even that had been picked and torn at by countless customers, over the years. "So what, two air molecules decide this moment to get it on in my ear hole, and I have to put up with the noisy neighbours? Does this kind of thing happen often?"

His soft voice continued: "Actually, it happens continuously, we just don't hear it. Our brains filter it out. Occasionally something will shift in our ears, or our perceptions, and we will become privy to something that is always around us. But don't worry, it doesn't last long. Our minds catch up with our bodies and phase the noise out again. It will still be there, you just won't hear it. In fact, you will probably never hear that particular frequency again, since you'll be filtering it out for yourself. As I said:" He made a conciliatory gesture with his hands. "Enjoy it while it lasts."

"Hang on a second," Cammie protested, holding up her hands as though to block the idea. "You're saying this noise is always there? Just that nobody hears it? Gimme a break. It's not a noise if you can't hear it."

"Well," he half-laughed, half-sighed, more exhalation than exhortation. "you're hearing it. And yes, it's always there. And so are lots of other noises. Lots of other things. You only see one percent of the light spectrum, whilst other animals, cats and dogs for example, see other spectrums. Heat is a good example, many things have heat vision, yet we do not deny that spectrum exists just because we, with our limited eyes, do not perceive it. Don't be limited by what you can see or hear. There's a lot more out there than we know. Or are capable of knowing, probably."

This was turning out to be an interesting morning, Cammie reflected to herself. "So, you're saying, if I just knew how to listen, I could hear these ... other noises?"

He smiled again. "If only we knew how, indeed. But in theory, at least, for sure."

She considered this for a moment, then turned her head: "Hey Steve, shut that thing down for a moment." she called out. Steve was spooning the now completed breakfast out of the skillet and onto a plate, so he cut the gas without complaint. Cammie ran to the double glass doors and slammed them shut. They were double-glazed, so the noise from the street was immediately dissipated. Steve started to issue a protest, but. Cammie cut him short with a finger and a tut as she rant to the stereo and killed the power. She signaled for Steve to stop scraping with his implements and also politely asked the couple at the table to do the same, to which they quietly acquiesced. Still not satisfied, Cammie ran to the fridge and whipped out the power cord, causing its buzz to die away.

"Hey c'mon Cammie..." Steve began, but she gave him a pleading look:

"Let's just have silence for on minute, can't we Steve? One minute isn't gonna hold anything up at this time in the morning."

Without waiting for a response, Cammie gripped the counter and closed her eyes, and listened.

Above all else, she could hear the pure tone still ringing in her ear, although as the man had said it would, it was fading slowly as she grew accustomed to it. She could hear Steve breathing. She could hear the noise of birdsong from the still-open door to the back, and the indefinable noise that comes from wide open space. She listened harder. A car went by, still audible through the thick windows. She listened. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Was there anything else? Was she surrounded by noise, but just didn't know it? She felt she could almost ...

"Cammie enough of this," Steve's voice broke into her reverie. "I need my fridge on and my doors open."

She gave Steve a grumbled noise and expression as she went about the cafe, returning everything to its normal state, clicking the doors into their catches and shoving the fridge's fraying power cable back into the socket. Then she plopped herself down next to the man on the sofa. He was watching her with a slightly bemused expression.

"Hear anything?"

She let out a large exhalation of breath. "No. You were right about the noise though, it's gone now."

"Off to join the others in obscurity."

"But, I dunno, I felt like...if I was somewhere quieter, maybe I could have heard something else."

"Maybe you do hear them, you just don't notice."

She said nothing. She considered him carefully before deciding to thrust her hand in his direction.

"I'm Camille." She said, her eyes darting down to her outstretched hand as he took it.

"Anthony."

"It's a real pleasure to meet you Anthony."

"Likewise. Mind if I ask you a question, Camille?"

"Uhm, go with Cammie, if you like. Everyone else does."

"For sure. Can I ask you a question, Cammie?"

"Go for it."

"Can I have another coffee, please?"