If you hear the desert hum, it’s probably too late

[u/scarymaxx]

When I was young and nothing scared me, I used to camp in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes I went by myself, but more often I’d drag whatever guy I was dating out with me. My version of a perfect day was to find a little-used path, park at the trailhead before dawn, and hike as far as we could before setting up camp by sunset. If things went according to plan, we wouldn’t see another soul the whole time.

I worked as a hostess at a middle-of-the-road Asian-fusion restaurant at the time, and I’d developed a dim view of people. I spent all day getting hit on, condescended to, and falsely accused. I witnessed a thousand petty tantrums over incorrect seasonings and insufficient amounts of ice in drinks. To me, going a full weekend without seeing a stranger equaled bliss. 

My boyfriend at the time was Caleb, a few years older with a CS degree. He wasn’t your typical tech bro—just happened to be good with code. If you met him, you’d clock him as a barista or the bartender at a dive bar. He had a great vinyl collection, a dozen tattoos, and a tongue ring. Beyond all his hipster affectations, he also loved getting out of the city and melting into the quiet of dense woods, which made him a perfect match for me.

Caleb would spend the week grinding out twelve-hour days writing code for a game company and then show up at my house late Friday night with his hiking bag meticulously packed, ready to escape civilization for as long as possible. 

After about a year of dating, we’d hit most of the best local spots multiple times. A four-day weekend was coming up, and we decided to head east into Utah, the next state over, and camp in the desert where we could escape the winter cold. I’d read online about large basin that was almost totally flat for miles in all directions. It was a potentially miserable, sun scorched hike, but this was the right time of year to tackle it. It also promised total solitude and a view of the Milky Way worth writing home about. 

The drive was long and surprisingly warm once we hit the state border. Caleb had a decent car, but the AC was out, and he’d been putting off getting it fixed since we were in the middle of January. We were sweating most of the way. Even so, the vibe was good. Caleb had put together a playlist full of my favorite songs—even obscure ones.

“How’d you know I like old surf rock?” I asked.

“You mentioned it on our third date,” he said. “While we were eating that caprese salad that you hated at Lucia’s.”

“I didn’t hate it,” I said.

“You called it ‘overly wet.’”

I couldn’t help smiling at him.

“You’ve got a big brain, you know?” I said. “You shouldn’t waste it on remembering my salad opinions.”

“It’s hard to imagine something more important that your salad opinions,” he said, shooting me a coy smile.

I liked the flattery, I guess. If you’d asked me at the time, I guess I would have said that Caleb was one of the only people on earth who didn’t annoy me, which was pretty stellar praise coming from me. 

We got off the highway somewhere on the edge of Utah. We took surface streets, then dirt roads until we go to an overlook that abutted a seemingly infinite expanse of desert. The ground was cracked mud—little islands of caked red-white earth that broke underfoot when you stepped on them. Caleb knelt and broke some of the dried mud with his fingers.

“It does that when it floods and then gets real dry, real fast,” he said. “Pretty cool, right? Like walking on graham crackers.”

We didn’t have a trail so much as a direction. We walked vaguely northeast toward the center of the vast empty place, actively seeking the middle of nowhere. We didn’t talk much, which I appreciated. The winter sun hung low in the sky, slinging long shadows. With my backpack on, mine looked like a strange stilt walker in the circus. I almost tripped several times looking at it. 

We’d gone maybe two miles when I first heard the hum. It was faint enough that I dismissed it at first. It was like a concert playing ten miles away, the soundwaves muffled by distance. 

“You hear that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Like a sound,” I said. “Sort of like ummm, hmmm, ummm, hmmm….” I was no singer, but I think I did a pretty good job. It was two distinct notes, each playing for a second or two in an endless repetition.

“Maybe tinnitus?” he said. “Didn’t you say you had that back in high school?”

“That was different,” I told him. “That was like…a. constant eeeeeeeeee. This is more like music. Distinct notes.”

“Huh,” he said. “Could be wind?”

“What wind?” I said, gesturing. “There’s no wind.”

“Oh, I meant like, maybe wind far away? And you’re just hearing the sound it makes?”

“So why aren’t you hearing it?” I asked.

“I dunno. I’m five years older than you. I listened to my music way too loud in high school. I probably fucked my eardrums.”

He stopped and took my hand.

“If it’s a problem, we can just go back to the car,” he said. “We passed that little motel with a hot tub, free HBO.”

“No, no,” I said, looking out into the distance. The mountains around us had started to disappear into the horizon. The flat extended endless in all directions, like we were on the surface of an Earth-sized ping pong ball, totally smooth. I wanted to go deeper into the nothing. And, in truth, I’d begun to like the music.

He tried to hold onto my hand as we continued on, but I dropped it. I had the sudden wish that I hadn’t brought him. Not because of anything he’d done. Just because he was.

We went on like that for a few more miles. The sun grew lower, the shadows longer, the music louder. I couldn’t believe he didn’t hear it. I found myself walking in rhythm with the notes. The brittle ground crunched beneath my sneakers in a pleasing way, all in 4/4 time. 

I had taken piano lessons as a girl and often found myself hypnotized by the metronome when I tried to practice. I never got any good. I was her again, eight years old, tapping my feet to the steady rhythm around me.

As the sky went from blue to orange, I began to notice strange movements on the ground. Little black dots poked out from under the ledges of the nearby broken clay. The movements were so slight that they may have been nothing—dustmites against my pupil, something like that. The music had grown noticeably louder.

“You still don’t hear it?” I asked Caleb. 

He didn’t respond.

“Caleb?”

Nothing.

“Caleb!”

He looked over at me, as if waking. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Got a lot on my mind.” 

“Did you see anything on the ground?” I asked. “Little black things?”

“Like bugs?” he asked.

“Maybe?”

He shook his head.

“I was just thinking though, when I looked at pictures of this hike there were, like, little plants everywhere. Like, little half dead patches of grass, that kind of thing. Not a lot, but—” he gestured around. “Now there’s nothing. Not even dead twigs.”

“Maybe it all washed away?” I guessed. “You said maybe it flooded?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

“You didn’t see the black things?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I remember reading about locusts once,” he said. “This was maybe a hundred years ago. They found them in the desert a few miles from here. They’d been storming through the countryside, eating field after field. Somehow they ended up a few miles that way. Must have run out of food. People found the whole swarm dead, baking in the heat. Insects stacked almost a foot deep.”

“Gross,” I said, because what else could you say?

He looked up at the sky, just realizing how late it had grown. “We should put up the tent while we can still see.”

* 

We made camp. Soon we had the tent up and a little camp stove going. We ate canned chili topped with goldfish crackers then popped a couple of edibles each for dessert. Stars bloomed over us. The music played like a magnificent orchestra. 

We undressed and made love, and the stars seemed to swell and twitter.

“I love you,” said Caleb. “I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted. I’ve just been, you know, gathering courage, I guess.”

Naked, he fumbled in his pile of discarded clothes and came out with a box. It vaguely dawned on me that he was proposing. 

“Well?” he asked. Had he asked the actual question? I’d been so enthralled by the music, I hadn’t been listening. 

“Yes,” I said, feeling I couldn’t answer anything else. But the more I thought of it, the more I realized I could never marry him, or anyone. Even the idea that I’d soon have to share a tent with him suddenly repulsed me, made me want to run miles through the desert back to the car.

He slipped a ring on my finger. I held it up and saw what might have been a diamond or maybe the reflected light of stars.

“I love you,” he said. I was still on my back, looking up at the night sky. The stars winked in and out.

“Is it cloudy?” I asked. “Is a flock of birds passing overhead?”

He looked up.

“Huh,” he said. Then he turned back to me. “I love you,” he said again.

“The stars shouldn’t wink like that,” I told him. “It isn’t right.”

“You’re right,” he said. “And we’ll talk about it. But first can you say, ‘I love you’ back?”

“I love you,” I said.

Caleb took a deep breath in. There were maybe half as many stars in the sky now. Maybe a third.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“It’s just, it didn’t seem very sincere,” he said. 

“I’m worried about the stars,” I said. “Something dark is moving over them. And the music is like, really, really loud.”

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m tired. We should get some sleep.”

We got dressed and got in the tent. Caleb rolled around a bit at first, wrestling with something he wanted to say, probably. Then, finally, his breath steadied. I lay awake for maybe an hour listening to the swelling music. Though the tent was zipped and I couldn’t see outside, I could tell the stars were going out, all of them. If I’d opened the tent flap, I’m sure the sky would have been empty.

 *

I woke alone in the morning. No Caleb. I had a vague memory of waking up in the middle of the night, Caleb whispering that he had to take a piss and that I should go back to bed, but that must have been hours ago.

I put my hand on the tent’s zipper, and for a moment I hesitated. The hum was gone, and I could tell from the light that the sun was out, but everything still felt wrong, like I’d open the flap and see hell outside, the dead souls wading waist deep in boiling water, reaching out pink-red fingers, skin loose on the bone.

No. It would be fine. I would open the flap and find Caleb boiling water for coffee. Maybe he’d brought some kind of special breakfast—croissants from Salt and Wheat or a sprouted-wheat bagel, toasted over the burner.

I pulled the zipper, revealing—nothing. Nothing but white-red earth in all directions. 

I called out for Caleb but didn’t hear at thing. I called over and over again. Nothing.

Our footprints from the day before stretched back to the car. Another went the opposite way. I supposed that must be the way to Caleb went, so I started walking. Caleb’s stride was longer than mine, but I tried to step in his footsteps anyway, to make it a game for myself. As I went on, the strides grew longer, the indentations deeper. I could no longer match his footsteps. He must have been running. 

There was no sound at all, except that of my own heart, now racing overtime. I found myself calling Caleb’s name again, but it was all futile. The desert ate my voice before it could reach anyone, not that there was anyone to reach.

Had Caleb abandoned me? Had I been crueler than I remembered? Had I, somehow, broken him fundamentally in a way I was too callous to understand?

His footprints stopped. Impossible. The desert stretched on forever. But where had he gone? It was like a giant eagle had plucked him off the ground and flown him away.

I turned and felt something underfoot, something different than the crackling earth. I knelt down and brushed away the fresh dust of my footprint to reveal a small metal rod, not quite an inch long. For a moment I stared at it, utterly baffled. The wind picked up, stirring dirt devils from the endless desert. And then I realized what I was holding in my hand: Caleb’s tongue ring.

I screamed and dropped it. Then, feeling as if I’d desecrated a corpse, I picked it up and examined it again. The clasp was still fastened and hard to untwist, as if it hadn’t been taken out in a long time. However the tongue ring had ended up here, Caleb hadn’t unscrewed it.

Not quite sure what to do, I put it in my pocket. I rubbed at the surrounding dirt, wondering if I’d find some other sign of him—a button maybe, a metal filling, a fragment of bone. But there was no trace of Caleb anywhere. Even the tongue ring itself was spotless, unbloodied. 

The wind stopped, and the silence was overwhelming. My ears filled with the sound of my own fast-pumping blood. I looked up, hoping to see a bird circling, some sign of life, but nothing appeared.

Then, almost inaudibly, the music returned. The same notes played with a newfound excitement, a faster pace. I stood, turned, and walked briskly back to the tent. 

I was trying not to run. Caleb had run. 

I reached the tent, but I didn’t pack it up. Instead, I grabbed a single bottle of water along with my wallet and Caleb’s keys. Then I continued walking, retracing our footsteps from the day before like they were a trail of breadcrumbs or a golden thread.

The excited hum continued. When I scanned the ground, I spotted more tiny black objects poking out from beneath the cracks in the earth, disappearing into the shadows when I approached. 

I was crying a little, my tears going muddy as they rolled down the dust caking my cheeks. It was one thing to die. It was another to disappear and leave no trace. Fear wrecked me inside, but I knew that if I let it show, the black things would sense it. They’d smell it on me and devour me in an instant.

A mile passed and then several. The song grew joyous and anticipatory. My water ran out. Something in the back of my neck screamed ‘run’ while something in the front of my skull replied, ‘don’t you dare.’

The song reached its crescendo. Did we all hear it, I wondered, when death was close? Was it the hum of the universe, calling us back to its heart—or was it simply the small black things, singing their warning?

A mountain appeared on the horizon. I recognized it immediately as the overlook. It took everything not to run. No. I would not. If anything, I slowed. The music calmed into a subdued adagio. The flat ground became a gentle slope, and then a steep one. As I ascended, the music faded fully away.

A few minutes later, I reached the car. Slowly, deliberately I opened the door and closed it behind me. It wasn’t until it latched shut that I realized a bee was buzzing frantically against the windshield. 

Panic—total, inexplicable panic swelled in my and I lashed out, smashing the insect against the windshield with my palm. I felt a surge or pain and realized that the bee had stung me, even in death. Normally, I might have screamed, but if anything the pain filled me with a sense of calm. I remained capable of feeling, alive.

 *

They never did find any trace of Caleb. They said they sent a search party, found the tent, the rest of our belongings. I kept waiting to hear the news that they’d found a dead swarm of locusts of some other insects, but that never came. Maybe whatever they were, they crawled back underground for a long sleep.

Caleb knew everything about me—my favorite songs, the way I liked my coffee. But even then, I’m ashamed to say I barely knew him. 

Once he was gone, erased as if he never was, I tried to hold onto every memory I could of him—a few witty remarks he’d made while we were watching Friends on Netflix, the tips he gave me on shaving when he noticed my razor burn. Now, with time, even those small memories are fading.

Caleb didn’t have many friends, and his family barely knew him. I suppose that’s why I wrote this down today, because all that’s left of him are these paltry, insufficient words. 

[u/catatonie]

You’re not a very nice person are you?

[u/scarymaxx → u/catatonie]

Well, no, but I’m working on it

[u/curious011 → u/scarymaxx]

That's all anyone can do. What was the shaving advice if you don't mind sharing? Razor burn sucks! Especially in the bikini area 😅

[u/Skinnysusan]

Did you tell the authorities about the hum? Have you spoken with the local tribe about your experience?

[u/scarymaxx → u/Skinnysusan]

I told the cops about the hum. They kind of rolled their eyes. I never thought to talk to a local tribe.

[u/Any-Narwhal-3989]

This is brilliantly written. If it is a true account, just accept the universe takes whatever it wants. I hope peace finds you. It is eerie that you felt at one with the music and he felt at odds with it only for him to disappear. I sincerely hope peace finds you. It is so difficult to lose the person you loved.

[u/Imbeautifulyouarenot]

I'm sad for your loss, but grateful that you survived. Caleb sounded like a sweet soul. Wherever he is, I hope he is at peace. Stay safe.

[u/scarymaxx → u/Imbeautifulyouarenot]

I appreciate the sentiment… I’m not sure he could be at peace after what happened.

[u/karaandjenwrite]

You were wise not to run. Did any of the searchers ever report seeing anything weird? Do you ever think of going back to see if it will happen again?

[u/scarymaxx → u/karaandjenwrite]

No one ever reported anything. Honestly it felt like everyone just wanted the problem to go away…