A Woman in Distress

Hav­ing popped through a for­ward hatch onto the bow of the ship, I imme­di­ately encoun­tered a guard with a .45 strapped to his side, pac­ing back and forth across the deck, obliv­i­ous of the shrill sound that pierced the air like the scream­ing of a woman in dis­tress. “This is ASROC,” I heard my guide say above the ever increas­ing inten­sity of the scream­ing in my ears, “a tor­pedo launcher with nuclear capa­bil­i­ties.…” At that point, I could no longer hear what he was say­ing, as the scream­ing in my ears had drowned out his voice. Obvi­ously dis­tressed, I cupped my hands over my ears to drown out the screaming.

“Are you all right?” my guide asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “That shrill, high pitched scream is hurt­ing my ears.”

“I didn’t hear any high pitched scream. Did you?” my guide asked the guard.
“No, I didn’t,” replied the guard.

“For­get it,” I said out of frus­tra­tion. “I must’ve heard some­thing far off. It’s noth­ing. Go on—I’m all right.”

But I wasn’t all right, for I def­i­nitely heard what had sounded to me like a woman scream­ing out at the top of her lungs. And I hadn’t just imag­ined it either, because I heard the scream­ing again as I rounded the ASROC launcher, on the heels of my guide, to see one of the ship’s five-​​inch gun mounts. This time, I tried not to make such a big deal out of it. Instead, I sim­ply rubbed my fin­ger in my ear to deter­mine whether the scream­ing was actu­ally com­ing from my head or from some out­side source. Besides, I didn’t want to give him the impres­sion I’d heard the scream­ing again, when he obvi­ously hadn’t.

As I tried to col­lect my wits about my self, I won­dered about the ori­gins of this scream­ing. At first, I’d had the sense that it came from a great dis­tance out­side my body. But as the scream­ing increased in inten­sity, I’d felt as if some­one were stand­ing right next to me scream­ing in my ear. Besides, I’d heard the scream­ing with the same inten­sity whether I plugged my ear with my fin­ger or not. And since the oth­ers had not heard it, I reluc­tantly con­cluded the scream­ing had come from within my head, as a prod­uct of my imag­i­na­tion, I sup­posed, even though it had sounded so real to me.

With that, I later real­ized the scream­ing had actu­ally been the cry­ing out of my feel­ings in hor­ror of the weaponry, which had sprung into view. In my fas­ci­na­tion with appear­ances, I’d been momen­tar­ily lulled away from the real­ity that such weapons are, after all, instru­ments of death and destruc­tion. In fact, I recalled that the scream­ing had actu­ally begun to sub­side as I paid more atten­tion to it. I won­dered then, if she hadn’t screamed at me only to get my attention.

The whole expe­ri­ence left me with more ques­tions than it did answers. Who was this other within me, that she could manip­u­late real­ity in such a man­ner as to get me to hear screams which no one else heard? Why should I be so hor­ri­fied by the sight of a weapon which oth­er­wise meant absolutely noth­ing to me? Why had I been the only one who had heard her scream­ing? As these ques­tions popped into my head, I dared not repeat them, for fear of learn­ing the truth.