White Noise Red Light

White Noise

Red Light

By Paul Mandel

Every morning, Enoch disappears for twelve minutes.

He enters his study and fills a glass kettle for tea. While it heats, he switches on his red-light therapy panel, kneels before his altar, and lights incense. Then he fixes his gaze on the lurid red light, lowers noise-canceling headphones over his ears, and disappears into a susurrus of white noise.

Twelve minutes later, he concludes his meditation.

Enoch visits the white noise because it is empty. But one September morning, Enoch dove into the noise and found it wasn’t empty at all.

The kettle boiled, and the turbulent water fractured the red light, casting distortions across the room. They trembled over the walls, over Enoch’s face, and over his altar. A soot-covered thurible hung above the altar, issuing tendrils of smoke that momentarily took strange forms before dissolving. Among Enoch’s treasures was a brass anchor larger than Enoch’s hand, given to him by Ted, his boyfriend of three years. It leaned against the red-light panel and cast an enormous shadow on the opposite wall.

When the twelve minutes elapsed, Enoch removed his headphones. The red light was still blazing across the room, and the white noise still seemed to hum inside his skull. He listened for a moment longer, then seized his journal and wrote:

Ted is in danger.

***

That evening, as Enoch was preparing dinner, he told Ted about his premonition.

Ted stared at him incredulously. “What do you mean you heard a voice telling you I’m in danger?”

“When I put the headphones on and listen to the white noise, I go somewhere else. It feels like I’m underwater, under pressure. And with the red light in my eyes, I see the world of auras. It’s like I’m in heaven, or hell, or some other dimension.”

Ted said nothing.

“And I listen to the noise. Really listen. At first it’s just noise, but it turns into rhythms. Patterns. And sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, the rhythms become words.”

“Words?”

“Yes, messages.”

“From where?”

“From the great beyond—the astral plane. I don’t know, but when I hear these messages, I must listen,” Enoch explained.

“And this morning the astral plane said something about me?”

“It said you were in danger.”

Ted sat up in his armchair. “Don’t get carried away.”

“Ted—”

“Remember when we rented the sailboat in Monterey?”

Enoch set his spatula down and looked at Ted. He had heard Ted tell this story before, but he liked hearing Ted tell it.

Ted said, “The little rental place. You saw the boats and decided we were going sailing even though neither of us knew anything about sailing. Some nineteen-year-old gave us ten minutes of instructions, and off we went.”

“I remember.”

“We were clueless for the first twenty minutes, but before long you figured it out, and once you did, we started moving.”

Enoch thought back to that day and smiled.

Ted continued, “Yeah. Suddenly the boat caught the wind and took off. The whole thing leaned over, water was rushing past us, and you got this look on your face like you’d just discovered fire. You wanted more. You pulled the sail in. We went faster. The boat leaned farther.”

“We weren’t going to capsize.”

“We had no idea whether we were going to capsize. That’s the point. You didn’t know. I didn’t know. You were just willing to find out.”

The smile disappeared from Enoch’s face.

“And then I told you to slow down. You eased the sheet, the sail started flapping, and the boat stood back up." Ted leaned toward him.“You think I’m always the one holding you back. Maybe I am. You’re the sail and I’m the anchor. But an anchor isn’t your enemy. You need me. Otherwise one person keeps chasing the wind until the boat is someplace neither of them meant to go. And now, if you’ve gone to the astral plane, you’ve gone too far.”

“You just don’t believe me.”

Ted sighed. “Enoch, you’re sitting in front of a red light listening to static and concentrating until your brain starts finding patterns. That’s what brains do. They find patterns.”

“You weren’t there.”

“No, I was driving to work. I live in the real world.”

“You never believe me.”

“I don’t believe that random noise is sending you messages.”

“It isn’t random.”

“It’s white noise. It is literally random.”

Enoch felt his face grow hot. “Maybe you aren’t the one in danger.”

Ted frowned. “What?”

“Maybe you’re the dangerous one.”

“Enoch.”

“Maybe I misunderstood it. Maybe the warning wasn’t about something happening to you. Maybe it was about you doing something to me.”

At that moment, the smoke alarm sounded. Enoch raced to the skillet to turn the steaks over while smoke rose from the pan.

Above the din of the alarm, Ted gave a short, incredulous laugh. “So now I’m dangerous? You’re the one about to burn the house down.”

Ted deactivated the alarm while Enoch rescued dinner. They ate in silence.

***

That night, Enoch couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about their fight and about the strange message he had received. As Ted slept beside him, Enoch pulled out his laptop and began reading. In one tab was a thread about premonitions. In it, a woman described dreaming about fire, only to discover the next morning that her childhood home had burned to the ground.

In another tab was an article about auditory pareidolia: the tendency for people to hear music or words in random sounds. 

Ted shifted in bed and draped his arm on Enoch’s chest. Enoch gently lifted his arm, pausing for a moment with Ted’s hand in his own before setting it back on the bed. 

Enoch returned to his research. A few hours earlier, Enoch had felt certain that he had received a message. Now he wasn’t so sure. Was his meditation practice a doorway to the spirit world, or a neurological curiosity?

At three o’clock, still unable to sleep, Enoch decided he needed to return to that other realm. He got out of bed, went into the study, and began his ritual. 

He started by lighting the incense and placing it in the thurible, which swung gently above the altar, issuing spirals of smoke. Then he switched on his red light, and in an instant, the smoke was transubstantiated into sacrificial blood.

Enoch knelt and looked at his altar and his beloved collection—a private heresy of sacred objects gathered over the years: bundles of sage, feathers, currencies from a dozen lands. He picked up a little plastic statue of Mary and positioned her such that her outstretched arm seemed to bless a bronze statuette of Vishnu.

Theologically speaking, such an arrangement was absurd, but in the intense red light, the details and dogma were washed away, leaving only energetic essence.

Enoch took Ted’s anchor from the altar, kissed it, and placed it in his lap. He breathed three times, deeply and deliberately, staring into the cardinal glow. Its rectilinear grid of diodes held his gaze. He lowered the headphones over his ears and plunged into an ocean of energy.

He projected his consciousness into the noise until a rhythm emerged from the static. At first it was one simple beat. But gradually it accumulated embellishments and counter-melodies of clacks, clangs, bangs, and bonks. They reverberated in his mind as if the dome of his skull were the vault of a psychic cathedral. Then came the words.

“Losing… losing… Ted… danger… is… you… Ted”

When he heard his lover’s name, he grabbed the anchor and held it with both hands. The voices repeated the words in different orders, volumes, and tones. He wanted to know what it all meant, but he knew to be patient. The spirits do not like being interrogated; he must only listen.

The vibrations moved through his body, pushing him off balance, but he tightened his grip on the anchor and held himself steady. 

The rhythms warped around his mind and the words wove together into a multitude of nonsensical sentences, until all of a sudden the words settled into one simple statement. The message crystallized.

“Ted is in danger of losing you.”

Enoch took the headphones off. Tears sprang from his eyes.

He said, “Ted is in danger of losing me. That is what the voices are trying to say…”

Enoch turned off his red light and stood up. He murmured, “Ted is in danger of losing me. I can’t let that happen.”