Her fingers moved over the anechoic foam pyramids on the walls. These pyramids had been designed to absorb all sounds and so the charcoal ones trapped every bit of noise in its path, but could anything stop her voice? She had waited for this moment for fifteen years when she would no longer miss anything while working with artists at the studio.
The director of the meditation center, Chen, issued her with a unique directive; to create an ideal room for individuals who engage in mindfulness. “I need some kind of peace that is beyond just the quiet,” he said as he joined his wrinkled hands together.
The completion and subsequent grand opening of The Quietest Room occurred after three months and it was immediately followed by complaints from customers who had waited to get in. Businessmen, students with insomnia or nervousness – all these clients wanted to escape from the surrounding cacophony in their sensitive city ears. Maya observed as they stepped out of the room through a pane of glass looking fresh with an inner glow.
However, it was not long before they started complaining.
“I think my heart is under a magnifying glass,” said Jessica haltingly, a two-session-per-week client for some time now, with added dark rings below her eyes that day. “Every time it beats! Every time there is a gap between the beats! I can’t take it anymore!”
The list went on with Marcus hearing his pulse like drums in a cathedral and Sarah developing what she termed cardiac hyper-awareness hence missing her therapy sessions.
At first Maya brushed off the initial complaints as signs of the visitors taking too long to adjust but then things began getting out of hand; she too had encountered such problems while carrying out tests – when one is in complete silence, any slight noise caused by movement or coming from within one’s body becomes very obvious. Nevertheless, when Chen brought her attention to an increasing number of written complaints filed over time, she began to doubt herself.
"This month alone, the number has been twenty three," said Chen as he placed some documents on his desk. "They are afraid of the actions that their hearts may take."
That night, Maya took the instruments and went into her room. The silence was deafening and seemed to muffle all sounds that could have been heard; however, for some moments she could hear only her heart beat until she also noticed a second sound. It was not distinct, but rather sounded like it was going at a reduced pace than normal. She analyzed the situation using the readings and saw that level indicated nothing yet she heard everything. The woman put her hand on the wall and tried to sense oscillations in vain. There was total silence around.
It was a matter of days before she realized that this would not help. The problem was that even after a visitor’s evaluation stating that everything was wrong, Maya continued experiencing some anomaly.
For some reason, she started going back there more often and staying for hours. It would now appear to her as though there were multiple rhythm patterns; some simple while others appeared as if they came out from the walls. Her sketches became more detailed as she tracked and compared different kinds of sequences over time.
In the early hours of Tuesday, when she could not sleep, it suddenly occurred to her.
At 3 AM, she unlocked the door and ran downstairs instead of going inside but rather climbed up onto the roof where she used a torch to read some plans of how the building had been constructed after which she compared them with those of the hospital next door whose cardiac wing directly faced such location in the building.
Descending to the street, Maya counted windows. The room was positioned in such a way that it was directly connected to the central monitoring station of the ICU whereby there were tens of heart monitors showing the condition of patients around the clock.
The solution came not from adding more sound-absorbing materials, but from introducing what Maya referred to as "cardiac white noise"—a barely perceptible layer of sound that masked the phantom pulses without disrupting the room's meditative qualities. She calibrated it to match the frequency of a relaxed heartbeat at rest.
By the end of seven days, all grievances had stopped. The visitors went back to enjoying their tranquility but little did they know that now they were relaxing as they followed an optimum heart patient’s condition.
There was no communication between Maya and Chen concerning this discovery. According to her some facts are better left understood than said out.
It took her several months before she could realize the unusual contents written on those feedback forms from the visitors. It was not only peace as most individuals claimed but also sound sleep, less worry as well as high human interconnectedness feeling.
Apparently, they could sleep better because now even on this ward everything was okay with other peoples’ lives too.