Sounds Like Trivia Quiz

Answer: Software company

The story begins with Larry, a call center supervisor listening to the calls of his operators in the offices below. As he switches from call to call, he listens for any signs of discontent in both his operators and the consumers, who seem to be having problems operating their software and computers.

At one point, Larry comes across on interesting call. As a female caller asks for assistance (but doesn't even know where to put the installation disc), the operator on the other end gets so fed up that he's ready to shout obscenities. Larry terminates the call mere moments before the man is about to blow his top though, and he walks off the job, claiming that he wouldn't have done it. Larry knows otherwise though. When Larry goes home, he continues his woodworking in the garage.

He can hear as his wife knits inside the house- the gentle clicking of knitting needles sounds like the sharpening of knives to his ears. That night, Larry passes by his son's room on the way to bed, and as he's about to open the door, he thinks better of himself and walks on.

Answer: Michael

Before going to sleep, Larry's wife lets him know that the following day is their next chance to have a child, and she asks him where he wants to go for dinner. He mentions 'someplace quiet' before putting earplugs in his ears, ignoring her story, and falling asleep. The next day at work, Larry listens to a conversation across the room between four of his subordinates. One notes how earlier, he was caught instant messaging during work, but the only way Larry could have known is if he had heard.

He notes that Larry is a weird person, having come back to work the day after 'the incident' happened. Another co-worker says that it was just a way of dealing with the loss. Larry remembers his son, Michael, at this point, during a time where they went to sail a model ship in the park.

While Michael sailed the ship, Larry could hear into his son, and when he suspected something awry, he took Michael to the doctor's. After the tests were performed, the doctor told Larry and his wife that the cardiac tissue in Michael was deteriorating too fast, and had they noticed this two years earlier, then an operation could have been done.

Unfortunately, it was now too late. While Larry's wife began to cry, Larry could not pull himself away from the loud clicking of the doctor's watch, slowly turning its second hand.

Answer: Sounds from within the kitchen

That day, Larry visits his son's grave, leaving a small toy sailboat on the gravestone. As he apologizes, he listenes to a loud flapping noise. Looking over, he sees the source: a small American flag. To quell the sound, he stomps it into the ground. Later that night, Larry and Brenda go to their dinner, and although Brenda assumes that she chose a quiet restaurant, it is anything but for Larry.

While Brenda tells Larry that she saw a friend of hers getting her mail and just knew that she had to be pregnant, Larry listens to the cacophony of noise from every table of the restaurant; the screeching of spoons swirling in cups, champagne being poured, the crying of a baby, someone chewing a stick of celery, and shaking salt onto their food.

While Larry listens in envy as a father talks to his young daughter, Brenda asks how his day went. He says that he ended up terminating a call for no reason, about halfway through, and he can't figure out why. That night, they attempt to have another child, and although Larry can't say it, he's distracted by the noises around him even still.

Answer: True

The following morning, Larry is just leaving the driveway before his neighbour stops and chats with him. Larry congratulates the man, but it takes a moment before he is responded to, as the man and his wife hadn't told anyone yet. Larry realizes that his wife was right about the two expecting.

The neighbour asks Larry how he and Brenda have been doing and he heads off to work. When he arrives, Larry has to speak to his boss about recent call times, which, on average, have risen. The boss not only suggests, but makes a visit with a motivational psychiatrist mandatory for Larry, since he regrets not forcing a leave of absence on him. Larry returns to work and views one of his workers, who he has been keeping an eye on for a while.

When he listens into the conversation, he finds that it's from a lonely woman, and the operator is telling her that her husband, although no longer there, is with her in spirit. Larry keeps the call going, despite the fact that it wastes company time, and he thinks of his son.

He calls the man to his office later, and tells him he'll be reporting it to management, but he lets the man return to his job. When Larry returns home, he hears noises from Michael's room. As he goes to open the door, Brenda comes out with sample sheets of wallpaper. Larry yells at her and tells her never to go into Michael's room again before walking off to bed.

Answer: Cigarettes

Larry visits the psychiatrist, but can't help but dwell on the fact that the problems he constantly needs to face are those with other problems. The psychiatrists tells him that he had to face his own problems and come to terms with himself, but Larry says that he doesn't have a problem. The psychiatrist tells him that it was just a meet and greet and that his foot's in the door. The man quickly goes to his desk to make another appointment, but Larry hears a bit much. First, the man eagerly scratches at the table with his finger and stomps at the floor with the heel of his foot. Larry also hears the shrink's strained breath. Larry tells him that he's a fraud before leaving.
At home, Larry struggles to work on his new boat. The neighbour is still playing basketball, pounding at the concrete, and his wife continues knitting, with each needle scraping at one another with the sheer, thick sound of metal on metal, like two swords. Larry puts on a pair of earphones and continues working.
The following day, Larry runs into the worker he said he'd report. He ends up noting that since it was a first offense, he wouldn't do anything, and he asks him if he wants to go out to lunch. The two of them go to the pond in the park, and Larry mentions that the man is a good listener; he can hear it in his voice.

Answer: Life

Larry continues saying that people like noise, and they pile the noises of everyday items around them because it makes them feel more alive, but these people are living in denial because they refuse to listen.
Larry looks over and sees Michael sitting on the bench. He goes on to say that silence is what really connects everyone, and he pats his son on the leg. He says that they should just sit and enjoy the lack of noise in the park, but the man says that the needs to get back. Larry invites him onto his day sailor that weekend, but the man says he has plans. Larry says that it's a great place to be, so far out there, because there's almost no noise.
That night, Brenda makes dinner and tells Larry that she's pregnant. Larry flinches; not because of the news, but because of the smoke alarm, running on the end of its batteries. Brenda goes on to say that her dreams told her she would be, and this morning, she felt it. Larry asks how she could possibly know, since they only tried two days earlier. All the while, the fan overhead whirrs in his ears. He goes to the garage and smacks a nearby table. Soon, however, a squealing noise pierces his ears, and he has to break open a wall to find the source; a nest of squealing baby mice. He ends the noise with a hammer.

Answer: A library

Larry walks up to the boss' office the next day and listens to the conversations in the back rooms of the building. He fully knows what's in store for him, since the tech guy he took to lunch quit his job. The boss says that the tech filed a complaint report before leaving, saying that Larry harassed him. The boss was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he heard that his session with the psychiatrist didn't go well. Larry is preoccupied with something else during the conversation though, a fly is making noise on the window nearby. The boss puts him on probation, letting him come to work, but watching his moves.
Larry remembers his last night with Michael in the hospital. While his wife and Michael slept, Larry listened to the noises of the machines keeping Michael alive. Soon, however, these blocked out of his mind, but it resulted in the hospital staff needing to revive the boy. They were unsuccessful.
The next day, Larry finds himself in traffic. He tries to turn on the radio to drown out the sounds of construction nearby, but it's too loud. Soon after, it begins raining; each sound like a gunshot on his windshield. He pulls the car onto the curb and gets out, running past the construction, the sound of bike tires, sizzling hot dogs from a nearby vendor, cell phones, and opening umbrellas, to the nearby library. His success is short-lived though. As he grips a table and sits down, a librarian types at a keyboard and people turn the pages of their books, each one sounding like a whip. A woman chews her pencil with loud crunching noises while a highlighter screeches across the page.

Answer: The fishtank

Larry arrives home and turns on his lights. He can't stand the dull humming of the lightbulb though as it scratches into his head. A clock ticks to a thud each second on the wall and a leaky faucet, somewhere in the house, drips to a tinny crash. Taking a baseball bat off the fireplace mantle, Larry proceeds to breach each light in the house, the clock, the faucet, the whirring air conditioner, and nearly, the bubbling fishtank in the living room.

He goes outside to the power meter on the side of the house, listening to it grind in circles, and smashes it off the wall before tearing it from its wires and throwing it across the lawn.

He returns to the house for the peace and quiet of silence, but finds that the dying smoke alarm is still running off its last beeps.

He smashes it with the bat and crouches down in the silence, finally smiling at a job well done. But this is short-lived. He goes upstairs to follow a peculiar noise into his bedroom. He finds his wife in bed, sleeping, and the noise is coming from her eyes, which are in REM at the time. Placing a pillow over his head, he begs for the sound to stop.

Answer: Behind a pillow

The next morning, Larry wakes up in the living room to his neighbour, Jim, knocking on the door. When he answers the door, Jim says that he found his power meter on his front lawn. Jim invites him over for a barbecue next week since Jim says that his wife is feeling ill and Larry says the same for Brenda, but Larry's mind wanders to the scenery outside- the sounds of real life seem to have returned to normality from two boys playing catch outside to the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees.

He drives to work and listens to the radio at a calming volume and finds that the calls are going smoothly; each one being attended to at a fast pace. In the cafeteria, he goes to get dessert and finds a fly in the cupboard. He doesn't hear it though.

He also doesn't hear the cashier tell him his total. He laughs at this. That night, Larry returns home and cleans up a bit of the living room, taking the shards of broken glass from under a lamp and throwing them out, then coming across Brenda's knitting under a pillow on the couch.

He stores this in a drawer in the living room and lays down. He hears something though. Going into the kitchen, he finds the leaky faucet. Putting his finger over the leak, he continues to hear the leak elsewhere. The next day at work, he hears a leak while listening to his calls as well. At home, he finds the source is in the bedroom, so he places a towel at the bottom of the door, shoving it into the crevasse. Finding this not helping, he goes to his car and puts his earplugs in to fall asleep.

Answer: True

The next morning, Larry wakes up and walks through his house in silence. He picks up an apple, eats it and walks out the front door to find life as normal, but everything is still silent. He remembers the earplugs though, and when he pulls them out, everything comes back full force, and he screams in pain.
Larry heads in to work wearing a pair of earmuffs and a toque, and while his co-workers laugh at him, he makes his way to his office. He takes off his earmuffs and begins listening to calls, but each one is directed at him, telling him that he's living in denial, crashing and burning, and spiraling out of control. He terminates all the calls, much to the dismay of his workers, and picks up his ringing phone. The thing on the other line turns out to be odd crunching noises, and Larry drops the phone. He slowly leaves the office before his boss stops him, asking for an explanation. Larry can't hear him though; the crunching comes from him as well. Larry drives home to the same sound on his radio, and the same sound as he walks across the graveyard to his son's burial spot. The noises stop when he reaches the grave, and he lies down on the ground. The sounds turn to a different noise though, and when Larry digs into the soil, he pulls up handfuls of earthworms.
He drives back home, crashing into his mailbox on the way. Jim, watching from his driveway, calls the cops on his cell phone. Larry makes his way upstairs to the bedroom and bangs on the door, telling his wife to stop it. He makes his way down the hall, smashing the family photos on the wall, and he cries over a picture of his son, saying that he wants him back. He hears laughter from Michael's room shortly after and proceeds to search it. He finds the source of the noise, though. It's just the sound of a tree branch on the window. Larry quickly rushes to the garage and sharpens a knife before suiting up and going into the bedroom. He looks into the mirror before doing the deed.
The cops show up soon after to find blood on the floor. They make their way to the bedroom and find Brenda's corpse inside. Long deceased, maggots crawl all over her face, the source of the sound that plagued Larry over the past day. Another cop looks to the mirror to find the knife, covered in blood, and in its reflection, two ears.
Larry walks down a nearby street with the wooden sailboat in his hands. Now, having severed his own ears, he walks in silence to the shining sea.