James knew with certainty, on his seventh day of death, that he could only hear living things. This difference between the world of the dead, in which he now dwelt, and the world of the living, which he missed completely, was among the differences that intrigued him. The sound of the world was entirely different than it had been when he was alive. The wheezing of an old woman while coughing, the crickets and the cicadas, the shallow sleeping sound of his favorite dog, Indy… all was the same as before.

Yet, it was not the same. The difference was within the silence of the synthetic, a silence that had caused a rift in what James believed was the auditory experience: the absence of airplane engines, car motors and music. Well, not all music, still he could hear the birds sing, he could hear Egon whistle and his own mother hum as she tried to drown out the sorrow of losing her son. She would not cry, not his mother, who had brought her family here when her country of Yugoslavia again changed to a world of violence and sorrow.