The Noise Tax のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 9

The walls of our home were white, while the numbers on the decibel meter were red. It was the most obvious thing in the house.I sat at the dining table, staring at the number on the display. 28. It was safe, for now.Dad sat at the head of the table, holding a newspaper and turning the pages, barely making any sound. Mom was in the kitchen, and the sound of her chopping vegetables was so careful and measured it was almost inaudible.I did not dare breathe too deeply. Even breathing too loudly came with a fee.Dad had explained it once. Air itself was free, but the air inside our home had been bought and paid for when he purchased the house. If you used a resource, you paid for it.In front of me sat a bowl of plain chicken broth with noodles and no meat. Meat cost extra, and my account balance was insufficient.The week before I had accidentally knocked a glass off the table. The glass itself was 5 dollars, the cleaning fee was 10 dollars, the disruption fee was 20 dollars, and

Mom held me against her chest, her whole body trembling. She looked down at me, barely conscious in her arms, then back at Dad, who stood there waiting with all the patience of someone reviewing a contract."I'll sign," she said.In the car, I leaned against Mom while Dad drove in silence, the financial news radio program murmuring from the front speakers. When the market was up, the corner of his mouth lifted. When it dipped, his brow tightened.The daughter burning up on the backseat did not factor into his calculations. As long as I did not die, the investment could still be recovered.At the hospital, I did not cry when they put the IV in. The nurse smiled and told me I was incredibly brave for not making a peep.She did not know that I was not brave. I just could not afford to cry. If I had made a sound when the needle went in, it would have cost another hundred dollars, and that was several days of Mom's grocery money.I watched the IV drip and thought about how each drop w

Dawn came and the rain stopped.I was awakened by screaming, except I was not really awake at all. I was already gone. I drifted somewhere above it all, looking down at the scene below me.Mom was on her knees, holding my bloodied body, and the sound that tore out of her was unlike anything I had ever heard her make."Jenny!"The decibel meter maxed out instantly, its red light flashing and shrieking in the early morning silence.Dad came bursting out of the bedroom, hair disheveled, still in his pajamas. "What is all this noise about? It's barely even mor..."The words died in his throat. He saw the blood on the floor. He saw me, pale, still and no longer breathing, cradled in Mom's arms.Then he saw the cabinet across the room, ransacked and hanging open. The metal lockbox lay on its side in the middle of the floor, completely empty.Dad's eyes went to the box. He crossed the room, picked it up, and turned it upside down. Not even a single coin fell out."Where is it?" His v

The private investigator had come through. For the right price, one could find out anything, down to what color socks a man wore on a Tuesday.The burglar went by the street name Rat, and his real name did not matter.What mattered was that he was a gambler, and most of what he stole ended up lost at underground card tables before the week was out.Dad studied the photograph of the man, a wiry, rat-faced figure caught mid-stride by a surveillance camera, and looked at him the way he used to look at a debt that would never be repaid."Bad debt gets written off," he said to himself. "Permanently."He opened a fresh notebook, but he was not doing financial calculations this time. He was mapping time, routes, and probability.Dad had spent his career as an actuary, and he applied that same precision now, working out what time Rat left his apartment each morning, when he ate, when he arrived at the gambling den, and which route home gave him the lowest chance of being seen.On the wh

On the evening of the third day, the sun went down. No police car pulled up outside. No phone call came.Dad sat in his chair in the basement without moving, like something carved from stone. When the last sliver of light disappeared from the gap beneath the door, he stood up, took the hammer in one hand and the decibel meter in the other, the same one that had defined every hour of my short life.He was going to settle the final account.Rat had fled. He had crawled out of his hospital window and dragged himself on a broken leg through the city's back alleys and drainage tunnels, vanishing the way a rat always does, into the dark places no one thinks to look.He had not counted on Dad's ability to map every vein of a city the way other men read a balance sheet.Dad found him in an abandoned civil defense shelter on the edge of town. Rat had been trying to climb aboard a freight truck to get out of the city for good, and Dad blocked the only exit.The shelter was dark and damp,