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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Speech Sounds, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Miscommunication and Violence
Language, Communication, and Peace
Self-Preservation, Protection, and Partnership
Summary
Analysis
Rye senses trouble brewing on board the bus to Pasadena. She’d expected this, which is why she waited to travel until she was too lonely and desperate to stay at home. In order to find her relatives who might still be alive, Rye has to travel twenty miles, which will likely take a full day.
From the reference to Pasadena, readers can intuit that the story takes place in the Los Angeles region. However, it’s immediately clear that something is amiss, since traveling twenty miles—which should take under an hour on a bus—will likely take Rye a full day. Between that and the reference to finding relatives who might be alive, readers can sense that something is seriously wrong.
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The trouble on the bus stems from a “disagreement […] or, more likely, a misunderstanding” between two men. As the bus careens over rough road, the men stand in the aisle gesturing aggressively to each other without making physical contact. Warily, Rye watches them, knowing that a fight will begin as soon as one of them slips or comes “to the end of his limited ability to communicate.” The bus lurches and one man falls into the other, which provokes the fight. As passengers move out of the way, another fight starts, likely because someone “inadvertently touched” someone else.
It's noteworthy that these men are fighting not because they have a legitimate disagreement, but rather because they misunderstand each other. Simple communication should be able to clear this up, but they seem unable to speak, communicating via crude gestures instead. This passage makes clear that there has been a widespread loss of language and communication ability, and that—without language—simple misunderstandings frequently break down into physical fights.
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Literary Devices
Rye braces for the bus driver to hit the brakes, which he does, throwing the fighting men to the ground. As soon as the bus stops, Rye exits through the back door alongside a few other passengers. Buses have become “rare and irregular,” so when they come, people will often ride them regardless of what happens during the trip. Planning to get back on the bus when the fight dies down, Rye moves to shelter behind a tree trunk in case there’s shooting.
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A beat-up car pulls up to the bus, which is unusual. Cars are rare now, due to a shortage of both fuel and “relatively unimpaired mechanics,” and cars are also dangerous, since drivers sometimes use them as weapons. For this reason, Rye is wary when the man driving gestures for her to come over to him. She watches this big, bearded young man to see how he behaves, remaining aware of the gun inside her jacket.
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When the man points towards the bus, Rye notices that he is left-handed, which is more interesting to her than the question he seems to be asking. Left-handed people are generally “less impaired”—rational and calm, rather than angry and violent. Gesturing with her left hand, Rye indicates that there’s fighting on the bus. The man takes off his coat, revealing a Los Angeles police uniform, and Rye recoils; the LAPD doesn’t exist anymore. There is no more government or large institutions, just “neighborhood patrols and armed individuals.”
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With something in his hand, the man walks to the bus and gestures for Rye to follow. Curious if he can stop the fighting, she obeys. He throws the object in his hand onto the bus, and people start fumbling out the door, fleeing what was apparently a gas bomb. Rye helps the passengers out the back door, while the man helps others out the front.
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When the man helps the bus driver out, the driver appears ready to fight, but the man won’t engage. While the driver yells incomprehensibly and makes aggressive gestures, the man simply steps back and stays silent. This behavior is typical of the “least impaired people,” Rye reflects. It’s almost like it’s “beneath them” to be as quick to anger as the “less comprehending.” Of course, more impaired people often interpret this as a sense of “superiority,” which often leads to violence—even death. Rye has experienced this herself, which is why she carries a gun. Now, the “only likely common language [is] body language,” so merely being armed can prevent violence, even without drawing the weapon.
Seeing the man’s gun, the bus driver returns to his bus. It’s filled with gas, and he cannot continue driving until it clears. The bus belongs to the driver, and he has pasted to its walls magazine pictures of things riders can give him as fares—this is how he makes a living for his family. The driver seems angry about the gas in his bus, and he shouts without forming words. Rye isn’t totally sure, though, if the bus driver is failing to speak or if she simply cannot recognize speech anymore.
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The man gestures to Rye to get in his car, which she doesn’t want to risk. Even though she shakes her head no, the man continues to beckon, which draws the attention of the other passengers on the street. One of these other passengers walks towards her, and Rye doesn’t believe that she can outrun him, nor does she think anyone would help if she needed it. But when she gestures for him to stop, he does. He makes an obscene gesture, and Rye believes that everyone else would stand by if he tried to rape her or if she shot him.
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The man in the LAPD uniform is still by his car, but he has put away his gun, now gesturing with empty hands. Rye thinks that this might mean he is safe; maybe he is simply lonely, as she has been for the past three years, since the virus killed her children, husband, and extended family. In addition to killing people, the illness caused a widespread loss of language—most people lost language altogether, while some were partially impaired.
Despite the “possibly deadly consequences” of getting into a car with a stranger, Rye decides to go with the man. As she walks to his car, she thinks of her neighbor, an unwashed man who pees in public and keeps two women, one to tend each of his gardens, who “put up with him” because he protects them. Rye understands that he wants her to be one of his women, too.
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As the man drives, Rye wants to relax, but she doesn’t stop worrying about being in a stranger’s car until they reach an intersection and he gestures for her to tell him which way to go. When he follows her cue to go left, she begins to believe that he might be safe. Passing abandoned buildings and wrecked cars, he hands her a pendant from around his neck: it’s a piece of obsidian. Rye isn’t sure if his name is actually Obsidian, or whether it might be “Rock or Peter or Black,” but she decides to think of him as Obsidian. She hands him the pin she wears of a stalk of wheat, which is the closest symbol to “Rye” that she could find. She knows that people likely think of her as Wheat, but it doesn’t matter, since she won’t ever hear her name spoken again.
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Obsidian pulls over and takes out a map, pointing to where they are and asking Rye to point to where she’s going. She can’t; she lost the ability to read and write with the illness. This was a devastating loss for her, as she was a history professor and freelance writer before the illness, and now she cannot even read the books she wrote. Watching Obsidian with the map, she realizes that he can read and likely write, too. This makes her feel a “deep bitter hatred,” since she guesses that reading and writing don’t mean as much to him as they did to her. Sick with jealousy, she remembers that she has a gun. After a moment of stillness, though, her rage subsides.
Having recognized Rye’s jealousy, Obsidian takes her hand. It unsettles her how powerfully she had wanted to kill him a moment ago. She is traveling to Pasadena because, at home by herself, she felt that she had “no reason to stay alive” and she had almost killed herself. Obsidian gestures to ask if Rye can speak, and she nods—she sees him experience a similar wave of envy, and he gestures that he cannot speak. Rye suspects that the illness took from both of them what they most valued, but nonetheless they have been able to share this without inciting violence.
While Rye is wondering why Obsidian still wears an LAPD uniform, he puts his hand on her thigh and—thinking of how horrible it would be to bring a child into this world—she shakes her head no. It’s a shame, though, because she hasn’t been touched in three years and she finds Obsidian attractive: he’s young, clean, and he “ask[s] for what he want[s] rather than demanding it.” As he pulls her closer, she sadly pushes away—then he pulls a condom from the glovebox, which makes her laugh for the first time in years.
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They get into the back seat of his car and eagerly have sex. Afterwards, they lay together and—through gestures—Rye tells Obsidian that her children have died. To fight her grief, she tells herself that children deserve pity; they have no memory of the world before the illness, and instead they run around like monkeys with no future to look forward to.
Rye asks Obsidian to have sex with her again, thinking he can make her forget all of this. Nothing until now has brought her pleasure, which is why she came close to killing herself. When she asks if he will come home with her, though, Obsidian shakes his head. Disappointed, Rye imagines that he probably has a wife, since relatively unimpaired men are so rare that women try to hang on to them. When she asks him again to come home with her, he hesitates, making her think she can convince him. Through a series of gestures involving pinning his LAPD badge next to her wheat stalk, the two of them confirm that they will be a couple. Then, she directs Obsidian to return to her home—she no longer needs to go to Pasadena.
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As they drive towards her house, Rye imagines what it will be like to have a partner—she has enough food and enough room in her house, and best of all, her predatory neighbor will back off. She puts her head on Obsidian’s shoulder to rest, but he suddenly brakes; a woman is running in front of the car, followed by a man with a knife. Shouting nonsense, Obsidian gets out of the car to help and Rye follows; both of them draw their guns.
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The woman jabs the man in the face with a piece of broken glass, and before Obsidian shoots the man in the stomach, the man manages to stab the woman. Rye leans over the woman, recognizing that her wounds are fatal, and she taps Obsidian—who is leaning over the man—to tell him. While Obsidian is distracted, the man opens his eyes, grabs Obsidian’s gun, and shoots him dead. Rye shoots and kills the man.
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As Rye leans over Obsidian’s body, thinking that he has left her like everyone else, two small children come out of a house and walk to the dead woman—the girl shakes the woman’s arm trying to wake her. Feeling sick, Rye gets up and heads back to Obsidian’s car. The children will have to fend for themselves—Rye doesn’t want to raise someone else’s children who will grow into “hairless chimps.”
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Back at the car, however, Rye realizes that she wants to bury Obsidian, so she returns to his body and sees how frightened the children are. She realizes that she cannot let two toddlers die, so she must take them—she wouldn’t “be able to live with any other decision.” Thinking of where to bury the bodies, she muses that Obsidian should have known, as a cop, how dangerous domestic violence is—but she realizes that this knowledge wouldn’t have kept him (or her) from helping the woman.
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As Rye drags the woman’s body to the car to bury her at home, the little girl screams “no” and tells Rye to go away, while the boy tells the girl not to talk. The children’s speech is perfectly intelligible to Rye. Marveling at this, Rye wonders if the children’s mother shared their ability to speak, if maybe her husband—or a stranger—killed her out of jealousy. Then she realizes that the children were born after the onset of the illness, and she wonders if maybe the disease is over—maybe very young children are safe and ready to learn language, and maybe they need people to teach and protect them.
Looking at the dead man, Rye understands his jealous violence, his commonplace desire to “destroy what [he] could not have.” Unlike him, Obsidian had been a protector—maybe he had patrolled the streets in his uniform so he wouldn’t kill himself. She had also been a protector, but lately she had only protected herself—now she can keep these children alive. As the children begin to cry, she tells them that it’s alright and that they’re coming with her. When the boy tries to cover her mouth, she explains that it’s okay to speak with her as long as nobody else is there. As they begin to look less afraid, she tells them that her name is Valerie Rye and that they can talk to her.
