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She had lost reading and writing. That was her most serious impairment and her most painful. She had taught history at UCLA. She had done freelance writing. Now she could not even read her own manuscripts. She had a houseful of books that she could neither read nor bring herself to use as fuel. And she had a memory that would not bring back to her much of what she had read before.
“Speech Sounds” begins with Rye at a point of despair. She has fought to sustain her will to live after her sister, parents, husband, and three children, “one by one,” died. Her attempt to get to Pasadena is likely pointless. The risk of travel is probably not worth it. Rye’s brother and nephews are, or were, right-handed males, the demographic that fared worst during the pandemic. Her willingness to take the risk speaks to how desperately she needs a reason to keep making the effort to survive in the hostile city.
These lines occur just before Rye realizes, with a rush of rage, that Obsidian can read. Rye’s identity was in part invested in her family but also in part invested in what she did for a living. She was, she later says, “a teacher. A good one.” Her study of history suggests that she feels intensely the contrast between the life of Los Angeles and the whole world before and after the pandemic. Unlike children of the pandemic, who think books are for burning to stay warm, she can’t consign her books, now useless to her, to the fire. Her loss of skills compounds with her loss of family to bring her to the point of self-destruction. Rye even personifies the illness, saying that it “played with” her to take what she valued most.
She had almost done it, almost left two toddlers to die. Surely there had been enough dying. She would have to take the children home with her. She would not be able to live with any other decision. She looked around for a place to bury three bodies. Or two. She wondered if the murderer were the children’s father. Before the silence, the police had always said some of the most dangerous calls they went out on were domestic disturbance calls. Obsidian should have known that—not that the knowledge would have kept him in the car. It would not have held her back either. She could not have watched the woman murdered and done nothing.
These lines, which occur near the end of “Speech Sounds,” mark a turning point in Rye’s trajectory. Obsidian’s death, coming just after he and Rye become a couple, feels like “a sudden, inexplicable beating.” She wants nothing to do with the children in that moment, but as she kneels by Obsidian’s body, Rye finds that she shares his sense of duty. Elsewhere in the story, Rye notes that deeply impaired survivors are robbed not only of language and reason but also of sympathy and empathy. They feel fear and respond to threats, but they would simply watch if a man tried to rape her or if she shot that man.
Obsidian is an exception. He is not “playing cops and robbers,” as Rye earlier thought. Duty to others gives him purpose. Purposelessness is one of the terrors driving Rye, but seeing Obsidian risk his life in action reawakens her purpose and reignites her empathy. She “almost” left the children in the street, but now she is, again, a mother, teacher, and protector. She has a reason to live, even before she hears the children speak.
