Thomas arrived at the cabin at Bodega Bay with a group of 30 other writers. It was a good cabin. Maybe better with twenty fewer writers, but a good cabin nonetheless. It had two cute kittens and a large window that looked out at the Pacific Ocean, which reassuringly was still there.

He was here to write a novel about a man who catches a very large fish and feels sad about it later. It was to be a book about redemption. He brought an IBM typewriter and a handle of scotch.

Then he noticed the noise.

Beep.

It was not the romantic, brassy bellow of a lighthouse. It was the low, insistent electronic burp of a phone left off the hook. A call-waiting tone from hell.

Beep.

Thomas waited five seconds.

Beep.

“It is a navigational aid,” a fellow writer told him. “It prevents shipwrecks.”

“It prevents sanity,” Thomas said.

Beep.

The other writer shrugged and went back to writing thoughts about organizing meetups about thinking.

By the time the sun was setting, the interval became the only unit of time Thomas understood. The universe was no longer expanded by light years, but chopped into five-second increments by a government-funded metronome.

Beep.

It came from the jetty at the harbor entrance. A government machine designed to keep fools from smashing their fiberglass hulls against the rocks.

Beep.

Thomas sat out on the back porch at his typewriter. He waited for the sound to stop. He checked his watch. Five seconds passed.

Beep.

He tried to write a sentence about the iridescence of the fish’s scales in the moonlight.

Beep.

The sentence died on the page. The iridescence faded.

He poured a drink. He was a professional. He knew that to write well, you must ignore the world and focus on the page. You must be a rock against the crashing tide of distraction.

Beep.

Five seconds. A very short amount of time for a human, but a very long time for a machine.

Beep.

By midnight Thomas had written one paragraph. It was a bad paragraph. It was mostly commas.

He tried sleeping but it was no use. By now, Thomas had finished the bottle of scotch. He was now vibrating at the same frequency as the recurring sound. He realized his story was trash. He knew what must be done.

Beep.

The silence between the beeps was worse than the noise. The silence was a threat that was always followed through on.

Beep.

He grabbed a fire poker and stumbled out the door, past the other sleeping writers.

Beep.

He marched into the gray soup. Forty-five minutes of darkness. He navigated by sonar, like a bat, moving toward the source of his undoing.

Beep.

It was louder now. Closer. He scrambled onto the jetty. The rocks were slick with kelp and sea slime, tearing his expensive writer’s trousers. He did not care. He was Ahab. He was Don Quixote unstuck in time and very drunk.

Beep.

It was smaller than he expected. It was just a thing. A stupid noisy thing.

Beep.

Thomas swung the iron. He struck the casing with the fury of a man who realizes he is worthless in the face of a digital D-flat.

Clang.

The box dented. Thomas smiled. He had impacted the universe.

Beep.

Yet the tone had not changed. It was indifferent to his violence. It was indifferent to his suffering. It was just doing its job.

He swung again. And again. He rained blows upon the casing. He dented it more. He scraped the paint. He broke his own nose with a rebound swing.

Beep.

The machine did not care. It was built by the lowest bidder for the federal government to withstand North Pacific gales. It was sturdier than Thomas’s sanity.

Beep.

Thomas dropped the poker. He sat on the wet rock and laughed until he choked on the sea spray. He understood now.

Beep.

He never wrote the book. He became a real estate agent in Arizona, where it is dry and silent.

Beep. Let’s call it five seconds. Beep.