I would like to increase the thickness of the walls and ceiling of my apartment so that I don't have to listen to the ghost babies all the time. This will, I hope, allow my wife and I to get a little more sleep at night and then maybe we can start to recover some semblance of the life that we used to share, the one that seems so irrevocably gone. I realize that in the process, I may also have to seal off the air vents in our bathrooms and kitchen because they seem to carry many of the ghost baby sounds, but I don't care. I am willing to put up with any inconvenience if I can just get some rest.

I know that this is not a problem that afflicts every family. Most of you are probably not even familiar with the term "ghost babies," which I use to refer to all the baby-like noises that come through the walls, ceilings and air vents of my apartment and make me think that my son is awake and in need of attention. My wife objects to the term because it makes her feel like there are dead babies in our midst. She finds this upsetting, which is understandable; but, as I've explained many times, there couldn't possibly be any dead babies or ghosts of any kind in our building because our building was built in the early eighties by idiot real estate developers who went bankrupt immediately and then had to let the thing sit empty for almost ten years until people like us moved in. So nobody has ever lived here before, so there can't be any ghosts, just a lot of shitty early eighties carpentry work and refrigerators that are going to break soon. And noises. There are lots of noises here. Haunting, mind-injuring noises. And when you are getting about five hours of highly interrupted sleep every night, just about all of those noises sound like your crying baby. Every squeak or footstep, every rustle, the air moving through the shafts, the pipes expanding, the doors expanding, the electricity, everything--it all sounds something like your baby and it wakes you up. Or worse, you just lie there listening and you never fall asleep in the first place. You toss and turn, waiting for the ghost baby noises to turn into the real baby noises. It's very confusing--all the more so because the ghost babies sometimes wake up the real baby--by which I mean that something happens, like a toilet flushes somewhere, and then your baby starts crying. And to further complicate matters, you don't really know that the toilet woke him up. It could have been another noise that you didn't quite hear, or no noise at all because he often wakes up without the slightest provocation. So it's very confusing. Things start to erode. You find yourself leaping out of bed in the middle of the night and running to the baby's closet to calm him down before things get out of hand and he's awake for good, but when you reach the closet, you discover that he's not awake at all--you've just heard a ghost baby noise. So you go back to bed and start to hallucinate some more. You become convinced that the baby is in bed with you and you reach out to keep him from falling and you grab your wife's head. Then she yells at you. Or perhaps, on the way back from the closet, you trip over a squeaky book and the house is suddenly filled with electronic cow mooing sounds. Now the real baby is up and crying. It's four in the morning. He won't be going back to sleep for another two hours and you can't put him outside in the hall because that's wrong. This is clearly a real baby problem now--and not a ghost baby problem--but sometimes, I swear to God, you cannot tell the difference. You need help and there is no help coming. You can't start drinking again, and you can't run away. Your teeth hurt all the time, everything tastes the same, and you have to go to the bathroom a lot more often than seems natural. Thickening the walls and ceilings would definitely help, but of course, if you're like me, you can't afford anything like that, and you don't really understand what it would mean to do it anyway. You could put up blankets everywhere to muffle the sounds a little, but even getting all those blankets would be pretty expensive, and how would you attach them to the walls and ceiling? You could probably get the same effect for less money by wrapping yourself in a few blankets, but that would only further isolate you from everybody else; especially your wife who already thinks you're turning into a zombie. So the thickening stuff remains kind of a dream. Just like the quiet. And so you listen for the ghost babies and you argue with your wife about whether the pacifier that the real baby is sucking on is somehow, even though it doesn't seem like it, storing up "bad energy" in the baby and causing him to wake up in the middle of the night. You give him gallons of Infant Tylenol--hoping that it's teething and not the noises, or the pacifier, or a sleep disorder that's waking him, but again, who knows? He's a tabula rasa and you and your wife are turning into tabula rasas. So seal up the fucking airshafts! With cardboard and electrical tape, you could do it pretty easily and that would be a start. You have to start somewhere.