The Caretaker's Bandwidth
an excerpt

"Can you hear me now?"

Tobey couldn't help but smile when he heard someone say that. Time and time again, people would hunch over, stand still, place their hand over their ear, or any number of contortions in order to attain a clear signal. Meanwhile, other people would waltz by, walking their dog next to a bus stop, chatting all the while on their hands-free headset. It wasn't even that the headset offered any real advantage in clarity. It was just that those people with the headset had accepted the fact that the quality of the audio signal would never be as good as a direct conversation, so they'd simply trained their ears to comprehend human speech through that level of interference. It wasn't a miraculous feat of conditioning, either, although Tobey had an amusing mental image of an aspiring cell phone user holding their ears under a waterfall, trying to strengthen them. Almost any human ear could detect those sorts of levels. It was just a matter of the human brain being willing to listen. Tobey reached out to the man struggling to talk to his wife, and pushed his hand against the man's ear. Tobey concentrated on acceptance, and peace, and his ability to understand someone without speaking to them. In the right conditions, he always knew what his wife was going to say before she said it, he remembered. When she spoke, it was nothing more than a formality. He still loved her, and as his thoughts turned to her, the man on the phone became more attentive, realising suddenly how much his wife meant to him. Good for him, Tobey thought. But better communication or not, there's still a time and place for such things.

He placed his other hand on the man's head, and plunged both intangible fists in with a crushing motion, his mind afire with incompetence, embarrassment, shame, inferiority, awkwardness, horror, and for an added touch of flair... empathy.

The man's eyes widened in shock, and he broke out into a pale sweat. "I'll... I'll talk to you later," he told his wife abruptly, and he turned off his cell phone and ran out of the movie theatre.