Voices – Page 12
Voices – Page 12 – 3/23/04
After agreeing to stay with him for another night, Jen’s mood was dark. They watched a movie in silence. By the end of it, she seemed to have relaxed a little. Confident that she wouldn’t run from the apartment while he was gone, John went and brought back her clothes, now clean. Jen changed into the jeans and t-shirt in the bathroom, emerging with her hair pulled back into a pony-tail. She sat back down on the couch next to John, put her feet up on the coffee table, and looked at him.
“Tell me about your voices,” she said.
John opened his hands, palms up, and said “What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Everything. How do they work?”
John thought for a moment, trying to put it into words. Finally he said, “Sometimes I hear what seem to be direct, uh… transmissions. Like one time I was sitting next to a man on the subway and there was a voice just going ‘I’m going to kill that bitch’ over and over again.”
“Did he kill someone?” Jen asked.
John gestured toward the windows. “It’s a big city. Lots of people die. No idea if he killed her or not. I got off at my stop and his voice faded away. It’s a short-range kind of thing. Like say I wanted to find out where the president was going to dinner. I’d have to be within a couple hundred feet of him. I can’t just ask the voices for that information.”
“You talk with the voices?”
“No… not really. That’s just the term I use. It’s not so much asking them things as filtering. Like when I wanted to find out about you, I didn’t talk to any of them, I just sort of put the ones that weren’t about you on mute. I really don’t do that too much. It feels like eavesdropping.”
Jen tilted her head sideways, clearly interested, saying nothing. John continued.
“Basically most of the voices are like echoes. They’re scattered and weird, not always coherent. They tell stories, but they do it in bits and pieces. I’ve just learned how to piece them together. Like the woman above me, she’s really got a thing for guys going down on her, but I’ve never heard her voice say it like that. I just hear fragments, and eventually you hear enough that it sort of makes sense. Like jumbled word puzzles or whatever… you know how those just ‘click’ eventually?”
Jen nodded.
“There’s a click, like that, when I get it. Usually it’s pretty easy. Sometimes it’s not. It took me a few minutes just to get as much as I got from your voices, because they’re pretty uh… chaotic.”
“I imagine. So, look, have you ever considered that you’re maybe reading people’s minds?”
John nodded. “Yeah. Well, no. I mean… I’m not reading their minds, I don’t think, but I have considered that the voices are thoughts that are being broadcast. You see the difference? Reading minds would be more like looking up something in an encyclopedia. This is more like walking by a radio and catching whatever happens to be playing.”
“Have you ever tried to read a mind?” Jen asked.
“No, not really.”
She grinned, and shut her eyes. “What am I thinking of?”
“Oh, Christ. I don’t know.”
“Try!”
John shut his eyes as well, and concentrated. The other voices quickly filtered away and he was left with only Jen’s.
“You’re thinking about a doll you had in third grade, with a pink patchwork dress. This still isn’t reading minds, Jen.”
“It’s not?”
“No. You’re broadcasting, like the radio.”
“Well, shit… then try to pull something out of my head that I’m not thinking about.”
“I have no idea how to do that.”
“Try, dammit!” Jen’s earlier anger seemed to have been forgotten. There was laughter in her voice. “I’m going to keep thinking about the doll. You try and pull something else out of my head.”
John kept his eyes closed. “Okay.”
He concentrated, focusing on the voices surrounding Jen, trying to find a way to pull others from her than those she was broadcasting. At first there was nothing, and then John felt a moment of horrible vertigo, felt as if he were being pulled through a tube and yet sitting still at the same time, and a voice said “Timmy, please stop hiding my cigarettes,” and for the first time John found an image materializing in his mind’s eye that didn’t seem to be coming from his own brain. A young man with blonde hair and blue eyes, features like Jen’s, clearly a relative.
John opened his eyes and there was again that sense of vertigo, this time much worse, as he felt himself rush back into place. Jen was looking at him in anticipation, smiling, eager.
“Do you have a brother named Tim?” John asked.
Jen went white and her eyes grew wide. “Holy shit,” she said in a breathless whisper. “Holy shit, John, yes, and I totally wasn’t thinking about him. I… where are you going?”
Staggering toward the bathroom, John said “I have to throw up now.”
