Today
I had a revelation, as if waking from a long dream that resembled
reality all too closely, right down to the fine details.
It
was an ordinary day, like any other really; I woke without the
overly-enthusiastic assistance of my alarm, hovering in bed for a
stew of hazy minutes, unsure of what there was worth getting up for,
or what possible disadvantages there may be to staying in my
makeshift incubator. I eventually slipped away when the bed wasn't
looking, gliding quietly from the magnetic sheets, seamlessly merging
with the comfort of my already worn-clothes on the other side. The
few steps between the bedroom and the kitchen went without a hitch,
bringing me parallel with the sink where I immediately filled my
glass with the local brew, emptying the cool fluid into my awaiting
gullet in 10 smooth gulps, counted out consecutively in a satisfying
rhythm. Slam! The glass breaks the late-morning silence as it
connects with the startled worktop, signalling the real beginning of
another day.
Between
the daily de-cluttering and breakfast, I heard a faint sound, at
first like a silky whisper brushing gently against the ear, hinting
at words and phrases as if building to a peak, but then suddenly
dying again. I thought nothing of it, and so returned to the chorus
of chores patiently waiting for me in various pockets of space around
the house. After rallying the emptied cups from the remnants of
yesterday, somewhere between the living-room and the kitchen, I
became conscious of the sound again. Initially it just appeared to
be noise, but the more I concentrated on it the more I heard, and the
more I understood. It slowly dawned on me, like a dense grey cloud
bringing with it the certainty of storms, that this noise, this
constant background radiation had been here all along, contentedly
resting in a safe corner of my mind somewhere. Like looking down at
your arm to notice blood dripping from an unacknowledged cut, to both
simultaneously ponder its origin and awake to its effect at the same
time, this moment brought with it the sudden and horrifying
realisation that these seemingly benign sounds were in fact voices.
And there were lots of them, with no single locus, no definitive
ending, chattering away in turns, each one as eager as the next to
recall their stories, spill their guts and bare their disembodied
souls to me as if I had enquired.
Understandably
worried, I immediately called up my doctor who mistook my malady as
merely English idiosyncrasy. Exasperated, full of, but nevertheless
lost for words, I mustered one of many emergency French sounds that
was undoubtedly invented for such an occasion. And like a sheep
protesting the removal of its wool at the start of a long winter, I
said “….baaaaaaaah!”. Apparently, my nasal objection was a
hundred times more effective and comprehensible than any of my
previous word-strings had been, and so in the condescendingly polite
and impatiently calm manner that they only teach at medical, school
she asked me about the voices.
“Describe them to me” she said.
“How many of them are there?”.
“Well, hmmmm....first
there's...the Party Man”, I tell her, almost accidentally
articulating a question mark on the end of my sentence. Silence at
the other end of the phone.
“Ze party man?” came the confused
reply, as if I had slipped into an alternate dimension, one in which
I was cold-calling potential customers in hopes of selling my
services as a low-budget children's entertainer.
“Yes”, I
replied reassuringly, “he doesn't stay long, but when he comes he's
usually in high spirits. He tells me that it's my birthday, but at
the same time, he says that the party we're going to have will be as
if it's my birthday. It's quite confusing. Maybe it's a sort of
riddle, or one of those 'if a tree falls in the woods' philosophical
questions”. A longer bout of silence. I remove the phone from my
ear to check that the battery hasn't died on me or that I've lost the
connection.
“I...see....” came the voice eventually, like some
trapped gas skeptically escaping a rather comfortable imprisonment.
“Who else?”, she probes, as if the infamous Party Man's tricks
had once again failed in keeping a group of eight-year-olds occupied
for the five simple minutes it takes to prepare a birthday cake, thus
flunking his audition with the doctor.
“Well,
there's another guy, equally as friendly as the first, but even more
cryptic in what he says. He tells me to come down from the mountain,
implying that I've stayed atop this mountain for some length of time,
and that now Spring is here I should return home, wherever that is.
Do you think I should interpret these voices like dreams? Is it all
metaphorical and emanating from my sub-conscious? Repressed feelings
perhaps?”
I
begin to imagine that my multi-tasking doctor is struggling with a
particularly fiendish crossword puzzle during my consultation.
“Baaaaaaa....”, came the reply, half-expecting me to help her
decipher what six letter word beginning with D, might be a large sea
animal with thick, greyish skin, and live mainly in the Indian ocean,
surviving on a diet of plantlife. I continue:
“There's the bright
and cheerful woman with an often piercing voice, who uses martial
arts to obtain her dinner, a man who refers to me as 'baby' and
repeatedly requests to see my thong, a melancholy woman with her
heart on fire and another who talks to rocks for moral support.
There's a man who recounts his road trip through America following
the Mississippi river, who appears later on to tell me that I can
refer to him as 'Al' if I wish. I hear another, who always talks so
quickly, but who apparently has the lungs of an old woman. He tells
me that it's better to be sick in the head than sane in the city. On
occasion, a rebellious young man who refuses to accept the ways of
modern society tells me the story of how he expresses his
non-conformist sentiments by throwing objects on the floor. They are
numerous, faceless, unforgiving and relentless, they greet me with
exuberant cheer the instant I awake in the mornings, and they
interject when I am mute. They follow me, in their hundreds to the
four corners of the earth, nagging at me like a rabble of needy
children, making unreasonable and incomprehensible demands. I am
powerless to make them stop or even to stymie their stories, they are
stripped of sympathy, unanimous in their interrogation, and
wholeheartedly heartless. I don't understand them or why they insist
on talking in code, or why they even talk to me at all!”
“Wait
just on one minute please, Mr Sing, I have someone else on the line.”
Silence.
Before
I could conjure another one of those emergency French sounds, a
second bout of dumfoundedness was interrupted by the tinny, upbeat
melody of some ska, beamed down via a distant satellite to ease my
pain, while the ever-intrigued doctor set about reading the winding
Wikipedia entry on the manatee. Sea Cow redirects here.
“Mr
Sing”, I say to myself, trailing off. At that exact moment a voice
chimes in over the music as if all along he had been calmly waiting
to give his personal diagnosis;
