Demons, they said.
They saw demons with claws, horns and pointed teeth, of course, but often demons appeared in the shape of seductive women and yet others were amorphous shapes that shifted beneath the faces of loved ones. Briefly those faces would distort, then swiftly resume their devious guise, pull over themselves the skin of normalcy.
Or people heard demons that had no physical form but only spoke, mostly in biblical tongues like Aramaic or Hebrew. Experts were consulted and that was often their verdict: what the demon-visited persons were hearing was Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek. The demons tended to speak in dead scripts, as though frozen in the time of early Christianity—the demons clung to the old, reluctant to embrace the new.
I was glad Lena’s mouth didn’t move when the words issued, as in some possession stories. Because it was only sound and words, invisible, the experience also conjured TV shows involving ESP. I looked into spoon-bending hoaxes and watched shows that featured ghost-finding teams that crept through haunted houses trying to capture stray ectoplasm.
I was worn down by the elements of my routine—the stream of words and my bewilderment during the days, the nights half-sleepless, a mesh of hours spent fitfully dozing or nursing my daughter when she woke up. Ned had moved out of our bedroom while I was pregnant and never moved back, claiming his restless sleep would bother me. Often he didn’t come home at all, in those first months when Lena’s crying disturbed the nightly peace, but stayed over at the office. It wasn’t long before I began to understand that at the office was a euphemism.
And when the baby was sleeping but I couldn’t sleep, I wallowed in pulp fiction. I read thick paperbacks set in old houses, where the devil took the form of flies and buzzed on windowpanes, or in upscale prewar apartment buildings in Manhattan, where babies were fed evil baby food and raised by Satan cults. Plus there were the movies about antichrists and child possessors, the one with the black-haired boy named Damien, the one with the blank-faced girl who floated over her bed, rasping obscenities. When I was too tired to read, with the baby mostly sleeping and the speaker fallen silent, I’d curl up in front of the screen with cheese popcorn.
But in the end the B-movie fiends were too showy for me to take seriously, almost self-parodies. Besides, the stream of words wasn’t malicious and my daughter committed no alarming actions. She ate and slept, lay bundled in my arms. Time passed and she rolled over, sat up, crawled; also gurgled and drooled.
She never fixed upon me a bold, sinister eye.
So by and by I let the demons go, telepathy I dismissed out of hand, schizoaffective disorders I further renounced.
I went with the hallucination theory.
Hallucination has the qualities of real perception: vivid, substantial, and located in external space. It is distinct from a delusional perception, in which correctly sensed stimuli are given additional, often bizarre, significance. —Wikipedia 5.10.2009
PEOPLE WITH MIGRAINES see colors and shapes fading and forming anew on the wall. Others, with visual hallucinations, believe strangers are sitting beside them dressed in old-fashioned garb. Next to these people’s apparitions my own affliction didn’t seem so grave.
It was true that the disturbance was constant, and I didn’t find an identical case in the articles I read, but this struck me as more or less a technical detail. At first I called it the voice, as others like me did. Because I wasn’t alone: there were whole support groups given over to non-psychotics who heard things, including a so-called Hearing Voices Movement (its mission: to empower chronic voice-hearers). There were affirming Listservs.
I avoided them studiously. I began to write in this Word file instead, a diary whose sporadic, rambling texts I’d tinker with for years. Over time I redacted, adding and subtracting until the entries formed a narrative that clarified my own story—at least to me.
I spoke to no one about what I believed I heard. I sought out no company in my infirmity.
WHERE WE LIVE now is a seaside motel in the off-season. We’re on the edge of rocky bluffs, so I can see a car coming when it’s a speck on the long gravel road.
There are few guests this time of year; in summertime they get the kind of tourists who, says Don the motel manager, bicker sharply over the bright-orange sandwich crackers in the vending machine re: advisability of purchasing.