Regina spoke first. I’d barely heard her talk before but now she was painfully eager. She has what I guess is a Dutch accent, and what she said corrected me: it wasn’t just preverbal infants. There too my assumptions had been unfounded.
I listened to what she said and it never struck me to disbelieve. She’d been exposed through someone named Terence, and though she didn’t describe him he clearly wasn’t a baby. She was an ad exec who began hearing the voice when Terence was with her in her corner office. At first it spoke to her only in ditties and slogans; whenever she was with Terence, these ditties and slogans were audible, though he didn’t seem to hear them. Almost right away it began happening when they were at home, too, she said, so now I assumed Terence was her husband—that they had worked together and gone home together too.
The man she’d come with sat across from her, nodding. But he couldn’t be Terence; the way she talked about the absent person was almost patronizing. She’d cycled through various fixed ideas, she said, one of which had to do with wires in the walls, the audio of her TVs, computers, and many other interlinked devices. In service to that idea she’d hired contractors to tear into the walls, looking for speakers, receivers, anything that could be transmitting—she watched the workers like a hawk to determine whether wires existed where they should not. She’d pretended to be opening the walls for other reasons, she’d actually pretended to want to renovate, she said, had her company pay through the nose to renovate her corner office. Then she renovated her home, where, as a pretext for opening the walls and having the electricians carefully inspect all wiring, she paid to install complex systems that controlled the house’s appliances, temperature, and lights.
Nothing had been found, the contractors dismissed her as a neurotic rich woman—which she was, she admitted in her tight, well-bred, Dutch voice. She was a neurotic rich woman, but so what?
Finally she went online and she found Don, she said: “I found all of you. And it was such a relief.”
“She didn’t tell me any of it,” said her companion, who also had a Dutch accent. “She never told me what she was hearing, why she had taken on these construction projects, until we were on our way here.”
“You know,” said Regina. “I feared that Reiner would dismiss me. For being mentally ill, you know? People just get dismissed. It’s how we get rid of people these days, we throw their opinions in the garbage can by calling them crazy. Whenever a man talks about his ex-wife, he says she’s crazy! You notice? Because she must be crazy, right? To want to get a divorce from him.”
“Ik wil geen scheiden, schat,” said Reiner fondly.
“He says, ‘I don’t want to get a divorce,’ ” translated Regina.
Quaking aspen trees make clones of themselves to build colonies, becoming one large organism connected by its root system. They are able to survive forest fires because, although individual trees may burn, the roots underground remain intact. One colony in Utah is 80,000 years old.
Not to have to have children, I thought as I read about the aspens in Wikipedia, or at least not to have children that were separate from you—and yet to live throughout history, your family not only close around you for all that time but part of your own body.
Not to have to be alone.
I envied those aspens.
NAVID TOOK A TURN at the next meeting, shuffling his feet on the linoleum and clearing his throat nervously. I felt the attention of the group fasten on him: he must not have talked much before.
He’d been on set, he said, he loved being on set, and even though his job almost never required it, he did it as often as he could. He had one assistant, he said, just out of film school whose job it was to hang around a movie set all day and then, when finally a scene was ready to shoot, to text Navid so he could drive over. Best money he ever spent, he said, best money . . . he trailed off. I saw Kay catch his eye and smile at him, encouraging.
When he had started hearing, he said, it was a period of hard work and, he admitted, chronic drug use, and so his assumption was that what he heard was a cocaine artifact. Well, also crack, he said, because sex on crack, you know, was really excellent, he added awkwardly. “Or maybe you don’t know, ha ha,” and he looked around at the room of non-crack-users and emitted a nervous laugh.
No one else laughed.