WITH A HANDFUL of exceptions I found that when I tried to write down what the voice said, I couldn’t. A fog would descend. Phrases that seemed sharply etched to me when I heard them, sense and structure cut like a skyscraper against a crisp sky, would crumble and fade as soon as I tried to record them.
I heard the words in the stream as English or French or Spanish, or sometimes it would be modern English in an accent or dialect, say Australian English or an English with Welsh accents. Other times it was English that sounded like Shakespeare or Middle English, like Chaucer maybe, which I’d read in college. But whenever the format changed I half-forgot what had come before, as though the switch between lexicons and grammars occurred imperceptibly. Since I couldn’t identify the languages that weren’t English or Spanish or French I figured my imagination was making up a stream of nonsense, sounds that resembled other tongues but were only a sham.
That was a game I’d liked to play when I was a kid. I even played it a few times with Lena, speaking in rapid-fire gibberish, pretending it was an unknown exotic language, say Urdu or Tahitian.
And the voice never went silent, except when Lena was sleeping. It changed from low tones to high, speech to singing, singing to humming to clicking sounds that had a rhythmic quality, on occasion devolving into grumbling or even yelling. I drew the line at yelling—at those times I’d call a babysitter and go out.
I’d shut the door behind me and step into the street, and right away I didn’t hear a thing.
WHEN I LEFT Ned, I took enough money to live on for a while. It was only a fraction of the legacy from my family that he’d funneled into his businesses, but I didn’t want to fight over money. Ned wanted it more than I ever had and taking too much would bring out the edge in him.
So I took only what I felt I needed. I made a budget carefully, knowing I wasn’t going to work again until Lena started school. I’d worked steadily all my adult life and I thought I could use a break; I was well pleased to be only her mother and teacher for those years. I didn’t plan to have a second child.
The money keeps us afloat, Lena and me, and in that respect we’re fortunate.
I PUZZLED OVER the link between the baby’s presence and my hallucination. There wasn’t generally supposed to be such a clear connection, in the hallucinations of the sane, between what was heard or seen and the fixations of the hallucinating person—not in the descriptions that I read, anyway. This made my case seem more psychological than purely neurological, and I worried about it periodically. Because the presence of my infant carried with it a voice that had the appearance of fluency in all tongues and gave an impression of encyclopedic knowledge—some kind of frightened projection of my overpowering responsibility as a mother, possibly, was one of my interpretations.
Sometimes the stream of sound wasn’t a voice but music, welcome relief: old standards, dramatic epics by well-known composers, folk tunes, pop riffs. It liked Woody Guthrie, whose music I didn’t remember encountering before except for the song “This Land Is Your Land,” which I knew from summer camp. Research on the snatches of lyrics I could recall yielded his name, and I thought I must have been exposed as a child, and quashed the recollection.
But most often the content was words—what sounded like recitations of texts of all kinds, poems, fictions both literary and mass-market, movie scripts and stage plays, histories, dictionaries, textbooks, biographies, news stories. The subjects were as diverse as the genres: single-celled organisms, hockey scores, feathers on dinosaurs, celebrity suicides, the pattern of Pleistocene extinctions, the fate of the tribe known as the Nez Perce; relativity, particle accelerators, Greek myths, the troubled term Anthropocene, the chemistry of a callus on the hand of Heidelberg man.
I was impressed by the knowledge base from which my mind appeared to be drawing. I marveled at it, even. Buried in my unconscious must be some capacity for photographic memory, I thought.
That surprised me.