It would say:
“Open your mouth to reply to that cute boy who has ACTUALLY STOPPED AND SPOKEN TO YOU IN THE CAFETERIA AS IF YOU’RE A REAL, VISIBLE PERSON, AND ACTUALLY SEEMS INTERESTED IN YOU, and I will make your dad die in an accident.”
I’m paraphrasing—not the dying-in-an-accident bit, the boy bit.
And I kept my mouth shut. It didn’t make much difference at school. I never had any friends anyway. I was a freak and a weirdo. I sat alone, I worked alone. The voice let me speak to teachers if they asked a direct question, and if I obeyed it in all other things. It even let me finish King Lear and write a short assignment on it. I guess the voice considered Shakespeare un-fun enough that it was not verboten.
At home, I noticed that the voice was always loudest in my room. So I moved out—I mean, not out entirely, but to the little apartment above the garage, the one Dad would rent to kids working summer jobs at the amusement park.
Your apartment.
But back then it was mine. I laid out all the books I’d borrowed from the library in the little sitting room and kept the bedroom tidy; the voice made sure of that. I even cooked a couple of times in the kitchen when Dad was at Donato’s. Simple stuff: pasta, steak.
Like I said, when I was reading, as long as it wasn’t something fun, the voice left me alone. And especially when I was in the apartment. I don’t know why; I guess I would speculate that it was because my own room held more memories of my mother in it, invisible but there, like dust in dark air.
But anyway, reading in the apartment was the safest activity. Which meant no TV, no sketching in my sketchbook, no reading for pleasure. But nonfiction was fine, the drier and more boring the better.
So I read a lot. I’d stock up on books at the library and bring them back to my fortress above the garage, and I’d work my way through them: stuff on Greek myth, Native American legends, the history of the Spice Routes, technical textbooks on coding in Linux. Anything, so long as it wasn’t a story.
But mostly, anything I could find about the Houdini Killer.
I remember the exact day when I worked out what was happening with the voice, or thought I did. It was June now, near the end of the school year. It was seventy degrees out. Dad was introducing a new millipede to a tank in the house; we didn’t hang out much back then, but I’d seen the box arrive by FedEx, the holes cut in it. Old Mr. Grant next door was mowing his lawn; the drone of the rotor blade was coming through the open window and I could smell cut grass, mingling with ocean air. Mr. Grant lives on the side that does not have the mobile home filling the yard.
Obviously.
I was reading about Echo; what the voice was interested in was educational value. Not that it said so, but I got the point quickly after I turned on the TV and caught a few seconds of My Super Sweet Sixteen before the voice forced me to run up and down the block fifty times or it would cut out my dad’s tongue, which in itself was very Ovid, but more Procne than Echo.
Anyway.
You know the Ovid version of the Echo story, of course:
Echo has been helping Zeus to sleep around, distracting his wife, Hera, with her beautiful singing voice while Zeus schtups every shepherdess and naiad he can get his divine hands on. Hera finds out, and takes away Echo’s voice, her greatest asset, so she can only repeat the ends of other people’s phrases. Echo sees Narcissus in the forest, this unbelievably beautiful boy, and falls in love. But she can only say what he says back to him, which sometimes distorts his words in comic ways and besides anything weirds him out, and anyway he’s too, well, narcissistic to reciprocate, so he rejects her totally.
He says, “May I die before my body is yours.”
And she says, “My body is yours.”
Which obviously mystifies him and only makes him angry so he runs away. It’s all pretty funny and tragic and she wastes away and dies and blah blah blah, you know the rest.
But did you know there’s another story?
It’s in Longus, in his Daphnis and Chloe. Which, incidentally, is one of the very first novels. Long, long before Don Quixote. You thought I was a geek before? Ha.
Anyway. In this one, there’s no Zeus and Hera. There’s just Echo, who is a nymph. Again, she has a beautiful voice—one she can use to imitate any sound, the song of any mortal, the call of any beast, the liquid babble of a stream. Then along comes Pan, the goat-god of chaos and hedonism. Pan is worshipped by followers who enjoy going into frenzies, and who tear animals to pieces in his honor.
Yes: