Going out. Client. C U tmw?
I thought of Dad, banning me from seeing her. But he’d be at work from eleven in the morning …
Yeah. Wld have to be daytime tho.
The answer popped right up.
That’s cool. Maston Theater? Matinee of Toy Story.
Toy Story? I replied.
Hey don’t diss Pixar.
OK. What time?
1.
OK. Night, Paris.
Night, Cass.
I put the phone down. I lay down again and reached for the Haruki Murakami book on my nightstand.
“No,” said the voice.
“Oh hi,” I said. “Nice to hear from you. And thank you for waiting till after six p.m. to—”
“No reading.”
I thought of Dr. Lewis. I thought: I have nothing to lose here. “Or what?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“If I read my book, what are you going to do about it?”
The voice thought for a moment—this sounded different from when it went away. I can’t explain it. I mean, I could still feel it there. “I will make you cut off one of your toes.”
My toes curled. “How?”
“What?”
“How will you make me do that?”
“I will force you to.”
“No.”
Then the voice screamed at me. That was new. I mean, it was always saying horrible things. But the screaming was different. “Don’t push me! ” it screamed.
“I’m not pushing you. I’m just saying no.”
“Go to the kitchen this instant. Tell your dad you’re getting a glass of water. Take a bread knife, and come back up here. Then cut off your pinky toe on your left foot. Do it right now.”
“Or what?”
“What do you mean, or what?”
“I mean, if I don’t cut off my toe, what are you going to do about it?”
The voice thought. “I’m going to kill your father. No more injuries. No more minor ****. You don’t cut off your toe, your dad dies. Okay?”
You can’t imagine how scared I was. My eyes were filling with tears. It was dark out; my room was gloomy with shadows. I flicked on my bedside lamp. But that only made it worse. Now my clothes hanging on the door handle, my posters, my shelves, cast weird shapes on the walls and floor.
“I won’t do it,” I said.
“Then you will wake up in the morning and your father will be dead.”
I said nothing.
“He will die. Do you understand? I will kill him in his sleep. I will smother him until he stops breathing and his body is cold and dead.”
I said nothing.
“Get the bread knife. Now.”
“No.”
“Last chance, Cass.”
“No.”
The voice sighed. “He dies, then,” it said.
And then it did go. I felt it withdraw from the room.
From my head.
The voice didn’t speak then, but my mind was unquiet. You get that word in old gothic novels, don’t you? Unquiet ghosts and so on.
That was my mind that night. My thoughts just raced around, like ghosts in a haunted house, unstoppable.
What if your dad dies because of you?
How selfish are you?
You really want to kill another parent?
Sometimes they were words, like that, and sometimes they were images. Scenes, flashing in and out of my consciousness.
Tiles.
Blood.
The house was mostly wood and I could hear it expanding or contracting or whatever houses do at night when they cool down. Outside, there was a strong wind coming from the ocean. I could smell it through the cracks of my windows, salty and holding the promise of distance and forgetting—a promise I wished it would make good on. I wished that wind would sweep into my head and rinse it clean, whistle through the cavities of my skull until there was nothing there but emptiness, and silence.
But the wind didn’t do that, and the voice was still in my head. “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die like a dog on the ground, like your mother. It’s going to be your fault.”
The voice was everywhere. It was speaking, in my ears, as a voice, but it was merging with everything else too. The creaking and clicking and ticking of the house were all consonants, the wind outside was all vowels, and together the house and the wind were saying,
Your dad is going to die.
In the end I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I got some old headphones out of my nightstand—I had to dig under the piles of medication that I hadn’t been taking; archaeology. I plugged them into my radio and tuned it to a dead channel again, the way I used to block out the voice.