Voices

It started the same time his voice started breaking; his awkward puberty made even more so by the flashes of strong emotion. He found himself feeling whatever those around him felt…even when that was fear of himself.

As his voice settled in an octave lower and the peach fuzz on his face resolved into mustache and beard, the voices started. By concentrating on one voice, he could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of any person around him.

He couldn’t, however, concentrate every moment of every day. When his concentration broke, thousands of voices and emotions flooded his mind. When it became too much to bear, he dropped out of school.

“This is a curse. I wish it would just go away.”

“It’s a gift,” his mother had said, “that runs in the family. You’re not the only one to experience it. It gets better, manageable…with time.”

“Then why do you think of suicide?” he asked.

“Look deeper,” she said, grabbing his hands.

“Oh.” He saw the diagnosis, the unfavorable prognosis, and the reality that any treatment would do nothing but add a few weeks at most to the constant pain. The cancer had started in her femur and metastasized throughout her body.

More than what he saw was what he felt. The weight of inevitability, the certainty of death, and her only control of it was whether it would be long and painful, or at the time of her choosing.

She wiped the tears from his face. “It’s my burden, but I won’t leave without saying goodbye.”

He hugged his mother tight. “When it’s time, I’ll help you.”

It was the sudden peace a month later that made him aware his mother had decided to go. He rushed to her room and held her hand, but she was already to weak to talk. “I’m here, Mom.”

He felt her in his mind, covering over him with a blanket of love. Her voice, sounding far away, reached across his mind; “Goodbye.”

His grief was palpable, pushing aside the voices and feelings of others for the first time since he was thirteen. It poured out of him in waves, infecting the police and medics at the scene. He found himself surrounded by first responders holding him in a group hug, consoling both him and themselves.

That was the point at which he felt his “gift” was dangerous to others. He packed up the bare essentials, sold his mother’s home, and bought a cabin in the mountains.

Without manmade lights, the Milky Way painted its form across the night sky. All the electricity came from solar panels and a wind turbine. Heat came from the small wood stove, which was also the only cooking surface.

Aside from the occasional flash of surprise or fear or curiosity from the animals, he felt and heard nothing beyond his own mind…for the first three months. His peace was broken in the middle of an autumn night as he watched the stars wheel overhead.

It was faint at first, a feeling of dread. Over the following weeks, it grew. He could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of people from every direction. Despite the vast distance between the cabin and population, it still found him there.

Far from becoming manageable, his “gift” was getting stronger, more out of control. He burned all his satellite internet usage for the month looking for any way to remove the curse…to become normal.

There was one name that came up again and again, “Doctor Kate.” It seemed that this woman — who may or may not be an actual doctor — had success treating patients with “the gift.” Not all were cured, and at least one was left a vegetable, but it didn’t stop her practice.

Finding the name was the easy part, finding the doctor herself was more difficult. He increased his monthly satellite usage and still used up all his data in the first week.

His searches for Doctor Kate finally led him to Katherine “Kate” Holtz, MD, at a neurosurgery and recovery practice somewhere “outside of Tijuana, Mexico.” He planned out the trip to avoid heavily populated areas as much as possible. At the end, though, he would have to traverse the border in San Diego. The thought was daunting, but worth it if she could cure him.

He arranged his eight-week appointment and recovery stay via email and began a road trip that he hoped wouldn’t be too arduous. Because he was taking the backroads and avoiding cities and large towns, the trip would take longer than a straight shot down the interstate.

It was around ten-thirty of the second night that he pulled into a gas station to fill up. Another car was already there. His first thought was to get back on the road and go to a station without anyone there, but as he worked out how much farther he could drive on the gas he had left, his concentration was broken by a silent plea.

She was in the trunk of the car, bound hand and foot and gagged. She was frightened and wanted her mother.

He listened to the voices in the convenience store attached to the station. One was bored, thinking about how much longer until he could go home. The other was excited, fantasizing about all the things he was going to do to his new “toy” when he got her out to the lake house.

The man’s thoughts were loud, scattershot, and filled with blood and sex…blood as sex. He didn’t know how much longer the man would be in the store, but he knew he had to act fast.

Remembering how his own grief had overwhelmed the first responders, he tried to push a desire for chocolate, a specific type that he couldn’t recall, but would know as soon as he saw it. Feeling it as he did when he was a child with a dollar bill in his hand, he pushed it toward the man’s mind.

Seeing the man staring in bewilderment at the candy display, he checked the trunk of the car. There was no way to open it from the outside, meaning it used a key fob and probably a button near the steering wheel.

He checked the driver’s door and found it unlocked. He let himself in and found the trunk latch. After opening the trunk, he ran around to it.

She was maybe eleven or twelve, with bruises on her arms and neck. He motioned her to remain silent and lifted her out of the trunk and laid her down in the back seat of his car. He removed her gag and untied her hands.

“Just hide down by the floor, okay? I’ll get you to the police and your mom as soon as we leave, or he leaves.”

She nodded in shocked silence, and he closed the door and fueled the car. It wouldn’t do to run dry in the middle of nowhere with a scared child.

The man had finally chosen a chocolate bar and was paying for his purchases. He watched the man out of the corner of his eye. The man pulled his key fob out of his pocket and began to walk toward the trunk.

He thought as hard as he could, “Don’t look! Not here! They’ll see you!”

The man stopped, turned around, and got in the driver’s seat. The man left with a squeal of tires while he memorized the license plate.

The tank full and the man gone, he thought it might be better to call the police here. He opened the door and found her struggling to untie her feet. He helped her loosen the knots and free herself. A mix of fear and gratitude pulsed from her.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Let’s go inside and call the cops…and your mom.” He offered his hand to help her out of the car and she took it. The gratitude and relief took over and she grabbed on to him, sobbing.

He picked her up, letting her cling, sobbing, to his neck while he walked into the store. “Call the cops,” he said to the cashier.

The cashier picked up on his fierce protective instinct for the child and made it clear that the police needed to get there right then. He passed on the license plate and cued up the security recordings for the man’s image.

When the girl had calmed enough to call her mother, she did, but still didn’t let go. He’d already decided that he would hold her until she wanted down or her mother arrived…whichever came first.

It happened that both were the same moment. Surrounded by police, she still clung to him until her mother walked through the door. “Lisbeth!” her mother cried.

She let herself down gently and ran into her mother’s embrace. The police all mirrored his feeling of relief, and his surprise when she said to her mother, “I want chocolate, but I don’t know which one.”

It was past three in the morning that he got back on the road. He stopped in a pull-out on a deserted road to sleep in the car for a few hours. The voices woke him before he was ready. He continued on, the din of the voices growing louder as he got close to San Diego.

Getting through the border checkpoint required all his concentration to block out the overload from the mass of people around him. Once through, he drove through Tijuana, following the directions Doctor Kate had given him.

It turned out that her office was outside of Tijuana only in the sense that it was the closest city. The neurology center was in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing in any direction. Still, the voices intruded.

Approaching the building, he could hear the doctor’s thoughts, hearing his thoughts. “Yes,” he heard her think, “I’m like you.”

After a lengthy consultation, which from the outside looked like the two of them staring at each other in silence, she told him to remove all metal items from his clothes and pockets. Since that included his zipper, he stripped to his briefs. The next step was the fMRI. While doing certain mental tasks, the machine got a mapping of his brain.

From there, he was led to a cafeteria for lunch. He noticed that everyone kept their thoughts calm and their mood as level as possible. They must be used to dealing with people like me, he thought.

After lunch, he met back up with Doctor Kate. Instead of thinking everything, she spoke. “We’ve mapped out the areas of your brain associated with your gift,” she said. “It’s in your language recall and speech centers.”

“What does that mean?”

“If we provide the kind of fix we normally do, you will likely never understand speech or be able to talk again.”

He let out a long sigh. Maybe it would be better anyway. His life was not a happy one. He was stewing over the thought and noticed Doctor Kate snapping a rubber band on her wrist. “What’s that about?” he asked.

“Think of it as an interrupt switch. It forces my mind to focus what’s internal to me.” She cocked her head to one side. “You’re far more powerful than I am, but maybe you’ll get this. Some people think louder than others. You think loud enough that people without the gift pick up on it. To me, your thoughts aren’t just loud, they’re standing next to the stacks at an outdoor heavy metal concert loud.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Does it work?”

Doctor Kate smiled. “It does, but some days are better than others, as I’m sure you know.”

“And if I said go ahead with the surgery?”

“I won’t do it. There’s a very good chance it would render you mute and unable to comprehend language. The risks are far too high.” She shook her head. “Contrary to internet rumors, I’m not a butcher, and I’ve never turned a patient into a zombie or a vegetable. If we can treat it with a neurostimulator, the same way we treat epilepsy, we do. Lobotomies and brain butchery are not in our toolbox.”

“What can I do?” he asked.

She handed him a rubber band like the one around her wrist. “For starters, we’re going to work on control. I’ve got a therapist that comes in three days a week, and I want you to work with her.”

“And if—” he began.

“If you choose to leave, I can’t and won’t stop you.” She placed a hand on his and he could feel her concern radiating like warmth. “You’ve already paid for eight weeks in recovery. Please, stay until you have it at least partially under control.”

“I wish it was gone,” he said. “It’s not a gift, it’s a curse.”

“And how do you think that little girl, Lisbeth feels?”

“Okay, one good thing came of it.”

“You don’t know that it’s the only good thing that will come of it, do you?”

He shook his head, knowing she could feel his wavering. “I’ll…go to my room,” he said.

As he slept, the image of Lisbeth running to her mother’s arms replayed over and over until it woke him. He heard weeping from one of the other rooms. “Sorry!” he shouted.

Her image firmly in mind, he decided that even if that was the only good that would come of his gift, it was worth it to endure. He tried to feel her mind, to comfort her, tell her that all would work out, but he couldn’t find it among the myriad of voices.

He rolled over on his side and snapped the rubber band hard. The pain brought his mind back in, letting the voices go unheard for the moment, and he went back to sleep.