Whisper to Me(37)
Anything the voice wanted had to be bad, didn’t it?
But I squashed this thought down, jumped on it, like Daffy Duck jumping on Bugs Bunny when he’s trying to get out of his hole. I didn’t want to be taking the drugs either; I didn’t want to be a zombie all my life.
“Cass?” said Paris. “Earth to Cass?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here.”
“That you are,” said Dr. Lewis. Mike. “And it’s an important first step. So. Why don’t you take a seat and tell me about it. Paris, you mind giving us the room?”
A nervous voice inside me spoke up then, not the voice, but an instinct voice. It said, You want to be alone in here with this guy you don’t know?
Then the actual voice said,
“Shut the **** up, *****. Stop being so pathetic.” It was quiet from the risperidone, but it was still pretty forceful.
I closed my eyes as my inner voices argued. “Can she … can she stay?” I said.
Paris looked at the doctor.
“Why don’t we leave the door open?” he said. “Paris can wait in the main hall. She could even bowl a few rounds.”
“Bowl?” said Paris, like he was suggesting necrophilia or something.
He shrugged. “The balls are there. Might as well use them.”
Paris smiled. “The philosophy of every male,” she said. “Okay, fine. You need me, Cass, you call for me.”
And then she swept out the room, long legs tick-tocking. I watched her go, amazed as I always was by her, by her self-possession and her grace, despite her illness. She was like a machine in tight-fitting clothes, engineered to hold the eye, but she had charisma too, blazing out of every pore.
“She shines like a star, doesn’t she?” said Dr. Lewis, more succinctly. “I just hope she doesn’t turn out to be meteor.”
“Why?” I said.
He looked sad all of a sudden, thoughtful. “Because they fall to the earth. And they burn.”
DR. LEWIS: Take a seat. Sorry about the plastic chairs.
ME: That’s okay.
DR. LEWIS: Paris has told me a little about you. But why don’t you tell me something.
ME: Like what?
DR. LEWIS: I don’t know. How about your favorite music.
ME: Oh. Uh, I used to like hip-hop stuff. But now I mostly listen to, I don’t know what you would call it; electronica. Stuff without voices. Just … beats and bass, you know?
DR. LEWIS: (Rolls up his sleeve. There is a tattoo reading COME AS YOU ARE in gothic script down his forearm and an anarchy symbol.) I listen to a whole load of stuff. When Kurt Cobain died, that was the day I decided to be a psychologist. Sounds stupid, but it’s completely true. I was, what, seventeen?
ME: (inside my head) Oh, he’s not as old as I thought. It’s the gray hair, I guess.
DR. LEWIS: I just thought, what a waste, you know? I thought if I could stop one person from doing what he did, then my life would be worthwhile. It’s like … a world ending, every time. Do you know what I mean?
ME: (thinking of my mother, her likes and dislikes, her opinions, her favorite foods and movies and her jokes and smiles and angry days, the songs she liked to sing, reduced to a red puddle of blood on a tiled floor) Yes.
DR. LEWIS: The loud music helps?
ME: With?
DR. LEWIS: Your voice.
ME: Oh. Yes. It does.
DR. LEWIS: This voice, do you have any idea who it might be?
ME: (puzzled) I don’t … I don’t think I …
DR. LEWIS: I mean, is it someone you know? Someone you knew?
ME: It’s a voice. It’s not real.
DR. LEWIS: The shrinks told you that, right?
ME: (nods)
DR. LEWIS: (sighs) The voice is real to you, is it not? I mean, you hear it, like any other voice? With your ears?
ME: Uh, yes.
DR. LEWIS: So it’s real. It’s a real phenomenon. It doesn’t matter if you can see it or not. It’s real to you.
ME: I guess.
DR. LEWIS: It’s possible to do scans, you know. Functional MRI. Electrical signals. What we know is that a person who hears voices, when they do hear them, the exact same brain areas light up as when they hear real speech. It is, for the purposes of the brain, exactly the same experience as hearing an actual person speaking.
ME: Okay.
DR. LEWIS: Anyway. Your voice, it isn’t someone you know.
ME: (suddenly too hot, suddenly itchy all over) I don’t think so.
DR. LEWIS: History of mental illness? Other hallucinations?
ME: No.
DR. LEWIS: And what does it say, the voice?
ME: Horrible things.
DR. LEWIS: Like?
ME: To hurt myself. To not talk to people or it will punish me. Stuff like that. But not so much now.
DR. LEWIS: Drugs?
ME: Yes.
DR. LEWIS: Hmm. And when did the voice first speak to you?
ME: The police precinct. I’d just found a foot on the beach.
DR. LEWIS: That was you?
ME: Yes.
DR. LEWIS: Wow. And what precise words did it use?
ME: I think … it said, “You’re disgusting.” I think.
DR. LEWIS: Interesting. Did you agree?
ME: Um, with what?
DR. LEWIS: Did you agree with the voice that you were disgusting?
ME: (Thinking how weird this is, how Dr. Rezwari never wanted to know anything about what the voice said. Only that it threatened stuff, and that meant it had to be stopped.) Um. Yeah. I guess so.