Historical November 1994 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
As long as he could remember, he’d heard the voices. Oh, he didn’t hear them all the time. Sometimes he could go days or weeks without hearing them. Those were times he enjoyed, relaxing times.
But other times, he would hear the voices several times a day. Those days were rarer now, but they still happened. Usually the voices started in the late afternoon.
He might be coming home from work or maybe relaxing, reading the paper. At first, he remembered, in kindergarten, he thought that his imaginary friends were like everyone else’s imaginary friends. Sometimes he and his friends would play dress-up or house or cowboy, and they’d all talk to their imaginary friends.
He didn’t think he was any different.
But then as he grew older, he realized that the other kids’ voices were made-up.
But his weren’t.
He used to wonder if he was making up the voices. Once, when he was eleven years old, he decided that he was going to stop the voices for once and for all.
He remembered it as if it were yesterday.
He was in his room, it was late at night and he was trying to fall to sleep.
The voices kept booming in his ears, though, especially the male one. “Stand up, jump up and down, jump up and down, higher, higher,” the voice commanded.
He remembered standing, with some resignation.
This was the kind of thing that the male voice commanded him to do often. Sometimes it was jumping in bed, sometimes it was pushing someone off the sidewalk or ramming his bike into theirs. Sometimes it was tripping a friend who was running by. And he always did what he was instructed. Until that night.
For whatever reason, he stood up on his bed and then sat down. “NO,” he said to an empty room, “I’m tired and you can’t make me!” He waited for what seemed like an eternity, and then the voice returned.
But it was a different sound than before.
Now the voice whispered. “Fine,” it said, “but you’ll be sorry in the morning.” He often reflected back on that night many years ago.
The house had been quiet and he had been awake all night, or so it seemed, waiting for something to happen. Now, as an adult, he realized that probably he had fallen asleep; but at the time, and for years afterwards, he had been convinced that he had stayed awake all night, guarding against the voice.
He had spent thousands of hours thinking about that night and what he had done.
He remembered, he could never forget, going downstairs the next morning to an oddly quiet kitchen and finding it empty.
It was only him and his mom, but usually she was up every morning before him.
The image of the mother he found remains with him to this day, slumped in her bedroom chair, dead of a heart attack.
The doctors told him it was odd, she had no history of heart problems.
But he knew what had happened.
She had died because he had disobeyed. Before he had picked up the phone to call 911, he knew what had happened and had vowed never to disobey again.
The next decade of his life was fairly uneventful, as uneventful as this time of life can be anyway.
He went through the normal developmental stages and trials of a teenager.
He had moved to Phoenix to live with an aunt.
To her credit, she tried to do her best for this unwanted man-child who showed up on her door.
They had tried to find his father at first, but gave up.
He always suspected that they had been successful in making contact, but that his dad didn’t want him. At least that’s what the voices told him. High school was difficult. Not the learning, but making friends. Whenever he began to know or enjoy someone, the voices would demand that he test the relationship. “Did that person really like him?” the voices would ask.
The only way to find out was to test the person, put him or her, he had would-be friends of both sexes, through some pain. Afterwards, if the person still seemed to like him, the voices would demand that he hurt them even more.
This went on and on, over and over, until he had no friends.
He was known as someone who humiliated others, made fun of them in front of their peers. People who know him better knew that he also physically hurt his friends. Sometimes he would laughingly trip or punch, sometimes he would hit hard enough to cause a bruise or bloody a nose. Once, in his senior year, he developed a relationship with a girl named Ann.
She had gone to a girls’ boarding school in the east, and he met her over the summer.
When September came the voices were happy because he had left his mark on her.
She showed no physical bruises at all; but her selfconfidence had been destroyed by his ego. Whatever she did wasn’t good enough.
He held out his approval like a golden orb, always out of reach. And the more difficult he made things, the more she tried and the worse she felt.
It was a relationship made in heaven for him and the voices.
In his adult years, the voices had changed their demands.
They no longer asked him to hurt those who were close to him, at least not so obviously.
The voices were simpler now.
As an adult, he was sarcastic and a user of others. And the voices were happy. By now it had become his second nature.
It was just part of who he was. Every once in a while he would want to be nice, would want to be kind and trusting, would want to be supportive.
But then he’d hear the voices again. And he’d think about his mother.
He knew he had no choice.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, November 1994.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1994_11.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
