A Voice That Isn’t Mine

A Voice That Isn’t Mine

If a man's memory can be wiped and written over in one night like an old hard drive, then the only things left in the world worth trusting are machines.

I stood at the desk without moving. Two fingers had the paper squeezed into a fold. The line "DON'T LET HER TOUCH YOUR HEAD" sat there in black ink, the down strokes pushed hard enough to tear the page. That was my handwriting. I had nothing in my head about picking up a pen and writing it.

What happened last night?

The black leather notebook with the lab terms in it was gone. So were the four gray cassettes and the old player, the ones that held a child named B crying. The living room had been straightened past what it usually was, and the mortar dust in the corner was swept up. The fight, the crying, her hands working on my temples, all of it had been lifted out of my head and the space painted over.

Nothing about the blank was restful. One fact sat under it: My reason had been taken off me. I can't trust my own brain anymore.

If I wanted to survive I had to build a second memory, a storage system outside my own body, out of Emily's reach and out of reach of whatever was being done to me while I was under.

I turned and went along the wall toward the corner of the room, careful with my weight. Every step I took was worked out the way you work things out in a house that belongs to somebody else.

The night before, before I came back here to put it to Emily, the last working part of me had set something up. I was not all the way gone.

What I had brought home was a cheap dashcam, $40 at a gas station, wired into a power bank so there would be no cord running across the floor. I taped it to the top of the bookcase in the corner behind the money plant and pointed it down the hall; the lens on those is narrow, and all it took in was the chair at the desk, the mouth of the hallway, the first few steps down to the basement, and at the far edge of the frame the corner where Emily had put her bed. I set it after midnight and meant to have it down again before it got light.

The camera was a 1080p unit with a 140-degree lens. I threw out the suction mount that came with it, ran two strips of gaffer tape over the housing and down onto the top of the bookcase, and slid a folded coaster under the front edge to tip the lens about 20 degrees toward the floor. The card in it was a new 32-gigabyte MicroSD. Loop recording off, time stamp on, a square of electrical tape over the blue status LED.

The power bank was a 10,000-milliamp brick, charged full, taped to the shelf below with the cord run up behind the spine of a dictionary. From the chair the lens sat between two leaves of the money plant and came to nothing. Recording started at 12:41 a.m. An inch to the left of where I laid my tape down there was an older rectangle of adhesive in the wood, gone yellow, the same width as mine.

There was more than that. Over the last three weeks, as the doubt set in, I had been building a system for holding on to what was real:

A voice recorder the size of a thumb, pushed back into the vent duct at the ceiling of the hallway, set to run on sound. A small handwritten journal under the loose floorboard at the end of the hall, where the rule was three lines every night before I let myself sleep, the most important thing that had happened that day, and then a photograph of the page taken with a cheap phone that had no internet on it. And the last one: marking my own body.

I pushed my sleeve up and used an oil-based ballpoint on the inside of my thigh and the back of my hand. The date, and one word for the day. Pressed in that hard the ink bruises under the skin and stays for days, so if the brain got wiped, the body would say it out loud.

The kitchen clock said 6:52. Outside it was still dark enough that the window gave me back the room instead of the yard. The math gave six hours and 11 minutes of recording on a card with room for four times that.

I dragged the stool over, stood on it, and worked the MicroSD card out of the dashcam. My hand was not steady.

The power bank read two bars out of four. I peeled the gaffer tape off the housing, brought the camera down, and put it in the desk drawer under the warranty envelopes with the lens against the back.

I took the card to the desk. I put it into the laptop, the personal one I had taken off the Wi-Fi for good. The screen went black, and then there was the file, the whole night on it.

There was one file on the card, 5.71 gigabytes, and the player read the length as six hours and 11 minutes. I set playback to eight times and kept my thumb over the space bar. The picture held its color until 2:06 and ran gray after that.

I ran it fast through the two of us going at each other, through Emily crying, through her hands on my head and the part where I go under. After that it kept running in a house with nothing happening in it.

Then the counter on the screen came to 3:14 a.m.

I had never once pictured what came next.

In the gray infrared I watched myself sit up in the chair at the desk, all at once.

A man coming out of sleep moves slow. This was stiff and sudden, a wooden doll pulled up on a string. My eyes in the frame were open wide, the pupils blown, throwing the infrared back as two flat white points, and they never blinked.

I put the file back to 3:14:22 and let it run at normal speed. My collar was open in the frame and the skin over the artery in my neck moved well enough to count. I counted against the wall clock for a full minute and got 26. I ran the same minute again and got 26, and I wrote it on the edge of the desk blotter.

On the tape I got up, slow. I ran that stretch back three times: arms hanging straight at my sides, shoulders up, the knees taking short steps, each one the same length as the last.

I timed the walk across the living room off the frame counter. Fourteen steps, 25 seconds, and the gap between footfalls held at 1.8 seconds the whole way, out to the last one at the basement door. Later I walked the same floor myself and the gap came out at 0.6.

I crossed the living room and went toward the door to the basement.

I put my hand on the knob, turned it, opened the dark up, and went down the wooden steps one at a time, each one giving the same dry creak. The camera couldn't see down into the basement, but the microphone took everything that came back up through the open door.

For the next six minutes I stood by myself in the dark down there, facing an empty room, and I talked.

I got myself back down into the chair, and my tongue had gone flat against the roof of my mouth and stayed there while the sound came out of the laptop speakers.

That was not my voice.

A 46-year-old man's voice has a rasp low down in it. This one came out higher and thinner, with a hesitation in the rhythm, a child's voice, and the child was about 15.

"...Recording number four..." The voice was coming out of my mouth on the screen, one word at a time into the length of the basement. "...The red Parcheesi piece has been moved to square 16. The blood on the wood floor will not come up with cold water... Why does the doctor lock the door from the outside? I want to see James... Where is James hiding? Mom, where did James put the key?..."

I stopped the file, took a yellow legal pad out of the drawer, and ruled it into four columns: time, clear, unclear, background. The black notebook I would have used for this was gone. I wrote the header the way I used to write them for research, the date and the source and the running time, and then I started the file again from 3:16:31.

The whispering ran the full six minutes, questions a child would ask and then begging. On the tape I stood still down there with my face to the dark corner of the wall, going back over the same lines the way a scratched record goes back.

The clear column ran to 11 lines. The unclear column ran to nine, and four of those I marked with a question mark and a guess in parentheses beside it. Under background I put the furnace coming on at 3:18, a click every 11 seconds that I never found a source for, and water moving in the pipe behind the basement wall.

I ran the stretch between 3:19:40 and 3:20:12 back nine times and the words did not come clear. What was clear I counted. Doctor came 11 times, James 14, Mom six. At the bottom of the page I wrote the running total, 6:04, and the time I finished writing it out, 7:41.

At six minutes the voice stopped.

I turned around, walked back up in those same short steps, and shut the basement door behind me. I went to the couch, lay down, closed my eyes, and was asleep in seconds, like nothing had been done at all.