Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

  “You mean like those CDs that are supposed to help you sleep? The ones with the sound of rippling streams and soothing waves?” She was immediately sorry she’d said that. It reminded her of the roaring waterfalls.

  “Which is why you can’t use those,” C.B. said. “Plus they don’t work. And neither does blasting loud music or listening to audiobooks. Or wearing noise-canceling headphones. The voices don’t have anything to do with sound. They come from inside the brain.”

  “But I thought you said I needed to create white noise—”

  “Mental white noise. Inhibiting one set of signals by focusing on another, like when you’re working on a report and don’t hear your phone ringing. By focusing on the report, your brain automatically boosts the signals you want and turns the volume down on all the others.”

  “So by trying to list the Lucky Charms marshmallows, I can do the same thing to the voices—”

  He nodded. “Or listing Monopoly tokens or movie stars or brands of designer shoes. Or you can recite Monty Python routines or sing songs, especially songs with lots of verses, like the theme from Gilligan’s Island. You know the theme from Gilligan’s Island, don’t you?”

  “Everyone knows the theme from Gilligan’s Island.”

  “Good, then you can sing that. Or the Pokemon theme. Or ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling.’ ”

  “And singing those songs will stop the voices?”

  “No, nothing can stop them. But singing—”

  She gasped. “What do you mean, nothing can stop them?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. There are ways to keep them at bay—”

  “At bay?” she cried, thinking of them always there, coiled and snarling, waiting to pounce.

  “Sorry, bad metaphor. I should have said there are ways to control them. It’s a lot like tinnitus—you know, that continuous ringing in the ears some people have? There’s no way to eliminate it—”

  No way to eliminate it? “But Mary Clare said the EED’s effects can wear off.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve had the voices for fifteen years, and they haven’t shown any sign of going away yet. I’m afraid they’re permanent. But there are ways to control them. I’ll teach you—”

  She’d stopped listening at the word “permanent.” The voices would always be there, poised to attack, every time she went to a play or a meeting—

  That’s why C.B. refuses to go to them, she thought. Because the voices are there, waiting. And have been since he was thirteen. They’ll never go away, and I can’t sing or recite poetry forever—

  “No, no, you won’t have to,” C.B. said. “Those things are just interim measures till we can get your permanent defenses up.”

  “Permanent defenses?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to teach you how to build barricades that’ll keep the voices out, but I can’t do that till I get you someplace safe, and the sooner I do that, the better.”

  Someplace safe. That meant that even though there was no way to stop the voices, there were places they couldn’t reach. The knowledge that she could get out of range was immediately calming, and with the calmness came the awareness that she had a death grip on C.B.’s leg.

  “Sorry,” she said, and loosened her hold.

  “That’s okay. I still have a little circulation left.” He grinned at her and went on with what he’d been saying about reciting lyrics. “Or poetry. Narrative poems work the best. What do you know? ‘The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls’? ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’?”

  “No,” she said, thinking, I should have gone to those Daughters of Ireland meetings Aunt Oona kept pestering me about. “I know ‘The Highwayman,’ sort of. I had to memorize it in high school, but I’m not sure I remember all the words.”

  “Then how about Christmas carols? Or show tunes? Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Wicked. Rent. The Music Man. Almost any musical will do. Except Cats.”

  “Why? Doesn’t it shut out the voices?”

  “No, it shuts them out fine. But it’s a terrible musical. And that reminds me, you need to be careful which songs you sing. Getting an annoying song stuck in your head can make you wish you were hearing the voices instead.”

  “Nothing could make me wish I was hearing the voices instead,” she said fervently.

  “That’s what you think. You’ve obviously never had ‘I Got You Babe’ wedged in your neurons for weeks. Or ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.’ Or ‘Feelings.’ ” He shuddered. “I made the mistake of thinking that would be a good song for fending off the voices, and at the end of two weeks I wanted to kill myself and Engelbert Humperdinck. And it’s worse if it’s their song.”

  “Their song?”

  “One they’ve gotten stuck in their heads. The voices aren’t always kvetching and ranting and swearing and screaming. Sometimes they’re singing—and they’re just as nasal and off-key inside their heads as they are out loud. Plus, they’ve got terrible taste. They never sing something by Bob Dylan or Cole Porter or Stevie Wonder. It’s always ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ or ‘Shake Ya Ass’ or that godawful Celine Dion Titanic thing. And half the time they get the words wrong. Especially when it comes to Christmas carols—‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Stranger’ and ‘dashing through the snow in a one-horse soap and hay.’ And no matter how much you shout at them, ‘It’s “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” not “the Lord has gum,” ’ it doesn’t do any good.”

  He’s trying to distract me again, she thought. All this talk about songs is just white noise to keep me from hearing the voices till we get to wherever it is we’re going.

  Which was where? They’d been driving for fifteen minutes, and they didn’t seem to be getting any closer to being out of the city. Or to a highway.

  “You know the song ‘Molly Malone’?” C.B. was saying. “Of course you do, you’re Irish. Well, you know the part where she wheels her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, crying cockles and mussels? Well, one of my voices was convinced she was crying ‘cocker spaniels,’ which not only is wrong, but doesn’t even scan! Nearly drove me insane.” He turned to look at her. “Speaking of which, just how Irish are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how much Irish blood have you got? With a last name like Flannigan and that red hair, I’m guessing at least three-fourths of your ancestors are from Ireland. Is that right?”

  “No. All of them are. My family is pure Irish. I’m surprised Aunt Oona didn’t tell you that. It’s usually the first thing out of her mouth.”

  “We had other things to talk about,” C.B. said. “Pure Irish, hmm? And your people are from—what? County Kerry? County Cork?”

  “County Clare. Why? You think my hearing the voices has something to do with my ancestry?”

  “No. It has everything to do with it—or more particularly, with the haploidgroup gene R1b-L21 the Irish carry.”

  “That’s why you tried to stop me from having the EED done,” she said. “Because you knew I was Irish and you were afraid this would happen.”

  “Well, that, and the fact that elective brain surgery is a spectacularly bad idea. As you have discovered.”

  “But if it’s a gene the Irish carry, then wouldn’t everyone Irish be telepathic? I know dozens of Irish people, and none of them can read minds.”

  “That you know of. They could be keeping it quiet, like me. Or that subject of Dr. Rhine’s I told you about. Bad things have been known to happen to people who hear voices, like—”

  “Being diagnosed as schizophrenic or burned at the stake. I know,” she said. “So you’re saying all these people are secretly telepaths?”

  “No. I think it’s more likely they’re only part Irish. Most of the ‘Irish,’ ” he said, taking his hands off the steering wheel for a split second to make air quotes, “actually have a good chunk of Viking or Germanic or Anglo-Saxon genes in them. And if they’ve been in the United States for a generation or two, they’ve got all ki
nds of other genes, too.”

  “And only people who are a hundred percent Irish carry this gene?” she asked, thinking, Aunt Oona wouldn’t be so determined for me to marry a “foine Irish lad” if she knew about this. “But if that’s the case, why aren’t my sisters telepathic? And don’t try to tell me they are. If they were, Mary Clare wouldn’t spend all her time worrying about what’s going on with Maeve, and Kathleen definitely wouldn’t date the guys she does. And you yourself said Aunt Oona’s premonitions weren’t real. Or were you lying about that?”

  “No, there’s no such thing as clairvoyance. Or telekinesis. Just telepathy.”

  “And if they were telepathic, they’d have known I had the EED,” Briddey said, “which they didn’t. If your theory’s right, why aren’t they? And why was Joan of Arc telepathic? She wasn’t Irish. And neither are you. Your name’s not Murphy or O’Connell. It’s—”

  “Schwartz,” he said.

  “So your theory is what? That this haploidgroup R1b gene is carried by the Irish and the French and the Jews?”

  “Nope, just the Irish, though there’s a small possibility the Romany carry it, too, and that that’s where the tradition of Gypsy fortune-telling comes from.”

  “And you have Gypsy blood?”

  He shook his head. “Nary a drop.”

  “Well, then, why can you hear the voices? You’re obviously not Irish.”

  “Um…about that,” he said. “Actually, I am.”

  “The library, and step on it.”

  —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Infinite Jest

  “You’re Irish?” Briddey said.

  “Yep. All the way back on both sides, just like you.”

  “But—”

  “Schwartz is my stepfather’s name. My father was an O’Hanlon. And my mother was a Gallagher.”

  “But you…,” she began, frowning at his dark hair, nearly black in the light from the passing streetlights.

  “Don’t look Irish? Actually, I do. Dark hair’s common in Ireland, especially in County Clare, where my mother’s people are from,” and the moment he said it, she thought, I should have seen it. He had the classic dark hair and black-lashed gray eyes “put in with a sooty finger” of the Black Irish.

  “But you said my red hair—”

  He shook his head. “If you have the gene for red hair—which is a mutation of a different gene, MC1R—and you’re Irish, you’re also likely to have the telepathy gene, but one’s not dependent on the other.”

  “But you…,” she said, still unable to take this in. “I mean, everyone at Commspan thinks you’re Jewish.”

  “I am, for all intents and purposes. My dad died when I was two, and my mom remarried when I was four. Then she died, and my stepdad raised me till he died,” he said. “But the name also serves as protective coloration.”

  “But if you’re Irish, why isn’t your first name Irish?” she asked, and realized she had no idea what his first name was. C.B. could stand for anything—Christian Bale, Charlotte Brontë—or be a nickname for computer bandwidth or CB radio or something.

  “As in ‘Breaker, Breaker, good buddy, this is Big Trucker,’ you mean?” he said, turning his attention from his driving to grin at her for a moment. “That’d be appropriate, considering. But actually, C.B. stands for Conlan Brenagh. Conlan Brenagh Patrick Michael O’Hanlon Schwartz.”

  “And so because we’re both Irish, you think this haploidgroup gene is what’s causing the telepathy?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “But two people is hardly proof. Or is it just two? Were your mother and father telepathic, too?”

  “I don’t know. They both died before it happened to me, and it’s not the kind of thing you’d tell anybody, even your own kid, unless it was absolutely necessary.”

  “Then how can you be so sure that’s the cause? Why couldn’t it be the EED?”

  “Because I didn’t have one. Remember?”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why you think being Irish caused it unless you’ve found another telepath with the gene. Have you?”

  He turned his head sharply to look at her. “What?”

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve found someone else who’s telepathic, and they’re Irish, too. Who is it? One of those professional psychics you were talking about?”

  “Of course not. I told you, they’re fakes.”

  “You said most of them were fakes. I thought maybe you’d found one that wasn’t, and he—or she—was Irish.”

  “No. I told you, so-called mind reading is all just tricks.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Because nearly every documented historical incident of telepathic communication involves someone who’s Irish, including Dr. Rhine’s ESP subjects and the messages from the Titanic, whose steerage decks were full of immigrants from County Clare—plus the incident I told you about the Nebraska girl who heard the torpedoed sailor. She was a Donohue and he was a Sullivan. And Ireland has a long-standing history of its inhabitants hearing voices, from Saint Patrick and Saint Cieran to—”

  “Bridey Murphy, who’s completely reliable,” Briddey said sarcastically. “To say nothing of all those Irishmen who claim to have seen leprechauns.”

  “Don’t knock leprechauns. If you look closely at those stories, you’ll see the vast majority are about talking to someone no one else can see.”

  He can’t be serious, she thought. This is just more white noise—or maybe “blarney” is a better word under the circumstances—to keep the voices at bay till we get safely out of the city. Which they were still nowhere close to doing. The darkened streets they were driving along were lined with businesses and office buildings that showed no sign of thinning out.

  “We’re almost there,” C.B. reassured her. “And my theory’s not blarney. I’ve spent a lot of time researching this.”

  “And this research said the early Irish developed some sort of gene that gave them—and only them—telepathic ability?”

  “No, just the opposite. Everybody—or at least a sizeable chunk of our ancestors—once had it, but now the Irish are the only ones left with it. Did you ever hear of Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a theory that for most of human history, hearing voices was a common occurrence. People attributed the voices to the gods, but it was actually the two halves of the brain talking to each other. And when the brain evolved into a single entity, the voices stopped. Or, rather, people stopped thinking of them as voices and realized they were just hearing their own thoughts.”

  “So you’re not really talking to me—I’m just talking to myself?”

  “Obviously not. Jaynes’s conclusion about why the voices went away was totally wrong, but he was right about hearing voices being a common phenomenon that then disappeared. I think back then everybody was telepathic, but over time the ability largely died out through natural selection. My guess is that some people had a gene—or genes—which inhibited the uptake receptors that made it possible to hear the voices—probably the neural equivalent of either a perimeter or the words to ‘Teen Angel.’ ”

  “A perimeter? What’s that?”

  “A kind of defense. I’m going to teach you to build one when we get where we’re going. Anyway,” he continued, “that inhibitor gene gave them an evolutionary advantage. Telepathy’s not exactly a survival trait, you know. Hearing howling voices in your head when you should be concentrating on the battle you’re in is likely to get you killed before you can pass on your genes, and so is being believed to be possessed by demons. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of the voice-hearers threw themselves off a cliff to escape the voices. Or off a bridge. Like Billie Joe McAllister.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy in ‘Ode to Billie Joe.’ Great song. Lots of verses and nice, distracting white-noise-type words—Tupelo and black-eyed peas and Tallahatchie Bridge.”

  “Which he jumped off of?”

  “Yeah, but
not because he was telepathic. Though I guess he might have been. In that part of the South, a lot of people are descended from the Irish, and his name was McAllister. Anyway, my point is, over time the inhibitors won out over the no-inhibitors, and telepathy died out.”

  “But why wouldn’t the same thing have happened among the Irish?”

  “Because during those centuries when the rest of Europe was invading and being invaded and hooking up with other peoples who had inhibitor genes, the Irish weren’t. Ireland was way off the beaten path, especially the western reaches, which meant the inhabitants’ original genes, even the recessive ones, like red hair and telepathy, were able to survive.”

  “But the Irish didn’t stay isolated,” Briddey said. “England invaded in the 1500s, and during the Famine hundreds of thousands of them emigrated to America—”

  “Right, and they married people with one or more inhibitor genes, which is why most Irish today are only partially telepathic, if that.”

  “Partially telepathic?”

  “Yeah, they can only hear someone calling to them in circumstances of heightened emotion, or they have a vague sense when something’s wrong. Just a few Irish still have the genetic makeup to be fully telepathic.”

  “And you and I are two of them.”

  “Yeah. Lucky us, huh?”

  “But if your theory’s right, I inherited the gene from my parents, so why aren’t Kathleen and Mary Clare—?”

  “Because it’s the kind of gene that has to be activated, either by an alteration in brain chemistry or a change in the circuitry.”

  “Like the EED,” Briddey said grimly.

  “Exactly. Though it could just as easily have been the anesthetic. Anything that lowers the brain’s natural defenses or causes an increase in receptivity to the telepathic signals can trigger it—drugs, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, physical trauma, emotional stress. Any heightened emotional state, really. Fear, longing, adolescent angst.”