Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

“What does that leave?” said Brodie.

  The neurologist spread his hands. “Psychiatric causes?”

  The psychiatrist said, “You’re not schizophrenic. I find no dissociative tendencies.”

  “So I’m normal? But I hear voices.”

  “You hear voices but you don’t know what they’re saying. Most people who hear voices know exactly what they’re saying. The voices tell them to do things. Often they are things they shouldn’t do. Sometimes they are things no one should do.”

  “So I should feel good about that?”

  The psychiatrist interlaced his fingers and said, “How do you feel about it?”

  The psychologist said, “You fall in the middle of the bell curve on every measure I’ve taken of you, except two.” The man looked through the sheaf of papers before him, found one and scanned it. “In intelligence, you’re in the top percentile.” He looked at another. “In terms of affect, you seem to be sad.”

  Brodie sat in the patient’s chair, a comfortable armchair upholstered in brown leather. “They told me I was bright in high school,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m sad. I’m just me, the way I’ve always been.”

  “I’m a little concerned that you live such a solitary life—”

  “I’m not concerned,” Brodie said.

  The psychologist made a gesture of acquiescence. “It’s not uncommon in cases of exceptional intelligence. And you don’t seem to be actually depressed.”

  Brodie ignored the motion that he saw indistinctly from the corner of his right eye and the barely audible susurration that seemed to come from just behind his right ear. “If there’s nothing wrong with me,” he said, “then what’s wrong with me?”

  The psychologist stroked his chin. “How does it affect your life?”

  Brodie thought for a moment. “Minimally,” he said. “It comes and goes and I can usually ignore it. But, steadily, it comes more often and lasts longer.”

  “What is it that bothers you most? The inability to control it?”

  “At first, yes. Now I’d just like to know what they’re trying to tell me.”

  The psychologist zeroed in. “‘They’?” he said.

  “There’s more than one voice,” Brodie said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “And what makes you think ‘they’ are trying to tell you something?”

  Now it was Brodie’s turn to spread his hands. “Why else would they be trying so hard to get my attention?”

  The parapsychologist said, “Have you experienced any instances of precognition, lengthy periods of déjà vu, astral projection?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “No.”

  The exorcist closed the book, rang the bell and snuffed out the candle and said, “Are they still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dammit. Now we’ll have to start over.”

  The medium said, “I hear the name Walter. Does that have any meaning to you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Not your father’s name?”

  “No.”

  “A childhood friend?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Maybe an uncle? A pet?”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Close your eyes and imagine you’re sitting in a darkened movie theater. The screen is bright white and in the middle of it is a small black dot.”

  “All right.”

  The hypnotist’s voice was warm and calmly assured.

  It reminded Brodie of his mother’s voice when he was young. “Concentrate on the dot.”

  “Yes.”

  “The more you concentrate, the more relaxed you feel.”

  “Yes.”

  “All you can see now is the dot.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s growing larger. Now it fills the screen.”

  Brodie made an involuntary sound.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “What don’t you like?”

  “The big dot. It’s too big. Too dark. Too . . . deep.”

  “All right. It’s not a dot. It’s an x. Is that better?”

  It was. Brodie felt his anxiety fade.

  “You’re becoming more and more relaxed,” the woman said. “Your feet are relaxed.”

  Brodie’s feet were very relaxed.

  “Your legs are relaxed.”

  He felt the muscles of his calves and thighs slacken pleasantly.

  “Now your abdomen and your lower back are relaxed.”

  “Yes.” The word came on a sigh.

  “Your shoulders and your upper back are relaxed.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “And your neck.”

  “Ungh.”

  “You’re relaxed from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. You’ve never felt better.”

  It was true. He’d never felt better. “Mmm,” he said. “Wonderful. Now turn your attention to the whisper in your right ear.”

  “Yes.”

  “As you listen, it gets louder.”

  Brodie listened. The whisper grew louder.

  “As it gets louder, it becomes clearer.”

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

  “Concentrate. Your hearing is becoming much sharper. You could hear a pin drop in the next room.”

  Brodie’s hearing became sharper. The hypnotist’s voice sounded more crisp. But the whispering remained an undifferentiated sequence of sounds.

  “I can’t make it out,” he said.

  “You’re still relaxed, more relaxed than you’ve even been before.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let the sound come to you. Let it become clear.”

  Brodie did as he was told. But the whispering did not become clear.

  The hypnotist was a plump, grandmotherly woman. The room where she practiced her profession was as congenial as she was. “I want to try something else,” she said.

  “It didn’t work,” Brodie said. “Nothing I’ve tried has worked.”

  “We got somewhere,” she said.

  “True.”

  “So it’s worth trying a different approach.” She leaned back in the comfortable chair that faced and matched Brodie’s. “You get a feel for these things. I’ve got a feeling that there’s something buried in you.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I had a completely untroubled childhood. My parents didn’t beat me or cast me as a supporting player in their own psychological dramas. I was not ritually abused or locked in a dark closet.”

  “Even so,” she said, “you’re throwing up a lot of dust right now.”

  Brodie thought about it. “I am, aren’t I?” He agreed to come back for another session.

  “Completely relaxed.”

  Brodie made a contented, compliant sound. The chair held him like the palm of a warm hand.

  “Now you’re standing on a high place. You can see very far in every direction.”

  “Yes.”

  “In one direction, you can see your childhood.”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Sunny. Bright colors. I see my dog, Willy.”

  “What happened to Willy?”

  “He got old. The vet put him to sleep. It didn’t hurt him.”

  “It made you sad?”

  “Yes. I cried. Mom and Dad cried, too.”

  “Think about Willy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now think about the dot in the middle of the screen. Think about it getting larger.”

  Brodie shifted in the chair, as if preparing to stand.

  “You’re still very relaxed, as relaxed as you’ve ever been. You’re completely safe.”

  He settled back.

  “The dot cannot harm you. It cannot harm Willy. You can think about it without being troubled.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “What don’t you like about the dot?�
��

  “It’s a hole, a dark hole.”

  “Why does the hole bother you?”

  Brodie shifted nervously. The chair wasn’t supportive now. It was confining. “Because you can’t get out.”

  “The hole is going away now. It’s far away where you don’t have to worry about it.”

  Brodie relaxed, settled back into the chair. “Good.”

  “Now you’re back on the high place, looking over your whole childhood.”

  “Mmm.”

  “You’ve got a telescope that lets you focus on any time in your childhood, any event. You can see yourself and other people, see what you were doing. And Willy, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Look through the telescope now and see a time when you were frightened by a hole.”

  Brodie grunted.

  “You’re still far away from that time, just seeing it through a telescope.”

  “Okay.”

  “The you that was frightened then doesn’t have to be frightened now.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re safe and relaxed. Nothing can hurt you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now look through the telescope. What do you see?”

  Brodie looked.

  “We’re getting somewhere,” the hypnotist said.

  “I suppose,” Brodie said. “But where?”

  He could remember what he had seen, because the hypnotist had told him he would. At first, the scene had been contained within a circle, just as if he had viewed it through a telescope. Then, as she had told him to zoom in on it, the image had filled the inner screen of his mind.

  He saw himself—his much younger self; he could not have been older than five—sitting on the old couch in the living room. Willy, still just a pup, was lying on the carpeted floor, licking his paws, paying no attention to the television.

  Now the image shifted its point of view, so that Brodie was looking over his earlier self’s shoulder. The television was showing an old movie about a boy who had a dog—a bigger dog than Willy, a collie. Now the dog on the TV was barking. Willy looked up at the sound, then went back to his grooming.

  A woman wearing an apron over a long dress was asking the collie what was wrong. The dog’s boy was nowhere in sight. The animal ran off a short distance, stopped, turned back to the woman, barked.

  “Is it Timmy?” she said. “Find Timmy!” The dog ran off, barking, and she followed it out of the shot. As the scene changed, Brodie had felt a chilling shock pass through him. The hypnotist had had to tell him to freeze the scene in his memory so that she could spend a few minutes calming him and distancing him from the events. Finally, he was ready to go on.

  And then, when the moment of revelation came, all that he recalled was a shot of the dog barking at the edge of a hole in the ground—a hole partly covered by splintered boards. Then came a shot of a little boy, his blond hair seeming to glow against a surrounding darkness, looking up toward a dim light far above, with the sound of the dog barking off-screen, and the woman’s voice calling, “Timmy! We’re going to get you out of there!”

  “Can you remember now what was so frightening about that television show?” the hypnotist asked.

  But Brodie couldn’t remember. Seeing it now, in his mind’s eye, and stretching to recall what emotions his little-boy self had felt, all those years ago, he came up blank. “No,” he told the grandmotherly woman, “fact is, I don’t even recall being scared. I just felt . . .” He searched inside himself and after a moment it came to him, “So sad. I was so sad for the little boy. He’d fallen in the hole.”

  “Why was that so sad?”

  “I don’t know,” Brodie said. “I just knew that it was the absolute worst, the absolutely saddest thing in the world. I couldn’t bear to think of it.”

  Brodie’s response to the memory of watching the TV show about the kid who fell in the hole had been so strong that the hypnotist wanted to let the emotions settle before she asked the crucial question: What did this have to do with the shadows and whispers that still plagued his dreams and, more and more, his waking moments? She let that wait until his next visit.

  Before she put him under, the woman said, “We’re going to go back to the memory of the boy in the hole. It won’t be so difficult now that you’ve confronted the emotion, and we’ll try and see how that memory connects to what’s happening to you now.”

  Brodie wasn’t averse to using the telescope to go back to his long-ago self again, sitting on the couch watching TV. In the few days since they had uncovered that memory, he had thought quite often about what had happened. The whole business puzzled him. He accepted that some part of him hadn’t wanted to remember feeling so sad, had buried the memory and had had to be led gently back to it.

  So it was with more curiosity than apprehension that he relaxed in the comfort of the chair and allowed the hypnotist’s soothing voice to take him back to the high place, then through the telescope to the boy on the couch. And from that came . . . nothing.

  “Put yourself back in the boy’s body,” the woman said. “Look around the room. Are there shadows in the corners, perhaps a curtain blowing in a window that you see from the corner of your eye?”

  “No.”

  “What do you hear in the background? Is anyone talking in another room, talking softly?”

  “No.”

  “Your hearing is getting much stronger. You can hear every sound around you. What do you hear?”

  Brodie listened with the boy’s ears. He heard a distant radio playing rock and roll, the sound of water running. “Wes Fordham,” he said, “the teenager who lives next door. He’s washing his car. He loves that car.”

  “Anything else? Your hearing is even sharper now.”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Where is your father right now?”

  “At work.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “In the kitchen, reading Reader’s Digest. It came in the mail today. She likes to read it. Sometimes she reads me funny bits. They make me laugh.”

  The hypnotist took him back to the high place. “Was there another time when you were frightened about a hole? Before the time you saw the TV show?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Look back across your childhood, even to the earliest times you remember. Was there a time when you were frightened by a hole?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You can use the telescope to examine the farthest-away parts of your childhood. Look closely.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “You need fear nothing. You are perfectly safe.”

  “I’m not afraid. I just can’t see anything.”

  The hypnotist told him to put down the telescope. She relaxed him further, took him deeper into the trance. Then she said, “You are on the high place again. Before you stretches your childhood.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now look down at your feet. You are standing on a flying carpet.”

  “Okay.”

  “You sit down cross- legged on the carpet and tell it to fly over your childhood.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are perfectly relaxed and safe. You are flying over your childhood, toward the earliest years.”

  “Yes.”

  “You fly past the day you saw the TV show about the boy who fell in the hole.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you are flying over the years when you were a toddler.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you are flying over the time when you were an infant.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you are flying over the moment you were born.”

  “Yes.”

  “The carpet keeps flying, carrying you further back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Back to when you were growing in your mother’s womb.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are very relaxed, very safe.”

  “I am safe.”

  “Now th
e carpet takes you back before you were in your mother’s womb.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  Brodie was silent.

  “What can you see?”

  “The . . .”

  “Your eyesight is very sharp. You can see very clearly.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you see?”

  “The tatuksha.”

  “What was that? What do you see?”

  “The tatuksha.”

  “What is the tatuksha?”

  Brodie’s face collapsed in sadness. His mouth fell open, the corners turned down in a grimace of despair. Tears flowed down his cheeks. “I’ve fallen into it,” he said. “It’s dark. I can’t get out.”

  It took her a long time to bring him back. At first, he refused to recognize the existence of the flying carpet. He wept and made odd sounds that might have been words or might have been wordless cries of anguish. She spoke soothingly, telling him he was safe, that the darkness could not hurt him. Finally, she got him to focus.

  “You see a white dot in the darkness.”

  “A white dot.”

  “It’s above you. Look up and see it.”

  “Yes. I see it.”

  “It’s the way out of the tatuksha.”

  “Too far.”

  “Look down at your feet.”

  “No feet.”

  “You have feet. Wriggle your toes.” He had taken off his shoes for the session. She saw his toes move in his socks.

  “I have feet.”

  “You are standing on the flying carpet. Look down and see it.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “It’s underneath your feet. It brought you here and it will take you back.”

  “I see it.”

  “It is a strong carpet.”

  “Yes.”

  “A magic, flying carpet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now it lifts you up, toward the white dot.”

  “Yes.”

  “The dot grows larger. You focus on it. You see only the white dot.”

  “I see it.”

  “It is the way out of the darkness. The way out of the tatuksha.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now the carpet is lifting you back into the light. You are free.”