The eerie lights of nighttime faded with the rising of the sun, but the voice began to haunt you during the day. You'd be at work, leaning over a light table, and the voice would drone on in your head. While drawing the exterior of a housing development-- White Pines Estates, “upscale living for the middle class”-- the voice said: It is, after all, just a bunch of buildings to you. That is all you see-- that is all you're able to see. You can color the brickwork and the trees and bushes, but you can never make them feel like home. They are all empty boxes….
As the weeks passed, the voice assumed a more accusatory tone.
On the train ride home every day, the other passengers seemed unsavory. A man wearing a rumpled overcoat kept coughing as he loudly crumpled the newspaper each time he turned a page. A ragged-looking teenaged girl stared at the floor, never once looking up to show her face. A young black guy looked balefully at nothing in particular as he stood holding onto one of the poles near the exit. All the passengers appeared sinister or depraved or just plain gray, not quite human. And the voice in your head said: They are the living, those you can never know. You cannot imagine what they see when they look at you….
You never thought he was losing his mind, yet recognized the fact that hearing voices was never a good thing.
One day you come home from work. The house was oddly still; there was something in the air that made it heavy, like the air within a funeral home but without the cloying smell of flowers. You have a difficult time breathing, as though on the verge of an anxiety attack. But you slough off the feeling, and search through the house.
She was not there. At first you thought that she had simply gone out to the store. But then something made you check upstairs, the bedroom, the closet. All her things were gone-- that that she ever had much-- her clothes, a few framed photos of her family, a funny stuff alligator you had won for her at a carnival two summers ago.
There was no proof that she had ever been in the house.
You wandered around in a daze. It all seemed to unreal-- as unreal as the tiny voice that you had been hearing at night. Finally you find yourself in the kitchen, and you spot the neatly folded paper on the kitchen table.
“Dear Jeff,” the note said, in that large loopy handwriting with which you had become familiar. “I have been dreading the day I would leave this letter for you. You will, no doubt, believe that I am an awful person to do such a thing to you. But, really, it is a kindness that I remove myself from your life. I feel sure that you will feel better off without me. You are very remote-- I suspect you are just built that way, and can never change. At one time I had hope that you could be different, but I lost that hope long ago. I did love you, though, and hoped that one day you could love me as much.
“Please don't attempt to find me. It would be a waste of time. Even if you did find me, I would never return to you. There is just nothing for me to return to.
“I will have the baby alone-- raise it alone. I feel that that is for the best. I will love that which you gave me, and it will love me back. I regret that things had to turn out this way….”
And she signed her name, the jolly loops of her writing growing tighter and darker.
Months later you would still wonder at it all. Had the last five years ever really happened?
You were now content to be alone. The entire house was yours. There would not be the least bit of sharing.
At night now you lay alone. The tiny voice leave with her, and only the deep whirling of night played through your mind.
The voice returned only once, several months later, the first and last message from your only child.
And now I, the son, am born, and you, my father, the bastard.
