Sitting alone in the couch tonight, I slowly realize that I can hear someone singing.
Somewhere in the house, a man is singing.
It has a muted quality, as though it is coming from very far away.
I stand for a moment and listen.
I recognize it. The clear voice, the calypso intonation is unmistakeable.
Someone is listening to Harry Belafonte, somewhere.
But, of course, no one in the house is listening to Harry Belafonte, not tonight.
And yet, there it is.
After a few minutes, the music fades.
…and my wife’s face contorts in pain, her brow furrowed. I ask her what’s wrong but, before she can answer, a wave of distortion ripples through the air like a mirage.
“Something’s happened.” I look out the window and see a mushroom cloud rising in the distance.
The television fills in the rest of the details: Every major city in the US is in chaos after multiple ‘dirty bomb’ attacks.
The footage is terrifying. People flood the streets. Suddenly we are all refugees.
Holding our daughter between us, my wife and I start making plans…
…I wake in the pre-dawn dark, wondering if this dream was just that or something more: A precognition of something to come? Or just a byproduct of sleeping with a sword under my bed?
The voices again tonight.
No music this time, no men.
One or two women, I can’t quite be sure. Possibly a child.
I told my wife about the voices a few days ago. She could tell tonight that I was hearing them again. And, of course, she cannot.
We keep a fan going at night, even in cold weather. White noise.
She suggested I turn it off, just to see if that helped.
She might be right. I honestly can’t say for sure.
Maybe it’s a trick of the sound in the room, the combination of the fan and the hiss of the baby monitor.
With the fan off, we sat there in the dark and waited.
There. Not as loud, not as much. But there.
And again.
“I don’t hear anything,” she told me.
I apologized, turned the fan back on so she could sleep and came downstairs to wait it out.
Down here it’s the usual creaks and hums of the house by night. The fridge ticks over from time to time. The radiators gurgle. The cats snore, dozing. The baby monitor sounds a bit like running water.
And, sometimes, I think I catch a brief murmur underneath it all. Somewhere.
I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s all just paradoelia.
But . . . I have a vague memory of something similar when I was a child. This would have been when I was maybe six or seven years old.
I remember my two older brothers got to stay up later than me, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair they got to watch Hawaii 5.0 and I didn’t.
I remember lying there in bed, listening to the pulse of drums and what sounded like singing or chanting –faint and very far away.
I got up to complain that the TV was too loud.
My mother told me that the set was off. It was later than i realized, my brothers had gone to bed, She asked me what I heard. When I told her, she gave my father an odd look.
I would get to know that gesture very well in the coming years — the sidelong glance, lips compressed, a knot of worry in between her eyes.