The Listener

by Christopher Carrolli

Ever hear of a microwave, asshole?

  “Asshole?” He shouted back at her, yet she knew full and well that she hadn’t said a word out loud. “How about if I put your goddamn head in that microwave!”

  He lunged at her, and Ian was burly, built like a wall, but she was not the type of woman to be intimidated. Her own temper fueled from the full-force slap; she kicked him in the groin then smashed the side of his face with the glass sugar-bowl she’d snatched from the counter, gashing a slice in the side of his head.

  This was the beginning, when the hidden demon inside of Ian had reared its ugly head. The shouting, the cursing, the expletives had continued that night, and through it all, one thing continued to flash in her mind like a beacon shining a warning...

  She hadn’t said anything aloud about the microwave. He had read her thoughts without realizing he had. A sick feeling swept through her that she’d fought with the devil.

  And the next morning, regrets, sorrow, and hollow apologies followed. That night had created a distance between them forever. He was changing. Something was happening to him, and yet simultaneously, something was happening to her love for him; it was fading, and somehow he was shamefully aware of this.

  But his drinking must have been some early, hidden part of his life because surely it had resurrected. The next night would wipe the day’s slate clean, but the irritated sore was left to fester for another time. And many more times there would be.

  Ryan would hear them fighting and go back to sleep, but in the morning, he still loved his father. Children could be so resilient, she thought, oblivious to the wrongs parents sometimes commit because they are blind to them in the first place. She was thankful for this, as it maintained some cause for neutrality between them.

  She had decided it was time to leave him. How many times could she cover the bruises on her face with makeup? How long would it be before Ryan developed a better understanding of what had really been going on? She had to shield him, deciding that she and her son would move to her Mother’s house in a neighboring town.

  She sat in the living room, contemplating it all, when the phone rang.

  The first sound she heard on the other end was his breathing, rising in the hard, fast panting of a mad, rabid dog. She could identify the slightest sound of him.

  “So, you think you’re going to just take my kid and leave me? I don’t think so, bitch! Do you think I won’t find you? Don’t make me have to find you!”

  The phone was slammed in her ear, silencing the random chatty voices and empty clinking glasses in the background. He was reading her mind, even from where he sat at the bar three blocks away. She broke into tears thinking of all the continuous excuses she had made for him, and now all of the angst and anger within her had turned to sheer terror.

  They began to lead separate, non-existent lives. They rarely spoke and barely looked at each other, but the violence dissipated as the fighting soon became random. She took to sleeping in Ryan’s room, and the fact that he had suddenly been having nightmares served as a perfect justification.

  And then she found the drugs.

  The rolled up twenty-dollar bill alongside the line of white powder on the bathroom counter caught her eye. It had been a shock seeing it for the first time in her life. She had never been exposed to it, not even in high school, but she could see exactly what it was. She stood for seconds in stunned silence, feeling the simultaneous dread, contempt, and most of all, disappointment.

  She snatched the rolled-up cash from the countertop, and then paced into the living room where he lazed around on the couch watching reruns. The twenty flew in his face by the fast, angry flash of her hand.

  “So this is what you’re into now? I guess this is where all of our money’s been going, right?” She steamed as she continued to pace, waiting for a fight, but he’d said nothing. He didn’t move from his position; he just stared at her with the mean arch of his sage-green eyes that now seemed lifeless, vacated of what once lay behind them. The twenty-dollar bill lay untouched on his chest, which moved up and down to the rhythm of his strange but steady breathing. He refocused his odd stare back toward the television.

  Strangely, she became alarmed at the fact that he’d made no move toward her. The confusion made her eyes widen in a watchful, glowering glare back at him. She kept her eyes on him as she slowly stepped away from the couch.

  “By the way, you left your cocaine on the bathroom counter.”

  Again, he’d said nothing. She left to pick Ryan up at school.

  The next day when she’d taken Ryan back to school and Ian had been at work, she made a secret trip to the local library. She knew there was a name for people who could read minds, but she was unsure what it was, never having paid any attention to such matters in what used to be her normal life. She didn’t even believe in that sort of thing, until she’d actually experienced it. Whatever it was, was evil, a capability of that kind could never bring about any good. She had been kept a virtual prisoner because of it.

  In fact, she couldn’t be sure that Ian wasn’t capable of knowing where she was, right this second...could he? Did this thing that he possessed reach that far? If it did, she was silently prepared for it. When she picked Ryan up, she would bring him to a friend’s house.

  One of the librarians showed her how to research topics using their extensively updated library search engines. She typed in the words “mind reading” and found the word that described the warden of her prison: telepathy.

  Most of what she’d read described everything that Ian had demonstrated. He was a telepath, and from what she’d researched, an extremely powerful one. She wondered if Ian even understood what he possessed, but he must have on some level. If he did know, how long had this been part of him; was this what had changed him? She’d read that telepathic abilities begin in early childhood for some, while others develop it in adulthood as either a result of trauma to the brain, or manifesting itself after lying dormant for years.

  This would become the secret she would hide from her son about his father.

  Their finances had dwindled even further, and Ian began getting strange phone calls at all hours. A friend who frequented the same bar told her the rumors about Ian’s increasing cocaine use, and that he’d been getting drugs spotted to him, paying later, and rousing up anger and attention toward himself.

  Little did she know that Ian had owed up to fifteen-hundred dollars as a result of his drug habit. It would explain why he was becoming antsy, irritated; she had assumed it was the cocaine. Drug dealers were lurking over him, calling and hounding him for their money. She silently plotted a way to get Ryan out of this house; they would both just have to disappear—damn the consequences for her. She had to protect her son.

  After picking Ryan up from his friend’s house, she’d brought him home and locked the doors. They had a quiet evening together, as Ian was out again and likely to stay out. She secretly decided that, tomorrow, she would drive her son away from here. There became no question of it when that night she answered the phone.

  “Is Ian there?” An angry male voice on the other end shouted at her.

  “No, he isn’t,” she said, composing herself, trying to avoid the caller’s anger.

  “That’s okay, I’ll find him.”

  Then, the caller hung up.

  It was later that night when she was awakened by Ryan’s tortured screams as he reeled in bed from the nightmare of his father, and a few hours after getting him back to sleep, she was roused again by a hard, persistent knocking at the front door. She was sure it was someone for Ian, some irate dealer about to shout a drunken rant at her or even threaten her and Ryan. She would peep through the lace curtains of the front-door window; if she didn’t recognize the person, she was calling the police.

  Yet it was the police; Ian was dead and an incident over drugs was suspected.

  She hadn’t told them about the angry caller earlier, because the strange irony of it had swept over her like a cool breeze. Whoever t
he caller had been, if he was responsible for Ian’s death, had removed her burden forever, setting her free. She felt an almost unspeakable debt of gratitude and a bizarre sense of allegiance to this dark and anonymous pardoner.

  She told them she didn’t know whom Ian was dealing with, nor did she discover his cocaine use until recently, all of which was the truth. She sat stunned by the fact that her son had just dreamed the reality she was now listening to, and of course, she’d made no mention of this to the police either.

  But now she would have a deeply bereaved and possibly traumatized child on her hands. How was she supposed to tell him that his nightmare had come true? Ryan adored his Dad, and though Ian was a son-of-a-bitch, he was ultimately a good father. He wasn’t always drunken and abusive, the way he’d been toward the end, not for the first couple of years she’d known him. She would never know what had completely changed him, but she would mourn for the person Ian once was. Ryan continued to hear the voice of his father. She didn’t believe any of it at first, figuring that Ryan was grieving and trying to hold on to Ian any way he knew how, but then he told her things that only Ian would know. Then, the other voices came, and many of Ryan’s predictions had come true, all because “the voices had told him.”

  The fear of what was happening to her son was a constant, blaring alarm she could not shut down. The freedom from the life with Ian she’d felt after his death was fleeting in the face of the fact that he’d passed his strange psychic bloodline down to their son. Soon after, Sidney Pratt had pronounced Ryan as a clairaudient; Ryan was able to hear the voices of the dead, as well as remotely perceive the conversations of living people. Fear and devastation had swept over her.

  She had never mentioned Ian’s telepathy to Ryan, or to the investigators, fearing they would make a freak of her son, study him under a microscope to learn the extent of his capabilities, and make him their latest “discovery.” Sidney had never said anything about Ryan being able to read minds—maybe he would never develop his father’s ability. She would just stay silent and pray, pray that it would leave him.

  Her feat of keeping Ryan away from the investigators had finally failed. Ryan was now headed to the hospital; he was hell-bent on seeing Sidney. She felt a slight twinge inside of her, a sickly omen telling her that the secret she’d tried to keep was slowly slipping away. She knew she couldn’t hold out much longer; everything was coming unraveled.

  The hospital’s heliport loomed closely into her view. She was only three blocks away from the coming confrontation, and her raw nerves jittered in a flurry.

  Chapter Six

  The immaculate white rolled away like a fog, unveiling the brilliance of a bright, beautiful, summer day. Above him, the sky stretched magnificently, an unblemished baby-blue blanket being warmed by the blinding sun. Before him, a familiar river oddly rippled with a clean, crystalline blue that competed with the perfect sky, and the dock where he and Grandpa had fished shined a perfect painted white beneath the sun. He was enraptured by the temporal utopia, euphoric in of itself, magnificent in its appearance.

  He stepped onto the dock, and out of nowhere, a man began walking toward him. His heart nearly leapt from his chest as he recognized him; it was Grandpa, yet the old man’s appearance was somehow different. He was sharper, more refined, his face tightened and unwrinkled and sporting a youthful glow.

  Soon, they stood face to face, with Sidney’s mouth upturned in a nervous and tearful outcry of joy as Grandpa smiled in unsurprised reassurance.

  “Hello, Sidney, my boy,” he said, his strong voice seeming to echo through the expanse of boundless time. Sidney struggled to speak from the wincing pain in his throat.

  “Grandpa, am I dead?”

  The old man closed his lips and sighed.

  “No, Sidney, you’re not dead. You’re here, but you’re not dead.”

  “Then why am I here? What’s happening?” His state of confusion intensified.

  “I’m afraid you had a close call, Sidney, but now is not your time.”

  “But I want to stay, with you, and this place, it’s—”

  “You can’t, Sidney. You will go back, after you’ve finished your journey.”

  “Journey?”

  “It happens in life to many people,” he said to him, gazing straight into his eyes. “There are things you need to figure out, Sidney. I can’t give you the answers; you need to find those out for yourself. Only you can do that.”

  “What answers?”

  “About your life, Sidney, about this thing you’ve carried around for most of it. It’s essential that you understand.”

  “But, I do understand, I—”

  “Not everything, Sidney. How could you at such a young age.” He smiled and admired his grandson once again, who stood before him now beneath the brilliant light as a grown man. “You will learn everything you need to, Sidney, and then you will go back, where you will be needed.”

  “But, Grandpa, wait!” He heard his own cries, and they were somehow greater in timbre. Then the old man smiled and blended with the light.

  Suddenly, the scene changed; the river and the dock disappeared in a flash and were instantly replaced by another setting. He found himself standing in the front yard of the family home, where he had lived with his parents and Grandpa; its white vinyl siding and black shutters were exactly as he remembered it. How could this be? The atmosphere around him seemed undeniable as the constant chirping of birds intermingled with the soft, rustling breeze that swept through the trees, and even the aroma of freshly mowed grass hung thickly in the air.

  Yet underneath those various sounds came a soft, quiet sobbing that came from the front porch. He moved his eyes in that direction and caught sight of a little boy. He moved a few steps closer for a better glance, but he recognized the boy in an instant—it was himself at age five.

  An inner instinct also recognized this particular moment in time, and the occurrence that followed was just as he expected. The shroud of deafness had descended over everything, silencing the birds, the rustling leaves, and the young, sobbing Sidney. The deafness had enveloped him even in this strange utopia, and Grandpa’s voice called out again.

  “Sidney! Search from here Sidney...do you remember what I said to you that day?” Then the moment replayed itself, as if to remind him.

  “I love you, Sidney, always.”

  He watched as the boy that he once was raised his head upward to the sky in disbelief at the voice, shock at the deafness, the eyes rolling slightly upward, the chest heaving faster.

  A genuine tear rolled down his cheek.

  “I know, Grandpa,” he called out.

  “I chose to speak to you, Sidney, because I knew you could hear me. This is where it all began. Search through time, Sidney, from this moment on.”

  The sounds returned in full clarity.

  The boy roused with a start from the porch and ran into the house, calling out for Mom and Dad in a child’s voice that once was his own. Sidney moved quickly, swinging the front door open and entering, as though it were nothing, and followed the boy into the house.

  “Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad!” The sound of his once puerile voice, becoming more and more familiar, had unlocked forgotten memories of his childhood, as well as the sight of the house the way it was years ago: the green living room carpet, the white wallpaper that covered the walls above the staircase, the chipped wooden banister he’d slid down every morning before breakfast.

  Knowing that the boy was headed for the kitchen, he followed fast behind him, and then suddenly stopped where he stood. The memory of this moment had returned in full detail, and the sequence of events burst through an unlocked door in his mind. He stood and stared at the running child and the kitchen doors that he knew would open—and they did.

  The double doors flew open, and he watched as the younger figures of Mom and Dad stepped out. The child grabbed onto and held the hem of his mother’s dress, and his father knelt down before him, clutching and combing him to make
sure he was all right.

  “Mom, Dad, Grandpa’s still here. He’s still here! I heard him...outside!”

  “What do you mean, you heard him?” Sidney now recognized that the exaggerated tone of disbelief in his father’s voice was meant for someone else; they had company, the Fullers, the two neighbors that stood behind his parents in the frame of the double doors. As they’d come out to see what was happening, the child stepped slightly away, made to feel embarrassed.

  “I couldn’t hear anything, and then I heard Grandpa’s voice. I did, I did hear him!”

  His mother’s lips parted in pristine astonishment. Her eyes opened wide as the child’s ramblings made her nervous at first, and then mortified. His father’s eyes closed in equal embarrassment. The child looked up at the neighbors, and even now, Sidney recalled that look with photographic recollection, the wide-eyed look of fear and misunderstanding.

  “Son, what did I tell you about the wild imagination, huh? Now, you only imagined you heard Grandpa, and you know that. You wanted to hear him, so you did.”

  “Sidney, we thought you were hurt! You scared the daylights out of us!” His mother clasped her chest, a purely dramatic effect for her guests, whom she turned to. “Sidney’s been having a hard time with Michael’s father’s death.” She shook her head, letting out a final gasp, as young Sidney continued his unacknowledged protests.

  It had been the Fullers who had first suggested a psychiatrist.

  Now, the brilliant white overwhelmed everything in its path with a blinding iridescence that soon faded away, unveiling yet another scenario. He found himself seated next to his younger self in the backseat of Dad’s Chevy that through the years, he’d forgotten. Dad was driving and Mom rode shotgun, while he rode in the back, playing with the Rubik’s cube Grandpa had bought him.

  He was a little older than the last scenario he’d witnessed, probably eight or nine. What was so important about this particular car ride with his parents? It had been one of many; yet simultaneously, it also seemed familiar.