What?
by Doug Hawley
Duke started
hallucinating about a month before seeing a
psychiatrist. At 7pm someone, perhaps
himself, went flying off a cliff on a horse, but
never landing. That was just the
beginning. From that day on, each
evening at the same time, he would experience
what appeared to be a dream overlaying his
reality. The next night while talking
to his wife Sally, he suddenly saw someone having
sex with movie star Vicky Newsome. The
male involved looked to be about forty years old,
balding and generally pretty ugly. Sally was
talking to Duke, but there was no way he could
follow what she was saying. “Duke,
you looked like you just went into a trance. Do
you have any idea what I was saying?”
Duke tried to
pretend that he wasn’t scared sh****** and
after a lengthy pause, just said “Sorry, my
mind just wandered off for awhile.”
Duke was sure
he had gone crazy, but was afraid to tell anyone. He
just hoped the problem would go away quickly, but
no. Every evening, same time, what
appeared to be a waking dream would come to him. Sometimes
someone was being chased, sometimes it was sex,
sometimes it was something that got lost and
couldn’t be found. Except for an
occasional celebrity, there wasn’t anyone
that he could recognize in his hallucination. There
was the one recurring character, the unattractive
man who had sex with Ms. Newsome. Rather
than admit that he was crazy, he started reading
a book at the same time his hallucinations
started and just accepted that he wouldn’t
make any sense of what he read.
After a couple
of weeks Duke started to hear a strange voice in
his head. He would pick up things like
“Its Miller Time” or “I want to go
Coney Island.” Duke was able to
cheer himself up a little because the voice never
asked him to kill anybody, not even his boss, who
certainly deserved killing.
When the
voices started, he broke down and told Sally what
had been happening. She tried to
reassure him “Whatever is happening, your
behavior has not changed at all. Well, maybe
your 7pm book habit, but after what you have told
me, I can’t blame you. Could you
have hit your head? I hear that can
cause weird brain activity, both hearing and
seeing things.”
“No.”
“Any
mental trauma – have you had any shocks or
losses that you didn’t tell me about?”
“No.”
“Okay, I
guess you should see a psychiatrist. Keep
in mind as troubling as this seems, we will get
to the bottom of it and get you fixed. In
case you’re worried, I don’t mean like
we had Kitz fixed.”
“That’s
a relief. Finally, some good news.”
Dr. Finley did
the standard battery of questions and brain scans,
and couldn’t find a thing. In
desperation, he asked about Duke’s hearing
aids. “Did you get the hearing
aids before or after the hallucinations began?”
“I had
them for a month before they started.”
“That
eliminates my last hope. I can’t
find anything wrong with you at all. About
all I can do is to start you on a tranquilizer
and hope for the best.”
As soon as
Duke started using his prescription tranquilizer
the various voices and visions muted, but did not
disappear. He decided that he would
just have to live with his problem. Neither
Duke nor Sally told even their friends or family
about what was happening.
A year later,
Duke was reading “Popular Science” and
saw the article “Telepathy – Fact or
Fiction?” He scanned the article
until he came to:
“Rumors
abound that telepathy devices, which look and act
like hearing aides were developed at an East
Coast lab. Alleged testing began a
year ago last August. It is further
claimed that a disgruntled employee of the lab
smuggled a sample of the devices into a hearing
aid store disguised as a regular set of hearing
aids. This all seems to be an urban
legend, because the recipients of these special
telepathy aids would have reported it by now. The
unnamed employee has spread the word that testing
began first with dreams starting as the telepathy
originator slept from 10pm on, and then started
testing waking thoughts.”
Duke did some
quick calculations. Eastern Time was
three hours ahead of his home in Portland. Check. His
visual hallucinations started before his verbal
hallucinations. Check. The time
that the testing started was when he started his
visual hallucinations. Check.
Prudently,
Duke first saw a lawyer who was entrusted with
breaking the news if any harm would come to Duke. After
thinking about how much money that he could make
writing a book, a little discrete checking around
found that it was much easier and a lot more
remunerative to sell the telepathy aids quietly
back to the lab that lost them. Duke sealed
the deal by telling the lab “But wait, there’s
more – you get my silence along with the
devices.”
Duke had no
more hallucinations, but he did begin living the
dream with the money he got. Sally
said “Given how you suffered, I don’t
think that any amount of money would have been
too much.”
Previously
appeared in “Beechwood Review”
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