Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I heard certain things.”

“You what?”

“I heard certain things.”

“Sit up.”

“I was hearing certain conversations.”

“What do you mean?”

They took the phone privileges away from her, that was the first thing they did, because after they gave her the exam and remanded her to this ward, she got right on the phone, and she would not let anyone else use the phone, and she was belittling them, because this seemed pragmatic, but then she started to feel as if there were vermin around, a bad sign. She got up out of bed to demand that something be done about this vermin. If this was a respectable hospital in a respectable neighborhood in Brooklyn, at least they could ensure that there wouldn’t be hundreds of cockroaches in her room. And this was certainly criterion for dosage escalation, after which there is a gap in the story, and she is waking up on the floor of her room and they are telling her that she has had a seizure, and she feels as though a factory of aeronautics has opened in her vocabulary, and ideas appear like mobiles, but the best she can do is watch them circle. They prescribe some other thing, some other medication, an anticonvulsive, and when they give her the anticonvulsive it becomes clear that they have taken care of the vermin infestation. There are still moments she is unclear on. When exactly did the obese woman arrive in the room? No one will talk to her about the obese woman.

And in the middle of the night she began overhearing conversations, and it turns out that she recognizes some of the voices of the conversations, and these are people in her daughter’s office. First she recognizes the voice of the black girl, which is a voice she always liked, and maybe she just hears a voice because she admires a voice, and a voice is a thing of comfort. As when you are falling into sleep, fretting. Not the particular words of the voice but the sound of it, like it’s a melody of a song. And she always liked Annabel, called the office just to talk to Annabel sometimes, because Annabel reminded her of the children from the neighborhood. But she hears a particular conversation and then she hears Annabel talking to another person, who was a man. And the conversation is fishy, to be sure, not a good conversation, there are things going on there, with the man, who is, Rosa believes, the man in the office, the man from the mindless action films, and there is something going on between them. Even though he is a married man. She has an idea, in her bed, in the slipstream of detoxification, that there is something going on between Annabel and this married man, but out of this comes this idea, and that idea is —

“I heard about diviners.”

“But where did you hear about it?”

“I just heard about it.”

“Ma, you’re on drugs.”

Rosa cannot dispute certain hypotheses because it’s too tiring to dispute them. The orderly comes by and tells her to sit up.

“The story, it’s incredible, it’s like this gigantic story spanning thousands of years,” and then Vanessa, ignoring what Rosa has said, goes off on her plot summary, and Rosa is unable to follow the story, just as she was not really able to understand the voices after the seizure. She told the doctor that she had heard the voices, and the doctor asked what kind of voices, and she said she believed that they were the voices of persons acquainted with her, but they were not just any kind of voices, and the doctor asked what kind of voices, then, and she said that she was hearing voices from telephones. And he asked how did she know that they were voices on telephones, and Rosa said that she knew because there was static on the line. So, he said, you are receiving cellular telephone traffic? It had not occurred to her that it was cellular telephone traffic, because Rosa has never used a cellular telephone, and she only really knows about them because once she went to a matinée with a friend and she heard a cellular telephone go off; well, and then Vanessa, her daughter, has one, and her daughter let her try her cellular phone once, but who would she call? There was no one to call except her daughter. Nonetheless, it was a working theory that telephone calls took up residence in the affected parts, and when the affected parts were operating in such a way that one piece of information followed another, she formulated the thought that she had begun receiving the cellular telephone traffic of the city of New York in her head. She was now in condition of receiving and she could single out certain calls, and they were in fact the calls that had anguish in them, she could overhear only the calls that had anguish in them, for instance a call where some man was realizing that some stock that he had was going down. And she could hear that Annabel was suffering, not that Annabel gave away her anguish, because Annabel was a good girl and she would not let a little thing like a married man provoke a scene, but Rosa could hear the loneliness, all these calls were about loneliness; for example, later there was a call from Annabel to her parents, there was a call to her parents —

“So it’s going to make a really great television show, that’s what I think. I think we’re going to try to pitch it to one of the cable stations, and maybe there’ll be a way to make part of it in Italy, you know? Like, if they take it, I could just make sure that part of it’s in Italy, and maybe we could go back over there.”

And the other girl, is she an intern, the other girl, the one with the burns? It was late at night, and she was thinking about the burns. The obese woman in the next bed was like an oppression. Soon the obese woman would awake. And Rosa was afraid, and the part of her that was afraid was also overhearing the conversation from the girl with the burns. And now Rosa is hearing it all again, in the dining room with her daughter. She’s hearing, in her head, about the burns.

“Did you hear this thing in the papers? About Annabel’s brother? Ma, are you listening?”

It is almost the time of medication, which is why the voices, the telephone calls, are back, because it is the time of medication, which is the time when detoxification of addicts appears as what it is, a medical problem, and the moisture arguments do perhaps include a recognition of a retreating backward away from Vanessa, and from the neighborhood, and into the logic of the telephone calls.

“It’s in the papers. It’ll be the front page tomorrow. You watch and see if someone brings the paper in. A woman got hit in the head with a brick walking home yesterday, in midtown. She was just walking along, and someone hit her in the head with a brick. Just because she was there. I mean, who’s surprised about that? The thing is that the woman was hit in the head by a bicycle messenger. And they released information about a suspect this afternoon, and the suspect they are looking for is Annabel’s brother. Apparently he got into some kind of scuffle yesterday. So if you talk to Annabel, be nice to her. Her brother is missing. He just took off somewhere. Didn’t show up for work.”

The orderly announces that visiting hours are over. Vanessa helps Rosa up onto her feet, and Vanessa tells her that she loves her, in a nonchalant way, and then they walk down the corridor together, and the only clinging opportunity, for the moment, is onto the arm of her daughter. Rosa Elisabetta is worried about what night brings, about the fresh information of the night, which is worse than the television squawking in the dayroom. The only good thing about her illness of overheard voices is that it is not an illness of overheard television programming. Now she is back by the nurse’s console, and her daughter is talking to someone, and no doubt her daughter is describing their exchange, describing affected parts, describing the unusual occurrences that are now taking place in affected parts, and this is not good because it augurs a dosage escalation and a further reduction of things in their infrastructural simplicities, but there is no time for that because now the addicts are lining up.