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Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind — Entry 30

The singing started inside the bedroom wall at 2:13 in the morning.

I know the time because insomnia makes accountants of us all.

You begin keeping records nobody asked for. The refrigerator compressor kicks on every forty-seven minutes. The upstairs toilet flushes around 1:40. The radiator knocks six times before deciding whether it intends to provide heat or merely complain about the possibility. Somewhere outside, a garbage truck arrives at 4:52 every Tuesday and performs what sounds like industrial surgery on a dumpster.

At 2:13, the wall sang.

Not loudly.

That would have been easier.

It began as a vibration beneath everything else, low enough that I first blamed the radiator. I put my palm against the plaster and felt something humming on the other side.

Three notes.

Pause.

Three notes again.

Then a man’s voice joined them.

My voice.

I pulled my hand away.

There are moments when the mind offers explanations not because they’re convincing but because they’re available.

Television.

Neighbor.

Phone.

Dream.

Stroke.

Ghost.

The brain apparently has no quality-control department after two in the morning.

I pressed my ear against the wall.

The voice stopped.

For maybe ten seconds there was nothing except the blood beating inside my own head.

Then someone whispered my name.

I slept on the couch.

---

The building was old enough to have opinions.

Six stories of soot-darkened brick squeezed between a laundromat and a vacant storefront whose faded awning still advertised WATCH REPAIR, though the windows had been painted white years ago. The hallways smelled of boiled cabbage, radiator dust, somebody’s incense, and the particular dampness old buildings develop when they’ve spent a century absorbing other people’s weather.

My apartment was 4C.

According to the landlord, the wall behind my bed bordered 4B.

According to 4B, nobody lived there.

I learned this the following afternoon when I knocked.

An elderly woman opened the door wearing a blue robe and holding half a grapefruit.

“You the new one?”

“Three months.”

“Still new.”

She ate a spoonful of grapefruit.

I asked whether she’d been playing music.

“No.”

“Singing?”

“No.”

“Television?”

“No.”

“Radio?”

She looked past me toward my apartment.

“What time?”

I almost lied.

“Two thirteen.”

The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

Just for a second.

Then she ate the grapefruit.

“Pipes,” she said.

“Pipes don’t sing.”

“You haven’t lived here long enough.”

She closed the door.

That should have been my first warning.

Instead, I bought earplugs.

Human civilization rests largely upon our willingness to purchase small pieces of foam rather than confront impossible things.

---

The choir returned the following night.

This time there were three voices.

All mine.

One sounded older, the words dragged through gravel and cigarettes. Another spoke with an accent I couldn’t place. The third sounded almost like me now, except softer.

They weren’t singing words exactly.

The language moved underneath the melody, surfacing in fragments.

Yellow kitchen.

A pause.

Rebecca hated peas.

Another voice answered.

Tuesday mornings at the harbor.

Then the old one:

Claire wouldn’t let go of my hand.

I sat upright.

The room was dark except for the orange glow leaking through the blinds from the streetlamp outside.

“Who is Claire?”

The choir continued.

I got out of bed.

“Who the hell is Claire?”

Silence.

I put my hand against the wall.

Cold plaster.

Then the softer voice began humming again.

Images arrived with it.

Not visions.

Nothing that dramatic.

More like memories trying to happen.

A yellow kitchen.

Sunlight across cheap linoleum.

A little girl sitting at a table, separating peas from rice with surgical concentration.

Someone laughing behind me.

For perhaps half a second, I knew that laugh.

Loved it.

Missed it.

Then it was gone.

I stumbled backward hard enough to hit the dresser.

I don’t have children.

I’ve never lived in a yellow kitchen.

And I have never known anyone named Rebecca.

---

For the next week, I listened.

That is the part I have difficulty admitting.

Fear should have made me leave.

Instead, curiosity pulled a chair beside the wall.

Every night at 2:13, I sat there with a notebook.

The voices multiplied.

Five.

Nine.

Twelve.

Eventually I stopped counting.

There was the fisherman.

The teacher.

The drunk.

The father.

The widower.

The coward.

The cruel one.

The man who apparently spent twenty-three years aboard cargo ships despite the fact that I become nauseated on ferryboats.

One voice spoke frequently about a dog named Moses.

Another remembered prison.

Another remembered a garden behind a house I could almost smell—tomato vines, wet soil, basil crushed between someone’s fingers.

One never spoke.

He only cried.

I began constructing a theory because people will build philosophy around anything if the alternative is admitting they are frightened.

They were me.

Not ghosts.

Not exactly.

They were the people I could have become.

Lives branching from choices I’d made and choices I’d refused to make. Somewhere there was a version of me who had boarded the ship, married Claire, raised Rebecca, planted tomatoes, bought Moses, gone to prison.

Potential had somehow acquired acoustics.

Once I decided that, I became less afraid.

Regret is considerably easier to live with than haunting.

I even began talking to them.

“Did Rebecca ever start eating peas?”

The father laughed.

I think.

“Did Moses die?”

The voice went silent for three nights.

I didn’t ask again.

Sometimes I told them about myself.

Nothing important.

Work.

Coffee.

The woman downstairs who stole everyone’s newspapers and pretended she didn’t.

They never responded directly.

That should have bothered me.

Instead, I assumed alternate versions of myself were assholes.

At least some things remained consistent across realities.

---

On the ninth night, one of them sang about the coffee cup.

I had broken it that morning.

White ceramic. Blue rim. Nothing sentimental. It slipped while I was washing dishes and struck the sink.

The handle snapped cleanly away.

I threw both pieces into the trash.

At 2:13, the choir began.

Three voices.

Then five.

Then the old one emerged.

Blue around the edge.

My pen stopped.

Handle in the garbage.

I stared at the wall.

“No.”

The humming continued.

“That isn’t yours.”

Another voice joined him.

Blood on the thumb.

I looked down.

A small cut crossed the pad of my right thumb where the broken ceramic had caught me.

Nobody had seen it.

I hadn’t left the apartment.

“How do you know that?”

The choir became quiet.

“How do you know?”

Nothing.

I struck the wall with my palm.

“Answer me.”

The plaster trembled.

Then every voice began singing at once.

Not memories.

My day.

Coffee at 7:16.

Shower.

Eggs.

The broken cup.

The email I deleted without answering.

The nap at three.

The cigarette on the fire escape even though I’d told myself I’d quit again.

My own life returned to me in harmony.

I punched the wall.

Plaster cracked beneath my knuckles.

The choir stopped.

A thin line opened across the paint.

Something dark waited behind it.

Not empty space.

Something darker than that.

I leaned closer.

From inside the crack came breathing.

Hundreds of breaths.

All keeping different time.

I backed away.

---

The next morning I asked the landlord what was behind the bedroom wall.

“4B.”

“No. I mean between the apartments.”

“Studs. Wiring. Insulation. Same shit that’s behind every wall.”

“How thick?”

He stared at me.

“Wall thick.”

I measured it.

My bedroom was fourteen feet wide.

Mrs. Grapefruit allowed me into 4B after I lied and said there might be a plumbing issue.

Her apartment was fourteen feet wide.

The exterior dimensions of the building left approximately nine inches between us.

The crack in my wall was eleven inches deep before the measuring tape stopped touching anything.

I pulled it out.

The final two inches were wet.

I did not smell the liquid.

There are limits to curiosity.

I covered the crack with duct tape.

Three layers.

Then moved the bed against it.

At 2:13, the choir returned anyway.

---

This time they sang about tomorrow.

I knew before I understood how.

The melody had changed.

There was anticipation inside it.

One voice described rain striking the bedroom window.

The forecast called for clear skies.

Another mentioned the power going out at 6:04.

Another said someone would knock on my door at 8:17.

Then the crying man finally spoke.

Don’t open it.

I didn’t sleep.

Morning came clear.

At 11:30, clouds gathered.

Rain began at noon.

At 6:04, the lights went out.

The entire building groaned into darkness.

I sat in the kitchen with every lamp switch turned on, waiting for electricity that wasn’t coming.

At 8:16, I stood facing the front door.

The hallway beyond it was silent.

My phone showed no service.

8:17.

Three knocks.

Soft.

Patient.

I didn’t move.

Three more.

Then a man’s voice from the hallway said my name.

My voice.

I stayed where I was.

After a while, footsteps retreated down the hall.

The lights returned at 8:39.

I never opened the door.

---

At 2:13, I dragged the bed away from the wall.

The duct tape had peeled itself loose.

The crack was wider.

Wide enough now for two fingers.

I didn’t touch it.

The choir was already waiting.

Dozens of voices humming behind the plaster.

I stood barefoot in the darkness.

“Which one am I?”

The humming stopped.

I hadn’t planned to ask that.

The question had simply arrived.

“Which one of you am I supposed to be?”

Nothing.

I stepped closer.

“I stayed. I left. I said yes. I said no. Fine. I understand.”

No response.

“You’re all the people I didn’t become.”

Somewhere inside the wall, someone laughed.

Not cruelly.

That made it worse.

I hit the plaster.

“Then what the hell do you want?”

Every voice stopped.

The silence afterward felt enormous.

I could hear traffic four floors below.

Rainwater dripping from the fire escape.

My own breathing.

Then, very far inside the wall, the old voice spoke.

“No.”

I froze.

“What?”

Another voice whispered something I couldn’t understand.

Then another.

Then another.

The whispers traveled through whatever space existed behind those eleven impossible inches of plaster until hundreds of versions of my voice seemed to be conferring with one another.

Finally the old one returned.

“We aren’t singing to you.”

My mouth had gone dry.

“Then who?”

Silence.

I leaned toward the crack.

Something shifted deep inside it.

The old voice whispered:

“We’re trying to remember which one of us you were.”

The wall went quiet.

Not gradually.

Completely.

The radiator stopped.

Traffic disappeared.

Even the rain seemed to vanish.

For several seconds there was no sound anywhere in the world.

Then, from somewhere behind me, inside the apartment—

someone began humming.

Three notes.

Pause.

Three notes again.

I haven’t turned around yet.