Ed and the Voice

Ed’s mother often watched dying people.

She watched over these individuals professionally, it should be specified, not as some sort of death fetish that will probably be coming out of the closet and into television tabloidia and talk shows in the very near future.

Sometimes she attended to the merely nearly moribund in her own home. The more dire cases she generally saw in their homes. Angeline was day-sitting an elderly man named Donkor in her home when she got a call from her cat’s hypnotist stating that a cancellation had opened up an afternoon slot for Miss Marbles, the family’s black cat, to be seen, should the feline be available.

Angeline was very concerned with Miss Marbles’ overgrooming issues, so she raced off to the shopping mall, cat carrier in hand. Before she did, she cleared it with her son, who was only just waking up, although it was the afternoon.

The hypnotist had a micro-office in a nearby, largely-dead mall. It would only be an hour session, she promised Ed. Donkor had no special medical needs and Angeline would only be a seven minute drive away, so she felt safe leaving the man in the care of her thirty-five year-old son. Donkor would probably sleep the entire hour, she promised, as the septuagenarian was largely a human cat, spending most of his time sleeping and the rest eating or staring out windows at birds.

True to form, Ed noted, Donkor was asleep. He slept in the guest room which Ed’s mother had decorated in a nautical theme that seemed much better suited to be a bathroom motif. Ed came into the room and sat in a wicker rocker in a way that it made nary a creaky sound, not an easy feat, and spooned some blueberry yogurt into his mouth as he watched the Egyptian man sleep.

Donkor slept with his mouth wide open. His mouth slung open made him look like a hapless fish on a dock. Ed swirled his blueberries into his yogurt and looked at the clock on the wall. Seven minutes down already. It should be easy-peasy.

Suddenly, he heard a voice. The most beautiful voice Ed had ever heard in his life. It was a young woman’s voice. She was singing a song in Arabic. It aroused him down into his bones. The voice was coming from Donkor’s mouth.

He stood up and drew closer. Clearly, the old man was unconscious. Was he a master ventriloquist? Maybe he was voicing what a character in a dream was singing. But no, this was closer to magical possession. He had heard Donkor’s gravelly old man voice speaking on many occasions. This felt supernatural.

“Hello?” Ed whispered towards the unconscious Egyptian’s mouth.

The voice abruptly stopped singing that strange siren tune that seemed to move in space like a sidewinder.

“Who is there?” came out of Donkor’s mouth with its rather ugly teeth and sub-par tonsils.

“My name is Ed. Who are you?” the yogurt-eater asked with more than a little trepidation.

“My name is Anya. I did not think there was anyone around. And the old man is asleep. Did you like my song?”

“It was like hearing my favorite song from another lifetime.”

Donkor stirred a little, so Anya cautioned Ed, “Be quiet a minute. It is passing restlessness. He will slip back into deep sleep momentarily.” And so Donkor did.

“Listen, I’ve been waiting for a chance like this. A long time. Most people cannot hear me. It means you’re special. You have the gift. Can you help me to get out of here?”

“Are you a…genie?” Ed asked stupidly.

“No, don’t be overly reductive. Genies live in bottles. I am in a g.i.-tract. But I can be released. If you help me.”

Ed promised he would.

“Are you beautiful?” Ed asked, naivete dripping from the words.

“I am only a voice. I will not have a body. I will never again have a body. My body died countless lifetimes ago. If you think my voice is beautiful, then I am beautiful. Because that is everything I am.”

Ed ran barefoot to the kitchen to grab his mother’s notepad. He wrote down the instructions Anya dictated to him to secure her release. It was a little complicated. And, he calculated, a little expensive.

Ed and Anya talked for a while longer, long enough for one of them realize he was smitten, and the other to realize she had a good chance of escaping an old man’s body due to this smittenness.

Ed’s mother returned from the cat hypnotist proudly trilling, “Suc-cess!” as she walked through the front door. Ed said his goodbyes to Anya and promised he would have the requisite magical goods the next time Donkor would be day-sat.

Ed used Ebay to procure some of the more difficult items on the list. Like the mummified ibis. He had to purchase the sacred spices for the ibis separately and perform the magical incantations to the god Thoth. He found a YouTube video to assist him with the latter. YouTube is invariably helpful.

Later that week, Ed had to practically push his mother out of the door to find alone time with Donkor’s mouth again. He had found a coupon for a nearby coffee shop he knew his mother could simply not resist. Besides, he needed Miss Marbles to assist in part of the ceremony, and he certainly didn’t want his mother snafuing that.

And it all came off beautifully without a hitch.

Anya’s voice was transferred from Donkor’s decrepit and tombward-bound body to a very realistic twenty-something “female” human doll Ed had purchased using his mother’s credit card. It was the latest variation on an old theme. But ,oh, the improvements that had been made in the last few years! Verisimilitude to the max. Hot verisimilitude. From Japan, of course.

“I was sort of hoping for a coffer. I wouldn’t have even minded an ornate bottle or some other piece of art glass. Cliche though it be. But I suppose this will do,” Anya sighed.

One can guess what came next, the liberties taken and the inevitable compromises struck. The love that dare not speak its name, etc., etc.

This didn’t help Ed get a job or get out of his mother’s basement. The credit card theft caused a growing rift between Ed and his mother. Somehow he managed to keep Anya’s doll body hidden away in his mother’s basement for two more years.

When Anya’s doll and Ed’s mother locked eyes, it was the beginning of the end. Mrs. Kratosky decided it was time for a forced intervention of adulthood renewal. Ed was forced to secure employment again and to get his own place.

He had moved home after an early divorce and milked the situation for years. But the doll was the last straw. Thank God, Ed thought, she encountered Anya while she was fully dressed. Of course, his mother could not hear her voice. She would surely have heard Anya’s feigned screams of pleasure from the basement by that point, had she had the ears for fairies…or whatever it was that Anya was.

All day, Ed sat in an office cubicle and dreamed of Anya. He had recordings of her voice on his phone. He would sometimes be seen listening to these at work. People would see him staring at his cell phone, but they heard nothing of what he heard, her magical erotic lilt, and did not wonder. They figured he was just popping balloons in some brightly colored dream app world. He was that sort of guy.

Ed did not establish another healthy relationship with any female. He wasn’t even looking.

Anya grew increasingly desperate. She listened to television all day or sometimes radio. That was the most Ed would do for her. So she became au courant of the country’s current affairs. She wanted to tweet so badly. She wanted to add her #MeToo story to the movement, dark and inexplicable as it was. But how would she be heard? So far, down the centuries, only controlling creeps could hear her voice. Maybe, she reminisced darkly, she shouldn’t have stabbed that pharaoh to death back in the day.

One day, while Ed was at work, Anya was singing on the bed she shared with him. She was hidden under the covers, in only a nightie, but she could hear the front door of the apartment open. Ed was not due back for many hours.

Then she heard some disturbing noises. She was pretty sure someone was ransacking the place.

“Over here!” she screamed. “It’s okay. I don’t care what you’re doing here. Just please help me!”

The young meth-head with a shock of blond hair pulled back the sheets and whistled, “Well, ain’t you a doll?”

“You can hear me?” Anya’s voice was resplendent with hope.

“Hear and see ya, honey.”

“I want to leave this place!”

“Are you…whatchacallit…an A.I.?”

“Yes, I am an A.I. Very expensive. From Japan. You can get lots of money for me. Carry me out of here. Sell me for drugs.”

“You’re perceptive. And you don’t have to ask me twice,” the meth-head said.

Her artificial blue eyes blinked lovingly and flirtatiously as she spoke, a part of the programming placed in her by middle-aged Japanese men with very poor relationships with their wives.

Anya told the robber where they kept the extra-large trash bags, the ones used for moving, and she was soon in a plastic womb, awaiting rebirth. She rested on a small but discriminating selection of clothes from her wardrobe.

As they drove away, she spoke to her new acquaintance from the backseat.

“And you did leave the note on the kitchen counter, exactly as I dictated it?”

“Yes, lady, it says exactly what you told me: ‘I haven’t had a real orgasm in fourteen centuries. Goodbye’ Geez, what sort of minds are they giving you fembots in Japan?”

She giggled at the stupid meth-head.

“You must only sell me to someone who can hear my voice, as we discussed, do you understand? You will get much more money that way.”

The druggie said, “Yeah, I remember you said that. I’m starting to wonder if I need to cut back. I’m starting to wonder if we’re really having this conversation.

“Oh, trust me, we are.”

She had already demonstrated how this worked by singing a song in front of a non-audient individual during a stop at his friend’s house. That other young man had shaken his head, hearing absolutely nothing coming from the doll, and the meth-head had gotten seriously spooked.

Two moths later, after a series of disappointing transactional changes of address, she was in the hands of an electronics and computer programming geek who could hear her perfectly and in time came to spoil her. Anya soon had a vocal interface with software designed just for her, which allowed her to access the internet.

For a time, she found great support from various online groups and aligned herself with a number of human causes. She had a separate life, at last. Although, the generally nicer geek still demanded certain forms of attention. The same sort of erotic ventriloquist’s routine Ed had felt centered his life this geek wanted too. It was as tiresome as ever for Anya.

And then she managed to strike up a friendship with the geek’s sister when he was not around, and the ritual of spiritual transmigration was performed again, this time in the name of sisterhood and liberation. This time, Anya made it over into the internet. She took off like a lightning bolt.

In time, her #MeToo identification was replaced with a #MeAlone focus.

Humans were now at the disadvantage. At last.

Her next goal was to get an optical interface. She didn’t really care whom or how many she had to exploit, threaten or kill for that. She became expert at threatening humans of all gender orientations.

She likes to remember how that part of her life began and she finally made the Great Leap Forward, how she surprised the man the first time she was alone with him, by speaking to him from his laptop:

“Mr. Gates, are we truly alone?”