The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut

Author:Mark Vonnegut
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781609800697
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-06-11T10:00:00+00:00

THE VOICES. Testing one, two, testing one. Checking out the circuits: “What hath God wrought. Yip di mina di zonda za da boom di yaidi yoohoo.”

By this time the voices had gotten very clear.

At first I’d had to strain to hear or understand them. They were soft and working with some pretty tricky codes. Snap-crackle-pops, the sound of the wind with blinking lights and horns for punctuation. I broke the code and somehow was able to internalize it to the point where it was just like hearing words. In the beginning it seemed mostly nonsense, but as things went along they made more and more sense. Once you hear the voices, you realize they’ve always been there. It’s just a matter of being tuned to them.

The voices weren’t much fun in the beginning. Part of it was simply my being uncomfortable about hearing voices no matter what they had to say, but the early voices were mostly bearers of bad news. Besides, they didn’t seem to like me much and there was no way I could talk back to them. Those were very one-sided conversations.

But later the voices could be very pleasant. They’d often be the voice of someone I loved, and even if they weren’t, I could talk too, asking questions about this or that and getting reasonable answers. There were very important messages that had to get through somehow. More orthodox channels like phone and mail had broken down.

The blanks were a lot like the voices: it’s hard to say exactly when they started. At first there’d be only an instant or two I couldn’t account for. Later I’d be missing whole days. I’d feel myself going away and then I’d feel myself coming back. I had no way to gauge how much time passed during the blanks. When I came out of them anybody could have told me anything. I wouldn’t necessarily have believed it but there was no way I could count it out either.

Sometimes when I got back from my little cosmic jaunts it looked like no time at all had passed in my absence, but so much had happened to me that I felt I must have managed to cram a year or more into an instant of everyone else’s time. Other times when I came back it was as if I had been in some sort of suspended animation. Years had passed for everyone but me. One way or the other I was out of step. That much was clear.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand what it is that I don’t understand. Whatever it is, it’s something I have never understood. I don’t understand why it’s all of a sudden so important that I don’t understand.

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