Crosstalk (31 page)

“Sorry,” she said, and loosened her hold.

“That's okay. I still have a little circulation left.” He grinned at her and went on with what he'd been saying about reciting lyrics. “Or poetry. Narrative poems work the best. What do you know? ‘The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls'? ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree'?”

“No,” she said, thinking,
I should have gone to those Daughters of Ireland meetings Aunt Oona kept pestering me about.
“I know ‘The Highwayman,' sort of. I had to memorize it in high school, but I'm not sure I remember all the words.”

“Then how about Christmas carols? Or show tunes? Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Wicked.
Rent.
The Music Man.
Almost any musical will do. Except
Cats.
”

“Why? Doesn't it shut out the voices?”

“No, it shuts them out fine. But it's a
terrible
musical. And that reminds me, you need to be careful which songs you sing. Getting an annoying song stuck in your head can make you wish you were hearing the voices instead.”

“
Nothing
could make me wish I was hearing the voices instead,” she said fervently.

“That's what you think. You've obviously never had ‘I Got You Babe' wedged in your neurons for weeks. Or ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.' Or ‘Feelings.' ” He shuddered. “I made the mistake of thinking that would be a good song for fending off the voices, and at the end of two weeks I wanted to kill myself
and
Engelbert Humperdinck. And it's worse if it's
their
song.”

“Their song?”

“One they've gotten stuck in
their
heads. The voices aren't always kvetching and ranting and swearing and screaming. Sometimes they're singing—and they're just as nasal and off-key inside their heads as they are out loud. Plus, they've got terrible taste. They never sing something by Bob Dylan or Cole Porter or Stevie Wonder. It's always ‘Achy Breaky Heart' or ‘Shake Ya Ass' or that godawful Celine Dion
Titanic
thing. And half the time they get the words wrong. Especially when it comes to Christmas carols—‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Stranger' and ‘dashing through the snow in a one-horse soap and hay.' And no matter how much you shout at them, ‘It's “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” not “the Lord has gum,” ' it doesn't do any good.”

He's trying to distract me again,
she thought.
All this talk about songs is just white noise to keep me from hearing the voices till we get to wherever it is we're going.

Which was where? They'd been driving for fifteen minutes, and they didn't seem to be getting any closer to being out of the city. Or to a highway.

“You know the song ‘Molly Malone'?” C.B. was saying. “Of course you do, you're Irish. Well, you know the part where she wheels her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, crying cockles and mussels? Well, one of my voices was convinced she was crying ‘cocker spaniels,' which not only is wrong, but doesn't even scan! Nearly drove me insane.” He turned to look at her. “Speaking of which, just how Irish are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how much Irish blood have you got? With a last name like Flannigan and that red hair, I'm guessing at least three-fourths of your ancestors are from Ireland. Is that right?”

“No. All of them are. My family is pure Irish. I'm surprised Aunt Oona didn't tell you that. It's usually the first thing out of her mouth.”

“We had other things to talk about,” C.B. said. “Pure Irish, hmm? And your people are from—what? County Kerry? County Cork?”

“County Clare. Why? You think my hearing the voices has something to do with my ancestry?”

“No. It has
everything
to do with it—or more particularly, with the haploidgroup gene R1b-L21 the Irish carry.”

“That's why you tried to stop me from having the EED done,” she said. “Because you knew I was Irish and you were afraid this would happen.”

“Well, that, and the fact that elective brain surgery is a spectacularly bad idea. As you have discovered.”

“But if it's a gene the Irish carry, then wouldn't everyone Irish be telepathic? I know
dozens
of Irish people, and none of them can read minds.”

“That you know of. They could be keeping it quiet, like me. Or that subject of Dr. Rhine's I told you about. Bad things have been known to happen to people who hear voices, like—”

“Being diagnosed as schizophrenic or burned at the stake. I know,” she said. “So you're saying all these people are secretly telepaths?”

“No. I think it's more likely they're only part Irish. Most of the ‘Irish,' ” he said, taking his hands off the steering wheel for a split second to make air quotes, “actually have a good chunk of Viking or Germanic or Anglo-Saxon genes in them. And if they've been in the United States for a generation or two, they've got all kinds of other genes, too.”

“And only people who are a hundred percent Irish carry this gene?” she asked, thinking,
Aunt Oona wouldn't be so determined for me to marry a “foine Irish lad” if she knew about this.
“But if that's the case, why aren't my sisters telepathic? And don't try to tell me they are. If they were, Mary Clare wouldn't spend all her time worrying about what's going on with Maeve, and Kathleen definitely wouldn't date the guys she does. And you yourself said Aunt Oona's premonitions weren't real. Or were you lying about that?”

“No, there's no such thing as clairvoyance. Or telekinesis. Just telepathy.”

“And if they were telepathic, they'd have known I had the EED,” Briddey said, “which they didn't. If your theory's right, why aren't they? And why was Joan of Arc telepathic? She wasn't Irish. And neither are you. Your name's not Murphy or O'Connell. It's—”

“Schwartz,” he said.

“So your theory is what? That this haploidgroup R1b gene is carried by the Irish
and
the French
and
the Jews?”

“Nope, just the Irish, though there's a small possibility the Romany carry it, too, and that that's where the tradition of Gypsy fortune-telling comes from.”

“And you have Gypsy blood?”

He shook his head. “Nary a drop.”

“Well, then, why can you hear the voices? You're obviously not Irish.”

“Um…about that,” he said. “Actually, I am.”

“The library, and step on it.”

—D
AVID
F
OSTER
W
ALLACE
,
Infinite Jest

“You're
Irish
?” Briddey said.

“Yep. All the way back on both sides, just like you.”

“But—”

“Schwartz is my stepfather's name. My
father
was an O'Hanlon. And my mother was a Gallagher.”

“But you…,” she began, frowning at his dark hair, nearly black in the light from the passing streetlights.

“Don't look Irish? Actually, I do. Dark hair's common in Ireland, especially in County Clare, where my mother's people are from,” and the moment he said it, she thought,
I should have seen it.
He had the classic dark hair and black-lashed gray eyes “put in with a sooty finger” of the Black Irish.

“But you said my red hair—”

He shook his head. “If you have the gene for red hair—which is a mutation of a different gene, MC1R—and you're Irish, you're also likely to have the telepathy gene, but one's not dependent on the other.”

“But you…,” she said, still unable to take this in. “I mean, everyone at Commspan thinks you're Jewish.”

“I am, for all intents and purposes. My dad died when I was two, and my mom remarried when I was four. Then she died, and my stepdad raised me till
he
died,” he said. “But the name also serves as protective coloration.”

“But if you're Irish, why isn't your
first
name Irish?” she asked, and realized she had no idea what his first name was. C.B. could stand for anything—Christian Bale, Charlotte Brontë—or be a nickname for computer bandwidth or CB radio or something.

“As in ‘Breaker, Breaker, good buddy, this is Big Trucker,' you mean?” he said, turning his attention from his driving to grin at her for a moment. “That'd be appropriate, considering. But actually, C.B. stands for Conlan Brenagh. Conlan Brenagh Patrick Michael O'Hanlon Schwartz.”

“And so because we're both Irish, you think this haploidgroup gene is what's causing the telepathy?”

“Afraid so.”

“But two people is hardly proof. Or
is
it just two? Were your mother and father telepathic, too?”

“I don't know. They both died before it happened to me, and it's not the kind of thing you'd tell anybody, even your own kid, unless it was absolutely necessary.”

“Then how can you be so sure that's the cause? Why couldn't it be the EED?”

“Because I didn't have one. Remember?”

“But that still doesn't explain why you think being Irish caused it unless you've found another telepath with the gene. Have you?”

He turned his head sharply to look at her. “What?”

“That's it, isn't it? You've found someone else who's telepathic, and they're Irish, too. Who is it? One of those professional psychics you were talking about?”

“Of course not. I told you, they're fakes.”

“You said most of them were fakes. I thought maybe you'd found one that wasn't, and he—or she—was Irish.”

“No. I told you, so-called mind reading is all just tricks.”

“Then why—?”

“Because nearly every documented historical incident of telepathic communication involves someone who's Irish, including Dr. Rhine's ESP subjects
and
the messages from the
Titanic,
whose steerage decks were full of immigrants from County Clare—plus the incident I told you about the Nebraska girl who heard the torpedoed sailor. She was a Donohue and he was a Sullivan. And Ireland has a long-standing history of its inhabitants hearing voices, from Saint Patrick and Saint Cieran to—”

“Bridey Murphy, who's
completely
reliable,” Briddey said sarcastically. “To say nothing of all those Irishmen who claim to have seen leprechauns.”

“Don't knock leprechauns. If you look closely at those stories, you'll see the vast majority are about talking to someone no one else can see.”

He can't be serious,
she thought.
This is just more white noise—or maybe “blarney” is a better word under the circumstances—to keep the voices at bay till we get safely out of the city.
Which they were still nowhere close to doing. The darkened streets they were driving along were lined with businesses and office buildings that showed no sign of thinning out.

“We're almost there,” C.B. reassured her. “And my theory's not blarney. I've spent a lot of time researching this.”

“And this research said the early Irish developed some sort of gene that gave them—and
only
them—telepathic ability?”

“No, just the opposite. Everybody—or at least a sizeable chunk of our ancestors—once had it, but now the Irish are the only ones left with it. Did you ever hear of Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind?”

“No.”

“It's a theory that for most of human history, hearing voices was a common occurrence. People attributed the voices to the gods, but it was actually the two halves of the brain talking to each other. And when the brain evolved into a single entity, the voices stopped. Or, rather, people stopped thinking of them as voices and realized they were just hearing their own thoughts.”

“So you're not really talking to me—I'm just talking to myself?”

“Obviously not. Jaynes's conclusion about why the voices went away was totally wrong, but he was right about hearing voices being a common phenomenon that then disappeared. I think back then everybody was telepathic, but over time the ability largely died out through natural selection. My guess is that some people had a gene—or genes—which inhibited the uptake receptors that made it possible to hear the voices—probably the neural equivalent of either a perimeter or the words to ‘Teen Angel.' ”

“A perimeter? What's that?”

“A kind of defense. I'm going to teach you to build one when we get where we're going. Anyway,” he continued, “that inhibitor gene gave them an evolutionary advantage. Telepathy's not exactly a survival trait, you know. Hearing howling voices in your head when you should be concentrating on the battle you're in is likely to get you killed before you can pass on your genes, and so is being believed to be possessed by demons. And I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of the voice-hearers threw themselves off a cliff to escape the voices. Or off a bridge. Like Billie Joe McAllister.”

“Who?”

“The guy in ‘Ode to Billie Joe.' Great song. Lots of verses and nice, distracting white-noise-type words—Tupelo and black-eyed peas and Tallahatchie Bridge.”

“Which he jumped off of?”

“Yeah, but not because he was telepathic. Though I guess he might have been. In that part of the South, a lot of people are descended from the Irish, and his name
was
McAllister. Anyway, my
point
is, over time the inhibitors won out over the no-inhibitors, and telepathy died out.”

“But why wouldn't the same thing have happened among the Irish?”

“Because during those centuries when the rest of Europe was invading and being invaded and hooking up with other peoples who had inhibitor genes, the Irish weren't. Ireland was way off the beaten path, especially the western reaches, which meant the inhabitants' original genes, even the recessive ones, like red hair and telepathy, were able to survive.”

“But the Irish didn't
stay
isolated,” Briddey said. “England invaded in the 1500s, and during the Famine hundreds of thousands of them emigrated to America—”

“Right, and they married people with one or more inhibitor genes, which is why most Irish today are only partially telepathic, if that.”

“Partially telepathic?”

“Yeah, they can only hear someone calling to them in circumstances of heightened emotion, or they have a vague sense when something's wrong. Just a few Irish still have the genetic makeup to be fully telepathic.”

“And you and I are two of them.”

“Yeah. Lucky us, huh?”

“But if your theory's right, I inherited the gene from my parents, so why aren't Kathleen and Mary Clare—?”

“Because it's the kind of gene that has to be activated, either by an alteration in brain chemistry or a change in the circuitry.”

“Like the EED,” Briddey said grimly.

“Exactly. Though it could just as easily have been the anesthetic. Anything that lowers the brain's natural defenses or causes an increase in receptivity to the telepathic signals can trigger it—drugs, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, physical trauma, emotional stress. Any heightened emotional state, really. Fear, longing, adolescent angst.”

“Which is what triggered yours.”

“And Joan of Arc's. Thirteen's when she first heard the voices, too.”

“But she wasn't Irish.”

“No, but she lived long enough ago that the genes could still have been found in other parts of Europe. And Domrémy's not that far from Dublin. She was also trying to connect, which seems to be a trigger, too.”

“Connect?” Briddey said blankly. “Who was Joan of Arc trying to—?”

“Connect to? God. When she heard Saint Michael the first time, she was praying, which is definitely a kind of reaching out.” He leaned forward and peered through the windshield. “Can you make out the name of that street up ahead? I want to see how much farther we've got left to go.”

“My phone has GPS on it,” she said, and then remembered that they couldn't turn her phone on. She squinted at the sign, which was barely visible in the darkness, trying to make it out. “Palmer Boulevard,” she said finally.

“Good.”

“Are we almost out of the city, then?” she asked, looking ahead for signs that they were nearing the outskirts.

“No,” he said, stopping at a red light. “We're not going out of it.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“Because it wouldn't do any good. The voices aren't affected by distance. Well, they are, but not enough that driving out in the country would put you out of range. And if you did go far enough to get away from the ones you heard in the theater, you'd just be within range of a bunch of others.”

There was no way to get beyond the reach of the voices, and no way she could get them to stop. Which meant they'd catch up, they'd wash over the car, they'd swamp her, and—

“Briddey!” C.B. was saying. “Briddey! Listen to me!”

“They'll drown me!” she cried hysterically. “They'll—”

“No, they won't. I won't let them. I'm taking you someplace safe.”

“There's no such place. You just said—”

“No, I didn't. There is, and I'm taking you there right now, but you've got to let me drive so we can get there,” and she realized she'd grabbed hold of his arm with both hands, and that the light had turned green and someone was honking at them.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and let go of his arm, only to be deluged all over again.

“You're okay, you're okay,” he said, snatching her hand up in his and holding it tightly.

The car behind them honked again.

“Oh, shut up,” C.B. said amicably, and held her captured hand against his chest for a minute before putting it on his knee. “Just hang on to me and sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,' or some other foine Irish song, and I'll have you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Though the truth is, ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling' isn't an Irish song at all, at all. It was written in Tin Pan Alley by someone who'd never set foot on the auld sod, and so were ‘Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra' and ‘Christmas in Killarney.' And ‘Danny Boy,' the ultimate in Irishness.
It
was written by a lying brute of an Englishman.”

This is just more blarney to keep me from falling apart till we get there,
she thought, and tried to pull herself together, to ignore the frightening knell that had begun ringing inside her when she realized that there was no place beyond the reach of the voices.