Disappearer

I have to disappear again, within me a discerning voice is saying. Whenever I hear it, it’s as if I’m overhearing. I’m not the one it’s talking to per se; it’s conversing with itself but I'm the ear. I know: confusing. But maybe you have a similar companion, a voice that rides along within you through your days and nights. Some evenings it keeps me up when I’d rather sleep. Some nights it even wakes me. Then I have to lay awake listening to it sort through its various concerns, deliberating. 

This is what it’s been saying lately: I have to disappear again. Implying I’ve disappeared at least once before, if not many times before. Implying each time I returned from hiding and resumed the course of a life unchanged. 

Hushed. But not purposefully conspiratorial. Casual, unbothered, like a person confiding their most private thoughts at a volume common to a regular speaking voice, drowned out by the loud chaotic conversation of a crowded room. Now that I’m describing it, I can almost remember: of course I’ve heard this before, of course I’ve overheard directives issued between one unseen part of myself and another. It’s true, I’ve been visible for too long, I’ve grown too accustomed to being counted among people of a crowd. If they could hear me, the voice that’s talking and the ear that’s listening, I would try and interject. I’d ask questions. Why? And what would happen if I didn’t? It’s a scary prospect to not know what might transpire if you don’t disappear and soon, as some voice within you suggests. 

It seems in the very nature of voices and ears they’re immune to interventions by their host consciousness. That could be a good thing, I don’t know. It means I always have someone else to listen to, someone secretly myself I don't quite identify with. They talk and talk and listen and listen and usually they’re camouflaged by distraction or my interest in louder, more outward conversations. Just because I’m their privileged audience, doesn’t mean what’s said is accurate or insightful or wise. The voice sometimes seems caught up in playing with phrases, testing slight but semantically expansive variations on simple themes. “The hand that feeds can starve the dog.” “The dog that bites feeds the hand.” Dog and hand and biting and feeding, basic elements of a conceit shuffled until they return to their original cliché, the dog that bites the hand. Listen long enough to that kind of talk, it leaves you feeling like you’re chasing a tail you didn’t know you had in the first place. But there’s the sense that ignoring the voice would invite misfortune. It speaks from a hidden place and weathers many a change undergone by human imagination. It is not holy, nor is it prophetic, of this I’m certain, but don’t ask me how. It’s as mortal as any mole in the ground, tending its tunnels. It’s a fellow traveller to selfhood, not quite its shadow. As you see, the nearer I draw towards it, the more descriptions break down. 

There was a woman once, books now tell us of her, the quality of her mind and the grave tragedy of her life. She starved herself in solidarity with the suffering of commoners, thinking it would somehow stall the hand of fate, which was always busy, it seemed to her, undoing lives at a far distance from her own comfort. It was not fair, it was not kind. An ecstatic horror, this was, living and breathing. Since she could not control the whims of worldly punishment, she controlled what passed from hand to mouth, food and water. The more malnourished and skinny she became, the more her skull glowed with righteousness. Throughout all that, who knows what the voice in her head was saying. The books tell us she perished and maybe it was a blessing her consciousness didn’t outlast her body, for then it might glean final proof that her death changed nothing the woman and her voice had been most concerned about. Removing herself from living company, nothing was brought back to an even and moral level. The voice, though, survived. Shedding itself of a woman, it endured as a prose style and an ethical meander, losing track of a few core themes in one book so later in another it might once again find them. I mention this because not too infrequently, hearing my own voice within me ramble on about this or that, it seems to catch a rhythm that resembles this woman at her most even-keeled or metaphysically pragmatic. Don’t mistake what I’m describing, she’s in no way within me, nor has her voice leapt bodies like a flea, to ensure further feeding and survival. My suspicion is my voice, and maybe anyone’s voice, is a skilled mimic and entertains itself by striking up small instances of otherness within itself. Anything for the ear that has been assigned to it, anything to confuse the host consciousness cursed with the task of overhearing it. In the case of this starved woman and her voice and its books and of my voice pleasuring itself through the adoption of tones unnatural to it, those of a resolute ascetic sternness, their differences have blended over time until they’ve achieved an ambiguous sameness. I’m at an equal distance from each of them and can affect none of them. For better or worse, I’m their shared habitat, one that can’t withhold nutrients or fair weather from them. And when I pause for a long while to listen, this is what they tell each other: it’s time to disappear again. Me first, the rest of them along with me. 

Head still, body still. Room quiet and expansive as a house around me. I’m listening. I’m in preparation for the beginning of a disappearance. As always, it will take more than hours, well more than a day or two. I’m not so skilled at self-effacement it can happen instantaneously. A wandering mind is a luxury I can’t enjoy when concentrating on achieving incremental, part-by-part removal from collective awareness, beginning first with me, the most immediate surveyor of my present intersubjective fleshiness, this personhood chained to the culture that feeds it. The less cluttered my surroundings, the more cleanly I hear voice and ear conversing. They’re in imitation mode currently, reciting from memory a passage from the long-gone woman’s oeuvre. Familiar. Heard it before. Heard it many times. Each pass through it rendering it differently, variations in phrasing and pauses. But voice to ear, the gist of its descriptions are roughly the same no matter how old I am, regardless who I am or where I am when I'm made to listen.  

Like this. 

The condition in which one person and another find themselves, no matter which people and what condition, are not unlike those of prisoners isolated in separate cells. There are walls between them and they are real. Such is the thickness of the walls that no speaking or even shouting can travel through them without losing clarity of words. So to communicate with one another prisoners must be satisfied with mere tapping, tap-tapping in code through iron or concrete. Without walls there would be no medium through which vibrations might travel, no hard surfaces against which taps might be conjured. The very obstructions that secure their isolation from one another are means of communication. Or, as the woman’s voice had expressed once quite memorably, “Every separation is a link.” On many an occasion while working hard to achieve and maintain a disappearance, I’ve questioned the universality of this sentiment. I’ve wondered whether it was intended to be true in all cases. Between people and their voices, I can see. Between many people and their own unique arrays of strangers and acquaintances, maybe. Maybe, but always? From a wholly disappeared position, when I look around, I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. I see adjoining cells uninterested in their walls, prisoners content to tap their own foreheads. I see these and am unhappy with the implications, phrased often as a single chastened question, Is this me? 

To be a model prisoner, or a troublemaker. To celebrate the appearance of a guard at the door, or to protest their presence with sullenness and a refusal to converse. The door is opened, the cafeteria is waiting. An hour in the yard or in the gym is available for the agreeable. How necessary are walls if simple compliance can lead a person to a room full of faces? Few are trustworthy. Few are honestly smiling. Behind each there is another voice, a covert fellow traveller talking. There is an ear that doesn’t require bending. They are equal to your own predicament, I tell myself, having vanished after long effort into full immersion with my surroundings. It’s me who’s telling this to myself, not a voice within but separate from how I feel and think. Beneath registers of witness or regard, voice and ear have edged near enough to become indistinguishable from the person I am, who rarely knows much for certain and certainly can’t speak for others who can’t see or hear him. Prisoners beyond their cells tend to bring the cells with them and the silences between them are a kind of tapping. Each disappear into themselves at their peril. If they leave, they might never return. If they come back after a long absence, there might not be much to come back to. I would do well to follow their example. Silence in the head affirms this is wisdom: it can be broken.