When I was younger, my grandpa and I would watch those medical mystery TV shows. You know, the ones with six-legged cows or skinless babies that still manage to live. Weird allergies, genetic mutations, and even the somewhat comical “Well the doctor made a really big oops and left medical equipment inside of you and you’ve been living with it for 5+ years” stories. They were educational and gross at the same time, something that I fed off of as a young teen.
Grandpa would always joke around that he should be on those shows. I knew he wasn’t serious - he hated drawing attention to his issue. I would occupy myself with what they would title an episode of his, and always came back to the blunt, retro movie title of “The Man with Two Voices”.
Ever since any of my family can remember, grandpa’s had “two voices”. The only way for me to describe it is to compare it to having phlegm in your throat when you’re sick, and how it sometimes creates a split in your voice. There’s your normal speaking voice that you can hear fine, but underneath it is like a deeper growly echo. Then it’d be gone when you cleared your throat. My grandpa is like that all the time, but his “second voice” is just as loud as his normal voice.
I remember him telling me stories when he was much younger, and his mother pulling her hair out over the whole ordeal. Took him to doctors that stuck scopes and lights down his throat - nothing. Primitive x-rays on his neck - nothing. I used to ask grandpa why he didn’t go back to the doctor after that, especially now with all the new things they have in hospitals that he didn’t have growing up.
It was always the same answer, “They can’t tell me nothin’ new.”
We named his second voice “Ed”. My grandpa’s name was Albert, usually Al, so it sounded like a TV show. Ed & Al. Al & Ed.
When my grandpa died, it was tragic. Despite his vocal anomaly, he had tons of friends and people that loved him. Or, my skeptical mother would say, people that liked his “circus act”.
Her skepticism - that grandpa was using some sort of parlor trick - was quickly debunked at his autopsy.
Grandpa should have gone back to the doctor, we learned. An ultrasound would have indicated that his beer gut wasn’t actually beer, and his “second voice” was literally a second voice. The small, curled-up body of his unknown twin was unearthed from his belly, connected to his esophagus below his collarbone. His childhood doctors did not detect it.
It was made clear, then, that the hollow tube connecting the mouth of grandpa’s twin to his esophagus was the source of grandpa’s second voice. A voice that kept talking past grandpa’s death, according to the autopsist. Ed was still alive some days after that.
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