Mr. Vonnegut walked with a nurse down a long white hall to an isolated room.
“So what do you guys think is wrong with him?” Vonnegut's voice crept out with confidence.
“Textbook schizophrenia.”
“Of course.” They always think it’s schizophrenia. “And you’re sure you don’t mind me going in and talking to him?”
“If I did, then I wouldn’t have walked you all the way out to the solitary confinement annex. Speaking of which, here we are, room A304. You can head on in whenever. I’ll be right out here.”
The nurse let out a strained sigh as he walked in. A boy, 10 or 11 years old, was bound to a chair in the middle of A304. He showed no interest in the the man’s arrival. He just sat in the chair and stared intently at the ground.
“So you must be Samson.” he said to the boy.
No response.
“I’m Dr. Vonnegut.”
Still no response.
“I hear that you’re a very gifted young man, but you’re suffering a great deal.” Vonnegut leaned down, eye level with the boy, but the boy didn’t look up at him. “I can help.”
“You can’t do anything, Mr. Vonnegut.”
“I can try. All you have to do is explain to me what’s going on in your head.”
“There are seven and a half billion of them, the voices.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I listen to them individually. I know them all by name.” Then he looked up at the man with piercing gray eyes. “Including yours, Mr. Vonnegut.”
“Interesting. What else do you know about these voices?”
“I know what they do. Most of them scroll through the internet and watch reruns of the same TV shows all day. Then there are those that suffer and starve, beg for change or just fall over dead. And then there is you, Mr. Vonnegut, a self-proclaimed doctor that believes, so firmly, in the supernatural that he’s willing to drop out of med school to disprove his peers.”
The man stood up, at a loss for words. “How could you possibly-”
“And what you don’t know, Mr. Vonnegut, is that I can make the voices stop if I wanted to. I can create new voices in an instant, and I can just as easily silence them.”
Vonnegut opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He pulled at his throat and collapsed to the ground with a strained sigh.
“And it takes so little effort.” said the boy. “Stefanie,” he called to the nurse. “Mr. Vonnegut isn’t breathing.”
Samson’s gaze fell back to the floor, listening to the voices in his head. “Oh yeah. I snuffed out her voice too.”
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