The Presonic Man

By Ahmed A. Khan

What would you have done if you were in my shoes?

It happened suddenly. One night, I had gone to sleep, a normal man. The next morning I got up, a thoroughly abnormal individual.

At that time, I was a moderately well-to-do writer. I had no living relatives and lived alone in my apartment.

That morning, I switched on the TV. A cartoon was being shown but the sound I heard was not the sound of a cartoon but of news being read. Was something wrong with the TV?

Had two channels somehow got mixed up? Then I heard the news reader announce the date. I sat bolt-upright. How could it be the 25th of May, today? Yesterday, when I had gone to sleep, it had been the 20th. What was going on? Had I slept for four days – a modern day Rip Van Winkle? I ran outside, picked up the newspaper lying on my doorstep and looked at the date. Twenty first of May.

So, after all, I had not slept for four days.

That was just the beginning. That whole day, I kept hearing voices: Voices of my friends, my neighbors, the voice of my sweet heart, and my own voice. What was going on? Was I going mad? But there was no insanity in the voices I heard.

I thought hard, struggling against a rising sense of panic. Slowly, almost shyly, a tiny idea raised its head. I had a hypothesis. It was fantastic. Nevertheless, I decided to test it.

Next morning, I switched on the television. Once again, the picture on the tube didn’t match the sounds. I heard the date being announced, and it was the twenty sixth of May. Hypothesis proved!

No matter how fantastic, it was probably true. My sense of hearing had extended four days and a couple of hours into the future.

First, I went into panic. Then, recovering, I quietly sat at my writing table for hours, mentally working out the ramifications of my condition. There were various things, big and small, to take care of. For instance, if someone rang the doorbell, I wouldn’t hear it. I had to have some kind of visual indication for it. Then there was the phone. This was one instrument that would become almost totally useless to me. And what about conversation with people? I could talk to them and they would hear me but when they talked, I would have heard it four days ago. How then to have a coherent conversation? The only solution was to tell everyone that I had gone totally deaf. Let them communicate with me via writing or sign language.

And life went on with all its strangeness.

My pre-sonic condition had its advantages. I made it a habit of hearing the business news bulletins on the TV, and armed with advance knowledge of the market, I started playing the stocks. Inevitably my income became healthier and healthier. In turn, I became quite a philanthropist and had no end of fun.

No one knew about my abnormality till I heard himself telling my sweetheart about it and didn’t hear her scream or panic. So four days later, I did tell her about it and she, after a brief adjustment period, accepted it and said so in writing.

And one day, I wrote a note to her, asking her to marry me. She accepted and soon we became man and wife and lived happily for quite some time…

…till the time – yesterday – that I heard my wife crying with grief. And this grief was over my death.

I immediately got busy straightening out my things, preparing my will, loving and cherishing my wife.

Today, I heard my friends come to bury me.

And then my world went dead silent for some time.

And then I heard a terrible voice say: “Who is your God?”

And now I have three days to find the correct answer to that question.

 

Ahmed A. Khan is a Canadian writer whose works have appeared in several venues including Interzone, Strange Horizons, Anotherealm, Starship Sofa, among others. He has also edited the anthology of Islamic SF titled “A Mosque Among the Stars”. The Presonic Man was first published in 2001 in Anotherealm and was later translated into Finnish and Lithuanian and reprinted.