62 Days: The Voices

A breeze whips through the trees, ruffling Jessica's hair and whispering something in her ear. She looks over her shoulder in panic, her eyes wide. No one there. She hesitates for a moment, wary, then turns around and keeps walking, faster this time. She keeps her eyes forward, but she can hear the soft, murmuring voices behind her. They're getting closer, their message more insistent. Jessica breaks into a run, her backpack bouncing heavily, trying to escape. But it's futile. Soon the invisible hordes are at her heels, and their words are pounding in her head:


"Marriage. Marriage. Marriage. Marriage. . . ."


She makes it into the nearest building, slamming the door shut behind her. She can hear them pounding on the door, their words slithering underneath and swarming around her ankles. Barring the door, she runs up the stairs, knocking over her fellow students in her terrified flight. She bursts into the women's bathroom and locks herself in a stall, ripping off long pieces of toilet paper and shoving into her ears, hoping to keep out the madness.

When she had started school at Brigham Young University one year ago, she hadn't believed the stories everyone told about "the voices." These voices were supposedly omnipresent, worming their way into the students' heads and causing chemical imbalance that resulted in an insatiable desire to get married. Jessica knew the folklore: women went to BYU to get their M.R.S. degrees; returned missionaries used BYU like a hunting ground, quickly felling their prey. But Jessica had always figured it was a natural result of growing up in the arms of Mormonism, if a bit extreme.

There was nothing natural about this.



It was a craze. Students came to BYU with no unusual background, and within three weeks they were all hooked up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. The relationships usually lasted about a semester at the longest, and if the couple wasn't engaged by the end of that time, they recognized the experiment as a failure and broke up. Then they ran off to find someone else to replenish the earth with. There was no thought except to appease the voices rampaging their skulls.

The professors were an interesting case as well. Most of them were married, of course, but prolonged exposure to the voices had morphed their minds. Each of them was constantly - unwittingly - speaking for the voices in the middle of class lectures. Computer Science teachers spoke of the need to get off the computer sometimes and date. Church History teachers explained how to use your patriarchal blessing to find a suitable partner for eternity. Each professor had their own way of doing it, but they were all working for "them," doing everything but making their students' dating lives worth 50% of their grade.

The students reeked of eagerness. The professors taught classes with sly, giggly hints. The trees, the mountains, even the air seemed to be full of some kind of brain-neutralizing, marriage-inducing toxin.



But Jessica had come to BYU reluctantly, grudgingly. She was not like other students. While her classmates all raced to get friends, Jessica walked between them indifferently, her nose in a book. She laughed when she saw the instant-couples, mocked the quickly-engaged even as she dutifully swooned over their shiny rings. She thought herself above the animalistic drones who scampered around everyday sniffing for a mate.

After all, she was not a huge fan of dating, having proved quite inept at it in high school. She had never had a boyfriend, never had a first kiss, even her hands were untouched. But she didn't really mind. She had plans, goals, ambitions, and lots and lots of books to read. Marriage was not high on her list of priorities. So she had strolled onto the campus without any protection but her own disdain. She believed herself immune to the voices.

She had underestimated them.

The voices swirled around her from the beginning. When she seemed unaffected by their call, they gathered in huge masses and tried sharp, sudden attacks, the pinkish fumes wriggling in through her pores, infecting her blood. She felt the effects after a few months, when her eyes started filtering out everything but her male classmates. If any of them looked at her, she immediately began to feel breathless and lightheaded. She felt sick. She started reading more feverishly, keeping her eyes on the black print and her mind off of the boys.

Soon the voices were with her constantly. They converged upon her when she got off the bus in the morning, and they drilled in through her ears to her brain, eventually driving her to the point of madness. Thoughts, that were not her own, hijacked her mind. In the middle of writing a paper she would suddenly find herself scribbling little hearts in the margins, or breaking off in the middle of sentences to write things like "love is all you need" or "true love's kiss." In lectures, she would be unable to concentrate, finding herself imagining romantic encounters or even a handsome husband, playing with her child.

She was getting desperate. She left campus as soon as her classes were over, breathing deeply the sweaty-smoky smell of the bus, trying to clear her head. Instead of reading on campus, she tried audiobooks, shoving the headphones deep in her ears and turning it up. The voices would not relent however. They came upon her when she least expected it, and it soon led to her sprinting from class to class, trying to escape the rose-tinted atmosphere and the heavily perfumed flowers that grew all over campus and which she suspected of being drugged.

This is how she came to be locked in that bathroom stall, squeezing her eyes shut and humming loudly. The door to the bathroom was opened suddenly, by another student, and she heard the voices cackling as they swarmed inside. She could almost see them crawling under the door to her stall. Screaming, she yanked the toilet paper out of her ears and broke through the stall door in her haste to escape. She ran up a few more staircases, the voices laughing evilly on a wind behind her, until she emerged on the building's rooftop.

Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Now there were voices flying at her from all over campus, a great storm of hormones rushing her way. She was surrounded, and she was terrified. After all she'd done, it was going to end like this? There were only moments now. She was feeling faint already. The voices screamed at her now, "MARRIAGE! MARRIAGE! MARRIAGE!" and her body, mind, and soul were just too tired to fight anymore. She swayed on the spot, struggling to maintain control of her conscious mind for only a few more seconds. . .

Then, quite suddenly, she threw back her head and bellowed, "GHOSTBUSTERS!"

They appeared immediately, almost out of nowhere, leaping out from behind fixtures and dropping down from helicopters. They ran forward in their funny suits, the high-tech vacuums on their backs, and unleashed on the voices. The sound was loud, the voices shrieking as they vanished into oblivion, and within two minutes it was over.

Jessica was on the ground, leaning up on one hand as she looked around. The voices were gone. A blissful silence filled her head. She sighed in relief. One of the ghostbusters came forward and pulled her to her feet. "Are you alright, Miss?"

"I am now," she said. She smiled. "Thanks."

"That's what we're here for," the man replied, hoisting his weapon. "If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call?"

She replied with a laugh. "Ghostbusters!"