Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [44]
After examining my uncle, the doctor, a young blond man with a cherubic round face and a bowl-shaped mop of hair, pulled out a sausage-sized machine and placed it in my uncle’s hand.
“Tell him,” said the doctor, “that this is a voice box, an artificial larynx, something that can amplify his whispers and allow people to hear and understand him.”
The doctor placed his hand on my uncle’s fingers and helped him form a fist around the machine, then he guided it to a spot above my uncle’s gullet and told him to speak.
“Speak?” my uncle asked.
The machine buzzed, letting out a clamor of static. The doctor moved my uncle’s hand a few inches, then said again, “Speak.”
Uncle Joseph opened his mouth and tried to utter a few words, but no sound came out.
The doctor moved his hand a few more inches, then asked, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”
“Ze,” he said. Eggs.
The sound of the word emerging out of his own body in a robotic monotone seemed to shock my uncle, who raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Keep talking,” the doctor said. “What would you like to have for dinner?”
“I don’t know,” Uncle Joseph said, the mechanical voice a bit clearer now.
His face lit up. He smiled, baring nearly all of his false teeth.
“Where can we buy it?” he asked.
The artificial larynx was sold in a medical supplies store near the hospital. After the doctor’s visit, we went there and got one.
Later that afternoon, when we returned to my parents’ apartment, my mother had not yet come back from her job at the textile factory, but my father was there, sitting on the blue plastic-covered sofa in the living room and sifting through his mail while occasionally glancing at the television set, which Bob, Kelly and Karl were watching from the floor. Uncle Joseph turned off the television, causing the boys to silently protest with grimaces. He walked over and sat down next to my father, signaling for them to also pay attention.
“I was worried,” my father said. “I thought they’d kept you in the hospital.”
The plastic squealed under my uncle as he leaned even closer to my father. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the voice box and raised it to his neck. The machine screeched with static when he turned it on. Uncle Joseph adjusted the volume, then pressed it more deeply at the curve between his chin and neck.
“Mira, I can speak,” my uncle said, drawing out each mechanized word.
The boys rushed over to the sofa, circling my uncle. My father pushed his face closer to my uncle’s. His eyes widened as he looked into my uncle’s mouth, dumbfounded.
“How’s it happening?” he asked.
“It must be a miracle,” my uncle said. “What else can it be?”
“Science?” my father absentmindedly offered.
“Science is God’s way of shielding miracles,” Uncle Joseph replied.
My father took my uncle’s hand and led him to a lamp in a corner of the room, so he could better see the machine and its interaction with my uncle’s neck. This was their first two-sided conversation in many years and they both seemed to want to move it past the technicalities to a point of near normalcy.
“How does it sound to your ear?” my father asked.
“How does it sound to yours?” my uncle countered.
My father paused to think, searching perhaps for the most tactful and encouraging description of what he was hearing.
“It sounds like yon robo,” he replied. A robot.
My father was trying to be more exact than heartening. My uncle was not fazed.
“To my ear,” my uncle said, “it sounds like two voices, my own voice inside my head and the one you hear. I know that voice is going to sound strange to people.” He was smiling now, showing all of his false teeth. “But it’s better than not speaking at all.”
That summer when my uncle went back to Haiti, he sold his first house, the one Bob and I and everyone else in the family had lived in with him and Tante Denise. The house was beginning to fall apart