The sound arrived when Voss was twenty-three, during an unremarkable Tuesday, while she was shelving books in the university library where she worked. She stopped, one hand on a spine, and listened. Something was being written. Not in any room she could identify. Not by any hand she could locate. Something above the level of the building, or inside it in a direction that was not a physical direction, was writing continuously, and she could hear the sound it made.
She finished shelving the books. She went home. She sat in her kitchen and listened for an hour. It was still there. It had always been there, she realized then. She had simply not been attending.
She bought a notebook. She developed a notation system. She records pauses, accelerations, the quality she calls italics because she cannot find a better word for it, and a rhythm she calls the long passage which happens every eleven to fourteen days and lasts between two and six hours. She is on her thirty-first notebook. The notebooks are in the apartment in a specific order. She would be distressed if they were reorganized.
She has told seven people in twenty-six years. The responses have ranged from careful concern to interested curiosity to one researcher who wanted to run tests, which Voss declined. The notebooks are not data; they are a record. She knows the difference.
What she cannot know: what is being written, in what language, about what subject. She only knows the rhythm of the writing. This is enough to have organized her life around. She works in a library, which is surrounded by the written, which feels appropriate. She keeps quiet hours in the evenings. She has learned to let the writing be the background against which everything else happens, and not the other way around.
Her sister Nesta visits once a year in March. They walk, eat, talk about the things sisters talk about. The sound continues through all of it. The sound does not pause for company.
In the evening after Nesta leaves, Voss sits at the table for a while. The apartment is quiet in the way it is when someone has recently left. She opens the thirty-second notebook. The sound is there: steady, mid-pace, the ordinary writing that runs under everything. She picks up her pen.