Chapter 1

I was very normal until I turned twenty eight. I had gone to college, graduated, gotten married, gone to work, had a child, made friends, bought a house, settled down, all of my life as normal as can be. Then, the voices came to me. Not just one voice, but hundreds. It first started on a clear April day when I was out playing golf. It was a business foursome, with my boss and two of our company's biggest customers. We were on the eleventh hole, a par four, with a sharp dogleg to the right. There was a large green, surrounded by bunkers on both sides. I was in the trap to the left of the green, thinking about how unfortunate I'd been to roll off the green and into the bunker in the first place. Mr. Ames, my boss, was already pissed that we were losing. He was super competitive in everything he did. Losing, at anything, wasn't something that he would tolerate for long. It was my poor play that had us down by two holes. If we went down by three here, his mood was going to get even darker. That was when I heard my first inner voice. I was addressing my ball, getting ready to try to scoop it out of the sand.

<Stop! Put the ball further back in your stance, open your club face, and aim three feet to the left.>

I was startled to be hearing any of this. I'd taken golf lessons before, but not while I was playing, and not from a voice inside my head.

<Swing through the ball. Don't try to lift it, let the club face do that for you.>

I took a deep breath, adjusted my stance, and swung my club with the face opened a few more degrees. The ball lifted out just like it should have, landed close to the pin, and came to rest less than a foot from the hole. I made my par, and with the stroke I got on the hole, we won it, putting us only one hole down for the match. Mr. Ames patted me on the back for my amazing bunker play. We finished off the match, pulling even when Mr. Ames fired in a thirty foot putt on the final hole. I didn't hear any more voices for another week after that first time.

It was a Saturday, and I had just come in from three hours of doing some weeding, mowing and edging out in the back yard. My wife, Ginny, was in the living room, laying on the floor with Kaitlyn, our two year old daughter, playing a game where they rolled a ball back and forth to each other. Ginny was twenty seven, not beautiful perhaps, except to my eyes. She has hair the color of maple sugar, a light, light brown color. She keeps it short, and she still had the extra fifteen pounds she hadn't lost after Kaitlyn's birth. She has hazel eyes and is warm and witty, with a good disposition that made her seem happy and bubbly most of the time.

I first met her at a party right after graduating college. We started dating, and just grew on each other over the next two years. I asked her to live with me, and she refused. We had been intimate since the end of our first month of dating, so her refusal to move in with me kind of took me by surprise. We already spent most of our free time together, and she slept at my apartment most nights anyway.

"Why not?" I was genuinely curious, having assumed that she would immediately see this is a good move for both of us.

"I thought you were going to ask me to marry you Frank. That's what I thought you were leading up to with this. You've been spending the past week, as nervous as a cat, and so I figured you were getting ready to propose to me. I already told my family, and all of my friends, that you were finally ready to ask me." She started crying.

My parents were divorced. Ginny's parents and both of her brothers were divorced. Half the people I knew, who had gotten married, were now divorced too. To me, marriage didn't seem like it was worth all the bother, fuss and expense. Ginny and I had talked about all of this over the past two years. Never once had she said anything about expecting us to wind up married. I didn't understand where this emotion of hers was coming from. I looked at her, not really knowing what to say. She went and got her purse, preparing to leave.

"Suppose I didn't ask you to come live with me? Would you still be upset right now? We never even talked about getting married before."

"Forget it, Frank. It doesn't matter. Look, I'm sorry about the way this conversation turned into something you weren't prepared for. I need to go home and think about us some more. I'm not sure there is an 'us' anymore. We're obviously in different places as far as our expectations are concerned. Can we give it a few days, and then we'll talk again?" She came over and kissed me on the cheek and let herself out of my apartment. I didn't try to stop her.

A week later, she was going out with some guy from her office. I called her a few times, and even went over to see her at her apartment, but she said our relationship was over and she was out looking for someone new. Just like that. After a month, when I knew how much I missed having her in my life, I went over and asked her to marry me. She accepted right away. I felt like I'd been manipulated into proposing marriage, but I was happy to be back in my comfort zone. We were married two months later, a small wedding, with no honeymoon. We were saving up to buy a house.

As soon as Ginny told me she was pregnant, about seven months after we got married, we went out and bought a house. We needed more room than my apartment offered, if we were going to have a baby.

When Kaitlyn was born, it was a happy day for me. I fell in love with her as soon as I laid eyes on her. Her hair was thin, but what there was of it was light, almost white. She had my nose and looked like my mom around her eyes. She had Ginny's jaw and neck, and it all seemed to work to make her absolutely the best of both of us. I thought we were a happy, normal family.

Back to that Saturday, a week after my first encounter with the voices. I came inside, dirty, sweaty and itchy from all that yard work, and I stopped for a minute to enjoy the sight of my wife and daughter playing their game of roll the ball together. I had put the voice from the bunker behind me, relegating it to some unexplained phenomenon. I had concluded it was some forgotten golf lesson that my mind had recalled in vivid detail.

<Your wife is having an affair, Frank, and has been, since even before your marriage.>

This was a different voice. This was no remembered conversation either. What was happening to me? People who heard voices inside their head, were, almost by definition, crazy. Besides, never once had Ginny given me even the slightest reason not to trust her. I was having some kind of attack, some mental disorder.

<Frank, you're not having any mental problems. You've been selected to be watched over and helped by us.>

'Who in the hell was us?' That was the first thought that popped into my head.

<We are the guardians, Frank. We watch over all the inhabited planets in the Universe.>

'Why me?' I thought.

<Frank, why anybody? We picked you out almost at random, really. It was that golf game. We were watching your boss, we had a bet about whether he was going to have a stroke or not. When your ball rolled off the green and into that trap, Q77321 became upset with the way you were setting up to try to blast it out of that bunker. He decided to assist you, and, because of that, we've been monitoring you and all those around you ever since.> 'What makes you think Ginny is cheating on me?'

<Think? It isn't us thinking it, Frank. She's been unfaithful to you ever since the two of you broke up that time, three and a half years ago.>

'Why would she do something like that? It doesn't make sense. We've got a good marriage. I thought she loved me.' <She prefers him to you in bed, Frank. He satisfies her in ways that you don't. She has never gotten over her anger at you for not wanting to marry her. If her lover had any of your financial prospects, she'd have left you for him long before now. Kaitlyn is his child, Frank, not yours.>

'That's not true, she has my nose and is the spitting image of my mother around her eyes, and in the shape of her forehead.'

<Have her DNA tested if you don't believe me. Would you like to observe your wife with her lover?>

'No!' Leave me alone. This isn't what I want, Just leave me alone.' All the time I'm thinking this, of course, I'm also thinking that I'm going crazy. Still, I looked at Kaitlyn more closely. As she had gotten older, her hair had remained very blond. Not as white as it had been, but still far lighter than either my hair or Ginny's. Lighter than anyone I'd ever met on either side of our two families. My nose was pretty average in appearance, not distinctive or anything. No, I was being paranoid, that's all. Schizophrenic and paranoid. I wanted to cry. If I wasn't crazy, then the voices were real, and my wife had made a cuckold of me. She even had me loving and raising another guy's kid. If I was crazy, that was almost as bad. Either way, my life was shot to hell. I wasn't sure which way I wanted to root for it to turn out.

I went in and changed out of my old sweaty clothes, and took myself a long hot shower. I was upset. I was scared too. I really loved my little girl. I loved Ginny too, of course. Unless she had done all those things the voice had told me about. If she had done all that, then I hated her. I didn't want to know though. I was too much of a coward to want to know for sure. The thought that Kaitlyn might not be my child was the most upsetting thing of all to me. I dressed and walked back out into the living room.