I was standing near the open door of my hospital room when I heard a voice. I listened closely and the sound grew fainter, as if it were somehow folding in on itself. There was a kind of taunting echo, like the noise that can be heard when you hold a conch shell to your ear. This noise was categorically different from anything I had ever heard before and anything I’ve heard since. It was what William James, in his essay on the “unclassified residuum,” might have described as one of those “wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole.”
