The voices arrived without warning on an October night in 1962, when I was fourteen years old. Kill yourself....Set yourself afire, they said. Only moments before, I’d been listening to a musical group called Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons singing “Walk like a man, fast as I can…” on the small radio that sat on the night table beside my bed. But the terrible words I heard now were not the lyrics to that song. I stirred, thinking I was having a nightmare, but I wasn’t asleep; and the voices–low and insistent, taunting and ridiculing–continued to speak to me from the radio. Hang yourself, they told me. The world will be better off. You’re no good, no good at all.

Terrified, I turned off the radio, got out of bed, and crept down the hallway in my bare feet, a full harvest moon lighting my way. But the voices would not be tuned out. They accompanied me. You should die, muttered one. You should never have been born, shrieked another. They were talking to me…someone or something wanted me to die. Who was doing the talking? What was going on? I turned the handle to the door of my parents’ bedroom, looking for safety, but my mom and dad were sleeping soundly, and I was afraid to wake them. I knew they had to go to work in the morning. My parents, Sarah and Kenneth Steele, both had jobs at the Timex plant in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from the little town of Prospect where we lived. And even if I woke them, what would I say? The voices supplied an answer. Go right in to him, they said. Tell your dad that you’re afraid of the dark and then tell him about us. It will only confirm what he already knows–that you’re different, a disappointment.

My father, named Kenneth but called Bud, had wanted a baseball-playing son; I was a boy who read books. I took my first steps dragging along a baseball bat that my father had placed in my hand. Later, I can remember peeing in my pants during a Little League baseball game so that I wouldn’t have to play, but Dad forced me to go out on the field in the soiled uniform. Over the years, in ways both stern and subtle, he made it abundantly clear that I had failed him. He won’t believe you. The voices were right: This was not a man to whom I could confide that I was hearing things.

I wandered down the stairs of our tidy Cape Cod-style house to my grandmother’s bedroom. Emma Mae Wilder-White, my mother’s mother, was my best friend. I could tell her anything and she would still love me. As I turned the knob to her room, the voices in my head grew shriller and louder until I felt I was drowning in sound. Die, die, die. You’re worthless, no good. Do it now, not later. I staggered into the living room and collapsed in the floor.

My mother found me lying there in the morning.

“What are you doing up so early?" she asked, shaking my shoulder. I mumbled some sort of answer, something Mom could accept. I remember thinking that my mother had arrived, like a lifeguard, to rescue me and that now I was safe. But my relief was short-lived. The voices were still there, lower in volume and chattering in the singsong cadence that children use to taunt one another. Na na na na na / We’re still he-ere / You thought you got rid of us / No such lu-uck.

Standing over me in the still-darkened room, my mom was saying, “What are you doing downstairs in your pajamas, Kenny? Have you brushed your teeth? Don’t let your father find you like this.” There were two sound tracks coming at me at once; I felt bombarded by the noise and terrified by the strangeness of what was happening. Act normal, I told myself.

I washed and dressed hurriedly. Look how ugly you are, look at those blackheads, the voices taunted as I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror. A familiar face stared back at me: wavy brown hair, eyes that others might have described as handsome. Like most teenagers, I was hypercritical of my appearance. But the voices were even harsher. You’re ugly, they screamed. How can you bear to look at yourself? I went down to breakfast and forced myself to eat. My parents soon left for work, and, as she did every morning, Grandma let me watch the Today show, my favorite television program, before I left for school. (Our house was directly across from Algonquin Junior High, and it took only minutes for me to leave one and arrive at the other.)

Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs were co-anchors of the Today show in those days. There was a film critic named Judith Crist, whom I liked, and a newscaster whose name I don’t recall. As I sat in front of the TV, all these people began to talk about me. They spoke in borrowed voices, as if their own voices had been dubbed over by actors in a foreign film. Today, Kenny Steele will kill himself, roared the newscaster in a voice he might use to warn viewers of a fast-advancing hurricane. An electric shock ran through my body. Had I heard right?

Seconds later, Hugh Downs spoke to me in a deeper voice: Don’t kill yourself, Kenny. Don’t give up. Try not to do it. Barbara Walters conducted a posthumous interview with me. Why did you kill yourself? she asked. Did you really mean to do it? When it was Judith Crist’s turn, the voice that came out of her told me what a fine movie my death would make. The voices were loud and clear. I sat transfixed before the TV set. Then the voices grew low and began whispering about me. He’s listening, said one. Well, that’s exactly what I want him to do, answered another. A third voice joined the duo. Leave home, this voice demanded with harsh urgency. These people are no good for you. Leave now.

I raced out the door. The voices were screaming at me. Run, run, run, you coward. I turned right and ran past the school building but did not go in. Instead, I headed for the forest next to the school. I hoped to hide from the voices among the dense foliage, but they found me and continued their diatribe. You’re worthless….Your parents don’t want you around anymore….You could leave home….Leave home….Better yet, you could kill yourself….Yes, that’s it. That’s the answer….Die. The tall trees became giant question marks. Whose voices were these? Why were they saying such terrible things about me?

I don’t know how long I lingered in the forest that day, but I do recall that when I returned home Grandma was clearly upset. She took one look at me, stroked my forehead, and declared, “You’re running a temperature, Kenny.” It was a fever of 102 degrees, enough to have my mother stay home from work the next day–a rare occasion because her pay would be docked. In a few days, the fever went away and I went back to school. But the voices stayed with me, and I began to struggle to put one foot in front of the other, to make it through each and every day.

A couple of weeks later, on October 22, Dad came home from work excited. “The president will be speaking about the Cuban missile crisis tonight,” he said. “I want you to hear what he has to say about the Communists.” I joined my father in the living room, and he turned on the TV set. As President Kennedy spoke to the nation, my voices spewed obscenities at me. It was impossible for me to hear and understand what was being said about the missile crisis, something that my father clearly cared a great deal about.

The president concluded his talk, and Dad began to speak to me. Here’s what I heard:

What are they teaching you in school
Don’t listen to your father. He’s no good.

about Khruschev and Cuba and about those
Don’t answer his questions….

My father was worried about the looming international crisis, and he wanted to make sure I was learning the right things, but I was drowning in these cacophonous sounds and couldn’t answer him. I felt powerless to pull myself to safety. In response to his barrage of questions, I mumbled, “What?” and “I don’t know.” Dad knew I wasn’t ignorant, so he decided I was being willful. What happened next only confirmed that belief.

Whenever I was near a television set or radio, the voices grew louder and more intense, and there seemed to be more of them. It was as if they were writing and directing the story of my life, telling me what I could and could not do, leaving little room for improvisation. That evening, the voices won out. As my father quizzed me about what we had seen on TV, what I knew, what I thought, I did as the voices directed: I put my hands over my ears and turned my back to him.

Dad became enraged. “Go to bed without dinner,” he ordered me, stalking out of the living room. It was a punishment he rarely imposed. Ungrateful boy, now see what you’ve done, said my voices. You have disappointed your father one more time. Your parents deserve a better son than you.

Soon they would have one. Some time after the voices first visited me, my mother and father told me they were expecting a baby. They had tried for years to have another child, had even declared several pregnancies that turned out to be false, but this pregnancy was apparently the real thing. I did not share their joy. An only child for close to fifteen years, I wasn’t eager to welcome a rival for their attention and affections. If I have to have a sibling, I prayed, let it be a sister.

But the voices knew better. They had decided the baby would be a boy, and on several terrifying occasions they made it seem as if “he” were speaking to me. I am coming, I’m going to be born, my soon-to-be brother would whisper menacingly from inside my mother’s swollen stomach. You have to leave. Soon other voices would join in–a deafening chorus that dictated ways in which I might manage my leave-taking: Take a radio into the bathtub and electrocute yourself….Jump in front of a car at night on Route 69….Pour charcoal lighter fluid over your body and set yourself afire….Hang yourself in the forest. They would provide precise instructions on how to perform these suicides, and I would listen, riveted by their sounds and sights–for by now I was also being visited by strange images: indistinct shapes that swayed before my mind’s eye.

At times, the images would appear more clearly, but only for split seconds, like a camera shutter opening and closing so quickly that I couldn’t recognize what I was being shown. These visual images came and went, but the voices were with me always–sometimes roaring in my ears, sometimes chattering in the background. Increasingly, I found myself inclined to obey their commands.

My brother, Joseph Robert Steele, was born on May 10, 1964. The fact that the voices had correctly determined his sex gave them a lot of credibility. He’s here now, they said, laughing maniacally. Joey is the good son….He’s the one they wanted….Wait and see, Joey will be a professional baseball player: (In fact, when Joe grew up, he came quite close to playing ball professionally.) Your dad will love him more, and he’ll deserve it….It’s time for you to go….Stop hanging around.

Only two things, reading and writing, could tone the voices down. When I read, I entered the world of David Copperfield or Huckleberry Finn; I’d suffer the growing pains of Holden Caulfield or the agonies of Oliver Twist. The voices would then become muffled, like a radio playing in the background. And so I read voraciously. I read everything I could get my hands on, while the voices waited in the wings, ready to surge onto the stage as soon as I turned the last page. We had a set of the World Book Encyclopedia, and I read all the volumes, some of them two or three times. I read my way through the last year of junior high school and wrote frantically, scribbling page after page of homework, trying to finish before the voices took over. Amazingly, I graduated from junior high with honors.

By graduation, however, I had separated myself from most of my friends. See, even your friends don’t like you anymore, the voices told me. See how they look at you? Strange…Look at Johnny. He used to be your best friend. He’s out to get you now.

More and more, I stayed at home, afraid to ride my bike in the street. Who knew what dangers lurked beyond the door of my home? Still, I managed to cover up what was happening to me, or so I thought. For the first three years, I was at times able function in both the event world (get up, go to school, help take care of the baby) and my hallucinatory world, but I walked a thin wire. Grandma would overhear me responding out loud to the voices’ demands and think I was on the phone with a friend. Apparently, she hadn’t noted that my schoolmates no longer called or came by. “Kenny, you know your parents want you to keep the phone free,” she’d call out, reminding me of the house rules. Her voice would bring me back to reality. “Sorry, Grandma,” I’d say, and I’d walk into the kitchen where she was preparing dinner, trying to stay calm, to show her that all was well.

But all was far from well. The voices were stepping up their demands that I destroy myself. No simple death for you, they railed. Guts and gore and a big mess…that’s the way you must take your life. Sometimes, they would start whispering, as if they were plotting against me, and I had to strain to hear them, or they would imitate monks performing a Gregorian chant, speaking to me in the Latin that was then still used in the celebration of the Roman Catholic mass. Then they would warn me, Remember, Kenny, you cannot be forgiven your sins when you commit suicide. The message was clear: I would die, but I’d fail to achieve grace.

Day after day, I flailed about in an ocean of sound so overwhelming that I would sometimes find myself capitulating to the voices’ demands. “Okay, I’ll kill myself,” I would tell them. Anything….if they would only let me be for a while. I was a perpetual guest at a noisy party, seeking a quiet corner, vainly trying to bargain for just a little peace.

“Okay, I’ll set myself on fire….I’ll hang myself. Yes, yes, I’ll kill myself.” It was August. Only when I heard my mother scream and felt my father shaking me into consciousness did I realize that I had blurted out those words in the living room in front of my entire family. The voices told me what I needed to do then. No more hiding. Your family knows everything now, they said. You’ve got to escape….Get out that door….Run, run, run. You’ve got to die.

And so I ran away from home. I ran to the same forest in which I had sought refuge the first time the voices had descended on me. It was black under the white birches, maples and pine trees, their stinging branches as dark as my fear. In the forest, the voices took over completely, but–strangely–they also seemed softer, more consoling. It’s really not your fault. You didn’t bring this on yourself, you know. Still, their message was the same: You have to die.

Over the last several months, this message had become more potent, for the voices had offered to help, even giving me explicit instructions. Get a rope, they ordered me, twelve feet long and two inches thick. I’d gone to a hardware store and bought the rope. Tie the noose with a sea knot, and make sure it’s tied tight, the voices said, but they hadn’t told me how to make the knot. One day at school, I approached a fellow Boy Scout, someone who had done knot-tying to earn one of his badges. “How can I learn to tie a sea knot?” I asked him. He gave me the name of an instruction manual, an old New England primer with drawings of tall ships, that provided illustrated, step-by-step directions on how to tie knots, how to expand the size of a loop, how to make sure the knot would not come out. I’d found a copy of the book in the town library, and I practiced tying knots.

At the direction of the voices, I had also taken a step stool from the basement and hidden it in the forest, covering it over with branches and leaves. I’d bought lighter fluid and matches and left them in a small locker that I’d hidden in the same area. When all the preparations had been made, the voices were pleased with me. Good, your suicide kit is complete, they said.

That night–the night I ran away–I made three different attempts on my life. First, I got up on the stool, then tied the noose around my neck. But even though I tossed and thrashed about, I couldn’t manage to kick the stool away. I had failed, and the voices made much of this. You weren’t able to do this simple thing, they said. You’re not man enough. They called me things like sissy and faggot. They called me a sow. You’re a fucking pig, they said. I got down from the stool. Then the voices turned into a wave of sound so strong, I felt as if I’d been physically knocked down by their force. Tears streaming down my face, I located the charcoal lighter fluid and poured it on my head. I could not bring myself to light a match.

The highway, I thought, half running, half dragging myself in my disoriented state about a mile to Route 69, a well-traveled road that connects Waterbury to New Haven, Connecticut. My plan was to leap in front of a car. I stood at the side of the road. Headlights were coming at me. Now, I told myself, but just then I noticed a spotlight atop the car. What if this was a state police car? What if the police were coming for me? Panicked, I ran back from the road, back toward the school that sat dark and deserted in the summer night. I crouched behind the building, clinging to its hard concrete walls for what seemed like eternity. After a while, I went back to the forest and fell asleep.

The following morning, I rose and headed for home. My parents’ cars were in the driveway. It must be the weekend or a holiday, I figured; that’s why their cars were there. It never occurred to me that my mom and dad were home because of the events of the previous night. Two state trooper cars were parked outside our house. Dad stood in our front yard, talking animatedly with the troopers. They’re going to shoot you. See the guns in their holsters? Your dad is arranging to have you killed. I froze in my tracks. My dad turned and saw me.

My parents had called the troopers, reporting me as a runaway who had threatened suicide. Now the officers wanted to escort me to the hospital for observation. Dad convinced them to let him take me to our family physician, Dr. Sullivan, instead. He phoned the doctor, who agreed to see me at the end of the day.

It was growing dark and pouring when we drove up to keep the appointment. The doctor’s office was in a three-story building with a large porch that ran almost its full length. Only a few windows on the first floor were lit. The other physicians who shared the suite of medical offices had gone home.

After letting us in, Dr. Sullivan asked my parents if he could speak with me alone. I have no memory of what the doctor said or did, but I clearly recall the looks of worry and confusion on my parents’ faces when the doctor called them back in and spoke with them. I remember the expression on my strong father’s face. I had never seen it before. It was a look of total defeat.

Mom, Dad, and I returned home. Later that night, I heard my father speaking on the telephone. He was talking about me. He was telling the person on the other end that I had a very serious mental illness. It had a long name, and I remember wanting to know how to spell it. That way, I could look it up in the library–like finding out how to make a sea knot–and learn how to deal with the illness, how to get rid of the voices and all the crazy ideas and thoughts that had been swirling in my mind.

I walked over to my dad and asked him if he would spell the disease that Dr. Sullivan said I was suffering from. Dad leaned his forehead into his left hand and handed me a small slip of paper that he held in his right hand. On it, there was one word, neatly printed in capital letters: