Finishing a Stranger's Sentences

It started as ordinary eavesdropping. Two men at the next table, one telling the other about a disastrous camping trip, me half-listening over a flat white.

Then the pre-echo began. He said 'and the tent pole snapped at two in the morning' — but I had already heard the sentence, complete with his little cough before 'snapped', about one second earlier, arriving in my head the way a remembered song lyric arrives. I put my cup down. He continued; the narration in my skull continued, one beat ahead, sentence after sentence. 'Marcus wanted to sleep in the car.' Beat. 'Marcus wanted to sleep in the car.' 'But the keys were in the tent.' Beat. 'But the keys were in the tent.'

I want to stress the fidelity of it. Not gist — wording. His pauses, his repeated 'anyway', the place where he said 'brolly' when I would have said 'umbrella'. My inner copy said 'brolly' first.

It ran perhaps ninety seconds, and the whole time I sat rigid with my heart tapping, testing it. I tried to jump ahead — to hear the story's ending early. I could not; the echo kept its fixed one-second lead, no more, like a broadcast delay running backwards.

It ended mid-sentence. He said 'so we drove home at' — my head went silent — 'dawn,' he finished, and the word arrived like any other word, in my ears alone, at normal speed. The relief was physical, a plug pulled from somewhere behind my eyes.

I have a psychologist friend, and I gave her the account that evening while it was fresh. She talked about dual-processing lags, perception buffering ahead of awareness. It is a good theory and I hold onto it. It just does not explain the last part: as they were leaving, the storyteller glanced at me, looked slightly startled, and said to his friend, perfectly audibly, 'weird — I feel like I've told him this before.'