Sweet Lamb of Heaven (24 page)

But he shrugged it off as though the detail either wasn't accurate or wasn't relevant. Our father has a disease, our father has a potentially terminal illness of the kind we all fear for the insidious poison of its medicine, the emaciation of bodies, shedding of hair, desiccating of bones and aging of skin. That was all Solly had room for, and I can't blame him.

And our father will have to endure all that without ever understanding his illness. He'll be like a child throughout the suffering, confused and blinking as my mother herds him gently on.

I think of those scenes to come and I also think of my father when we were young and he was middle-aged instead of old—how he read us stories using different voices, some deep, some squeaky, here a quaking mouse, here a growling lion. I think of how he carried us on his shoulders—“so you can pretend to be giants.”

He had so much dignity back then, but he was willing to cast it off to entertain his children. He tickled us until we grew out of being tickled, he made corny jokes until we grew out of those too.

Now I feel an ache of remorse when I think how we stopped laughing at his jokes. I would laugh so hard, if I could have a do-over. I can see that to Solly we're only losing my father now, where to me we lost him some time ago—or maybe it's fairer to say that Solly seems to be able to lose him twice, while for me once was all I could do.

Still Ned's casual assertion a few weeks ago, his matter-of-fact statement that my father would get sick with lymphoma—which at that time I assumed was just a fictional element of the so-called narrative—vibrates so hard I almost get a headache. I've actually been taking painkillers when the thought of it starts to make my temples send out their thin flashes of pain.

But Ned's foreknowledge vies with the diagnosis for my attention and I can't let it go. It may be coincidence—or maybe it's information gleaned from surveillance. Could he be surveilling them as well as me, tracking my father's diagnosis? Observed by Ned or his consultants, did my mother find out weeks ago and only tell us now? And what use would it be for Ned to spy on my parents anymore, when he already has my cooperation, when I've already done what he wanted me to do?

I'm going to ask my mother tomorrow when she heard the diagnosis. I'll reassure her that it's not a problem if she decided to delay telling us—we understand completely. But I need to know when she heard.

YESTERDAY
, she said.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech . . . And the Lord said, Behold: The people is one, and they have all one language . . . and now nothing will be restrained from them . . . Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
—Genesis 11:1–7

I HAVE IT—
I have it here on my desktop, a written record.

It's in the “templates,” as he and his staff call them: the schedule for the narrative, with our travel dates; the list of his positions on issues, which I'm supposed to know even though I won't parrot them, and a partial list of planned public appearances, both with Lena and me and without us; the breakdown of campaign employees by job description, plus key volunteers. All this is supposed to be memorized before our next stint in Alaska.

It's so repellent that I hadn't looked at it after a cursory glance, but here it is. The templates are connected to my laptop's calendar, which I don't use for anything else, with events assigned to months or weeks or days. The events pop up, color-coded, and I can't take them off again—I tried once and it gave me a message about contacting the administrator.

Apparently I don't have permission.

The developments connected to my father, and therefore my extended absences from Anchorage and Ned's campaign, are lime-green bars extending across several different blocks of days on the calendar.

They're labeled like this, on various dates:

LYMPHOMA STAGE 3. DIAGNOSIS, PROCESSING

TREATMENT MODULE 1: SURGERY, CHEMOTHERAPY

TREATMENT MODULE 2: RADIATION

METASTASIS: BONE MARROW, CEREBROSPINAL FLUID

And there's one I didn't notice before, a little further on.

PALLIATIVE CARE/MEMORIAL SERVICE

“Lymphoma Stage 3” is assigned to this month, the month we're in right now: February.

I called Ned, I left a voicemail for him asking how he knew, but I strongly doubt he'll tell me anything at all.

He typically has his staff email me when information needs to be exchanged; he and I don't communicate.

“STAGE 3,
” said my mother, on the phone again.

I'M PASTING IN
an email I got from Kay, strange and dense. I think she may be bipolar.

You said you wanted to hear everything I know. So OK. So I have trouble explaining how I know it & what it is—writing isn't my thing. I mean I was more the organic chem type!!! I used to get visions of like resonance structures & chair conformations & stuff, when I was holdig Infant V. But so. You know how I told you we r the only ones it leaves, what I meant was, it doesn't leave the whales or the crocodiles, it doesn't leave the plants & the trees, & that's not because, like, theyre dumb. Theyre not. Deep language is in all living things but all the others, it stays with. Only not humans. Its because the other things, apes, cats, even the grasses in a field, don't live just for themselves. They live for the group. They live for all, this whole of being. We used to be like that to, once a long time ago, once in our evolution, I don't know when but once. But slowly it chaged & now we live for ourselves. So the deep language does'nt stay with us when we get our own, our surface language, you coud call it. We split off from it then & are forever alone. God leaves us Anna.

God leaves us.

I can't tell how much is rumination or fabrication, whether some is intuition, how much she was given to know. In short I'm not sure if she has much authority.

But I'm keeping her message. I read it over in quiet times.

MORE GUESTS ARE
leaving the motel, Big Linda reports, all vowing to keep in touch—I've started to check in on the Listserv, where so far Navid's the only one absent. Regina and Reiner have gone back to their professions in the city, and Gabe has decamped too. He cited the needs of a lonely Bedlington terrier, pining away under the care of a neighbor back at the condo he shares with Burke, who's soon to follow him home.

And what did they accomplish with the meetings? I get Navid's impatience, though I wish he'd been nicer to Kay. Unlike me, the rest of the guests knew about each other before they came—they had an earlier version of the Listserv. They'd already exchanged messages containing much of what they'd say later, alongside the table of watery coffee and stale cookies. So I was the only new element. And they can't have got much from me.

I never illuminated anything.

I account, on my fingers, for all the elements of these events I keep failing to understand. I wish I had an abacus—confusion like this calls for a deliberate, manual counting, a ritual of organization. Digits or beads, bones or a rosary. Even assuming there does exist an ambient language that underlies life, what some people call God, others possibly photosynthesis or humpback song or the opinions of a dog, I have the same questions that I always did. I want to know why I heard it, and why through Lena; why it fell silent when she slept; why it departed when she said her first word. I want to know not only its rules but its purpose, but all of that remains opaque to me.

There are the practical questions, too: How did I know to go to the motel? How was Ned able to find me? How did John know to contact him, when I took my car in to his shop?

And how did Ned know my father's diagnosis?

On the face of it my questions about Ned are in a different category. And yet there's the lymphoma diagnosis. This is new, this introduces a fresh mystery, and it counts just as fluidly on my fingers as the questions that came before.

It was recorded digitally, “Lymphoma Stage 3,” a number of weeks, not days but weeks, before the doctors even biopsied my father. It was set in stone then, it has a path, a history that can be verified—the fact that he had that information, or at least that he acted as though he had it.

Lymphoma Stage 3.

I WAS ALONE
in the subway today, coming back from getting my hair cut, during which appointment Lena had stayed at home with Solly and Luisa. I was on a crowded platform at Columbus Circle with my bag over my shoulder and a book in my other hand—I must have been standing distractedly at the front hem of the crowd, my paperback curled back on itself in my hand as I read.

Then there were the lights and roar of the train. I felt a push behind me like a head butting against the small of my back and suddenly I was teetering, one of my legs over the edge, before someone grabbed my arm and my book flew out of my hand and I was jerked back, the tendons in my neck strained and one shoulder wrenched.

With a rush the train was screeching to a stop, people surging past me as the doors opened, jostling me and turning me around. I felt a weird heat prickle where my scalp meets my face, was breathless and seeing spots of light. Somehow I found my way to a bench, newly vacated and still ass-warm.

I never knew who pushed me or if it had been an accident, or who caught my arm and saved me either—maybe the push was just the movement of the crowd, that's the likeliest explanation. Right? But as the train pulled away I noticed a child staring at me through a train door, a dark-hooded child with a white face, and the child's head turned as the train moved, the child was staring at me fixedly . . . it had been a forceful push, so forceful it seemed it must have been purposeful.

Or so I felt as I sat there.

As soon as I got over the shock a wave of gratitude washed over me, a pure beam of gratitude struck out toward my unknown rescuer—how impossible it always is, I thought intently, to remember how lucky we are each second we remain alive.

When the train was long gone and the platform bare, I got up shakily and walked back to the edge. On the tracks was my book, ripped up and streaked with gray, its pages spread over the black. I gazed down at it for a while and then sat down again to wait for the next train. I wanted to call someone, maybe Will, maybe Solly, but of course there was no signal in the tunnel. And what had happened, anyway?

When the next train finally came rushing in I found I was trembling. I had to press my back against the cool, grimy tile of the wall. Presently I left and hailed a taxi.

Since then my day has been cast in a fractured light. I go back and forth between telling myself it was pure accident and wondering if Don and Will's fears deserve more serious consideration.

I SENT AN EMAIL
to Navid. Can I find out online, I asked him, who's financing Ned's campaign? I wouldn't mind knowing who Ned's backers are, what interests they represent and how deeply embedded their money is in institutions. Maybe one of them has connections to hospital records, who knows, some shadowy X-rays that were interpreted before the biopsy without my parents' knowledge—some link that would provide an explanation for that premature diagnosis.

Ned left his family of origin when he was in his teens, left and never looked back. His father had disappeared when he was an infant, his mother was strung out or drunk all the time, and there were no others. He lived outside the house anyway, from when he was twelve or thirteen, only returning to sleep. This was what I had gleaned, anyway, from the couple of times he'd talked about it to me.

But somewhere, now, he has another family. I want to know who his new family is.

WALKING BY MYSELF
to get a carton of milk, I suddenly spun on my heel and entered the business with the
HYPNOSIS
sign. I hadn't planned it.

There was no receptionist, only a counter with a fiber-optic lamp sitting on it, an abstract medley of colored lights pulsing. I wondered how a hypnosis business made the street-level storefront rent in this neighborhood; I rang a push-button bell on the counter and heard an electronic chime. After a minute a woman came in from the back, a woman with a soft, homely face and wavy hair. She was about to close up for the evening, she said, could she help me?

There was a voice, an auditory hallucination I used to have, when my child was a baby, I told her. I wanted to remember it now—wanted to hear it again to see if I could figure out what it had said. Could that kind of memory retrieval occur through hypnosis?

She asked me if the voice had issued instructions, had told me to do anything I didn't want to do.

I said no. No instructions.

She asked me a couple more questions I guessed were supposed to screen for mental illness, then hemmed and hawed briefly. She said there were no guarantees, that it was up to me, in a sense, what was accessed, but sure, she was willing to give it a shot. She could implant a suggestion that this “voice” return, she said; she could invite my mind to generate the “voice” again.

She had me sign a waiver and I made an appointment.

NAVID WROTE BACK
saying he'd research Ned's funding. He was good at following money trails, he said. Somehow he doesn't seem to blame me as he blames Kay and Don; with me he doesn't seem to have a bone to pick. Or maybe, because of what happened to Lena, he's just sorry for me.

USING VACATION TIME
, Solly's going to visit my parents and taking Luisa with him. He wants to be there to help out, as he puts it, but has urged Lena and me to stay here in the apartment without him. All four of us descending on my parents would be a burden and not what the doctor ordered.

It is possible that all languages spoken today are related through direct or indirect descent from a single ancestral tongue.
—Wikipedia 2016