Sweet Lamb of Heaven (25 page)

THE PRACTICE OF HYPNOTISM
seems to hover in the alt-medicine gray area, near chiropractors and acupuncturists. It's viewed as sporadically effective in treating certain bad habits and disorders, but tarnished by its history of showmanship.

The hypnotherapist had me lie down on a huge, brown recliner with wide arms—my arms had to be stretched out, hands laid flat, feet raised. She dimmed the lights, put on music, and asked me if the room's temperature was comfortable.

And I had to admit the temperature
was
comfortable. The air felt like a soft extension of my skin, without too much moisture or too much aridity. I could stay here, I thought.

A person could remain.

“Remember, I can't make you do anything you don't want to do,” she said. “This is a completely safe space.”

She had me close my eyes and listen to her voice describing a wooden rowboat over a deep blue lake. Out we went into the lake, rowing, rowing. Maybe I dove off the side of the boat or sank into the water, deeper, deeper, deeper; or maybe I was just looking down, looking into the water from the dry bench of the boat. I recall the color blue, the clarity of the lake water.

During this tranquil immersion a jellyfish floated up from the depths. I don't know whether it was associated with the therapist's words or only with my thoughts, but I gazed at it—a pink-white bulb with tendrils rippling. Although I wasn't asleep or dreaming I knew in the way of dreams, the passing of information that happens there where one thing is simultaneously another, that the jelly, having no place in fresh water, was an emissary from the ocean Kay had spoken of.

There was something to know here, something to discover. So when I left I made another appointment.

AROUND LUNCHTIME YESTERDAY
we got a call from downstairs: Will was in the lobby.

We went down in the elevator to meet him and there he stood, talking to the doorman.

Lena ran to him and hugged him and then turned her attention to the doorman, her friend. Will stepped away from them and turned to me, a woolen cap in his hands, the shoulders of his coat sparkling with melting snowflakes, and I was so happy to feel my stomach flip, to know how much I still liked him. More, even. His eyes, skin, mouth.

“I brought your car,” he said.

I'd been selfish. I'd given him nothing, and I'd added insult to injury by doubting him. Yet here he was.

He didn't ask to stay with us, in fact he had a friend's place lined up, but then he did stay.

It was good but curious, after so long a time—like walking through a forgotten wood. Like wandering beneath old trees, whose faint smell reminds you of a person you may once have been.

Not only does Will know
now
about the motel's Hearing Voices Movement—as I've come to call it privately—but he's known about it all along.

He knows the backstory of the motel guests; he's familiar with our group pathology. And he
has
known about it all, he says, since a couple of years after he got to know Don, when he first moved to Maine. Don has always lived there, as far as Will knows, like his father before him. He's a feature of the landscape and has never seemed to do anything but what he does now.

“But that's the thing. What
does
he do?” I asked.

Will shrugged.

“He's a host.”

We were in bed. I was so glad to be there, though at first it took me a while to relax about Lena, who was fast asleep in the bedroom and still too near for my sense of propriety.

“So confused people who hear voices have been coming there for years,” I said. “All of us with that same complaint.”

“You don't all seem the same to me,” he said.

The only unity I'd found in the guests was economic: none of them were poor. There were men and women, young and old, white, Asian and Iranian and Dutch Americans, straight and gay. We had no profession or other clear trait in common save money—everyone was at least middle-class, no one was on food stamps. I'm a former academic, Kay's a med student, Navid a producer; Burke is a botanist and between them the Lindas have three master's and a PhD.

“That's true,” said Will. “Because the poor don't weigh in on the channels Don uses to bring his guests together. He can't find them because he can't separate them in the social-service world from the population with schizoid conditions. They may be institutionalized or on the streets or just toiling, but they don't tend to be online so much. He doesn't have a way to get to them.”

But Don never found me online, or if he did I didn't know of it. I wondered if Will knew that too.

“Why does he
want
to bring them in?” I asked.

Maybe it was just group therapy, as Navid had alleged, I was thinking.

“He says it's just his role,” said Will.

After breakfast we sat on Solly's cheap, caving-in couch, which pushed us together comfortably in the middle, as Lena played with a magic coloring book Will had brought for her. Depending on how you flip through the book, its pages are blank or black-and-white or startling full color. Lena had wanted to do the trick in our coffee shop, but only a one-year-old had been present, on whom the trick was wasted. Babies think magic is normal, she said.

She flipped through the book as Will and I sat against each other, my laptop on my knees, his arm around my shoulders. Then I brought up the schedule and stared at it. Where before it had annoyed me, now the bristling field of white seemed ominous. Onscreen it didn't seem inert, as any other file would, but almost radioactive: it bore the weight of grim prediction.

By Ned's reckoning, it appears—or the reckoning of his aide or campaign runner or secretary, whoever created this schedule—my father will begin hospice in June and die before Independence Day.

NAVID CALLED ME
on the phone Will just bought me, his face popping up on the screen. I'd never bothered to use my cell that way before. He was wearing a headset and seemed to be sitting in a car: I saw the curves of a headrest behind him.

“Are you alone?”

I was trying to figure out how to hold the phone so that he didn't see the inside of my nose or ear. “Lena and Will are here. Can we just talk normally?”

“Yeah. I wanted to see it was you,” he said. “Now I've seen.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“So his donors fall into two categories. Industry kingmakers, the ones that run the politicians, first. Then there are others—also rich but not
as
rich, one or two have as much as half a billion in revenue, sometimes their wealth is shared among smaller entities or they're hidden behind so-called educational groups, these 501(c)4s—a big corporate entity of biblical literalists that owns hundreds of radio channels, for example. Those guys are his other backers.”

“It's not so surprising,” I said. “He's been talking the talk.”

“It's how he found you,” said Navid. “Turns out these guys have citizen networks. I wouldn't call it grassroots, there's too much money moving around for that. Or let me put it another way: there's money at the top and blue-collars at the bottom. Far's I can tell, the money at the top talks about ending the separation of church and state, making biblical law the law of the country. Like sharia, right? But Christian. End-times bringers. They use this shit to get the blue-collars to do their dirty work. It's cynical. So your husband's friends put out their version of an APB, you go down as a threat on the list they give out to their little-guy helpers across the country, and you're a target. I'm guessing it was your VIN that tipped them off. You took your car into the shop, right?”

“My VIN,” I repeated slowly.

I thought of Beefy John and the radio poster on his wall.

“Ned knew my father's cancer diagnosis before the doctors told my mother. Before there was even a biopsy. So I'm thinking maybe there was a scan or something, maybe the doctors knew earlier but just needed the biopsy to confirm to the family. Maybe someone connected to him had access and knew the probability.”

“I couldn't tell you for sure,” said Navid. “I can't get into hospital records. There are people who can, but it's not my bailiwick.”

It struck me after I hung up with him that he'd spoken faster than he used to when he was staying at the motel, he was energetic and focused but without the anger. High.

WHEN I PASSED
along Navid's discoveries Will gave me a look like
I told you so
—why I'm not sure, since there was nothing in what Navid had said that would link Ned to murder.

I keep trying to see clearly. There
are
clear signs out there, I feel sure, but all I can make out are the blurred edges. I feel a ghost of pressure on my lower back, the push that felt like the crown of a head. I remember a hooded child with a white face. Male or female, I don't know, but whatever it was stared out at me from a window of the subway train.

Either it was a simple accident or it was Ned's agency, no matter who was acting on his behalf. If it wasn't connected to Ned it shouldn't matter, since in that case it must have been pure accident. And it's a characteristic of accidents that they don't often identically repeat.

A programming language is an artificial language used to communicate instructions to a machine . . . thousands have been created rapidly in the computer field, and still many more are being created every year.
—Wikipedia 2016

ALONE IN HER SMALL
walk-up on Beacon Street, Kay took an overdose of sleeping pills last night. She lived but they had to resuscitate her, and now she's in a coma.

There
was
a bipolar diagnosis, as it turns out.

I can't bring myself to tell Lena. I should have been there to look out for Kay, should have done what I could: something. I seem to plod along in my own tracks, following footsteps I made before; this is always how I proceed, I don't look sideways, I'm not willing to stop. I was inside my own concern, blindered like that—worried about abstractions, worried about the future when for so many people, Kay for instance, the present is already a state of emergency.

I overlooked my duty for the sake of my convenience.

Will tries to tell me it's not my fault. I know I didn't cause it, but I didn't stop it either. I see what he's doing and I know it comes from affection, but listen: This is what we do for the people we're close to, all in the name of comforting. We ease the path for them to excuse their own failings.

We let them off the hook and call it love.

The truth is bare—I abandoned her, that tall, sad girl.

WHEN I WENT
back to the hypnotist I was like an addict. I rushed out of the apartment with the usual weight of guilt clutched to myself. The sessions are the only times I've left Lena with Will. And I do trust him, but he's not family.

I saw a city, mile upon mile of buildings, a cluster of tall commercial ones at the center and then, moving outward, the residential blocks, the tree-lined streets. The buildings were dilapidated but elegant, there was a detail of ornament to them like the tiny lines on an engraving, the careful, hair-thin lines of pictures on paper money.

The cave-in began in the distance, with the smallest, farthest buildings disappearing first, only visible as yellow clouds of dust billowed up and curled in. Like puffy hands clenching, I thought: beneath the furls of dust buildings were collapsing. Above them something dark raked down from a cloudbank, fouling the air.

I was standing in sand, sand that used to be an ocean and would be ocean again. I stood on the edge of the city as dust rose from the falling buildings. But these buildings were made out of words, locked into each other like bricks and beams—small words, minuscule words, inscrutable as seams.

Ned was coming, flying in from the west. His advent turned the distant sky black. Before him he whipped up a slave army, a crowd of gruesome flying things that drove billions of insects before them, clearing a path. The cloud was made of words too but the words were deformed, they meant confusion or blankness or insidious poison. What light filtered through them was cadmium yellow and leaked a slow disease.

I HAVEN'T SLEPT
well lately; I often sit staring at the screen of my laptop while Lena and Will are sleeping. I sit there and stare as the screen resolves into dull letters or right angles of light and fades into disinterest again. It was open to my inbox and at some point I noticed, on the left panel of the page, that my spam folder said 172. I clicked on it and was about to
Delete all spam messages now
when I saw, buried between an Enlarge Your Manhood and Hot Women in Your Neighborhood, another email from Kay.

I felt sick for a second, scared it was a suicide note or a goodbye letter—so sure I sat there for a long time gazing out Solly's window at the yellow and white squares in the buildings, tall rows of windows rising into the night sky. It's a sight I've always loved, assumed everyone loves: columns of lights in tall buildings at night in the city. Beneath them was the irregular black solid of the park's treetops.

Finally I looked back at the screen and it wasn't as dire as I'd thought. The date and timestamp were there as always, on the right: Kay's message hadn't been sent the day she took the pills; it had gone into my spam folder two days before.

Still, five more minutes passed before I was willing to click on it. I sat on and on at Solly's desk, counting the rows of yellow squares hovering midair, wondering what forms of life moved in the darkness of the park below.

The problem is, now, were going to be nothing BUT surface language. & no safeties, no backups, no checks & balances. The future is nothing
but
language, see, not languageS but language. Monolithic. The little ones are dying off @lightning speed. Programming Language, ad talk, 1 speech for all, a juggernot, that's where we're going Anna. All the native languages dead, all we'l have left is shells & false things & tongues spoken for profit &/or by machines. Don't u c Anna
this
is the tru end of God. When everything that lives the deep language dies. This is the end of God and not the fake god made up to look like us, not that fake god anna, the
real
god, the god tht IS evolution & speciation & Life, a god that did make the world, u see?—b/c this god
is
the beautiful unconscious, it is billion processes & intuitions under all of biology & personality & art, the thousands and millions of cultures of both Man and Beast. We're killing that deep god ana, the speakers of false language are suffocating the deep, they are the oil on the water beneath which all suffocates & dies
Satan is God weaponized
God weaponized by man