Sweet Lamb of Heaven (26 page)

Now is the point of danger b/c true language is the Soul Anna, tru deep language the soul & the soul can be
ruined
. God needs us Anna, as much as we need god

I WONDER IF
Ned's allies are mostly true believers or, like him, mere opportunists.

Will believes, like Don with his geese and songbird migrations, that I found my way to them via some kind of homing instinct, since a couple of others over the years have showed up without prior contact. He thinks it's part of the background orchestration of the deeper language, an urge that underlies our patterns of survival.

It isn't that I learned nothing at the motel, only that as soon as I learned it I seemed to always have known it, yet still feel I know nothing at all. Burke with his speaking tree, Linda with her theme-park whale, Kay with Infant Vasquez—I picture Burke's maple in its arboretum, planted halfway across the world from where it evolved, a lone specimen with a plaque in front of it bearing its names, both Latin and common. So unlike the aspen that grew not far away from that arboretum—those cloned aspen, connected underneath the earth, that lived as one for what could be millennia . . . I watch a pigeon strut around on Solly's windowsill, dirty but free, and wonder about the orca in its pool, its home only twice the length of its body.

They did have something in common, all those the voice spoke through: they were captives. Even Infant Vasquez, who quickly died, or Lena, who lived on and spoke. All infants are kept creatures, after all. I remember how snatches of poetry were given out to unfortunates when we passed them; I think of prisoners and victims and martyrs, the persistent notion of their closeness to God. I think of how a tinge of the divine rests on the hurt or unfortunate, how so many of them wear a kind of halo of gilded pity.

But if the injured and wretched
are
closer, what does it point to? Likely we give the poor and weak and sick their halos reflexively, I think, to make it easier to detach from them and not have to do fuck all. We give them sympathy in the place of help. We say they're not like us, they're sanctified and only half-human. They might as well be on a cross.

I recall acutely how abjection makes you a part of a herd. The kidnapping left me feeling robbed, not just of my assumptions about freedom but of my personality—no one has personality when their leg's being amputated, no one has personality when their eye's being poked out. You don't have any selfhood when you're suffering extremely: in suffering you could be anyone. Whether that makes you
everyone
, though, is a different question.

And I don't like the proposition that suffering puts us closer to each other. That suffering isolates the sufferer—this is equally valid.

So Will has comforted me over Kay. He's trying to be kind, of course, and I'd do the same if our positions were reversed, you don't question the rightness of trying to comfort someone. As behaviors go, it's universally acclaimed. Yet he told me there wasn't anything I could have done, when in fact there was: I could have done more than nothing.

I think of the duress that can be brought to bear on a soul, how selfhood, which we depend on so completely, is a luxury good.

I turn my palms up reflexively, thinking of those who suffer their whole lives. As though the gesture would make me one of them.

WE LEAVE SOON
, after one last hypnosis session. Kay has been moved to a hospital in Boston, near where her parents live. We will visit her there on the way to see my parents.

LYING IN THE RECLINER
I found myself walking along an institutional hallway, following green footsteps on the white floor—the footsteps were color-coded to the different wings and there were colored lines along the ceilings, too. I walked with deliberate steps until I came to a room.

An older woman sat in a chair, knitting with blue-gray yarn. The nightstand was crowded with propped-open cards. But instead of lying inert in her coma, Kay hovered above the bed. Her levitation had a Buddhist quality—though her posture was comfortable, not a straight-backed, cross-legged stance as in meditation or yoga. She slumped a bit, relaxed, and remained in the air smiling down at me, with a serene quality that's rare inside the confines of real life.

I wanted to rise to where she was, but I couldn't, so at an angle from each other, she high and me low, we gazed out the window. Out there was the crumbling city of words, much as I'd seen it before, though farther in the distance, dust rising from its slow-motion collapse. Kay nodded and stared. Her face had a kind of shining, imperturbable sadness like a bronze statue in a park, somehow civic.

I followed her gaze back to the window again and saw it wasn't a window after all but a computer screen.

She wouldn't explain at first, though her face kept on gleaming with a smooth and oddly official grief: yes, her grief seemed ceremonial. It was a stately mourning, like a dignitary presiding over a state funeral.

Expository words scrolled quickly along the windowsill.

IF Our symbols are corrupt. IF Our tools are made of symbols. IF We are made of our tools. ∴ We are made of our symbols. ∴ W
E ARE CORRUPT
W
E ARE CORRUPT
W
E ARE CORRUPT
W
E ARE CORRUPT
W
E

The last sentence ran on repeating forever, scrolling across the bottom of the screen like a stock-market ticker tape.

“Think of social-media websites,” said Kay.

For some reason she insisted on speaking silently, using a comic-book speech bubble.

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“Think of all those sites, all those apps, the billions of selfies. Now we filter ourselves through them. Sometimes it's our whole presentation of ourselves to the world. That's all that enters the social sphere—that imprint of our ego is all that ever meets up with the collective.”

“Seriously?”

I was sorely disappointed that here, under hypnosis, an oracle appeared and spoke to me, and the subject turned out to be
social media
.

The oracle had actually said the word
apps
.

“Lena will be all symbols, by the time she's grown up,” said Kay. “I'm sorry to inform you. It's a fact. Nothing but symbols, your little girl.”

The lights dimmed in her room, and in the corners dark beings flitted. I couldn't see them but I knew they were only half-alive, hybrids of flesh and machine, and they moved through the pipes in the walls, among the wires and conduits. Those too, the long tubes and threads that were supposed to be inanimate, moved sluggishly behind the drywall. Between the girders they pulled themselves in. Closer and closer they approached.

“Why do you pretend to know everything?” I asked her. “Are you right about it all? Or are you just sick?”

Kay's face kept on shining, turned away from me, but the knitting mother looked up from her bedside chair. Now the hands in her lap, holding a panel of blue-gray yarn that might have been a scarf, were made of metal: robot hands, with clicking needles. Her face was contorted with rage.

“This isn't a dream, Kay. It's more like a horror movie,” I said.

She was supposed to be trustworthy—she'd watched over my daughter's sleep, cried to me and told me about her life. But telling a feeling isn't the same as knowing someone, I thought regretfully. We think it is. A piece of the Freudian inheritance. People tell their emotions, tell their
emotional story
, and think that equates to knowing each other.

The pipes in the walls turned from ducts or sacks to the old bones of patients, bones that fed out their cold onto me so that the hairs rose on the back of my neck and my forearms. Yet when I tilted my head back the ceiling hadn't gone brittle at all but was warm and rotten, like pink foam breathing.

Kay turned her head slowly and looked at me, and when she smiled I saw her teeth were gray, not regular teeth but some kind of ugly digital code that shifted and moved in her mouth.

It looked a bit like hieroglyphs, a bit like 1's and 0's.

I thought:
What have they done to her?

Suddenly her mouth opened wide, wider and wider, far too wide. And something ugly streamed out.

“Your little girl won't even need her face,” she said.

9

TO THE WHITE CASTLE

F
OR A WHILE LENA AND I ARE GOING TO STAY WITH WILL. I DON'T
want to move back into the motel—memories of the kidnapping give the place an edge of chilled hardness for me, replacing the clean sea air, the pine needles I loved for their scent and sharpness, with an atmosphere of dread.

Will wants to be my bodyguard, and if he had his way I'd never be out of his sight. This has a cloying aspect, but more and more, during our last days in New York, I found myself hugging the sides of the buildings as I hurried down the sidewalk. I'd catch myself glancing around to make sure that no one was following me, no one was looking at me too purposefully.

I may not be any safer in Maine, but I want to see trees again that weren't planted by city planners. I'd like to take Lena sledding. I remember Will's house as neat and tasteful, floor lamps instead of fluorescents, old rugs and a lot of bookshelves. And next to Solly's apartment it's the Taj Mahal.

I'VE FOUND
a replacement for the hypnosis sessions and this afternoon, our first of three days with my parents in Providence, tried it for the first time. Lena was sitting at my father's feet putting on a show with puppets she'd made out of paper bags; Will was fixing a broken step on the porch. So I retreated to my childhood bedroom, which still bore the dusty traces of my teenage self—the pocked bulletin board that had held printouts of pop-star faces, snapshots of me with my arms around friends, a stray ribbon or two.

One ribbon that's been pinned to my corkboard for twenty years says just P
ARTICIPANT
.

I lay down carefully on the bed on my back, stuck in my earbuds, and cued up a twenty-minute hypnosis track downloaded from a website: “Goodbye to Stress.”

All it did was put me to sleep, but I'll try again tonight.

Later Will and my mother cornered me in the kitchen; she plied me with peppermint tea and announced she wanted to have a serious talk about “personal security.”

Somehow Will had convinced her I need protection. At least, she said, I could agree that there was a risk and humor her by letting Will install a home security system. Then she could rest easy, she said (and here she looked careworn and shaky—more elderly, I realized, than she ever had before). She already had my father to worry about; she didn't want to have to worry about Lena and me too.

I pictured a couple of sluggish rent-a-cops pulling up fifteen minutes too late, shooting the breeze about their personal lives as they casually dismounted from a company car whose doors were emblazoned with a bogus-looking shield. I don't like the idea of being guarded by electronics, of being sealed off from the world outside. More surveillance, I was thinking—all it's done in the past is harm us. It was surveillance that allowed my daughter to be taken from me.

But my mother looked drained. Resistance was futile.

“It's already being set up,” said Will gravely.

Panic welled up: I'd done everything Ned asked, everything I could possibly do to meet his demands, and still maybe it wasn't enough.

My mother advised me to carry mace whenever I go out.

“Or maybe pepper spray, dear,” she amended. “I think it's better. For their health. The criminals', I mean.”

Hypnosis is “. . . a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state.”
—Encyclopædia Britannica, 2004

It was a quiet and uneventful visit to Kay, who lay, much as you'd expect, motionless on a stainless-steel bed hooked up to machines. We had her to ourselves, as her parents had just gone to get lunch, a nurse told me. Kay's face was a ghostly shell, but Lena sat beside her bravely and held her hand. She only cried later, as we were walking out. I'd told her Kay took too much medicine by mistake.

The private room didn't bear much resemblance to the one I'd envisioned under hypnosis—no surprise there—but one thing struck me as we were leaving: a pile of knitting, two needles sticking out of it, on a low shelf on her beside table.

The yarn was blue-gray.

WE HAD
a car accident today.

Or almost had an accident, I should say. We avoided an accident, but it was close.

We were maybe half an hour northeast of Boston on the freeway. It was my turn to drive and I was fiddling a bit with the radio when abruptly the car started weaving back and forth across the lanes, fishtailing. My right hand flew back to the wheel as I felt the loss of control in the pit of my stomach and tried to keep the car straight. I almost hit someone on my left but veered away just in time, and then the car almost crashed into a guardrail on our right.

In the end we veered away from that too, luckily, and somehow I steered us onto the first off-ramp, pulling over onto a wide shoulder without any more near-collisions.

It happened too fast for Lena—startled out of a nap by the car's fishtailing motion—even to get frightened. When I'd pulled up the emergency brake I turned to look at her; she smiled at me uncertainly and rubbed her eyes.

Will and I got out and walked around the car:
all four
of the tires were flat.

The three of us rode in the tow truck to the car-repair place, where we hung around in a brown-tiled lounge area that smelled of disinfectant while they sprayed foam on the tires, performed some other tests. We were sure I'd driven over a spilled cargo of nails or other sharp objects—what else could have caused four same-time flats?—but finally they seemed to have exhausted their diagnostic tools.