Sweet Lamb of Heaven (32 page)

They are legion,
said Don. They speak in false tongues and want to own the world.

No, scratch that, he said. We both know they own the world already, but now they want even more.

Now they want to make it over in their own image.

“Are you ready?” he asked me.

I THINK OF
what Kay wrote in her mania.

Deep language is in all living things but all the others, it stays with. Only not humans . . . God leaves us, Anna, God leaves us.

Yet we're the children of that language—not the
only
children, that boast was always a rookie mistake, but among their multitudes. We still swim in the shallows of that vast and ancient sea, the water that runs through us, a coding of genes and flesh that lives on in beings and cultures. We are those bonds that make our nervous systems, our circulation, our lungs exert their miraculous intelligence without our direction—the beneath and always, the insane, preposterous motion of life.

Let
God leave us, Kay, if what you mean is constant company. Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we
need
the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it's our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.

Our loneliness
is
our strength. It's not the same as being alone—almost the opposite. Loneliness is the sense of others, present but beyond our reach.

We feel a terrible tenderness, a terrible gratitude, and at the end we see that face and know the moment is here. The beast has come for us at last.

ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET

Mermaids in Paradise

Magnificence

Ghost Lights

How the Dead Dream

Love in Infant Monkeys

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Everyone's Pretty

My Happy Life

George Bush, Dark Prince of Love

Omnivores

FOR YOUNG READERS

Pills and Starships

The Shimmers in the Night

The Fires Beneath the Sea

Deepest thanks to Maria Massie and Tom Mayer, beloved agent and beloved editor, and to all at Norton who worked on this book, including Elizabeth Riley, Ryan Harrington, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Ingsu Liu, David High, Bill Rusin, Deirdre Dolan, Dan Christiaens, Golda Rademacher, Karen Rice, Meredith McGinnis, Steve Colca, and Julia Druskin.

Copyright © 2016 by Lydia Millet

All rights reserved

First Edition

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ISBN 978-0-393-28554-3

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