Sweet Lamb of Heaven (4 page)

He never seemed to hear the voice again, or if he did, he never mentioned it.

Had I believed I was psychotic, no doubt I would have been relieved by what had happened—would have construed his hearing the voice as evidence of my sanity.

But I hadn't gone with the psychosis explanation in the first place, so I hadn't been seriously worried for my sanity. I'd comfortably believed in the power of a faulty and deeply complex neurology, and now that had been taken from me.

2

FIND THEM AMONG THE DEAD

I
WAS GRATEFUL THAT I NEVER RECEIVED THE VOICE'S ASSESSMENT
of Lena or me, that I was neither mentioned nor addressed directly. There were comments on what we encountered, though, the content of the patter overlapping with an image that flashed across a TV screen, a person driving the car beside us, a squirrel on a branch, a fresh berm at a building site. I'd see Lena's eyes alight on something and seconds later the voice would rush out a series of connected phrases, usually too swift and polysyllabic to be memorable to me, even when they were in English.

I got used to watching Lena's attention fasten onto a scene as only a baby's attention will, without seeming to focus—that round-eyed, often unblinking gaze of passive-seeming intake. But unlike with other babies this would be followed by commentary as the voice bounced over the object or landscape like a sound wave, a light wave, a stream of particles. I didn't get the feeling it was moving her, only that it was following her eyes, her fingers, her tongue. The model was accompaniment, not possession.

And what words came did appear, sometimes, to pass a kind of judgment. Their position seemed to be guided by aesthetics rather than morals—or no, that wasn't it either. More like, the morals
were
the aesthetics. What was ugly was wrong, but what was ugly was not the same as, for instance, what was brutal: ugliness was less the jarring or crude than the false or dishonest. Based on some standard I could never measure, the voice would be dismissive of systems or events, individuals or ideas,
products of human ingenuity
. It would rebuke the odd politician or captain of industry, engineer, or physicist; it would take even artists or musicians to task for
crimes against humanity.
And yet somehow the impressions I took from it were both less and more than opinions. They glittered like sun on water and glanced off again before I could fix my eyes on them.

Only a small number of the voice's observations were given over to the conditions of my life and Lena's, the rooms and scenes we moved through, but periodically there were upticks in interest. For damaged persons we encountered on the street, when we crossed paths with someone sick or in pain or disabled, often the voice would let loose a benediction, recite a snatch of poetry or hum a piece of music. To a shakily walking grandmother:
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.”
To a kid with Down syndrome,
“The Carriage held—but just Ourselves—and Immortality.”
Of all the lines of poetry, those were the only two I wrote down right away and looked up.

For an emaciated man we passed in the halls of a cancer ward, where we were visiting someone else, the voice had the famous lines from Chief Joseph after the battle that finally defeated him, which I searched via key words.

I want to have time to look for my children; maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Upon Ned's entry into our space there was always the same phrase, a faintly aggressive chant. In fact the chant was a tipoff that Ned was arriving. Typically it started up on cue a few seconds early, before I even recognized his presence.

You can keep your Army khaki, you can keep your Navy blue, I have the world's best fighting man to introduce to you.

Google revealed this to be a Marine Corps cadence, one of the verses cadets call out when they're marching.

But Ned was never in the military.

A NEW GUEST
came to us today. She's maybe a decade younger than I am, probably in her mid-twenties, and according to Don may stay a while.

She has an air of recovery, or so I thought as my daughter took her through the tour. She was nice to Lena in the cautious way of people who aren't used to the company of children but react graciously when it's imposed on them: patience, no talking down, a genuine interest.

Lena says the woman is a princess—probably because she's slim, tall and pretty, with long hair—and has spun a tale about her already. The princess fell from her throne through the deeds of an evil troll. She awaits an act of magic, here beside the sea. Lena says a team of seahorses will arrive pulling a giant white shell, and in the shell the princess will be borne away to her own kingdom.

At this point the story gets convoluted, because the princess can't be taken away; that would mean her leaving us. Instead she will sleep in a shimmering palace on the waves, a palace hidden from us now that hovers invisibly beyond the whitecaps. A bridge of waves will stretch from the beach outside the motel to the princess's ancestral home, a white castle of pearl, and we will walk over this bridge to banquets held in our honor, for we may live there too. Inside the castle keep, a special room will belong to us, connected to the princess's royal chamber by a spiral staircase. The chamber is full of sparkling fountains and cushions of cloud. It features a four-poster canopy bed and live-in midget ponies.

The ponies are velvety to the touch and curl up on the bed like dogs, their legs tucked beneath them.

But Lena reassures me that we won't have to sacrifice our lodgings at the motel for this resplendence. No, we'll still treasure our motel home. We'll still frequent these faithful lodgings with their yellowing shower curtain and moldy grout between the tiles. We'll have
two
houses, she says, that's all—“one for regular and one for special occasions.”

I'd go with her. I'd take the miniature dog-ponies and the pillows of cloud.

PEOPLE WHO SAY
they feel the presence of the Almighty hovering close to them, their personal savior, or tell how faith dwells in their hearts—the advantage they have is that if God overwhelms them, they're free to retreat. Or if the knowledge is so overwhelming it can't be contained, sometimes they let it out with shaking and strange articulations, crying and falling, ecstasy. I admire the idea of this, though I've never shaken in ecstasy myself.

I like to imagine I could, under the right conditions.

My point is, abandon to the spirit has an appointed time and place: the spirit can't be on you all the time. I never thought of the voice as God, while it was with Lena and me; such a thought would have been an outrage. When I write about God right now, that three-letter word—so loaded, so presumptuous—it's a word that I use in hindsight, as close a description as I can get of that stray cascade of ambient knowledge that distinguished itself from the static of everything else and filtered down to me.

So the voice wasn't God to me then, but in the months after Ned heard it, when I couldn't think of it as hallucination anymore, I was confused and stowed my questions in a locked compartment. Some things were unexplained; well, some things had always been. But I listened to it differently once I couldn't believe it was my own confabulation anymore. I gave it more credibility.

My brain's a little above average, according to standard aptitude tests, but not far above: I was always bad at calculus, I had no patience for high school chemistry. Whatever intelligence I have isn't rated for the ornate subtlety of the divine. Most of the time the voice was still wallpaper or elevator music as it streamed past and over me, citing, listing, cajoling, eulogizing, heckling. If I stopped what I was doing and concentrated on it, it quickly dazzled the faculties.

But there was no aspect of feeling chosen, no conviction of being purposefully anointed. We might have been sitting in a lounge chair on the green grass of my lawn, reading, when suddenly a bank of cumulus moved in and rain began pattering onto the pages of my book and the skin of my arms and we had to go in. I never believed the nimbus had chosen her or me or us on the basis of special qualities. I have other failings but I'm not subject to visions of personal grandiosity.

When I looked at holiday crèches or paintings of the infant Jesus I recognized the parallels—that Jesus as an infant had been believed to contain divinity, at least in retrospect—but there the similarity ended for me. I didn't think Lena was a prophet or a messiah.

More or less, in the time after Ned heard, I put off the question of causation, deferring inquiry.

The question of origin was too much for me.

LENA'S SECRET PRINCESS
is named Kay and hails from the fair land of Boston. She's a med student there, or possibly a resident or a nurse. She has a hospital job holding babies, according to Lena, so maybe she's assigned to a maternity ward. She seems reluctant to discuss her work so I haven't pressed her.

I let Lena eat lunch on the bluffs with her and they went out wrapped in scarves and wearing puffer coats, though it was mild, for Maine in fall, and the big jackets were overkill. They spread a blanket on the dry grass. I could see them from the back window in our room—the room's best feature, a picture window that offers a view of the cliff edge and the sea. Lena chattered constantly—I watched her small head bobbing and her hands moving—and Kay smiled indulgently as she followed Lena's gestures. And yet somehow Lena seemed to be looking after Kay, not the reverse; the young woman's face was shuttered, and only when Lena spoke did she become animated.

It's one of the bargains I've made with myself, to let Lena have the company of relative strangers as long as I'm nearby and can keep an eye on them. I try to compensate for the lack of other children in her life and the rarity with which she sees her extended family. Of course, it
doesn't
compensate for that; she's an extroverted little girl, always has been, and likes to caper and perform. People are Lena's game.

For her a trip to the post office in town is a trip to see Mrs. Farber, the gum-popping straight talker who presides over the counter; a trip to buy groceries to stock our kitchenette is a visit to Roberto, the skinny cashier with the soul patch and exuberance about cartoons. She knows all the cashiers' favorite colors, pet names, and birthdays. A trip to the big-box store a couple of towns inland is a carnival of anecdotes during which Lena recounts our previous trips at great and exhausting length. She has perfect recall of people she's met even once. “Julio, he's a Pisces that means fish, cars are his hobby, like racing cars that go fast. He has a niece named Avery, the tooth fairy brought her a charm bracelet with clovers on it. Faneesha likes those yucky cookies with figs in them, she learned to tap-dance in Michigan but once she ran over a worm that came out flat.”

I COULD OCCASIONALLY
discern what I thought were shadings of emotion in the voice, shadings of will. Maybe those shadings were my interpretation, but thinking about it now I'm not surprised, because after all the voice was words, sometimes converted to music or other sound, and I don't see how words can follow each other without implying emotion. Even the effort to control emotion is an act of words, while every effort to control words is an act of emotion.

I didn't catch much at a time but there were recurrent themes in the patter that I learned to recognize. The voice made light of what it held to be false ideas—for example, the yearning for an all-powerful father who grants wishes and absolves. On that subject it seemed to evince something like condescension, rattling off mocking wordplay when we passed a church marquee or once, another time, while I stood at the front door trying to get rid of a Witness.
Omnimpotence,
the voice said more than once.
Omnimpotent being,
omnimpotent force
. A
great and ancient omnimpotence
.

Sometimes it sang an eerie lullaby.
Oh little man, tie your own shoes,
it would sing, on the heels of a passage about the all-powerful father. There was a fire-and-brimstone sermon it liked to recite by an old-time preacher; it interspersed this text with laugh tracks and sang the cradlesong afterward.
Oh little man, dry your own tears. Oh little man, there is no knee. There is no knee to dandle on. Bury your dead, oh little man. Let darkness fall over the land.

Property was an object of mockery too—the ownership of land, of pets, and even of inanimate objects seemed held to be an elaborate charade, maybe a shared psychotic disorder. The voice inflected words like
owner
or
rich
with irony—as though these should be bracketed, in perpetuity, in quotation marks. Once it said
Fool, you are owned by the
sun.

I couldn't find an attribution anywhere.
No results
.

But in general such great swaths of what it said were borrowed or adapted that they were already familiar—part of the background of culture somehow, part of the landscape of the commonplace. I sometimes wondered if all of it was borrowed, if it was all pure appropriation, a colorful textile made only of copies.

I'd started reading in philosophy, every so often, and that was when I came upon its first word to me, the sound I'd heard in the hospital before it spoke English. That word was
Phowa
, or
poa
, meaning “mindstream” in Sanskrit—the transference of consciousness at the moment of death, was one meaning.

Phowa (Wylie: '
pho ba
; also spelled
Powa
or
Poa
phonetically; Sanskrit: sa
krānti) is a Vajrayāna Buddhist meditation practice describable as a “transference of consciousness” or “mindstream.”
—Wikipedia 6.20.2009