Sweet Lamb of Heaven

by Lydia Millet

  Starting at that moment when Ned cursed, and on and on forevermore, in my mind, it could not be and was not a hallucination.

  It was something else.

  MY PARENTS’ RELIGION had always seemed like a curious habit to me. While I was growing up I drove to services with them on Sundays, I said grace before evening meals, I went through the motions agreeably. But as soon as I was old enough to have my own opinion their churchgoing fell into a category like the next-door neighbor’s golf hobby, the macramé wall hangings accomplished by a wall-eyed teacher I had for fifth grade. I saw the neighbor bundle his clubs into the back of the car on days with pleasant weather; I watched the teacher sorting wooden beads to string into an orange owl. I wondered what shaped the particular details of their interests, where their strange avidity came from.

  I thought about mortality, sure, and I felt the pull of soulful music, but I never met with elevated feeling sitting beside my parents and listening to their minister. For me it couldn’t be found in the cramped and unlovely building of their church, the boring sermons, the congregants next to us (mostly aged, with skin tags and wadded sleeve-tissues). It would have been as out of place there as it was, for me, in the plaid of the neighbor’s golf bag, the yarn of the owl.

  What seemed as though it might partake of the awesome or sublime was away from these close-up elements, away from the grainy texture of everyday. It was in cloud passage, in the galactic sweep; it was the stars beyond count, footage of herds of beasts thundering over grasslands or flocks darkening the sky in migration. I saw it in the play of light over rivers, the rush of multitudes, large beauty: a utopian sunset, the black cloudbank of a looming storm.

  Meaning can be attached to it or not, I thought when I was younger, but either way the sacred has to live apart.

  Later I saw that the sacred was the apart, the untouchable and the untouched. Divinity is only visible from afar.

  THE NEXT MORNING I watched Ned like a hawk as soon as he woke up. I stared at him when he came into the kitchen and poured his coffee (with the voice nattering on to me the whole time as usual). But he said nothing. He didn’t seem flustered or confused in the least, only impatient as he always was to get away—impatient to begin the real life of his day, out of our house, with people who mattered.

  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: sakrānti) is a Vajrayāna Buddhist meditation practice describable as a “transference of consciousness” or “mindstream.” —Wikipedia 6.20.2009

  Sometimes there were brief flickers of foreboding, brief intimations of the voice’s departure, but I tried not to invest too much in those. I didn’t want to be disappointed so I didn’t hope too hard. When I caught a glimpse of a future leave-taking, a tiny slip of possibility, I didn’t trot out the streamers or confetti or whistles, the bejeweled gowns and conical party hats, the jeroboams of champagne.

  I waited quietly, holding my cards close to the vest.

  CURIOUSLY TWO MORE guests have arrived at the motel right on the heels of Kay
. By the standards of this place, it’s a madding crowd.

  They’re two middle-aged men, a couple, and I can’t help but feel that they, like Kay, are in some state of dismay. Maybe it’s conjugal, a conjugal problem, but I feel like it’s something else. One of them seems to be consoling the other half the time, he has a steadying hand on the other guy’s shoulder practically whenever I see them.

  They checked in at the cocktail hour—I have a glass of wine before dinner most days, while Lena and I play “Go Fish” or “War”—and shortly after that we heard a knock on our room door. When I opened it there was Don, the two men standing behind him, politely waiting, and Don peered past me and asked Lena if she wanted to conduct a tour. Typically she has to pester him for that; she’ll run along the row of room doors to the lobby as soon as she sees a car pull in and beg to be the tour guide, and Don will check with the new guests to see if they’re sufficiently captive to her charms. But this time Don sought her out, and it thrilled her, of course.

  So we set out, the four of us—Don peeled off toward the lobby again—and I talked to the balder of the two men while Lena kept up her monologue with the other, a gaunt, handsome blond called Burke who seems to need consolation. The balding one, Gabe, said they wanted to take advantage of the off-season rates, they don’t go in for tanning anyway, the cancerous harm of the sun’s rays; winter beaches are just fine. Nor do they like to swim, he said, except in pools that are very clean. They also do not fish, surf, parasail, or favor any other ocean-related activities.

  It became clear to me—as we stood near the ice machine and I listened to Gabe rattle on about bikini-and Speedo-clad crowds lying on beaches, the rude spectacle of this—that the two men knew Don, that Don was a personal friend of theirs, and that was why he’d felt all right bringing them back to our room.

  At that moment I saw Don coming out of the lobby again, this time with Kay; they walked with their heads inclined toward each other, talking low. And it struck me with certainty that Don knew Kay, too. In fact it could well be that everyone else staying here already knew Don; that Lena and I were now the only guests who had not known Don before we came to stay at his motel.