by Lydia Millet
It was unbearable to submit to my profound weakness and so the only choice was to shore up surface strength.
Plants might be able to eavesdrop on their neighbors and use the sounds they “hear” to guide their own growth, according to a new study that suggests plants use acoustic signaling to communicate with one another. Findings published in the journal BMC Ecology suggest that plants can not only “smell” the chemicals and “see” the reflected light of their neighbors, they may also “listen” to the plants around them. —National Geographic News
ONE EVENING AROUND dusk there was a call from a new number, and when I picked it up after one ring, as I picked up all calls—instantly, slavishly—I heard her.
“Mommy?” said Lena, on the brink of tears.
“I’m here! I’m here!” is all I remember saying.
The phone was passed from Lena to someone else, an adult voice I didn’t recognize. A contract was being faxed, it said, and I would have to sign it in front of a notary. We both understood, technically, that it wasn’t binding, wouldn’t hold up in court since it was being signed under duress, etc., but Ned also knew I knew that if I didn’t stick to its terms this would simply happen again.
“But worse,” said the person, inflectionless.
After I signed the contracts and they were delivered, Lena would be brought back to me.
These events unrolled quickly. The contracts were received and signed, Will and Don read them, as well as Reiner, who turned out to be a corporate lawyer. Will drove me to a notary at the fire station that stayed open all night, and after that a messenger took the packet from me. Then we went back to the motel and waited.
I took no pill and drank no wine, determined to be sober as a judge. Instead of drinking I walked around and around the outside of the motel, my heart beating fast, my cheeks hot, until my calves burned and the soles of my feet were sore. Freezing, I walked for hours. Every brief headlight near the end of the road made me breathless.
It was after midnight when the car pulled up and two men got out, two men I didn’t know, though I wondered in passing if I recognized one of them as a cop.
Then Lena was here, I had her with me again, and the motel guests were close, and Don and Will, Don’s father smiling widely as he leaned on his wavering cane. Everyone was hugging Lena or patting her, congratulating me, whatever. We were in the warm lobby without having walked there—we’d floated, I think now, and when I finally looked up there were no men and there was no car. Vanished.
SO NED HAS BECOME a condition again, a feature of life. Our end date is still the election, contractually, after which Lena and I should be released—but for now we’re indentured. We’re flying to Alaska next week for the official candidacy announcement, to do our duty as mannequins.
Ned’s staff booked the tickets; Ned’s staff booked the rental car. We’re staying in our old house for almost a week. Without speaking to me at all, only sending me emails containing flight confirmation numbers and the rental car details, Ned’s staff took charge of the arrangements.
Lena’s still saying little about her time in kidnapping—I can’t tell how deep the injury may go, though Don found us a counselor forty-five minutes away and we drive to see her three days a week. It doesn’t seem to be the case that anything of substance occurred while she was in Ned’s hands. That is, as long as she hasn’t blocked a trauma. All that happened, apparently—once the initial violation had occurred when she was drugged and taken from me—was that she stayed in a hotel suite with a babysitter. And of course she was frightened because they told her I was sick.
It sounds like it was one of those big chain hotels, more like apartments in an office park, possibly in Massachusetts somewhere, the PIs say, with generic but pleasant enough bedrooms off a central living room and kitchen. The babysitter had her own room, and so did Lena, between which the doors were left open.
Apparently she only saw Ned once. The first morning he stayed away and had the babysitter tell her that she was safe, I was safe, the illness wasn’t life-threatening. Everyone was safe, but she was staying there for her own protection in case the sickness was contagious. He made his single in-person appearance that evening, bearing ice cream and an expensive, wholesome-looking doll wearing a red-velvet ice-skating outfit. After that he sent her toys daily through the caregiver: animated movies, books, doll clothes.
She kept the doll for longest, toward which she felt a parental responsibility, but finally she asked me to take it to the same donation bin in the grocery-store parking lot where we’d taken the other items he’d sent. The gifts must have left a sour taste in her mouth.
The babysitter, a kindly, bland-sounding woman, prepared their meals: whatever Lena wanted, up to and including large ice-cream sundaes, chocolate layer cake, and piles of frosted cookies. For exercise she was taken to the indoor hotel pool, which, to hear Lena tell it, was always deserted, except for the babysitter and her. She liked the hot tub, which kids weren’t allowed to go in: she had received the babysitter’s special permission.
She watched a lot of TV.
Now that she’s back I can stand to hear about it, I want to know every detail she imparts. Her experience has taken her sense of security and consistency from her—her exuberance has been curtailed. She doesn’t sob or clutch at me, but she moves more cautiously than she used to, she’s more measured.
One afternoon a guest checked in—a tired man from Quebec who didn’t appear to hear any voices; he was so tired he barely even heard ours—and Don asked if she wanted to offer him a tour. She was polite and dutiful, mainly, I think, to protect Don’s feelings. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Yet the tour was subdued. She skipped the ice machine entirely.
I’m so angry at Ned for taking it from her, that free, unreasonable joy that was her greatest possession.
SO MY FEAR has turned mostly to anger, which is much easier to live with—I see now why it’s popular.
But I continue to need distraction so to expend my nervous energy, maybe dispel the rage, I scroll and scroll and click and click once she’s tucked in at night.
I’ve been going to the meetings faithfully, knowing we’re leaving, trying to absorb as much as I can before I say goodbye to this strange circle. I can’t take Lena with me to the meetings and there’s no one I trust to watch her when I’m occupied except Will, so I’ve been vague about the meetings, implying only that they’re about “recovery”—my own therapy, as she has hers. Fifteen minutes before they start I drop Lena at the library.
I’ve been trying to learn if anything unites the motel guests beyond the fact of having heard—whether, for instance, a message was conveyed to anyone. For me there hadn’t seemed to be a message, as I’ve written, for me the voice had been like weather, but I shared Navid’s questions, we all did: they were basic. I wanted to know if the voice had carried portents for others—if they’d felt like the Maid of Orleans, if any had believed they were receiving instructions or prophecies. It was a whale that spoke to Big Linda; well, whales have often figured in myths and stories. It seems well within the standard imaginative canon.
And just yesterday Burke spoke to the group at length.
“Chinese native,” he mumbled, looking down at his feet. Burke has the bearing of an absentminded professor. “Acer griseum. Paperbark maple. Beautiful, peeling red bark, this great, faded red I’ve never seen anywhere else. I remember having the impression that it was melodies made by the flow of cellular division, the phloem and xylem. The movement of sugar in the trunk.”
For him the voice—something like humming or singing, he said, a pure music sometimes like a chorale, sometimes like a Glass symphony—seemed to issue from a certain tree in the arboretum where he worked. The tree sang and its music was holy.
“But you know. Maybe it wasn’t really coming from the maple tree or Shamu,” said Navid. “Maybe they were both sort of like one of those ventriloquist’s dummies—like the sound or the song were being thrown onto them.”
I spoke for the first time. I said I’d been quite sure, when I was hearing the voice, that it was closely associated with Lena. It was either part of her or attached to her, but she was no ventriloquist’s dummy. I said how its monologues would follow the movements of her eyes, at times, commenting on what those eyes beheld.
“Assuming it’s not technology or communications from extraterrestrials,” said Big Linda, “maybe it can have many kinds of living hosts.”
“ET, really?” said Navid. “Hadn’t gone there. But now that you mention it.”
It seemed we were almost considering levity, or at least some of us were, and others were resisting and disapproving, at least that was how I interpreted the silence.
Kay spoke, softly as always.
“I know something,” she said.
Heads turned.
“I mean—I don’t have all the answers, I don’t mean that,” she went on carefully. “But I know part of it. I thought everyone did, until this meeting, hearing what Linda said, what all of you have, I thought we all knew that part of it, but now I think maybe that, with us hearing things, maybe I have this particular piece, and others have other pieces. I guess?”
Kay has that insecure person’s mannerism of ending her statements with question marks.
“What piece?” asked Navid.
“It—so what we heard is, how can I put it,” she said nervously. She was looking down at her hands in her lap, as though embarrassed by her claim to knowledge. “It exists in most things that live. It’s language, or the innate capacity for language, is a better way to put it. You could say it’s the language of sentience.”
“Trees don’t have language. Trees don’t have opinions,” objected Navid, kicking the floor with his toes.
Kay looked up at him. It was a different look from those she usually gave him, I realized. It was sympathy.
“It’s not that we’re the only ones who have it, or hear it, or are it,” she went on, so quiet that I had to strain to hear. “What’s different about us, different from how it is with the other animals and even the plants—what happened with Lena and Anna and in my case with Infant Vasquez? What’s different is that we’re the only ones it leaves.”
Communication is observed within the plant organism, i.e. within plant cells and between plant cells, between plants of the same or related species, and between plants and non-plant organisms, especially in the root zone … plant roots communicate with rhizome bacteria, fungi and insects in the soil. These interactions … are possible because of the decentralized “nervous system” of plants. —Wikipedia 2016
IT WAS A LONG meeting, a meeting that went on for three hours instead of one, and by the time we dispersed afterward it seemed that Kay had always had a clearer understanding than any of the rest of us—Kay’s hospital infant, an infant with a hole in its heart that lived for only three days, had somehow imparted more to her than the voice had told the rest of us in months. Even years.
Kay had heard more. Or Kay had listened with a greater aptitude for hearing.
I hadn’t thought I was special, just equal. Equal, at least, I always assumed. But by the time I left the meeting I was unsure, unsure and diminished.
After the meeting I suspected I wasn’t equal, and more, that there was no equality. Our idea of equality is a fiction useful mostly for the purposes of fairness, for law and economics. Elsewhere it’s an empty husk, a costume we put on when we get up in the morning. In the length of our legs and arms, the breadth of our shoulders, the tendons that give us strength or weakness, our beauty or lack of it, sharp or dull intelligence—we aren’t equal at all, and we never have been.
7
SOUL IS A UNIVERSAL FEATURE
NOT MANY TOURISTS FLY INTO ANCHORAGE IN WINTER. IN SUMMER there are backpackers galore: the small airport is full of tower-like packs with attachments dangling from them and duffel bags lumped on the floor in archipelagos of nylon and canvas. Among them you see hippies milling, hikers, hunters, fishermen, naturalists and wilderness fans of all stripes, talking excitedly about their planned itineraries as they wait for their car rides or small-plane connections. They crowd beneath the terminal’s fluorescents in a fug of B.O. and patchouli and bug spray, headed for Denali and other points west or north.
But January is quiet in Alaska. When we flew in, the airport was almost deserted. It had that peculiar desolation of an empty public space, and in the silence our roller-bags squeaked and our footsteps rang out. Lena squealed at the sight of a rearing grizzly in a glass cage, which a placard claims is the largest bear ever shot. Paws raised, it looms over the polished expanse of floor in a perfect embodiment of overkill. She stood beside me and gripped my hand as she read aloud the sign at the bottom of the case: WORLD RECORD KODIAK BROWN BEAR. The bear’s reared-up stance was upright, almost gentlemanly.
Ned wasn’t there to meet us, happily, only a driver at the curb. Everything had been choreographed by his staff; there was a schedule with places, times, and tasks listed: 4:30 p.m. Consultant Appt. 1: Wardrobe. He’s as disinclined to be in my company as I am to be in his. No good words will ever pass between us now.
We had an appointment with his lead media person right off, in his campaign office; we were instructed today, before the first press conference tomorrow. There are even clothes I have to wear, looks custom-designed for me as though I’m Sarah Palin. Clothes have been picked for Lena, too, apparently. Really? I thought. Even for the small time?
Ned has to do everything with corporate shine, he needs to be at the top of his game from the start. And he requires similar performances from his associates.
So we met with them and tried on the clothes. It was tedious standing around as they recorded our sizes and made adjustments, trying to keep Lena in one place. A hair and makeup person came and practiced painting our faces, taking pictures of us colored in different palettes. Lena was turned out like Shirley Temple at first and looked like a beauty pageant contestant, so I said no. The media consultant trotted out a second outfit, slightly less frilly, and agreed not to curl her hair into ringlets.
I know I won’t be able to stand Ned’s platforms and opinions, much less concur with them, so I’m doing my best to learn nothing more than I have to about what I’m shilling for. This is a farce I’m acting in. Except for one dinner with some women’s church group, I don’t have any conversations on my to-do list. I hold Lena’s hand whenever I feel doubt, press her to my side when I find I’m quizzing myself on how I could have been so easily brought to heel.
But I’m not willing to take risks: I stay close to her all the time. I was given a second chance, I was rescued after a shipwreck, and my goal isn’t ambitious. It’s just to keep our heads above water.
After the meeting with the wardrobe consultant we were driven to the house, once our home. I felt anxious walking in, not sad or nostalgic; the abduction had erased even the vestigial possibility of that. But I did feel off-kilter entering the place. Lena was merely intrigued and ran around trying to identify what she remembered.
Ned has a housekeeper so everything is neat, and he’s replaced the furniture I chose with items that are new and more generic. There’s beige upholstery and beige drapes, a bland beige background everywhere; there are cut flowers on mantels and tables, as though the premises are being kept at the ready for a meet-and-greet. Behind shining cabinet doors there’s a huge flat-screen TV, and photographs of snow-covered mountains have been placed on the white walls, no doubt by a decorator connected to his media team. They’re Alaskan mountains, of course—discreetly labeled at the bottom lest anyone doubt Ned’s loyalties. Chugach Range. 2008. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
Wrangell-St. Elias, I remembered telling Ned once, was larger than Switzerland. He’d shrugged: to him national parks were a waste of rich mineral and timberland.
But now he has pictures of them.
“Where’d my room used to be?” asked Lena. “Did I have my own room?”
“You did,” I sa
id. “But mostly you slept in the bed with me.”
We stood at the door of the very small room that had been the nursery, which now contains an exercise bike and free weights.
“It doesn’t look like my room,” objected Lena.
“Your daddy likes to stay fit,” I said.
THE NEXT CONSULTANT made her practice standing beside me in front of a video camera. She showed us the footage on her laptop, showed Lena how she was fidgeting and playing with her hair. Lena should stand still and smile and keep her hands clasped together, she said, or at least let them hang by her sides. She shouldn’t move around, said the consultant, because it would distract from Ned.
“Your daddy’s going to make a little speech, and then he’ll answer questions.”
“What if I have an itch?” asked Lena.
The consultant smiled and said the whole thing would be over before she even knew it.
The initial response to an anomaly is typically to ignore it; this is how the scientific community has responded to the seeming anomaly of consciousness.
Then, when the anomaly ceases to be ignored, the common reaction is to try to explain it within the current paradigm … to date, no such effort in any discipline—be it chemistry, quantum physics, chaos theory, or computing—has proved fruitful.
No matter what theory is put forward, the central question remains: How can immaterial consciousness ever arise from matter?
When it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. —Peter Russell, huffingtonpost.com 12.2013
I DON’T WANT to see my Anchorage friends, because to see them again now would bring them into this queasy distortion of my life, the fake alliance with Ned. It makes me ashamed, even though I’m looking down the barrel of his gun.
Some know about the kidnapping, some don’t; others know about how it resolved, others don’t. I can’t stand to do the mental accounting of who knows what, can’t bear to revisit the ordeal—it was hard enough writing it down for myself. I don’t need to listen to sympathy or indignation on my behalf.