Sweet Lamb of Heaven

by Lydia Millet

  I never illuminated anything.

  I account, on my fingers, for all the elements of these events I keep failing to understand. I wish I had an abacus—confusion like this calls for a deliberate, manual counting, a ritual of organization. Digits or beads, bones or a rosary. Even assuming there does exist an ambient language that underlies life, what some people call God, others possibly photosynthesis or humpback song or the opinions of a dog, I have the same questions that I always did. I want to know why I heard it, and why through Lena; why it fell silent when she slept; why it departed when she said her first word. I want to know not only its rules but its purpose, but all of that remains opaque to me.

  There are the practical questions, too: How did I know to go to the motel? How was Ned able to find me? How did John know to contact him, when I took my car in to his shop?

  And how did Ned know my father’s diagnosis?

  On the face of it my questions about Ned are in a different category. And yet there’s the lymphoma diagnosis. This is new, this introduces a fresh mystery, and it counts just as fluidly on my fingers as the questions that came before.

  It was recorded digitally, “Lymphoma Stage 3,” a number of weeks, not days but weeks, before the doctors even biopsied my father. It was set in stone then, it has a path, a history that can be verified—the fact that he had that information, or at least that he acted as though he had it.

  Lymphoma Stage 3.

  I WAS ALONE in the subway today, coming back from getting my hair cut, during which appointment Lena had stayed at home with Solly and Luisa. I was on a crowded platform at Columbus Circle with my bag over my shoulder and a book in my other hand—I must have been standing distractedly at the front hem of the crowd, my paperback curled back on itself in my hand as I read.

  Then there were the lights and roar of the train. I felt a push behind me like a head butting against the small of my back and suddenly I was teetering, one of my legs over the edge, before someone grabbed my arm and my book flew out of my hand and I was jerked back, the tendons in my neck strained and one shoulder wrenched.

  With a rush the train was screeching to a stop, people surging past me as the doors opened, jostling me and turning me around. I felt a weird heat prickle where my scalp meets my face, was breathless and seeing spots of light. Somehow I found my way to a bench, newly vacated and still ass-warm.

  I never knew who pushed me or if it had been an accident, or who caught my arm and saved me either—maybe the push was just the movement of the crowd, that’s the likeliest explanation. Right? But as the train pulled away I noticed a child staring at me through a train door, a dark-hooded child with a white face, and the child’s head turned as the train moved, the child was staring at me fixedly … it had been a forceful push, so forceful it seemed it must have been purposeful.

  Or so I felt as I sat there.

  As soon as I got over the shock a wave of gratitude washed over me, a pure beam of gratitude struck out toward my unknown rescuer—how impossible it always is, I thought intently, to remember how lucky we are each second we remain alive.

  When the train was long gone and the platform bare, I got up shakily and walked back to the edge. On the tracks was my book, ripped up and streaked with gray, its pages spread over the black. I gazed down at it for a while and then sat down again to wait for the next train. I wanted to call someone, maybe Will, maybe Solly, but of course there was no signal in the tunnel. And what had happened, anyway?

  When the next train finally came rushing in I found I was trembling. I had to press my back against the cool, grimy tile of the wall. Presently I left and hailed a taxi.

  Since then my day has been cast in a fractured light. I go back and forth between telling myself it was pure accident and wondering if Don and Will’s fears deserve more serious consideration.

  I SENT AN EMAIL to Navid. Can I find out online, I asked him, who’s financing Ned’s campaign? I wouldn’t mind knowing who Ned’s backers are, what interests they represent and how deeply embedded their money is in institutions. Maybe one of them has connections to hospital records, who knows, some shadowy X-rays that were interpreted before the biopsy without my parents’ knowledge—some link that would provide an explanation for that premature diagnosis.

  Ned left his family of origin when he was in his teens, left and never looked back. His father had disappeared when he was an infant, his mother was strung out or drunk all the time, and there were no others. He lived outside the house anyway, from when he was twelve or thirteen, only returning to sleep. This was what I had gleaned, anyway, from the couple of times he’d talked about it to me.

  But somewhere, now, he has another family. I want to know who his new family is.

  WALKING BY MYSELF to get a carton of milk, I suddenly spun on my heel and entered the business with the HYPNOSIS sign. I hadn’t planned it.

  There was no receptionist, only a counter with a fiber-optic lamp sitting on it, an abstract medley of colored lights pulsing. I wondered how a hypnosis business made the street-level storefront rent in this neighborhood; I rang a push-button bell on the counter and heard an electronic chime. After a minute a woman came in from the back, a woman with a soft, homely face and wavy hair. She was about to close up for the evening, she said, could she help me?

  There was a voice, an auditory hallucination I used to have, when my child was a baby, I told her. I wanted to remember it now—wanted to hear it again to see if I could figure out what it had said. Could that kind of memory retrieval occur through hypnosis?

  She asked me if the voice had issued instructions, had told me to do anything I didn’t want to do.

  I said no. No instructions.

  She asked me a couple more questions I guessed were supposed to screen for mental illness, then hemmed and hawed briefly. She said there were no guarantees, that it was up to me, in a sense, what was accessed, but sure, she was willing to give it a shot. She could implant a suggestion that this “voice” return, she said; she could invite my mind to generate the “voice” again.

  She had me sign a waiver and I made an appointment.

  NAVID WROTE BACK saying he’d research Ned’s funding. He was good at following money trails, he said. Somehow he doesn’t seem to blame me as he blames Kay and Don; with me he doesn’t seem to have a bone to pick. Or maybe, because of what happened to Lena, he’s just sorry for me.

  USING VACATION TIME, Solly’s going to visit my parents and taking Luisa with him. He wants to be there to help out, as he puts it, but has urged Lena and me to stay here in the apartment without him. All four of us descending on my parents would be a burden and not what the doctor ordered.

  It is possible that all languages spoken today are related through direct or indirect descent from a single ancestral tongue.

  —Wikipedia 2016

  THE PRACTICE OF HYPNOTISM seems to hover in the alt-medicine gray area, near chiropractors and acupuncturists. It’s viewed as sporadically effective in treating certain bad habits and disorders, but tarnished by its history of showmanship.

  The hypnotherapist had me lie down on a huge, brown recliner with wide arms—my arms had to be stretched out, hands laid flat, feet raised. She dimmed the lights, put on music, and asked me if the room’s temperature was comfortable.

  And I had to admit the temperature was comfortable. The air felt like a soft extension of my skin, without too much moisture or too much aridity. I could stay here, I thought.

  A person could remain.

  “Remember, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” she said. “This is a completely safe space.”

  She had me close my eyes and listen to her voice describing a wooden rowboat over a deep blue lake. Out we went into the lake, rowing, rowing. Maybe I dove off the side of the boat or sank into the water, deeper, deeper, deeper; or maybe I was just looking down, looking into the water from the dry bench of the boat. I recall the color blue, the clarity of the lake water.

  During this tranqu
il immersion a jellyfish floated up from the depths. I don’t know whether it was associated with the therapist’s words or only with my thoughts, but I gazed at it—a pink-white bulb with tendrils rippling. Although I wasn’t asleep or dreaming I knew in the way of dreams, the passing of information that happens there where one thing is simultaneously another, that the jelly, having no place in fresh water, was an emissary from the ocean Kay had spoken of.

  There was something to know here, something to discover. So when I left I made another appointment.

  AROUND LUNCHTIME YESTERDAY we got a call from downstairs: Will was in the lobby.

  We went down in the elevator to meet him and there he stood, talking to the doorman.

  Lena ran to him and hugged him and then turned her attention to the doorman, her friend. Will stepped away from them and turned to me, a woolen cap in his hands, the shoulders of his coat sparkling with melting snowflakes, and I was so happy to feel my stomach flip, to know how much I still liked him. More, even. His eyes, skin, mouth.

  “I brought your car,” he said.

  I’d been selfish. I’d given him nothing, and I’d added insult to injury by doubting him. Yet here he was.

  He didn’t ask to stay with us, in fact he had a friend’s place lined up, but then he did stay.

  It was good but curious, after so long a time—like walking through a forgotten wood. Like wandering beneath old trees, whose faint smell reminds you of a person you may once have been.

  Not only does Will know now about the motel’s Hearing Voices Movement—as I’ve come to call it privately—but he’s known about it all along.

  He knows the backstory of the motel guests; he’s familiar with our group pathology. And he has known about it all, he says, since a couple of years after he got to know Don, when he first moved to Maine. Don has always lived there, as far as Will knows, like his father before him. He’s a feature of the landscape and has never seemed to do anything but what he does now.

  “But that’s the thing. What does he do?” I asked.

  Will shrugged.

  “He’s a host.”

  We were in bed. I was so glad to be there, though at first it took me a while to relax about Lena, who was fast asleep in the bedroom and still too near for my sense of propriety.

  “So confused people who hear voices have been coming there for years,” I said. “All of us with that same complaint.”

  “You don’t all seem the same to me,” he said.

  The only unity I’d found in the guests was economic: none of them were poor. There were men and women, young and old, white, Asian and Iranian and Dutch Americans, straight and gay. We had no profession or other clear trait in common save money—everyone was at least middle-class, no one was on food stamps. I’m a former academic, Kay’s a med student, Navid a producer; Burke is a botanist and between them the Lindas have three master’s and a PhD.

  “That’s true,” said Will. “Because the poor don’t weigh in on the channels Don uses to bring his guests together. He can’t find them because he can’t separate them in the social-service world from the population with schizoid conditions. They may be institutionalized or on the streets or just toiling, but they don’t tend to be online so much. He doesn’t have a way to get to them.”

  But Don never found me online, or if he did I didn’t know of it. I wondered if Will knew that too.

  “Why does he want to bring them in?” I asked.

  Maybe it was just group therapy, as Navid had alleged, I was thinking.

  “He says it’s just his role,” said Will.

  After breakfast we sat on Solly’s cheap, caving-in couch, which pushed us together comfortably in the middle, as Lena played with a magic coloring book Will had brought for her. Depending on how you flip through the book, its pages are blank or black-and-white or startling full color. Lena had wanted to do the trick in our coffee shop, but only a one-year-old had been present, on whom the trick was wasted. Babies think magic is normal, she said.

  She flipped through the book as Will and I sat against each other, my laptop on my knees, his arm around my shoulders. Then I brought up the schedule and stared at it. Where before it had annoyed me, now the bristling field of white seemed ominous. Onscreen it didn’t seem inert, as any other file would, but almost radioactive: it bore the weight of grim prediction.

  By Ned’s reckoning, it appears—or the reckoning of his aide or campaign runner or secretary, whoever created this schedule—my father will begin hospice in June and die before Independence Day.

  NAVID CALLED ME on the phone Will just bought me, his face popping up on the screen. I’d never bothered to use my cell that way before. He was wearing a headset and seemed to be sitting in a car: I saw the curves of a headrest behind him.

  “Are you alone?”

  I was trying to figure out how to hold the phone so that he didn’t see the inside of my nose or ear. “Lena and Will are here. Can we just talk normally?”

  “Yeah. I wanted to see it was you,” he said. “Now I’ve seen.”

  “Did you find out anything?”

  “So his donors fall into two categories. Industry kingmakers, the ones that run the politicians, first. Then there are others—also rich but not as rich, one or two have as much as half a billion in revenue, sometimes their wealth is shared among smaller entities or they’re hidden behind so-called educational groups, these 501(c)4s—a big corporate entity of biblical literalists that owns hundreds of radio channels, for example. Those guys are his other backers.”

  “It’s not so surprising,” I said. “He’s been talking the talk.”

  “It’s how he found you,” said Navid. “Turns out these guys have citizen networks. I wouldn’t call it grassroots, there’s too much money moving around for that. Or let me put it another way: there’s money at the top and blue-collars at the bottom. Far’s I can tell, the money at the top talks about ending the separation of church and state, making biblical law the law of the country. Like sharia, right? But Christian. End-times bringers. They use this shit to get the blue-collars to do their dirty work. It’s cynical. So your husband’s friends put out their version of an APB, you go down as a threat on the list they give out to their little-guy helpers across the country, and you’re a target. I’m guessing it was your VIN that tipped them off. You took your car into the shop, right?”

  “My VIN,” I repeated slowly.

  I thought of Beefy John and the radio poster on his wall.

  “Ned knew my father’s cancer diagnosis before the doctors told my mother. Before there was even a biopsy. So I’m thinking maybe there was a scan or something, maybe the doctors knew earlier but just needed the biopsy to confirm to the family. Maybe someone connected to him had access and knew the probability.”

  “I couldn’t tell you for sure,” said Navid. “I can’t get into hospital records. There are people who can, but it’s not my bailiwick.”

  It struck me after I hung up with him that he’d spoken faster than he used to when he was staying at the motel, he was energetic and focused but without the anger. High.

  WHEN I PASSED along Navid’s discoveries Will gave me a look like I told you so—why I’m not sure, since there was nothing in what Navid had said that would link Ned to murder.

  I keep trying to see clearly. There are clear signs out there, I feel sure, but all I can make out are the blurred edges. I feel a ghost of pressure on my lower back, the push that felt like the crown of a head. I remember a hooded child with a white face. Male or female, I don’t know, but whatever it was stared out at me from a window of the subway train.

  Either it was a simple accident or it was Ned’s agency, no matter who was acting on his behalf. If it wasn’t connected to Ned it shouldn’t matter, since in that case it must have been pure accident. And it’s a characteristic of accidents that they don’t often identically repeat.

  A programming language is an artificial language used to communicate instructions to a machine … thousands have
been created rapidly in the computer field, and still many more are being created every year. —Wikipedia 2016

  ALONE IN HER SMALL walk-up on Beacon Street, Kay took an overdose of sleeping pills last night. She lived but they had to resuscitate her, and now she’s in a coma.

  There was a bipolar diagnosis, as it turns out.

  I can’t bring myself to tell Lena. I should have been there to look out for Kay, should have done what I could: something. I seem to plod along in my own tracks, following footsteps I made before; this is always how I proceed, I don’t look sideways, I’m not willing to stop. I was inside my own concern, blindered like that—worried about abstractions, worried about the future when for so many people, Kay for instance, the present is already a state of emergency.

  I overlooked my duty for the sake of my convenience.

  Will tries to tell me it’s not my fault. I know I didn’t cause it, but I didn’t stop it either. I see what he’s doing and I know it comes from affection, but listen: This is what we do for the people we’re close to, all in the name of comforting. We ease the path for them to excuse their own failings.

  We let them off the hook and call it love.

  The truth is bare—I abandoned her, that tall, sad girl.

  WHEN I WENT back to the hypnotist I was like an addict. I rushed out of the apartment with the usual weight of guilt clutched to myself. The sessions are the only times I’ve left Lena with Will. And I do trust him, but he’s not family.

  I saw a city, mile upon mile of buildings, a cluster of tall commercial ones at the center and then, moving outward, the residential blocks, the tree-lined streets. The buildings were dilapidated but elegant, there was a detail of ornament to them like the tiny lines on an engraving, the careful, hair-thin lines of pictures on paper money.

  The cave-in began in the distance, with the smallest, farthest buildings disappearing first, only visible as yellow clouds of dust billowed up and curled in. Like puffy hands clenching, I thought: beneath the furls of dust buildings were collapsing. Above them something dark raked down from a cloudbank, fouling the air.