Sweet Lamb of Heaven

by Lydia Millet

  His breath was moist and stale on my ear and a sight flashed before me, a black pit. Out of it climbed naked people in stuttering, stiff movements, herky-jerky. I’d seen that movie, I thought, a Japanese horror movie, I’d seen it and it scared me. They were like puppets pulled and released on unseen strings, and their thin limbs were hairy and banded as the tails of rats.

  “Like I did with the little doctor girl,” he said. “You can’t let people like that just keep going. She saw way too much. And then she opened her little bitch mouth. So she had to go. Didn’t she.”

  I turned and stared at his smile. Then I bolted ahead, my stiletto heels biting into the turf, until I was near enough to grab Lena’s hand and use the contact to steady myself. I walked forward holding that little hand tightly, my mother on her other side, and looked down at her face that I love so much, trusting and bright.

  I gazed at her face that banished fear and thought of not looking back—no matter what, I said to myself, no one can make me look back now.

  AT THE RECEPTION (carefully steering clear of Ned, who was at the far side of my parents’ house glad-handing the mourners) I took Will’s arm and pulled him into the kitchen with me, where we could talk. I watched Lena through the open door, carrying a tray of food with my mother at her side. I felt cracked and hollow.

  Drinking wine didn’t make me less parched but at least it loosened the tendons on my neck. I was living in a half-life, I thought, a life of distorted lenses where I couldn’t trust anymore that a man’s skin wouldn’t pixelate beside me. Even my thoughts weren’t my own, and without them I wasn’t myself. Alone had been free, I saw that now—alone had frightened me but the air was clear there. Now I was in prison, without the privacy of my mind. With those claws in my thoughts I wasn’t myself—I wasn’t anyone.

  Will and I stood and gulped from our goblets beside the trays of brought food, the donated lasagnas and plates of brownies crowded onto the island. I made myself focus on the practical and asked him what had happened over the past weeks.

  I didn’t say months. I was trying to test the waters.

  “You mean—in the news?” he asked.

  “I mean with us,” I said. “What have we been doing?”

  “Besides your father—helping take care of him? Besides the illness?”

  “We’ve been here at the house for a long time,” I repeated, tentative. “Just here with my parents.”

  I saw in his face: Of course. Yes.

  So it had been a nightmare, I’d been here, where I needed to be, with them. That motel room and fluttering fast-forward of days and weeks and months had been a memory Ned implanted when he took away the rest.

  “Is he threatening you again?” asked Will urgently. “Did he say something threatening?”

  “It’s not what he threatens,” I said. “He said—he said he did it to Kay. He said she saw t-too clearly. Somehow he did it, Will. She d-didn’t do it to herself.”

  I was starting to stammer, a habit I thought I’d gotten rid of as a child. Will reached out and held my shoulders.

  “And now I don’t have the right memories. This—it’s like I wasn’t here till today. I don’t remember anything since March. Right after the fire, after Kay. And he says it was him. In my head. He did it to her and he can do it to me.”

  “You don’t have the right memories,” repeated Will.

  I mumbled what Ned had said—his fingers, the holes in my head. My hands had started shaking. “You were reading Goodnight Moon. I had this—I thought my hair was growing just, just fast—”

  “Anna,” said Will, and moved his hands onto my own to hold them still.

  “That’s all I have since then, all I have since March, since we moved back to the motel—it was the week after your house burned, remember? Listen. He robbed me of this time. These months. His face talked to me from the computer … .”

  I looked down at my nails, my nails on the fingers held by his fingers, wanting some evidence to show for all of it, but the evidence was gone. It was my interior life Ned commandeered, that was all. Not time. He couldn’t do that. I was half-comforted.

  “My fingernails were never long,” I said dimly.

  Will was looking into my eyes intently, but I couldn’t describe it any better. As he stared at me, waiting worriedly for me to explain myself, I thought of checking this journal—I’d open this document, see what I’d recorded. Maybe, in the real months that had been taken from me, I’d written real entries. I’d check tonight, I decided.

  “I have to tell Don,” said Will. He was patting his jacket pockets, searching. “This has to be it. This is what we expected. He wants you to look fucked up. Depressed and grief-stricken. After your father’s death, you’re going to … he’s going to do it. Maybe just pills, like Kay, but he’s going to make you—he’s down in the polls. He could actually lose this. He and his people are desperate. He needs the sympathy vote.”

  He found his phone and dialed it.

  “Sympathy?” I asked. I noticed I was holding the stem of my wineglass too hard. I set the goblet down on the countertop, then picked it up and drained it. “I don’t understand it, Will. Do you?”

  But then he was saying he couldn’t get cell service in here and headed out the kitchen door, slipping his phone against his cheek. “Stay here, stay right here,” he called back. “OK? Don’t get near him.”

  Lena, I thought: Where was she? Still offering her tray of food to guests? I’d forgotten to watch her for maybe five minutes by then and my mother might not be vigilant enough. She knew Ned had taken my daughter before, but she didn’t know this new Ned, this Ned phase-shifted into pixels and a grin that was a rictus. This one who said bitch instead of honey, whose skin had pulled back from his face to reveal bone and metal … I looked down the hallway at the milling people, pushing away the fact that Will had asked me to stay here: it didn’t include panic over having to look for my girl. Then I was out of the kitchen, rushing to get to the living room.

  There was my mother, talking to an old woman with a walker, and there was Solly, there was Luisa.

  I couldn’t see Lena. I didn’t see her.

  I pushed my way through the people, made it to the front door, and hesitated. There was a ringing in my ears and my hands felt too numb to turn the knob.

  But then I was outside, and I must have left my heels behind because I was standing on the front porch in nylons, feeling the rubber nubbins of their welcome mat against my soles. Closest to me were Main and Big Linda, right there on the path from the street, and Lena was holding Main Linda’s hand and picking with a stick at the sole of her shoe—it seemed to have a piece of gum stuck to it. She waved the stick when she saw me, grinning.

  They were watching our suburban Fourth of July parade, whose route comes down our street every third year. There were floats and bunting that glittered red, white, and blue; there were some kids in an off-key marching band, a girl turning cartwheels. Up came a horse-drawn buggy decorated with stars-’n’-stripes and the name of a car dealership, and then, in the bed of a pickup truck, a human-sized blow-up statue of liberty with a big head. Its torch flames were made of yellow plastic streamers, blown upward from a small fan below in the truck bed. They snapped and fluttered in the breeze.

  The Lindas were looking out at the street and didn’t turn. Nearby Don and his aged father stood near a waxy rhododendron bush, the father leaning on his cane; up toward the sidewalk, on the burnt July grass, were the other motel guests, Navid and the Dutch couple. There were Burke and Gabe, just getting out of a car parked at the curb. I thought maybe I should talk to them, thank them for coming, but they were watching the parade, all of their faces turned toward it. I would wait, I decided.

  I walked down the sagging wood steps and went over to Lena, feeling the grass poke between my toes; I took the gum-stick from her gently and tossed it into a bush. With her hand in mine I turned to look at the parade.

  But as I gazed at it—the high school marching band pa
ssing—the marchers changed. Their uniforms faded to drab brown and gray; some of them were wearing hoodies or hats, some dragged bags after them, scraping the street—their instruments were gone, and instead of the instruments they carried sacks full of trash, sacks leaking fluids I couldn’t make out, leaving brown-red streaks on the road. Their heads hung down. Their passage had a dreadful weight.

  As I stared at them, all at once, they raised their faces to me. Hideous. Some seemed to be wearing gluey, primitive masks; some looked like burn victims and others were pimply teenagers, some were middle-aged with bad teeth and glasses. Some were diseased, their eyes red-rimmed, lesions that looked like eczema or leprosy splitting the skin of their faces. The worst were crones with thinning hair, clumps of ragged gray sticking to yellow scalps.

  But they were all Lena.

  “No,” I said out loud.

  They were Lena old, young, wretched, in a hundred distortions. That’s why we have to die first, I thought, panicked: before they get so old. I shook off the urge to throw up.

  Around me the motel guests were watching the parade and smiling. They didn’t see what I saw.

  I had to be defiant. It wasn’t the time to play dead.

  “Is this show all for me, Ned?”

  The parade shifted so that, for a moment, I saw normality—a second of cheerleaders with pompoms. Then the ruined Lenas were back, deformed and crooked, shambling. They made noises low in their throats. I saw a toddler so thin she was almost a skeleton.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, summoning a desperate bluster. “Give it up, Ned.” I moved my eyes off the parade and fixed them on the solid, actual Lena beside me. No one seemed to be hearing what I said.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw the front windows of the house and sure enough there was Ned, his grin a death’s-head rictus through the glass.

  “They got here fast, didn’t they,” came a voice. Will’s.

  He was on the porch. I pulled Lena with me, stepping back onto the lawn to meet him as he walked down the steps and grazed my cheek gently with the backs of his curled fingers. Once he was near us the yard felt more physical, the house—and when I turned back to the street the parade was normal, just a small-town parade befitting my parent’s sleepy suburb.

  My body slumped in relief.

  “I thought we were supposed to be the ones that didn’t go crazy,” I said, and leaned against Will, my whole body sagging against his side.

  “You’re not crazy,” he said. “He just wants you to feel that way. And look like it. So your suicide’s credible. Do you believe me?”

  I cocked my head at him and nodded slowly.

  “The others are here,” I said.

  “They came when they heard about your father.”

  “But Will. Ned’s calling the shots. He’s still—he’s in my head, messing around with me. The parade? To me it looked different.”

  “So,” said Main Linda, approaching. “Hey. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “We’re all so sorry,” added Big Linda.

  Navid hugged me lightly. He wore a dark suit almost as expensive as one of Ned’s, I noticed. And he was clean-shaven again.

  In the street several jeeps passed by with banners supporting the armed forces.

  “Soldiers,” said Lena helpfully.

  “Brave young Americans,” came Ned’s voice from behind us. “How do you like the parade, Anna?”

  I opted not to turn around. The others barely acknowledged his presence either, but I felt them tense and stiffen, I felt their mood turn gray.

  “Can we see fireworks?” asked Lena.

  “It has to be dark for fireworks,” said Will.

  “That’s later on tonight,” said Big Linda.

  “But can I stay up late?”

  “Of course you can,” I said.

  “I’ll see you then,” said Ned, and he strode down to the sidewalk, two suited bodyguards converging on him as he went, the engine of a parked car revving.

  Watching him get into the backseat of the car, hearing the curt slams of three car doors in a row as the bodyguards got into the front, was when it hit me: one job remains to me. However bad it is now, I saw—his cartoon-thug tactics, the way he used my love for my daughter against me—it will be far worse if he wins. And not just for Lena and me, not only for us, not at all.

  I’ve been blindered for months—maybe the whole length of my life. These visions and pixels make it obvious. Around me is the desperation of others, the arms of supplicants growing out of the dirt, and I’ve walked through those fields as though there’s nothing there but tall grass. I should have played dirty long ago.

  The living spring from the dead, was the first thing I had heard.

  I smile thinking of it. Maybe the dead had been me.

  I won’t have Lena if I don’t even have myself. And Ned has a sociopath’s overconfidence, that’s his weakness. Maybe he’s made mistakes that can be used against him, one or more of his obvious, arrogant, flagrantly taken risks.

  “Why are they really here?” I asked Will as we headed back into the house with Lena. The motel guests were drawing closer together on my parents’ lawn.

  “To be of service,” he said.

  And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. —King James Bible, Revelation 12:7

  62 percent of Americans … think recent natural disasters are evidence of global climate change while 49 percent say such disasters are evidence of biblical end times. —Washington Post, 11.21.2014

  I WRITE THIS in my old room with the bulletin board, where among the dust bunnies on a closet shelf I found a fortune-teller made of pink construction paper. It’s numbered with blunted pencil on the finger flaps, and inside each flap is an outcome scrawled in miniature writing. My friends and I made them up, giggling hysterically, during a sleepover when I was in sixth grade. You will be Famous (for Burping the national Anthem) You will be Rich but Really Dumb Our Love will never Die.

  In the corner is a crate of my old records, on top of which an LP lies flat. It bears a once-famous logo, a black-and-white dog staring into the cone of a gramophone beneath the words His Master’s Voice.

  When I looked into this Word file to see what I might have written during my lost spring, all I found after the cut and pasted-in email from Kay’s parents were two fragments.

  I assume I wrote them, but have no memory of it.

  Say God is a complex grammar that doesn’t coexist with our own language, its ego-driven structures. Say Kay is right and dolphins or whales can be its hosts for their whole lives, instead of funneling it briefly as Lena did, because the form of language that emerges in those animals doesn’t displace the deep grammar the way ours does. Say that deep language, whose name may also be God, stays with them because their communication systems, though capable of individuation, are not devoted to the self. Say we’re left on our own, as Kay had it, when we pronounce our first words and God deserts us, and it’s in that respect that we’re different from the other beasts and different from the aspen trees. Then it has to be said also that instead of being raised above the other kinds of life—instead of being special as we have always claimed—we’re only more alone.

  That one was peppered with errors of rapid typing that I’ve fixed. The other was this:

  Some people hear more, some less, some nothing at all. What we hear is what we can hear, its content minutely tailored to our character and biases. That means, if I believe her, that even we, who should be outside the range of any dogmatic faith, even we only ever know the God our personality describes.

  Lena, living out a fixation on the cute, has made the screen on our tablet into a picture of a fawn in a snowy forest glade, looking over its shoulder with big dark eyes as flakes fall and soften the world around it. The only moving elements are its eyes, which every so often blink, and the snow. I look at it now, while she runs through the sprinkler in the backyard with Will.

  I can see them out my win
dow if I scooch my desk chair sideways—there. Better.

  The fawn with its dark, slowly blinking eyes takes me back to Ned’s beautiful girlfriend, the young model or model lookalike. Where is she now? I could do so much good mischief if I had just a little timestamped footage of her and Ned together.

  Of course any action I take is a risk to Lena and there’s no way to attack him from anonymity. Everything’s obvious now that I know he actively wishes me harm. It’s transparent that nothing binds him to the norms of decency—no guarantee exists, none ever did. There was never a contract to rely on, some solid agreement that could be wielded in a court, only my naive belief that such abstractions have any weight at all.

  All my credulity is out the window now, that frail screen of written-on paper I let myself believe would keep the world predictable. Ned’s handshakes add up to less than nothing—or nothing but the flag my gullibility flew on. Don and Will and their fears, well, those fears were only a slice of the malice that Ned is.

  Maybe the knowledge is chilling—it is, when I don’t block it out stubbornly—but it also means I have no reason to jump at his command anymore, there’s nothing left to make me do what he wants me to. So he’s now lost his postcard family. He shouldn’t have shown himself, and I wonder why he did, because he could have strung me along forever, practically, while I still believed he could be bargained with.

  Now I know he doesn’t bargain. He only pretends to.

  And he has nothing left to get from me. Nothing but the last thing.

  It must be his narcissism that’s to blame, maybe he couldn’t help showing me how powerful he is. Maybe he had to flaunt it.

  And all I have left is this: my girl and her uncertain future.

  She used to look forward to every new day.

  THE OTHER MOTEL GUESTS insisted on staying close, crowding around Lena and me as we walked across the parking lot. We’d left Solly and Luisa and my mother at home, my mother so she could help the caterers clean up, Solly and Luisa so they could pack to leave for Manhattan the next day. But they urged Will and me to take Lena out. Let the child see the bombs bursting in air, at least, on this death-textured day.