Sweet Lamb of Heaven Read online

  CONTENTS

  1. HALLUCINATIONS, EVEN IN THE SANE

  2. FIND THEM AMONG THE DEAD

  3. HIGHLY EDUCATED, MODERN PROFESSIONALS

  4. IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE

  5. HURT, YOU WERE A CHILD AGAIN

  6. UNCLEAN SPIRITS ENTERED THE SWINE

  7. SOUL IS A UNIVERSAL FEATURE

  8. BONES THAT FED OUT THEIR COLD

  9. TO THE WHITE CASTLE

  10. I WASN’T MYSELF, BUT THE IMAGE OF ME

  1

  HALLUCINATIONS, EVEN IN THE SANE

  WHEN I INSISTED ON KEEPING THE BABY, NED THREW HIS HANDS into the air palms-forward. He looked like a mime climbing a wall—one of the few times I’ve ever seen him look clumsy.

  Then he dropped his hands and turned away, shaking his head. It was a terminal shake. Afterward his schedule got fuller, his long work hours longer, his attention more completely diverted.

  And I have to admit it wasn’t just him who turned away. After we differed on that point, the point concerning the baby, I began to give up on Ned too.

  So I was alone preparing. It had been an accident, technically more his fault than mine, but who’s haggling? And once it happened I felt I needed to accept it—I wanted to. I drove by myself to buy the various infant containers. I chose the doll-sized pieces of newborn clothing, set up a nursery and glued stars on the ceiling; I crept in at night sometimes to see how they glowed. I went alone to doctor’s appointments to listen for the heartbeat and see the first pictures, and when the time came I went through labor with mostly just medical staff keeping me company.

  Ned did stop by the hospital, apparently, and spent some time talking on his cell phone in the lounge, but he stepped out again for a work lunch, later for work cocktails, and finally for a late work dinner. After dinner he drove home and went to sleep.

  None of this was too far beyond the pale, I guess, when it comes to unfortunate marriages. After about twenty hours I lay against the pillows holding her slippery body. Her eyes, against my expectation, were wide open and there was a perplexing chaos of sound in my ears, too many voices in the room for the number of people—soundtracks that overlapped. A kindly nurse was telling me about the other babies he’d seen born with their eyes open when a stream of words intruded, covering his. I heard it most distinctly when the nurse paused.

  Later I would hear volumes and forget almost all of it, but the first phrase I picked out stayed with me despite my exhaustion. It started out as a string of foreign words, only one of which resolved, to my ear, into anything recognizable—something like “power,” powa or poa. And then it was English: The living spring from the dead.

  Delirium, was what I thought, and I dispensed with it by falling fast asleep. It was only when I woke up later, and the baby was brought back to me, also awake, that the stream of chatter started up again and was impossible to ignore.

  AT FIRST I was mostly irritated, and went to get my ears looked at. Once, when I was a kid, I’d had an infected ear and heard a wavy music when I pressed my head against the pillow. Maybe this had a physical explanation, maybe some ear-brain interface was being disrupted. But my ears checked out fine. The baby didn’t enjoy the doctor’s visit, and the voice talked on—only for me, of course—throughout her noisy crying.

  Next I made an appointment with a neurologist and insisted on an expensive scan: nothing.

  For weeks I combed through psychology case studies, ready to discover the evidence against my sanity. I read up on post-partum depression, though I didn’t feel depressed. Of course I might be in denial, I knew; I had a newborn baby, after all, and a husband who had no time for either of us.

  But I didn’t feel sad. I suffered from no flatness of affect. I was tired and confused—I felt besieged by the noise—but it was frustration, not despair.

  I also gave schizoid conditions due consideration. No mother wants a woman with psychotic features bringing up her child, even if that woman is her. So reading accounts of patients who heard voices became my avocation for a while, since, as it turns out, mental illness isn’t required to hallucinate. Hallucinations, even in the sane, are quite common. They accompany certain drugs and medicines and an impressive list of diseases; they can be caused by blindness or sensory deprivation or even seem to come out of nowhere.

  A stream of advice is often heard by people in extremis, fighting injury or the elements. Voices are heard by the sane in wartime or under other forms of duress, prison or isolation or grief. Sometimes the voices have no obvious cause, their origins buried in the electric labyrinth of the brain.

  I was prepared to accept the hallucination hypothesis—the baby’s presence, her rapt attention caused me to hallucinate voices speaking to me—but I was curious beyond that and needed to cover my bases. I also went to worst-case scenarios, to the bizarre and outlandish. I studied the occult, including demonology, for instance—spent hours on the Internet reading myths and legends of demonic possession. I made trips to the library, the baby snug in her carrier, and moved from articles about people with auditory hallucinations to those who identified their visitors very specifically, brooking no disagreement.

  Demons, they said.

  They saw demons with claws, horns and pointed teeth, of course, but often demons appeared in the shape of seductive women and yet others were amorphous shapes that shifted beneath the faces of loved ones. Briefly those faces would distort, then swiftly resume their devious guise, pull over themselves the skin of normalcy.

  Or people heard demons that had no physical form but only spoke, mostly in biblical tongues like Aramaic or Hebrew. Experts were consulted and that was often their verdict: what the demon-visited persons were hearing was Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek. The demons tended to speak in dead scripts, as though frozen in the time of early Christianity—the demons clung to the old, reluctant to embrace the new.

  I was glad Lena’s mouth didn’t move when the words issued, as in some possession stories. Because it was only sound and words, invisible, the experience also conjured TV shows involving ESP. I looked into spoon-bending hoaxes and watched shows that featured ghost-finding teams that crept through haunted houses trying to capture stray ectoplasm.

  I was worn down by the elements of my routine—the stream of words and my bewilderment during the days, the nights half-sleepless, a mesh of hours spent fitfully dozing or nursing my daughter when she woke up. Ned had moved out of our bedroom while I was pregnant and never moved back, claiming his restless sleep would bother me. Often he didn’t come home at all, in those first months when Lena’s crying disturbed the nightly peace, but stayed over at the office. It wasn’t long before I began to understand that at the office was a euphemism.

  And when the baby was sleeping but I couldn’t sleep, I wallowed in pulp fiction. I read thick paperbacks set in old houses, where the devil took the form of flies and buzzed on windowpanes, or in upscale prewar apartment buildings in Manhattan, where babies were fed evil baby food and raised by Satan cults. Plus there were the movies about antichrists and child possessors, the one with the black-haired boy named Damien, the one with the blank-faced girl who floated over her bed, rasping obscenities. When I was too tired to read, with the baby mostly sleeping and the speaker fallen silent, I’d curl up in front of the screen with cheese popcorn.

  But in the end the B-movie fiends were too showy for me to take seriously, almost self-parodies. Besides, the stream of words wasn’t malicious and my daughter committed no alarming actions. She ate and slept, lay bundled in my arms. Time passed and she rolled over, sat up, crawled; also gurgled and drooled.

  She never fixed upon me a bold, sinister eye.

  So by and by I let the demons go, telepathy I dismissed out of hand, schizoaffe
ctive disorders I further renounced.

  I went with the hallucination theory.

  Hallucination has the qualities of real perception: vivid, substantial, and located in external space. It is distinct from a delusional perception, in which correctly sensed stimuli are given additional, often bizarre, significance. —Wikipedia 5.10.2009

  PEOPLE WITH MIGRAINES see colors and shapes fading and forming anew on the wall. Others, with visual hallucinations, believe strangers are sitting beside them dressed in old-fashioned garb. Next to these people’s apparitions my own affliction didn’t seem so grave.

  It was true that the disturbance was constant, and I didn’t find an identical case in the articles I read, but this struck me as more or less a technical detail. At first I called it the voice, as others like me did. Because I wasn’t alone: there were whole support groups given over to non-psychotics who heard things, including a so-called Hearing Voices Movement (its mission: to empower chronic voice-hearers). There were affirming Listservs.

  I avoided them studiously. I began to write in this Word file instead, a diary whose sporadic, rambling texts I’d tinker with for years. Over time I redacted, adding and subtracting until the entries formed a narrative that clarified my own story—at least to me.

  I spoke to no one about what I believed I heard. I sought out no company in my infirmity.

  WHERE WE LIVE now is a seaside motel in the off-season. We’re on the edge of rocky bluffs, so I can see a car coming when it’s a speck on the long gravel road.

  There are few guests this time of year; in summertime they get the kind of tourists who, says Don the motel manager, bicker sharply over the bright-orange sandwich crackers in the vending machine re: advisability of purchasing.

  But in the wintertime it’s quiet here and there are weekly rates. The carpets aren’t much to write home about, having an ashy cast. The tables in the rooms are brown Formica with black cigarette burns; our shower curtains are mildewed. I like their pale-blue imprint of daisies. I also like the cliffs, the rocks, the trees and the gray water stretching to the east. I like the sharp nearness of pine needles against a blurry sheen of sea.

  And my little girl loves it. She loves the people and the place; small events make her giddy with pleasure. She spins, cartwheels, races and laughs easily. She doesn’t have much, but she doesn’t need much. She has her books and toys and art supplies. Some of the toys are old and bedraggled, since she doesn’t want to throw out anything—the second I suggest a disused toy might be taken to the charity bin in town she feels a rush of protectiveness and clings pathetically, lavishing praise upon the object that had been utterly forgotten until then.

  Watching her protect a ratty mouse, a dog-eared, broken-spined, finger-smeared picture book, it’s almost possible to believe that everything in the world is precious, that each humble item that exists has a delicate and singular value.

  It’s possible to believe that all matter should be treated tenderly.

  LENA WAS BORN in a hospital in Alaska. Up to that time I taught as an adjunct at the university and her father was in business: and he’s still in business today, though he’s expanded his purview.

  I was fond of Anchorage. It’s a sprawling city of mostly ugly buildings, but no other city I know has bears roaming downtown. I’d be picnicking with the baby near the central business district, watching the sunset from the Cook Inlet shore, and black bears would come rustling through the undergrowth a few feet away. Feeling a tug of panic, I grabbed Lena and retreated to the car, but still I treasured having them so close. The moose roamed Anchorage too, and you could encounter them on a casual run through city parks—more dangerous than the bears, if you believed the statistics.

  Of all the actions I’ve taken, leaving Alaska was the hardest. Not because I enjoyed living there, though I did, but because it’s a bold move to take a child so far away from the man who’s her father. Even when he doesn’t accept the position.

  I did have his approval at first for our departure. The part of the split he resented was financial: he didn’t like that I took half the value of our savings account and our CDs with me. (I left the stock, I left the mutual funds, but still.) Aside from money quibbles he was glad we’d left, at first; for more than a year he didn’t mind at all. He’d been indifferent to me for a long time, as he’s indifferent to most people who aren’t of use to him.

  As for Lena, he hadn’t wanted her in the first place and he never warmed to her. Our leave-taking gave him the same liberty it gave us—namely the open-ended chance to be who we were, instead of trapped.

  I’d send him the occasional email telling him what she’d learned, what she was doing, an anecdote here or there to keep her real. I clung to the belief that any father would want that, and more than that I felt I owed it to her, to try to keep him existent as a father, however marginal. He rarely responded to these, and his occasional replies were brief and rife with hasty misspellings.

  But over the past few months he’s decided to make himself a candidate, and candidates want family since family looks reassuring on them. So now we’re useful again and he’s searching for us. I think he wants a moving snapshot for the campaign trail, two female faces behind him as he stands on the podium.

  When I first met Ned he claimed not to have any politics. I should have known enough to be wary of that, but instead I made excuses to myself. Politics were for crooks, he said. But later politics grew in him like metastasis, branching into a network threaded throughout his veins and nerves and bones. It’s not that he’s left the business world behind, it’s just that he now believes politics are a sector of his enterprise.

  His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which “values the sanctity of every human soul,” and also “believes in the greatness of the American family.” The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren’t you. Ned believes in “the American family” the same way processed food companies do, companies that make products for cleaning floors or unclogging toilets—the kind of easy code that makes public speech moronic.

  But even if he’d been a genuine family man, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of his platform.

  Once he nearly caught up with us, before I understood that emails can be traced. It was stupid of me and caused a close call and as a result I’m wiser now—or craftier, in that I don’t send emails anymore. We move, we don’t use credit cards, I don’t write my own name when I sign things. I bought a fake driver’s license from a computer-savvy teen in Poughkeepsie. If a cop pulled me over I’d have to use the real one, which matches my registration, but I drive cautiously and keep the car in good repair and so far that hasn’t happened.

  I’m not in any system, that I know of, I’m not a fugitive. Ned wouldn’t report me. It would make him look bad, defeat his whole purpose in reclaiming us.

  The only authority I’m running from is him.

  EVEN THOUGH it’s cold out, we spend a lot of time on the beach, the rocks and pebbles and sand. At dawn we take the first walk, following a narrow path down the face of the cliff. I carry a thermos of coffee and she carries a basket divided into one section for treasures, another for litter. Not every form of litter is welcome: she can’t pick up medical waste, newly broken glass, rotting food, or old, yellow-white balloons.

  I’d like for us to settle down and live a steady life, so she can go to school and have friends. Lena begs not to go to school and claims she wants our life to stay the same forever.

  She’s six years old. She doesn’t know better.

  It seems to me that if we can escape his grasp till after the election, we may have a fair shot at an undisturbed existence. If he wins he won’t need us.

  On the other hand, if he loses and decides to take another shot in another cycle, he may search harder. He may get more determined.

  When we discuss her father
, who’s only a vestigial memory for her, I rely on platitudes like “Our lives took different paths,” or “Sometimes people decide to stop living in the same place.” The matter of the separation, unlike the matter of the voice I used to hear—on which I hope always to keep my own counsel—will one day require unpleasant conversation, but so far she’s satisfied with generalities. She’s not overly interested, since she never saw much of him. Much as she never caught his interest, he never seemed to capture hers either. When we did share an address he seldom came home: he traveled, he worked late, he cultivated his casual friends and many acquaintances. He never read bedtime stories or sat down with us for meals.

  He was a sasquatch in a photograph, a fuzzy obscure figure moving in far-off silhouette.

  DON, WHO’S BEEN so good to us, is a pear-shaped man. This feature endears him to Lena, whose favorite stuffed animal is a plush, duck-like bird with a small head and giant baggy ass. Don has a shuffling gait, seems erudite by hospitality-industry standards, and like us appears to be hiding here—not hiding from one person but from crowds of people, possibly, or from a faster pace. He has a job that involves people, true, but seldom too many at one time, and when people do show up they’re in his territory, his cavernous and dimly lit domain.

  I imagine he keeps the motel ramshackle so as not to attract too much traffic—so as to keep the trickle of company thin. His family owns the business and seems to accept the small returns.

  When a stray overnight guest comes through, Don’s civil but hardly overjoyed. Lena, by contrast, is always excited. She acts as though she, not he, is the owner: she’s the mistress of all she surveys, with the hosting duties this brings. To her the motel is first-rate; she sees no mildew or cigarette burns. Because I can’t leave her with strangers, this means I meet many guests too, tagging along in the background as she gives them the tour.

  Most are highly tolerant of her—eager children receive a plenary indulgence, especially dimple-cheeked girls—and her exuberance is contagious. She explains the rules about clean towels with gusto, as though the rules, if not the towels, are sacrosanct; she showcases the antique ice machine with pride of ownership.