Sweet Lamb of Heaven Read online

  “This ice is only for people’s drinks,” she says sternly. “So don’t pick it up and put it back, OK? And don’t stand with your hands stuck in the ice, even if you like the shiver.”

  WHEN NED CAUGHT up with us we were staying at a cabin in New Hampshire near the summit of a low mountain. It was a large, wooden cabin with a dozen bunk beds for hikers and three caretaker-cooks. Only a few dozen feet from the porch was a waterfall with a flat-topped boulder at its edge, where Lena liked to sit trailing her hand in the water and basking in the sun. The water wasn’t deep.

  We only got away that time because Ned made a mistake; he did a flyover. Maybe he wanted to preside from the air while his employees cornered us; maybe not. I still don’t know if he was personally there.

  But helicopters were rare along that part of the Appalachian Trail, coming in only with major equipment or for medical emergencies. I was on the porch with one of the cooks when that one chop-chop-chopped overhead and she looked up and said, “Huh, a private helicopter. It’s not the local guy.”

  That was all I needed to pull Lena off her sunny rock and leave our sleeping bags behind. I did it only because my stomach twisted when the cook said what she said: I followed my instincts and we bushwhacked down the mountainside—I said it was a game, going off-trail, and the one who made it to the bottom with no scratches on her legs or arms would win a double-scoop cone. When we reached the road I had some light scratches on my forearms while Lena had none; new mosquito bites itched and swelled around my ankles, and our shoes were soaked from slogging through a stagnant creek.

  Still, Lena was gleeful at the prospect of her ice cream reward.

  The car wasn’t parked in the trailhead lot most of the hikers used but in a shaded pullout I’d found. After a short walk on the shoulder of the road we got in and drove off.

  And I knew we’d been right to run when the cook, who had become a friend, called me. She said four men had come, two from each direction since the trail stretched out on either side of the cabin. They converged on it fifteen minutes after we’d left. They weren’t dressed for hiking: their shoes were shiny leather ruined by mud. So she told them only that we’d left the day before, and after some unhappy muttering and some prowling around the grounds and questioning of other guests, the four men went away.

  NED MARRIED ME for my family’s money, because he had none of his own and wanted some; I married him because I thought it was love. I was wrong too, it wasn’t love—I don’t mean to pin it all on him. I had a crush, if I’m being honest, and I didn’t know the difference.

  Ned’s a very attractive man, a man many people use the word handsome or magnetic to describe. Even straight men have said this of him, the same way they’ll concede it, often grudgingly, of famous actors or athletes. Both before and after we were married, men and women alike would confide in me about their attraction to Ned. He makes people covet him, inspires a desperate greed. And he knows this all too well—it’s key to his strategy for gathering investors. Ned is his own asset, his own front man, a property that sells itself. Both men and women want to own him or sleep with him, but failing that they’re just grateful to be part of his enterprise.

  It goes far beyond standard-issue good looks.

  He always had a talent for captivating an audience. From the first moment he meets you he establishes eye contact, and he doesn’t relinquish it easily. But he’s not only a mesmerist. He can embody audience convincingly as well, when listening is called for. When he receives a personal disclosure he seems to listen intently, even adoringly.

  In fact he isn’t listening but intently, tactically appearing to listen—no mean feat in itself.

  He’s humorless, though, which for me proved slowly deadening. Ned always laughs when others laugh, taking the social cues, but laughter doesn’t come naturally to him. And while he could occasionally say a funny thing, back in our early days together, it wasn’t intentional.

  There were other, more minor details of Ned that should have been red flags for me too—his allegiance, for example, to a certain brand of cologne. Before Ned I’d never been with any man who wore cologne. The smell of it didn’t bother me: this particular cologne was inoffensive, even subtle. But once, when a bottle of it was knocked off a bathroom counter and broke on the tile floor, I saw a strange edge of rage in him.

  In general I had no eyes for red at all in the infatuated months before we got married. Any flags of bright color were lost in the hills and dales of a hazy, indulgent country.

  And my feelings were irrelevant, in the end, since he had close to none for me. I was surprisingly late to this realization. We tend to believe what we wish to, and I was no exception. I hoped that Ned loved me, and hope shaded into assumption without me recognizing it.

  Before I got pregnant he found me attractive enough too, I guess, but this disappeared with the pregnancy, which he found repulsive. He pursued other women with unqualified success. He had no lasting feelings for any of them either, as far as I could tell, but each was new in her turn, and Ned prizes novelty. Novelty and momentum are his two passions.

  In saying he married me for money, I don’t mean to imply I was an heiress—my family had the complacent, middling inherited wealth that passes without much notice unless you happen to be Ned, brought up in poverty, entrepreneurial, and with an incentive to research. He could have held out for someone with far more money and far, far better connections, for I had none.

  Now, looking back, I’m surprised he didn’t. I was a small fish, very small. I had barely enough. But he was impatient to get his enterprises off the ground. And his disinterest in the marriage probably reflected his own awareness of that hasty choice—the fact that he’d settled for much less than he was capable of getting.

  WITH A HANDFUL of exceptions I found that when I tried to write down what the voice said, I couldn’t. A fog would descend. Phrases that seemed sharply etched to me when I heard them, sense and structure cut like a skyscraper against a crisp sky, would crumble and fade as soon as I tried to record them.

  I heard the words in the stream as English or French or Spanish, or sometimes it would be modern English in an accent or dialect, say Australian English or an English with Welsh accents. Other times it was English that sounded like Shakespeare or Middle English, like Chaucer maybe, which I’d read in college. But whenever the format changed I half-forgot what had come before, as though the switch between lexicons and grammars occurred imperceptibly. Since I couldn’t identify the languages that weren’t English or Spanish or French I figured my imagination was making up a stream of nonsense, sounds that resembled other tongues but were only a sham.

  That was a game I’d liked to play when I was a kid. I even played it a few times with Lena, speaking in rapid-fire gibberish, pretending it was an unknown exotic language, say Urdu or Tahitian.

  And the voice never went silent, except when Lena was sleeping. It changed from low tones to high, speech to singing, singing to humming to clicking sounds that had a rhythmic quality, on occasion devolving into grumbling or even yelling. I drew the line at yelling—at those times I’d call a babysitter and go out.

  I’d shut the door behind me and step into the street, and right away I didn’t hear a thing.

  WHEN I LEFT Ned, I took enough money to live on for a while. It was only a fraction of the legacy from my family that he’d funneled into his businesses, but I didn’t want to fight over money. Ned wanted it more than I ever had and taking too much would bring out the edge in him.

  So I took only what I felt I needed. I made a budget carefully, knowing I wasn’t going to work again until Lena started school. I’d worked steadily all my adult life and I thought I could use a break; I was well pleased to be only her mother and teacher for those years. I didn’t plan to have a second child.

  The money keeps us afloat, Lena and me, and in that respect we’re fortunate.

  I PUZZLED OVER the link between the baby’s presence and my hallucination. There wasn’t gener
ally supposed to be such a clear connection, in the hallucinations of the sane, between what was heard or seen and the fixations of the hallucinating person—not in the descriptions that I read, anyway. This made my case seem more psychological than purely neurological, and I worried about it periodically. Because the presence of my infant carried with it a voice that had the appearance of fluency in all tongues and gave an impression of encyclopedic knowledge—some kind of frightened projection of my overpowering responsibility as a mother, possibly, was one of my interpretations.

  Sometimes the stream of sound wasn’t a voice but music, welcome relief: old standards, dramatic epics by well-known composers, folk tunes, pop riffs. It liked Woody Guthrie, whose music I didn’t remember encountering before except for the song “This Land Is Your Land,” which I knew from summer camp. Research on the snatches of lyrics I could recall yielded his name, and I thought I must have been exposed as a child, and quashed the recollection.

  But most often the content was words—what sounded like recitations of texts of all kinds, poems, fictions both literary and mass-market, movie scripts and stage plays, histories, dictionaries, textbooks, biographies, news stories. The subjects were as diverse as the genres: single-celled organisms, hockey scores, feathers on dinosaurs, celebrity suicides, the pattern of Pleistocene extinctions, the fate of the tribe known as the Nez Perce; relativity, particle accelerators, Greek myths, the troubled term Anthropocene, the chemistry of a callus on the hand of Heidelberg man.

  I was impressed by the knowledge base from which my mind appeared to be drawing. I marveled at it, even. Buried in my unconscious must be some capacity for photographic memory, I thought.

  That surprised me.

  Nothing salacious ever came from the voice—that is, there were curses, there was profanity, there were even vague references to sex and reproduction, but there was never a suggestion of lechery directed toward me personally. Still, I felt perversion was implicit in the combination of a baby nursing while a stream of elevated diction flowed up from somewhere beyond the O of her mouth. I had to distance myself from the voice when I was nursing her: it might be my hallucination, but, much in the way I might detest my head lice or my chicken pox, should those happen to manifest, I was forced, at those times, to treat it as a pest.

  On occasion I’d try hard to write down what I heard despite my confusion, with doggedness but a lack of clarity, determined to record the substance of the hallucinated event. I still carry with me some scraps of paper—deep in the trunk, where I stuck the file after the last time I picked through it. I’d had to write the words down fast to get any of them, seldom had time to get to the keyboard, so the notes are scribbled on the backs of envelopes, grocery and housewares receipts, once along the edge of a worn dollar bill. Many seemed nonsensical: Windlessness = illusion planet is static in space ∴ windlessness entropic. Or “social animals + writing: ERRATUM.”

  Neighbors and friends came over fairly often in the first year of Lena’s life and (of course) they never heard the voice, not even the faintest hint of it—I made sure. I’d ask, in a roundabout, casual way, if anyone was hearing anything unusual as we sat there, but my questions always met with offhand dismissals.

  Joan of Arc had heard a voice advising her to help raise the siege of Orleans, but as far as I could tell the voice had no specific instructions for the likes of me.

  I PASSED THROUGH stages with my hallucination. Sometimes I wished I could hide from it, other times I was determined to study it steadfastly until I could pick out the details and know it more perfectly. After almost a year I fit myself into a certain orbit, adjusting my routine to its disruptions. I shrank and disappeared in the brightness of its perpetual day but at night, when it was silent and so was Lena, I tracked across the dark relief in solitary flight.

  I relied heavily on the fact that babies sleep for longer than adults and I also depended on her midday nap, an hour and a half like clockwork. The babysitters gave me some time off, and for the rest I’d found ways to fit myself into the spaces between words, to distract myself sometimes, at other times to tolerate nearness and even, when well-rested, to listen.

  In general I felt besieged, my defenses walled up around me, but every now and then something in the fall of words would strike. I’d feel my throat clench in grief or recognition, be on the brink of tears and then not be.

  At those times—it’s hard to describe and I feel like a fool even trying—I didn’t understand why emotion was overwhelming me but I also didn’t waste time belaboring the question. I had distinct sensations and I stilled everything to feel them: sometimes I thought I was being cut bloodlessly, cut so that a clear, frigid air entered me and the rest of the outside followed; or possibly I spilled out, it may have been the other way around. I’d feel as though I had the long view, past the end of my life, past the horizon, dispersing into ether.

  I loved that feeling the way a drug might be loved, I think, quick as it was, freeing—but also with an icy burn, a searing touch I imagined as the cold of space and couldn’t stand for long. There was the euphoria of ascent, the vertigo of height.

  Then the feeling would vanish abruptly. I’d just be there, in my house or on the street or in a store, wherever, with Lena. And I’d be desperate to see her clear eyes gazing at me with no interference—to be alone with her instead of in the company of slime molds, cyanobacteria genomics, cuneiform or the dancing of bees.

  And finally it wasn’t the substance or character of the voice I resented but its proximity—the fact that it was so close, and that it never ceased. I urgently wanted to be rid of the torrent of sound and image, the stream of convolved murmurings that often evoked either oppressive problems or, at the very least, the broad dramatic canvas of a universe that went on forever beyond our cozy walls. What I wished for was my child by herself, the child I’d counted on only with me—the two of us in peace and privacy.

  I wanted the normal pleasures of babies, the smell of her soft cheek against my face, to hold her in my lap at bedtime and be able to read picture books to her without hearing, as I read, the constant burble of a parallel story.

  But I adjusted, for the most part. I felt I knew the voice for the invention that it was, unconscious, a product of haywire neurology; albeit with some resistance, with some anxiety, I’d learned to live around it.

  And then that changed.

  WE WERE HAVING a rare family moment. One of Ned’s affairs had just ended in a mildly humiliating way (I figured out later) and at the same time he’d had a major setback at work—failed at a takeover of a small company that made some minor machine part for shrimp trawlers. He’d flown in that afternoon from Dutch Harbor and was home for dinner, albeit with the crabby attitude of someone who’s racking his brain but just can’t think of somewhere else to be. I stood at the stove cooking as the baby sat in her high chair eating spinach puree and cheese; as always, in those days, the voice was droning on in the background.

  “Turn off that racket, for Chrissake,” said Ned irritably, before he’d finished his first drink.

  At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was accustomed to talking over the noise in the background when I had company.

  “Turn what off?” I asked, and looked around me as if to see the source.

  “That AM radio, that shock-jock shit you’re listening to,” he said.

  I cocked my head and caught a few obscenities. The voice didn’t shy away from coarse invective: this piece must have been some standup routine, a foulmouthed rant. It liked to take a run through those, from time to time. I was pretty sure the FCC wouldn’t have let those words onto the airwaves and got distracted for a second thinking Ned should’ve realized that too.

  Then I realized the implications of what he had said—the sheer impossibility—and after a double take I walked away from the stove and sat down, stunned.

  He was hearing it.

  “Well, shit, OK. I’ll turn it off myself,” he said, and went to the radio on the
stereo, where he overlooked the darkness of the control panel and spun the volume knob to zero.

  The voice didn’t miss a beat and Ned said fuck, it must be coming from the neighbors’ and he wasn’t in the mood to walk over there and yell at them. There followed a tirade about said neighbors, who were hippies, a category Ned reviled. He ranted about their refusal to wear deodorant and their seaweed-harvesting business; he shoveled his dinner down, took an aspirin and went to bed with earplugs in.

  Earplugs had never worked for me.

  I’d lifted Lena from her high chair and she was sitting on a mat with arches over it, soft toys that dangled from the arches. When Ned disappeared down the hallway I heard the voice, rising again and switching into a milder patter. For once I was able to record what it said—a couple of quotations. On my laptop I found attributions to famous writers, and I wrote the quotes down. “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” “None so deaf as those who will not hear.”

  While Ned and Lena slept I went into a panic. I stayed up all night; I tried to fall asleep again and again, but I couldn’t, and so by 3 a.m. I gave up and put sneakers on and went walking—at times even running—in the dark, in the cold, through the silent neighborhood.

  The houses all seemed like statues, the cars, the trees all seemed deliberately placed to me. Of course, most of them had been deliberately placed, deliberately built or planted there, and yet their placement suddenly possessed a different character. It was as though they watched me, as though their positions had been decided by some unified and motive force … I was getting paranoid, I thought: first a delusion of hallucination, and now paranoia had come for me.

  Ned had heard it. Ned, indifferent, superficial, and seemingly sane as the next guy, had heard the voice. Someone else had heard it, therefore it couldn’t be purely hallucination. I had been wrong.