Sweet Lamb of Heaven (38)
I went over and over how my girl must be feeling, alone with someone she barely knew, whether her father loomed as a threatening figure or had made himself charming and likable to reassure her. I worked to craft this kind of picture for myself, Ned as a babysitter, performing an imitation of affection—I sculpted this image painstakingly, smoothing my fingers along the edges, pushing it into a shape I could live with. But it collapsed whenever I wasn’t vigilant and I wondered what he was telling her, what particular architecture of lies she was living in and what part of them she believed.
I couldn’t help recalling Ned’s phone conversation with my mother, his sly undermining of me, whether he was doing the same with Lena. But it was her relation to the whole world I feared for most, the way she might be changed. I got a prescription for tranquilizers the day after she was taken and tried, with Will’s help, to make a routine for myself around the investigators’ progress reports, which they gave to me twice a day.
Not even the voice had affected me like this, made my whole body weak with terror or my knees buckle whenever the knowledge of it struck me. It was my abject state that took me to Don’s meetings. Between the kidnapping and the first meeting I attended there was only one exchange with Don about the hearing of voices—one moment when he bowed his head to me and apologized for having kept me out.
“You’ve been in recovery longer than most of them,” he said. “You’ve done far better with it. For them it’s still new. They didn’t bring you in before because they weren’t ready.”
I said nothing to Will about the meetings, didn’t even intend to go myself—I only started to attend them because I’d been by myself in my room and, without Lena, was hit by the lightning bolt that had been striking me constantly since she was taken. It was a stupefaction that refused to diminish: as soon as I had a loose, idle moment I was scorched down the center by remorse, burnt black by the feeling of guilt. My fault. My fault.
At those moments I’d do anything for distraction, and so it happened that one time I left my room headed for anywhere—looking for the moving figures of people, the sounds they made, the industry of normal lives—and as I passed through the lobby I saw the café door cracked open.
The tables had been pushed back to the walls, chairs set out in a circle. I’d been to an Al-Anon meeting once keeping a friend company, and this had the same encounter-group feeling. There were baked goods and coffee arrayed on one of the tables, a hot-water container and a basket of tea bags. I settled myself on a chair a bit back from the rest—an outlier, satellite chair—and as the fog of panic receded, I took hold of myself and worked not to think of Lena. One minute, I said to myself, one minute first, then two; one minute at a time, one day was an eternity.
Navid wasn’t there, but the rest of the guests were accounted for.
“It’s been four months since I retired,” said Big Linda.
It didn’t grow clear to me then where they’d heard their voices or how, only that the content of their perceptions varied. They’d heard different sounds, drawn different conclusions and had different responses. Linda had heard a voice at work, somehow, and told no one until much later; Burke had told Gabe about hearing a voice immediately, and Gabe had believed him schizophrenic . . . but in fact, that first day, I barely heard what was said. I drifted on the back of my Valium, lulled by the drone of voices.
And my fear of a cult, at least, was assuaged by the drabness of the plastic chair edge in front of me and the matter-of-fact trudge of Main Linda over to the snacks table. There was no grim power to be felt amid that mundane scene of guests selecting baked goods beneath the tube fluorescents. Main Linda piled sandwich cookies onto a paper plate printed with rainbows, then returned to her chair licking the powdered sugar off a finger.
Don didn’t address a single word to me at that initial meeting, just let me sit there behind the ranks, saying nothing.
Not for the first time I thought how groups of people had a habit of making even the exceptional banal. Was it a national characteristic or a trait of all humanity? Crowds could be grandiose, that was true, but small groups in small rooms . . . it took me back to my parents’ church, where I’d sat bored and staring around, looking high and low for any object of interest. More often than not I’d failed to find such an object and ended up gazing at the dirty Kleenex wadded into someone’s sleeve. I remembered the backs of my legs sweating on the smooth wood of the pew, heard wet coughs off to one side, saw dandruff on shoulders and, in sandal weather, hoary toenails.
Still: there’d been hymns, and some of them were dull but many were beautiful and sad. Although I hadn’t felt that sadness till after, long after we had left the church.
It was remembered music that was beautiful.
6
UNCLEAN SPIRITS ENTERED THE SWINE
THE INVESTIGATORS IMPRESSED ME WITH A SENSE OF COMPETENCE as I looked at their faces on the screen or scanned the neat pdf records of their efforts and expenditures, the rows of line items. I thought how easy I must be to fool—experience had shown this with sparkling transparence.
My questions were lame and I was often sedated. So I made Don and Will, and also the Lindas, ask questions for me. They huddled around and gazed into the laptop’s camera. The investigators’ clean, concerned faces stared back at us from a gray office only a couple hours’ drive away. Were they really present, I wondered, in an office building in Portland? Or were they a shallow illusion of service?