Sweet Lamb of Heaven (45)
I’ve been trying to learn if anything unites the motel guests beyond the fact of having heard—whether, for instance, a message was conveyed to anyone. For me there hadn’t seemed to be a message, as I’ve written, for me the voice had been like weather, but I shared Navid’s questions, we all did: they were basic. I wanted to know if the voice had carried portents for others—if they’d felt like the Maid of Orleans, if any had believed they were receiving instructions or prophecies. It was a whale that spoke to Big Linda; well, whales have often figured in myths and stories. It seems well within the standard imaginative canon.
And just yesterday Burke spoke to the group at length.
“Chinese native,” he mumbled, looking down at his feet. Burke has the bearing of an absentminded professor. “Acer griseum. Paperbark maple. Beautiful, peeling red bark, this great, faded red I’ve never seen anywhere else. I remember having the impression that it was melodies made by the flow of cellular division, the phloem and xylem. The movement of sugar in the trunk.”
For him the voice—something like humming or singing, he said, a pure music sometimes like a chorale, sometimes like a Glass symphony—seemed to issue from a certain tree in the arboretum where he worked. The tree sang and its music was holy.
“But you know. Maybe it wasn’t really coming from the maple tree or Shamu,” said Navid. “Maybe they were both sort of like one of those ventriloquist’s dummies—like the sound or the song were being thrown onto them.”
I spoke for the first time. I said I’d been quite sure, when I was hearing the voice, that it was closely associated with Lena. It was either part of her or attached to her, but she was no ventriloquist’s dummy. I said how its monologues would follow the movements of her eyes, at times, commenting on what those eyes beheld.
“Assuming it’s not technology or communications from extraterrestrials,” said Big Linda, “maybe it can have many kinds of living hosts.”
“ET, really?” said Navid. “Hadn’t gone there. But now that you mention it.”
It seemed we were almost considering levity, or at least some of us were, and others were resisting and disapproving, at least that was how I interpreted the silence.
Kay spoke, softly as always.
“I know something,” she said.
Heads turned.
“I mean—I don’t have all the answers, I don’t mean that,” she went on carefully. “But I know part of it. I thought everyone did, until this meeting, hearing what Linda said, what all of you have, I thought we all knew that part of it, but now I think maybe that, with us hearing things, maybe I have this particular piece, and others have other pieces. I guess?”
Kay has that insecure person’s mannerism of ending her statements with question marks.
“What piece?” asked Navid.
“It—so what we heard is, how can I put it,” she said nervously. She was looking down at her hands in her lap, as though embarrassed by her claim to knowledge. “It exists in most things that live. It’s language, or the innate capacity for language, is a better way to put it. You could say it’s the language of sentience.”
“Trees don’t have language. Trees don’t have opinions,” objected Navid, kicking the floor with his toes.
Kay looked up at him. It was a different look from those she usually gave him, I realized. It was sympathy.
“It’s not that we’re the only ones who have it, or hear it, or are it,” she went on, so quiet that I had to strain to hear. “What’s different about us, different from how it is with the other animals and even the plants—what happened with Lena and Anna and in my case with Infant Vasquez? What’s different is that we’re the only ones it leaves.”
Communication is observed within the plant organism, i.e. within plant cells and between plant cells, between plants of the same or related species, and between plants and non-plant organisms, especially in the root zone . . . plant roots communicate with rhizome bacteria, fungi and insects in the soil. These interactions . . . are possible because of the decentralized “nervous system” of plants. —Wikipedia 2016
IT WAS A LONG meeting, a meeting that went on for three hours instead of one, and by the time we dispersed afterward it seemed that Kay had always had a clearer understanding than any of the rest of us—Kay’s hospital infant, an infant with a hole in its heart that lived for only three days, had somehow imparted more to her than the voice had told the rest of us in months. Even years.
Kay had heard more. Or Kay had listened with a greater aptitude for hearing.
I hadn’t thought I was special, just equal. Equal, at least, I always assumed. But by the time I left the meeting I was unsure, unsure and diminished.
After the meeting I suspected I wasn’t equal, and more, that there was no equality. Our idea of equality is a fiction useful mostly for the purposes of fairness, for law and economics. Elsewhere it’s an empty husk, a costume we put on when we get up in the morning. In the length of our legs and arms, the breadth of our shoulders, the tendons that give us strength or weakness, our beauty or lack of it, sharp or dull intelligence—we aren’t equal at all, and we never have been.
7
SOUL IS A UNIVERSAL FEATURE
NOT MANY TOURISTS FLY INTO ANCHORAGE IN WINTER. IN SUMMER there are backpackers galore: the small airport is full of tower-like packs with attachments dangling from them and duffel bags lumped on the floor in archipelagos of nylon and canvas. Among them you see hippies milling, hikers, hunters, fishermen, naturalists and wilderness fans of all stripes, talking excitedly about their planned itineraries as they wait for their car rides or small-plane connections. They crowd beneath the terminal’s fluorescents in a fug of B.O. and patchouli and bug spray, headed for Denali and other points west or north.