Sweet Lamb of Heaven (54)
Conspiracy theories are a mostly male hysteria, it seems to me. That style of paranoia isn’t my own—it has a self-importance I don’t relate to. Even now, when I know for a fact I’ve been conspired against, it’s hard for me to believe in conspiracies.
Ned acted against me not because of who I am but because of who he is—I’m just the one he happened to marry. And the kidnapping was only a conspiracy in that he hired some people and used others.
Without Will in front of me, though, the attraction is more abstract. Was it only a wishful idea? It was my idea, I know that, I asked him out and brought him in—but the newness of knowing him and Don makes them feel less like fixtures in my life and more like bystanders. Only the Lindas, with their earthiness, seem concrete and reliable.
Lena and I need relief from the closeness of the small apartment, so we do her lessons in a coffee shop. After the morning rush has subsided the place is colonized by mothers and their goggle-eyed toddlers, who stagger around banging plastic toys on the backs of chairs and gumming them; the women chatter to each other, brooding on nests of scarves and coats. Lena takes the roaming toddlers under her wing, holding their hands and showing them colorful objects. She’s popular with the mothers for this.
Most days when Solly gets home from work the two of them go out to a nearby playground; she doesn’t mind the creaking freeze of the swings, the burn of the icy slide. Sometimes I walk out of the lobby with them, wave goodbye as they cross eastward to the park and then veer west myself. I walk to the Hudson River, past a bagel shop, bodegas, some kind of pretentious cigar lounge, and an opaque window whose neon sign reads HYPNOSIS. QUIT SMOKING LOSE WEIGHT MANAGE GRIEF.
YESTERDAY IT WAS the Lindas first on Skype, then Kay. When Lena and Kay had finished singing together, a tuneless song about a mermaid, she ran off to build a LEGO castle and I slid into Solly’s desk chair in her place.
I was dismayed at how Kay looked. She had the same hollow-eyed face she’d had when she first arrived at the motel—ghostly pale. She and Navid hadn’t reconciled; after her meeting with the linguistics scholar Navid had spun off, his behavior erratic. He said he couldn’t trust her again because she had concealed too much.
But we don’t know how much we know, she said unsteadily, or we don’t know how little other people know. None of us ever possess this knowledge. We can’t know what others are thinking.
“It’s like a kind of instinct we go on, right? After we get reassured we’re not crazy. You know what Don told me?” she asked.
It was hard to hear her so I raised the volume on the laptop’s speakers.
“He told me there are crowds of people who never get to that point, they never cross that barrier. People who hear and never stop thinking they’re just insane, spend their whole lives on Thorazine or getting ECT. Living their lives all alone. And sad. We’re just this small fraction of people who, basically, refused to believe in our insanity.”
She hadn’t meant to keep secrets, she just hadn’t talked enough, she guessed. And now Navid was gone, flown back to Los Angeles. If all this was, he’d said, was some kind of off-brand encounter group, he might as well bite the bullet and do the real twelve steps. And when it came to AA, he had said, or NA or GA or CA, L.A. was the nation’s capital.
“I’m sorry,” I said, watching her cock her head to one side in the jittery connection. I had the fleeting illusion that she was preparing to keel over sideways in slow motion.
But she didn’t say anything, just gazed at me, so I kept on talking.
“I don’t think you were holding out on us, but I still want to know everything you know.”
“There are so many words for it,” she said.
I felt alarmed as I gazed at the fuzzy image of her face, the brown half-moons beneath her eyes. She always looks pretty, with the waifish delicacy of a ballet dancer, but there was a distraction to her expression.
She’s not paying attention to her own welfare and no one else is, either. She has no one to take care of her yet I suspect she needs help. I want to call her mother; I wish I had her mother’s telephone number.
It can’t be my job, though, to look after Kay as well as Lena—not now, especially, when I’ve failed so dismally with my own daughter. I’m not equipped.
“It is language,” she said. “The same kind that makes your body work without you telling it to. You know how the brain runs your kidneys, say, or tells an embryo how to grow in a pregnant woman? What’s the difference between that kind of implicit, like, limbic OS for our biology—and for the biology of all animals—and just a miracle?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s part of deep language that runs these operating systems for us. You see? It’s not the language we speak. I mean our language comes from it, like all language, but our own specific language is like the surface of the ocean, the very top line of the water. Just the line. Deep language—I mean I happen to call it that, but there are other names—it’s the rest of the ocean beneath, see, Anna? It’s the rest of the water below, and it’s everything the rest of the ocean holds, that makes that thin line of surface possible.”
She was doing something with her hands behind her head—scooping her hair into a ponytail as wings of the hair fell forward around her face. She kept talking faster and faster and shook her head as she did this, making it hard for me to hear; the volume was already at maximum. I wondered if she was manic.