Sweet Lamb of Heaven (57)

And what did they accomplish with the meetings? I get Navid’s impatience, though I wish he’d been nicer to Kay. Unlike me, the rest of the guests knew about each other before they came—they had an earlier version of the Listserv. They’d already exchanged messages containing much of what they’d say later, alongside the table of watery coffee and stale cookies. So I was the only new element. And they can’t have got much from me.

I never illuminated anything.

I account, on my fingers, for all the elements of these events I keep failing to understand. I wish I had an abacus—confusion like this calls for a deliberate, manual counting, a ritual of organization. Digits or beads, bones or a rosary. Even assuming there does exist an ambient language that underlies life, what some people call God, others possibly photosynthesis or humpback song or the opinions of a dog, I have the same questions that I always did. I want to know why I heard it, and why through Lena; why it fell silent when she slept; why it departed when she said her first word. I want to know not only its rules but its purpose, but all of that remains opaque to me.

There are the practical questions, too: How did I know to go to the motel? How was Ned able to find me? How did John know to contact him, when I took my car in to his shop?

And how did Ned know my father’s diagnosis?

On the face of it my questions about Ned are in a different category. And yet there’s the lymphoma diagnosis. This is new, this introduces a fresh mystery, and it counts just as fluidly on my fingers as the questions that came before.

It was recorded digitally, “Lymphoma Stage 3,” a number of weeks, not days but weeks, before the doctors even biopsied my father. It was set in stone then, it has a path, a history that can be verified—the fact that he had that information, or at least that he acted as though he had it.

Lymphoma Stage 3.



I WAS ALONE in the subway today, coming back from getting my hair cut, during which appointment Lena had stayed at home with Solly and Luisa. I was on a crowded platform at Columbus Circle with my bag over my shoulder and a book in my other hand—I must have been standing distractedly at the front hem of the crowd, my paperback curled back on itself in my hand as I read.

Then there were the lights and roar of the train. I felt a push behind me like a head butting against the small of my back and suddenly I was teetering, one of my legs over the edge, before someone grabbed my arm and my book flew out of my hand and I was jerked back, the tendons in my neck strained and one shoulder wrenched.

With a rush the train was screeching to a stop, people surging past me as the doors opened, jostling me and turning me around. I felt a weird heat prickle where my scalp meets my face, was breathless and seeing spots of light. Somehow I found my way to a bench, newly vacated and still ass-warm.

I never knew who pushed me or if it had been an accident, or who caught my arm and saved me either—maybe the push was just the movement of the crowd, that’s the likeliest explanation. Right? But as the train pulled away I noticed a child staring at me through a train door, a dark-hooded child with a white face, and the child’s head turned as the train moved, the child was staring at me fixedly . . . it had been a forceful push, so forceful it seemed it must have been purposeful.

Or so I felt as I sat there.

As soon as I got over the shock a wave of gratitude washed over me, a pure beam of gratitude struck out toward my unknown rescuer—how impossible it always is, I thought intently, to remember how lucky we are each second we remain alive.

When the train was long gone and the platform bare, I got up shakily and walked back to the edge. On the tracks was my book, ripped up and streaked with gray, its pages spread over the black. I gazed down at it for a while and then sat down again to wait for the next train. I wanted to call someone, maybe Will, maybe Solly, but of course there was no signal in the tunnel. And what had happened, anyway?

When the next train finally came rushing in I found I was trembling. I had to press my back against the cool, grimy tile of the wall. Presently I left and hailed a taxi.

Since then my day has been cast in a fractured light. I go back and forth between telling myself it was pure accident and wondering if Don and Will’s fears deserve more serious consideration.



I SENT AN EMAIL to Navid. Can I find out online, I asked him, who’s financing Ned’s campaign? I wouldn’t mind knowing who Ned’s backers are, what interests they represent and how deeply embedded their money is in institutions. Maybe one of them has connections to hospital records, who knows, some shadowy X-rays that were interpreted before the biopsy without my parents’ knowledge—some link that would provide an explanation for that premature diagnosis.

Ned left his family of origin when he was in his teens, left and never looked back. His father had disappeared when he was an infant, his mother was strung out or drunk all the time, and there were no others. He lived outside the house anyway, from when he was twelve or thirteen, only returning to sleep. This was what I had gleaned, anyway, from the couple of times he’d talked about it to me.

But somewhere, now, he has another family. I want to know who his new family is.



WALKING BY MYSELF to get a carton of milk, I suddenly spun on my heel and entered the business with the HYPNOSIS sign. I hadn’t planned it.

There was no receptionist, only a counter with a fiber-optic lamp sitting on it, an abstract medley of colored lights pulsing. I wondered how a hypnosis business made the street-level storefront rent in this neighborhood; I rang a push-button bell on the counter and heard an electronic chime. After a minute a woman came in from the back, a woman with a soft, homely face and wavy hair. She was about to close up for the evening, she said, could she help me?