Sweet Lamb of Heaven (6)

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.