Sweet Lamb of Heaven (60)

ALONE IN HER SMALL walk-up on Beacon Street, Kay took an overdose of sleeping pills last night. She lived but they had to resuscitate her, and now she’s in a coma.

There was a bipolar diagnosis, as it turns out.

I can’t bring myself to tell Lena. I should have been there to look out for Kay, should have done what I could: something. I seem to plod along in my own tracks, following footsteps I made before; this is always how I proceed, I don’t look sideways, I’m not willing to stop. I was inside my own concern, blindered like that—worried about abstractions, worried about the future when for so many people, Kay for instance, the present is already a state of emergency.

I overlooked my duty for the sake of my convenience.

Will tries to tell me it’s not my fault. I know I didn’t cause it, but I didn’t stop it either. I see what he’s doing and I know it comes from affection, but listen: This is what we do for the people we’re close to, all in the name of comforting. We ease the path for them to excuse their own failings.

We let them off the hook and call it love.

The truth is bare—I abandoned her, that tall, sad girl.



WHEN I WENT back to the hypnotist I was like an addict. I rushed out of the apartment with the usual weight of guilt clutched to myself. The sessions are the only times I’ve left Lena with Will. And I do trust him, but he’s not family.

I saw a city, mile upon mile of buildings, a cluster of tall commercial ones at the center and then, moving outward, the residential blocks, the tree-lined streets. The buildings were dilapidated but elegant, there was a detail of ornament to them like the tiny lines on an engraving, the careful, hair-thin lines of pictures on paper money.

The cave-in began in the distance, with the smallest, farthest buildings disappearing first, only visible as yellow clouds of dust billowed up and curled in. Like puffy hands clenching, I thought: beneath the furls of dust buildings were collapsing. Above them something dark raked down from a cloudbank, fouling the air.

I was standing in sand, sand that used to be an ocean and would be ocean again. I stood on the edge of the city as dust rose from the falling buildings. But these buildings were made out of words, locked into each other like bricks and beams—small words, minuscule words, inscrutable as seams.

Ned was coming, flying in from the west. His advent turned the distant sky black. Before him he whipped up a slave army, a crowd of gruesome flying things that drove billions of insects before them, clearing a path. The cloud was made of words too but the words were deformed, they meant confusion or blankness or insidious poison. What light filtered through them was cadmium yellow and leaked a slow disease.



I HAVEN’T SLEPT well lately; I often sit staring at the screen of my laptop while Lena and Will are sleeping. I sit there and stare as the screen resolves into dull letters or right angles of light and fades into disinterest again. It was open to my inbox and at some point I noticed, on the left panel of the page, that my spam folder said 172. I clicked on it and was about to Delete all spam messages now when I saw, buried between an Enlarge Your Manhood and Hot Women in Your Neighborhood, another email from Kay.

I felt sick for a second, scared it was a suicide note or a goodbye letter—so sure I sat there for a long time gazing out Solly’s window at the yellow and white squares in the buildings, tall rows of windows rising into the night sky. It’s a sight I’ve always loved, assumed everyone loves: columns of lights in tall buildings at night in the city. Beneath them was the irregular black solid of the park’s treetops.

Finally I looked back at the screen and it wasn’t as dire as I’d thought. The date and timestamp were there as always, on the right: Kay’s message hadn’t been sent the day she took the pills; it had gone into my spam folder two days before.

Still, five more minutes passed before I was willing to click on it. I sat on and on at Solly’s desk, counting the rows of yellow squares hovering midair, wondering what forms of life moved in the darkness of the park below.


The problem is, now, were going to be nothing BUT surface language. & no safeties, no backups, no checks & balances. The future is nothing but language, see, not languageS but language. Monolithic. The little ones are dying off @lightning speed. Programming Language, ad talk, 1 speech for all, a juggernot, that’s where we’re going Anna. All the native languages dead, all we’l have left is shells & false things & tongues spoken for profit &/or by machines. Don’t u c Anna this is the tru end of God. When everything that lives the deep language dies. This is the end of God and not the fake god made up to look like us, not that fake god anna, the real god, the god tht IS evolution & speciation & Life, a god that did make the world, u see?—b/c this god is the beautiful unconscious, it is billion processes & intuitions under all of biology & personality & art, the thousands and millions of cultures of both Man and Beast. We’re killing that deep god ana, the speakers of false language are suffocating the deep, they are the oil on the water beneath which all suffocates & dies

Satan is God weaponized

God weaponized by man

Now is the point of danger b/c true language is the Soul Anna, tru deep language the soul & the soul can be ruined. God needs us Anna, as much as we need god



I WONDER IF Ned’s allies are mostly true believers or, like him, mere opportunists.

Will believes, like Don with his geese and songbird migrations, that I found my way to them via some kind of homing instinct, since a couple of others over the years have showed up without prior contact. He thinks it’s part of the background orchestration of the deeper language, an urge that underlies our patterns of survival.