Sweet Lamb of Heaven (61)

It isn’t that I learned nothing at the motel, only that as soon as I learned it I seemed to always have known it, yet still feel I know nothing at all. Burke with his speaking tree, Linda with her theme-park whale, Kay with Infant Vasquez—I picture Burke’s maple in its arboretum, planted halfway across the world from where it evolved, a lone specimen with a plaque in front of it bearing its names, both Latin and common. So unlike the aspen that grew not far away from that arboretum—those cloned aspen, connected underneath the earth, that lived as one for what could be millennia . . . I watch a pigeon strut around on Solly’s windowsill, dirty but free, and wonder about the orca in its pool, its home only twice the length of its body.

They did have something in common, all those the voice spoke through: they were captives. Even Infant Vasquez, who quickly died, or Lena, who lived on and spoke. All infants are kept creatures, after all. I remember how snatches of poetry were given out to unfortunates when we passed them; I think of prisoners and victims and martyrs, the persistent notion of their closeness to God. I think of how a tinge of the divine rests on the hurt or unfortunate, how so many of them wear a kind of halo of gilded pity.

But if the injured and wretched are closer, what does it point to? Likely we give the poor and weak and sick their halos reflexively, I think, to make it easier to detach from them and not have to do f*ck all. We give them sympathy in the place of help. We say they’re not like us, they’re sanctified and only half-human. They might as well be on a cross.

I recall acutely how abjection makes you a part of a herd. The kidnapping left me feeling robbed, not just of my assumptions about freedom but of my personality—no one has personality when their leg’s being amputated, no one has personality when their eye’s being poked out. You don’t have any selfhood when you’re suffering extremely: in suffering you could be anyone. Whether that makes you everyone, though, is a different question.

And I don’t like the proposition that suffering puts us closer to each other. That suffering isolates the sufferer—this is equally valid.

So Will has comforted me over Kay. He’s trying to be kind, of course, and I’d do the same if our positions were reversed, you don’t question the rightness of trying to comfort someone. As behaviors go, it’s universally acclaimed. Yet he told me there wasn’t anything I could have done, when in fact there was: I could have done more than nothing.

I think of the duress that can be brought to bear on a soul, how selfhood, which we depend on so completely, is a luxury good.

I turn my palms up reflexively, thinking of those who suffer their whole lives. As though the gesture would make me one of them.



WE LEAVE SOON, after one last hypnosis session. Kay has been moved to a hospital in Boston, near where her parents live. We will visit her there on the way to see my parents.



LYING IN THE RECLINER I found myself walking along an institutional hallway, following green footsteps on the white floor—the footsteps were color-coded to the different wings and there were colored lines along the ceilings, too. I walked with deliberate steps until I came to a room.

An older woman sat in a chair, knitting with blue-gray yarn. The nightstand was crowded with propped-open cards. But instead of lying inert in her coma, Kay hovered above the bed. Her levitation had a Buddhist quality—though her posture was comfortable, not a straight-backed, cross-legged stance as in meditation or yoga. She slumped a bit, relaxed, and remained in the air smiling down at me, with a serene quality that’s rare inside the confines of real life.

I wanted to rise to where she was, but I couldn’t, so at an angle from each other, she high and me low, we gazed out the window. Out there was the crumbling city of words, much as I’d seen it before, though farther in the distance, dust rising from its slow-motion collapse. Kay nodded and stared. Her face had a kind of shining, imperturbable sadness like a bronze statue in a park, somehow civic.

I followed her gaze back to the window again and saw it wasn’t a window after all but a computer screen.

She wouldn’t explain at first, though her face kept on gleaming with a smooth and oddly official grief: yes, her grief seemed ceremonial. It was a stately mourning, like a dignitary presiding over a state funeral.

Expository words scrolled quickly along the windowsill.


IF Our symbols are corrupt. IF Our tools are made of symbols. IF We are made of our tools. ∴ We are made of our symbols. ∴ WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE

The last sentence ran on repeating forever, scrolling across the bottom of the screen like a stock-market ticker tape.

“Think of social-media websites,” said Kay.

For some reason she insisted on speaking silently, using a comic-book speech bubble.

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“Think of all those sites, all those apps, the billions of selfies. Now we filter ourselves through them. Sometimes it’s our whole presentation of ourselves to the world. That’s all that enters the social sphere—that imprint of our ego is all that ever meets up with the collective.”

“Seriously?”

I was sorely disappointed that here, under hypnosis, an oracle appeared and spoke to me, and the subject turned out to be social media.

The oracle had actually said the word apps.

“Lena will be all symbols, by the time she’s grown up,” said Kay. “I’m sorry to inform you. It’s a fact. Nothing but symbols, your little girl.”