Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

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?

There was a voice, an auditory hallucination I used to have, when my child was a baby, I told her. I wanted to remember it now — wanted to hear it again to see if I could figure out what it had said. Could that kind of memory retrieval occur through hypnosis?

She asked me if the voice had issued instructions, had told me to do anything I didn’t want to do.

I said no. No instructions.

She asked me a couple more questions I guessed were supposed to screen for mental illness, then hemmed and hawed briefly. She said there were no guarantees, that it was up to me, in a sense, what was accessed, but sure, she was willing to give it a shot. She could implant a suggestion that this “voice” return, she said; she could invite my mind to generate the “voice” again.

She had me sign a waiver and I made an appointment.

NAVID WROTE BACK saying he’d research Ned’s funding. He was good at following money trails, he said. Somehow he doesn’t seem to blame me as he blames Kay and Don; with me he doesn’t seem to have a bone to pick. Or maybe, because of what happened to Lena, he’s just sorry for me.

USING VACATION TIME, Solly’s going to visit my parents and taking Luisa with him. He wants to be there to help out, as he puts it, but has urged Lena and me to stay here in the apartment without him. All four of us descending on my parents would be a burden and not what the doctor ordered.

It is possible that all languages spoken today are related through direct or indirect descent from a single ancestral tongue.

— Wikipedia 2016

THE PRACTICE OF HYPNOTISM seems to hover in the alt-medicine gray area, near chiropractors and acupuncturists. It’s viewed as sporadically effective in treating certain bad habits and disorders, but tarnished by its history of showmanship.

The hypnotherapist had me lie down on a huge, brown recliner with wide arms — my arms had to be stretched out, hands laid flat, feet raised. She dimmed the lights, put on music, and asked me if the room’s temperature was comfortable.

And I had to admit the temperature was comfortable. The air felt like a soft extension of my skin, without too much moisture or too much aridity. I could stay here, I thought.

A person could remain.

“Remember, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” she said. “This is a completely safe space.”

She had me close my eyes and listen to her voice describing a wooden rowboat over a deep blue lake. Out we went into the lake, rowing, rowing. Maybe I dove off the side of the boat or sank into the water, deeper, deeper, deeper; or maybe I was just looking down, looking into the water from the dry bench of the boat. I recall the color blue, the clarity of the lake water.

During this tranquil immersion a jellyfish floated up from the depths. I don’t know whether it was associated with the therapist’s words or only with my thoughts, but I gazed at it — a pink-white bulb with tendrils rippling. Although I wasn’t asleep or dreaming I knew in the way of dreams, the passing of information that happens there where one thing is simultaneously another, that the jelly, having no place in fresh water, was an emissary from the ocean Kay had spoken of.

There was something to know here, something to discover. So when I left I made another appointment.

AROUND LUNCHTIME YESTERDAY we got a call from downstairs: Will was in the lobby.

We went down in the elevator to meet him and there he stood, talking to the doorman.

Lena ran to him and hugged him and then turned her attention to the doorman, her friend. Will stepped away from them and turned to me, a woolen cap in his hands, the shoulders of his coat sparkling with melting snowflakes, and I was so happy to feel my stomach flip, to know how much I still liked him. More, even. His eyes, skin, mouth.

“I brought your car,” he said.

I’d been selfish. I’d given him nothing, and I’d added insult to injury by doubting him. Yet here he was.

He didn’t ask to stay with us, in fact he had a friend’s place lined up, but then he did stay.

It was good but curious, after so long a time — like walking through a forgotten wood. Like wandering beneath old trees, whose faint smell reminds you of a person you may once have been.

Not only does Will know now about the motel’s Hearing Voices Movement — as I’ve come to call it privately — but he’s known about it all along.

He knows the backstory of the motel guests; he’s familiar with our group pathology. And he has known about it all, he says, since a couple of years after he got to know Don, when he first moved to Maine. Don has always lived there, as far as Will knows, like his father before him. He’s a feature of the landscape and has never seemed to do anything but what he does now.

“But that’s the thing. What does he do?” I asked.

Will shrugged.

“He’s a host.”

We were in bed. I was so glad to be there, though at first it took me a while to relax about Lena, who was fast asleep in the bedroom and still too near for my sense of propriety.

“So confused people who hear voices have been coming there for years,” I said. “All of us with that same complaint.”