Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

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.”

The lights dimmed in her room, and in the corners dark beings flitted. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were only half-alive, hybrids of flesh and machine, and they moved through the pipes in the walls, among the wires and conduits. Those too, the long tubes and threads that were supposed to be inanimate, moved sluggishly behind the drywall. Between the girders they pulled themselves in. Closer and closer they approached.

“Why do you pretend to know everything?” I asked her. “Are you right about it all? Or are you just sick?”

Kay’s face kept on shining, turned away from me, but the knitting mother looked up from her bedside chair. Now the hands in her lap, holding a panel of blue-gray yarn that might have been a scarf, were made of metal: robot hands, with clicking needles. Her face was contorted with rage.

“This isn’t a dream, Kay. It’s more like a horror movie,” I said.

She was supposed to be trustworthy — she’d watched over my daughter’s sleep, cried to me and told me about her life. But telling a feeling isn’t the same as knowing someone, I thought regretfully. We think it is. A piece of the Freudian inheritance. People tell their emotions, tell their emotional story , and think that equates to knowing each other.

The pipes in the walls turned from ducts or sacks to the old bones of patients, bones that fed out their cold onto me so that the hairs rose on the back of my neck and my forearms. Yet when I tilted my head back the ceiling hadn’t gone brittle at all but was warm and rotten, like pink foam breathing.

Kay turned her head slowly and looked at me, and when she smiled I saw her teeth were gray, not regular teeth but some kind of ugly digital code that shifted and moved in her mouth.

It looked a bit like hieroglyphs, a bit like 1’s and 0’s.

I thought: What have they done to her?

Suddenly her mouth opened wide, wider and wider, far too wide. And something ugly streamed out.

“Your little girl won’t even need her face,” she said.

FOR A WHILE LENA AND I ARE GOING TO STAY WITH WILL. I DON’T want to move back into the motel — memories of the kidnapping give the place an edge of chilled hardness for me, replacing the clean sea air, the pine needles I loved for their scent and sharpness, with an atmosphere of dread.

Will wants to be my bodyguard, and if he had his way I’d never be out of his sight. This has a cloying aspect, but more and more, during our last days in New York, I found myself hugging the sides of the buildings as I hurried down the sidewalk. I’d catch myself glancing around to make sure that no one was following me, no one was looking at me too purposefully.

I may not be any safer in Maine, but I want to see trees again that weren’t planted by city planners. I’d like to take Lena sledding. I remember Will’s house as neat and tasteful, floor lamps instead of fluorescents, old rugs and a lot of bookshelves. And next to Solly’s apartment it’s the Taj Mahal.

I’VE FOUND a replacement for the hypnosis sessions and this afternoon, our first of three days with my parents in Providence, tried it for the first time. Lena was sitting at my father’s feet putting on a show with puppets she’d made out of paper bags; Will was fixing a broken step on the porch. So I retreated to my childhood bedroom, which still bore the dusty traces of my teenage self — the pocked bulletin board that had held printouts of pop-star faces, snapshots of me with my arms around friends, a stray ribbon or two.

One ribbon that’s been pinned to my corkboard for twenty years says just PARTICIPANT.

I lay down carefully on the bed on my back, stuck in my earbuds, and cued up a twenty-minute hypnosis track downloaded from a website: “Goodbye to Stress.”

All it did was put me to sleep, but I’ll try again tonight.

Later Will and my mother cornered me in the kitchen; she plied me with peppermint tea and announced she wanted to have a serious talk about “personal security.”

Somehow Will had convinced her I need protection. At least, she said, I could agree that there was a risk and humor her by letting Will install a home security system. Then she could rest easy, she said (and here she looked careworn and shaky — more elderly, I realized, than she ever had before). She already had my father to worry about; she didn’t want to have to worry about Lena and me too.

I pictured a couple of sluggish rent-a-cops pulling up fifteen minutes too late, shooting the breeze about their personal lives as they casually dismounted from a company car whose doors were emblazoned with a bogus-looking shield. I don’t like the idea of being guarded by electronics, of being sealed off from the world outside. More surveillance, I was thinking — all it’s done in the past is harm us. It was surveillance that allowed my daughter to be taken from me.

But my mother looked drained. Resistance was futile.

“It’s already being set up,” said Will gravely.

Panic welled up: I’d done everything Ned asked, everything I could possibly do to meet his demands, and still maybe it wasn’t enough.

My mother advised me to carry mace whenever I go out.

“Or maybe pepper spray, dear,” she amended. “I think it’s better. For their health. The criminals’, I mean.”

Hypnosis is “. . a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state.” —Encyclopædia Britannica, 2004

It was a quiet and uneventful visit to Kay, who lay, much as you’d expect, motionless on a stainless-steel bed hooked up to machines. We had her to ourselves, as her parents had just gone to get lunch, a nurse told me. Kay’s face was a ghostly shell, but Lena sat beside her bravely and held her hand. She only cried later, as we were walking out. I’d told her Kay took too much medicine by mistake.

The private room didn’t bear much resemblance to the one I’d envisioned under hypnosis — no surprise there — but one thing struck me as we were leaving: a pile of knitting, two needles sticking out of it, on a low shelf on her beside table.