Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

I assume I wrote them, but have no memory of it.

Say God is a complex grammar that doesn’t coexist with our own language, its ego-driven structures. Say Kay is right and dolphins or whales can be its hosts for their whole lives, instead of funneling it briefly as Lena did, because the form of language that emerges in those animals doesn’t displace the deep grammar the way ours does. Say that deep language, whose name may also be God, stays with them because their communication systems, though capable of individuation, are not devoted to the self . Say we’re left on our own, as Kay had it, when we pronounce our first words and God deserts us, and it’s in that respect that we’re different from the other beasts and different from the aspen trees. Then it has to be said also that instead of being raised above the other kinds of life — instead of being special as we have always claimed — we’re only more alone.

That one was peppered with errors of rapid typing that I’ve fixed. The other was this:

Some people hear more, some less, some nothing at all. What we hear is what we can hear, its content minutely tailored to our character and biases. That means, if I believe her, that even we, who should be outside the range of any dogmatic faith, even we only ever know the God our personality describes.

Lena, living out a fixation on the cute, has made the screen on our tablet into a picture of a fawn in a snowy forest glade, looking over its shoulder with big dark eyes as flakes fall and soften the world around it. The only moving elements are its eyes, which every so often blink, and the snow. I look at it now, while she runs through the sprinkler in the backyard with Will.

I can see them out my window if I scooch my desk chair sideways — there. Better.

The fawn with its dark, slowly blinking eyes takes me back to Ned’s beautiful girlfriend, the young model or model lookalike. Where is she now? I could do so much good mischief if I had just a little time-stamped footage of her and Ned together.

Of course any action I take is a risk to Lena and there’s no way to attack him from anonymity. Everything’s obvious now that I know he actively wishes me harm. It’s transparent that nothing binds him to the norms of decency — no guarantee exists, none ever did. There was never a contract to rely on, some solid agreement that could be wielded in a court, only my naive belief that such abstractions have any weight at all.

All my credulity is out the window now, that frail screen of written-on paper I let myself believe would keep the world predictable. Ned’s handshakes add up to less than nothing — or nothing but the flag my gullibility flew on. Don and Will and their fears, well, those fears were only a slice of the malice that Ned is.

Maybe the knowledge is chilling — it is, when I don’t block it out stubbornly — but it also means I have no reason to jump at his command anymore, there’s nothing left to make me do what he wants me to. So he’s now lost his postcard family. He shouldn’t have shown himself, and I wonder why he did, because he could have strung me along forever, practically, while I still believed he could be bargained with.

Now I know he doesn’t bargain. He only pretends to.

And he has nothing left to get from me. Nothing but the last thing.

It must be his narcissism that’s to blame, maybe he couldn’t help showing me how powerful he is. Maybe he had to flaunt it.

And all I have left is this: my girl and her uncertain future.

She used to look forward to every new day.

THE OTHER MOTEL GUESTS insisted on staying close, crowding around Lena and me as we walked across the parking lot. We’d left Solly and Luisa and my mother at home, my mother so she could help the caterers clean up, Solly and Luisa so they could pack to leave for Manhattan the next day. But they urged Will and me to take Lena out. Let the child see the bombs bursting in air, at least, on this death-textured day.

The show was being put on at a Minor League baseball stadium about twenty minutes from my parents’ that’s always been the perfect place for pyrotechnics; we used to go there for the Fourth when I was a kid. Until I went to college I came here every Independence Day, first with my parents and Solly, then with a swarm of classmates, and by my last years in high school with guys in their hand-me-down family cars — not watching the show, just using the dark and crowds and noise as camouflage. That was when the stadium was small and dilapidated, with wooden seats, before it was renovated into the slick behemoth it is now.

I led the others into the elevator and we went all the way to the last row, where the view was worst for sports but best for fireworks. It had been a hot day but now a breeze swept up and chilled me; I’d remembered to bring a jacket for Lena, but not one for myself. As we filed along into our seats my arms came up in goosebumps.

Ned would have to work hard to find us, I figured, and of course there was no good reason he should try: no photo op, no obvious prospect of gain. Then again, hounding me seemed to be its own reward. He was always able to trace my movements. And he’d said he was coming.

Tumbling acrobats erupted onto the field, frolicked and ran off again; lumpy costumed creatures ran out next, waggling their top-heavy bodies, possibly cartoon animals connected to a TV show. Tinny pop music blared loudly from a bad sound system to accompany their antics, then mercifully cut off. Vendors of popcorn and glow-in-the-dark novelties moved among the seats; I bought Lena a whistle in the colors of the rainbow. Finally the main show started, a local orchestra that tuned up and launched into a jumbled rendition of the 1812 Overture.

Maybe it wasn’t jumbled, I thought, maybe the flaw was in my ear, maybe Ned’s long fingers had twisted even the music that I heard.

Lena bounced off my lap in delight when the first firecrackers shot into the sky. She’d moved along to sit with Main Linda by the time, a few minutes later, her father appeared at the end of our row.

He wasn’t wearing a suit and tie for once; in a jacket and a polo shirt he was strictly business casual. Where was his bodyguard, I thought, his driver, the fake Secret Service guy? There was always one of them at least, but I saw no one near. Maybe they were seated somewhere, hidden in the crowd.

I moved out toward him instantly, exactly as though I wanted to be in his company and sought it out — and I did want to, I wanted nothing more than to reach him at that moment. Instead of a rush of adrenaline or heavy dread it was a stolid calm that guided my progress; I barely noticed the guests as I inched myself along between their jutting-out knees and the seatbacks in front of us. It was almost romantic, as though, beneath the falling pink stars and showers of green, there was no one anymore but Ned and me.

Stepping onto the catwalk I remembered parking with a boyfriend senior year, just a few steps from the stadium wall. I knew the moldy smell of the seats in his car, the lacy brown rust along the bottom of the doors, and how we’d thought of the fireworks as our soundtrack — the world was about us. We were sure of that as we made out, moving in the darkness of the car with our long, lean arms and legs bound up in each other, that soft skin tingling over the curves, thrilled by the conviction that this here, this was the only and the all. There was no question, then, that the world had been created as our scenery.

That was the bliss of being young, the pure egoist joy. But if you get old and don’t grow out of it, I thought, looking up at my husband, you are ruined.

Maybe he’d never had a chance for that. Maybe he never had that kind of youth. Maybe he could only feel it now.