Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

Meaning can be attached to it or not, I thought when I was younger, but either way the sacred has to live apart.

Later I saw that the sacred was the apart, the untouchable and the untouched. Divinity is only visible from afar.

THE NEXT MORNING I watched Ned like a hawk as soon as he woke up. I stared at him when he came into the kitchen and poured his coffee (with the voice nattering on to me the whole time as usual). But he said nothing. He didn’t seem flustered or confused in the least, only impatient as he always was to get away — impatient to begin the real life of his day, out of our house, with people who mattered.

He never seemed to hear the voice again, or if he did, he never mentioned it.

Had I believed I was psychotic, no doubt I would have been relieved by what had happened — would have construed his hearing the voice as evidence of my sanity.

But I hadn’t gone with the psychosis explanation in the first place, so I hadn’t been seriously worried for my sanity. I’d comfortably believed in the power of a faulty and deeply complex neurology, and now that had been taken from me.

IWAS GRATEFUL THAT I NEVER RECEIVED THE VOICE’S ASSESSMENT of Lena or me, that I was neither mentioned nor addressed directly. There were comments on what we encountered, though, the content of the patter overlapping with an image that flashed across a TV screen, a person driving the car beside us, a squirrel on a branch, a fresh berm at a building site. I’d see Lena’s eyes alight on something and seconds later the voice would rush out a series of connected phrases, usually too swift and polysyllabic to be memorable to me, even when they were in English.

I got used to watching Lena’s attention fasten onto a scene as only a baby’s attention will, without seeming to focus — that round-eyed, often unblinking gaze of passive-seeming intake. But unlike with other babies this would be followed by commentary as the voice bounced over the object or landscape like a sound wave, a light wave, a stream of particles. I didn’t get the feeling it was moving her, only that it was following her eyes, her fingers, her tongue. The model was accompaniment, not possession.

And what words came did appear, sometimes, to pass a kind of judgment. Their position seemed to be guided by aesthetics rather than morals — or no, that wasn’t it either. More like, the morals were the aesthetics. What was ugly was wrong, but what was ugly was not the same as, for instance, what was brutal: ugliness was less the jarring or crude than the false or dishonest. Based on some standard I could never measure, the voice would be dismissive of systems or events, individuals or ideas, products of human ingenuity . It would rebuke the odd politician or captain of industry, engineer, or physicist; it would take even artists or musicians to task for crimes against humanity. And yet somehow the impressions I took from it were both less and more than opinions. They glittered like sun on water and glanced off again before I could fix my eyes on them.

Only a small number of the voice’s observations were given over to the conditions of my life and Lena’s, the rooms and scenes we moved through, but periodically there were upticks in interest. For damaged persons we encountered on the street, when we crossed paths with someone sick or in pain or disabled, often the voice would let loose a benediction, recite a snatch of poetry or hum a piece of music. To a shakily walking grandmother: “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.” To a kid with Down syndrome, “The Carriage held — but just Ourselves — and Immortality.” Of all the lines of poetry, those were the only two I wrote down right away and looked up.

For an emaciated man we passed in the halls of a cancer ward, where we were visiting someone else, the voice had the famous lines from Chief Joseph after the battle that finally defeated him, which I searched via key words.

I want to have time to look for my children; maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Upon Ned’s entry into our space there was always the same phrase, a faintly aggressive chant. In fact the chant was a tipoff that Ned was arriving. Typically it started up on cue a few seconds early, before I even recognized his presence.

You can keep your Army khaki, you can keep your Navy blue, I have the world’s best fighting man to introduce to you.

Google revealed this to be a Marine Corps cadence, one of the verses cadets call out when they’re marching.

But Ned was never in the military.

A NEW GUEST came to us today. She’s maybe a decade younger than I am, probably in her mid-twenties, and according to Don may stay a while.

She has an air of recovery, or so I thought as my daughter took her through the tour. She was nice to Lena in the cautious way of people who aren’t used to the company of children but react graciously when it’s imposed on them: patience, no talking down, a genuine interest.

Lena says the woman is a princess — probably because she’s slim, tall and pretty, with long hair — and has spun a tale about her already. The princess fell from her throne through the deeds of an evil troll. She awaits an act of magic, here beside the sea. Lena says a team of seahorses will arrive pulling a giant white shell, and in the shell the princess will be borne away to her own kingdom.

At this point the story gets convoluted, because the princess can’t be taken away; that would mean her leaving us. Instead she will sleep in a shimmering palace on the waves, a palace hidden from us now that hovers invisibly beyond the whitecaps. A bridge of waves will stretch from the beach outside the motel to the princess’s ancestral home, a white castle of pearl, and we will walk over this bridge to banquets held in our honor, for we may live there too. Inside the castle keep, a special room will belong to us, connected to the princess’s royal chamber by a spiral staircase. The chamber is full of sparkling fountains and cushions of cloud. It features a four-poster canopy bed and live-in midget ponies.

The ponies are velvety to the touch and curl up on the bed like dogs, their legs tucked beneath them.

But Lena reassures me that we won’t have to sacrifice our lodgings at the motel for this resplendence. No, we’ll still treasure our motel home. We’ll still frequent these faithful lodgings with their yellowing shower curtain and moldy grout between the tiles. We’ll have two houses, she says, that’s all—“one for regular and one for special occasions.”

I’d go with her. I’d take the miniature dog-ponies and the pillows of cloud.

PEOPLE WHO SAY they feel the presence of the Almighty hovering close to them, their personal savior, or tell how faith dwells in their hearts — the advantage they have is that if God overwhelms them, they’re free to retreat. Or if the knowledge is so overwhelming it can’t be contained, sometimes they let it out with shaking and strange articulations, crying and falling, ecstasy. I admire the idea of this, though I’ve never shaken in ecstasy myself.

I like to imagine I could, under the right conditions.

My point is, abandon to the spirit has an appointed time and place: the spirit can’t be on you all the time. I never thought of the voice as God, while it was with Lena and me; such a thought would have been an outrage. When I write about God right now, that three-letter word — so loaded, so presumptuous — it’s a word that I use in hindsight, as close a description as I can get of that stray cascade of ambient knowledge that distinguished itself from the static of everything else and filtered down to me.