Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

So the voice wasn’t God to me then, but in the months after Ned heard it, when I couldn’t think of it as hallucination anymore, I was confused and stowed my questions in a locked compartment. Some things were unexplained; well, some things had always been. But I listened to it differently once I couldn’t believe it was my own confabulation anymore. I gave it more credibility.

My brain’s a little above average, according to standard aptitude tests, but not far above: I was always bad at calculus, I had no patience for high school chemistry. Whatever intelligence I have isn’t rated for the ornate subtlety of the divine. Most of the time the voice was still wallpaper or elevator music as it streamed past and over me, citing, listing, cajoling, eulogizing, heckling. If I stopped what I was doing and concentrated on it, it quickly dazzled the faculties.

But there was no aspect of feeling chosen, no conviction of being purposefully anointed. We might have been sitting in a lounge chair on the green grass of my lawn, reading, when suddenly a bank of cumulus moved in and rain began pattering onto the pages of my book and the skin of my arms and we had to go in. I never believed the nimbus had chosen her or me or us on the basis of special qualities. I have other failings but I’m not subject to visions of personal grandiosity.

When I looked at holiday crèches or paintings of the infant Jesus I recognized the parallels — that Jesus as an infant had been believed to contain divinity, at least in retrospect — but there the similarity ended for me. I didn’t think Lena was a prophet or a messiah.

More or less, in the time after Ned heard, I put off the question of causation, deferring inquiry.

The question of origin was too much for me.

LENA’S SECRET PRINCESS is named Kay and hails from the fair land of Boston. She’s a med student there, or possibly a resident or a nurse. She has a hospital job holding babies, according to Lena, so maybe she’s assigned to a maternity ward. She seems reluctant to discuss her work so I haven’t pressed her.

I let Lena eat lunch on the bluffs with her and they went out wrapped in scarves and wearing puffer coats, though it was mild, for Maine in fall, and the big jackets were overkill. They spread a blanket on the dry grass. I could see them from the back window in our room — the room’s best feature, a picture window that offers a view of the cliff edge and the sea. Lena chattered constantly — I watched her small head bobbing and her hands moving — and Kay smiled indulgently as she followed Lena’s gestures. And yet somehow Lena seemed to be looking after Kay, not the reverse; the young woman’s face was shuttered, and only when Lena spoke did she become animated.

It’s one of the bargains I’ve made with myself, to let Lena have the company of relative strangers as long as I’m nearby and can keep an eye on them. I try to compensate for the lack of other children in her life and the rarity with which she sees her extended family. Of course, it doesn’t compensate for that; she’s an extroverted little girl, always has been, and likes to caper and perform. People are Lena’s game.

For her a trip to the post office in town is a trip to see Mrs. Farber, the gum-popping straight talker who presides over the counter; a trip to buy groceries to stock our kitchenette is a visit to Roberto, the skinny cashier with the soul patch and exuberance about cartoons. She knows all the cashiers’ favorite colors, pet names, and birthdays. A trip to the big-box store a couple of towns inland is a carnival of anecdotes during which Lena recounts our previous trips at great and exhausting length. She has perfect recall of people she’s met even once. “Julio, he’s a Pisces that means fish, cars are his hobby, like racing cars that go fast. He has a niece named Avery, the tooth fairy brought her a charm bracelet with clovers on it. Faneesha likes those yucky cookies with figs in them, she learned to tap-dance in Michigan but once she ran over a worm that came out flat.”

I COULD OCCASIONALLY discern what I thought were shadings of emotion in the voice, shadings of will. Maybe those shadings were my interpretation, but thinking about it now I’m not surprised, because after all the voice was words, sometimes converted to music or other sound, and I don’t see how words can follow each other without implying emotion. Even the effort to control emotion is an act of words, while every effort to control words is an act of emotion.

I didn’t catch much at a time but there were recurrent themes in the patter that I learned to recognize. The voice made light of what it held to be false ideas — for example, the yearning for an all-powerful father who grants wishes and absolves. On that subject it seemed to evince something like condescension, rattling off mocking wordplay when we passed a church marquee or once, another time, while I stood at the front door trying to get rid of a Witness. Omnimpotence, the voice said more than once. Omnimpotent being, omnimpotent force . A great and ancient omnimpotence .

Sometimes it sang an eerie lullaby. Oh little man, tie your own shoes, it would sing, on the heels of a passage about the all-powerful father. There was a fire-and-brimstone sermon it liked to recite by an old-time preacher; it interspersed this text with laugh tracks and sang the cradlesong afterward. Oh little man, dry your own tears. Oh little man, there is no knee. There is no knee to dandle on. Bury your dead, oh little man. Let darkness fall over the land.

Property was an object of mockery too — the ownership of land, of pets, and even of inanimate objects seemed held to be an elaborate charade, maybe a shared psychotic disorder. The voice inflected words like owner or rich with irony — as though these should be bracketed, in perpetuity, in quotation marks. Once it said Fool, you are owned by the sun.

I couldn’t find an attribution anywhere. No results .

But in general such great swaths of what it said were borrowed or adapted that they were already familiar — part of the background of culture somehow, part of the landscape of the commonplace. I sometimes wondered if all of it was borrowed, if it was all pure appropriation, a colorful textile made only of copies.

I’d started reading in philosophy, every so often, and that was when I came upon its first word to me, the sound I’d heard in the hospital before it spoke English. That word was Phowa , or poa , meaning “mindstream” in Sanskrit — the transference of consciousness at the moment of death, was one meaning.

Phowa (Wylie: ' pho ba ; also spelled Powa or Poa phonetically; Sanskrit: sa krānti) is a Vajrayāna Buddhist meditation practice describable as a “transference of consciousness” or “mindstream.” —Wikipedia 6.20.2009

Sometimes there were brief flickers of foreboding, brief intimations of the voice’s departure, but I tried not to invest too much in those. I didn’t want to be disappointed so I didn’t hope too hard. When I caught a glimpse of a future leave-taking, a tiny slip of possibility, I didn’t trot out the streamers or confetti or whistles, the bejeweled gowns and conical party hats, the jeroboams of champagne.

I waited quietly, holding my cards close to the vest.

CURIOUSLY TWO MORE guests have arrived at the motel right on the heels of Kay. By the standards of this place, it’s a madding crowd.

They’re two middle-aged men, a couple, and I can’t help but feel that they, like Kay, are in some state of dismay. Maybe it’s conjugal, a conjugal problem, but I feel like it’s something else. One of them seems to be consoling the other half the time, he has a steadying hand on the other guy’s shoulder practically whenever I see them.