by Lydia Millet
Nothing had been found, the contractors dismissed her as a neurotic rich woman—which she was, she admitted in her tight, well-bred, Dutch voice. She was a neurotic rich woman, but so what?
Finally she went online and she found Don, she said: “I found all of you. And it was such a relief.”
“She didn’t tell me any of it,” said her companion, who also had a Dutch accent. “She never told me what she was hearing, why she had taken on these construction projects, until we were on our way here.”
“You know,” said Regina. “I feared that Reiner would dismiss me. For being mentally ill, you know? People just get dismissed. It’s how we get rid of people these days, we throw their opinions in the garbage can by calling them crazy. Whenever a man talks about his ex-wife, he says she’s crazy! You notice? Because she must be crazy, right? To want to get a divorce from him.”
“Ik wil geen scheiden, schat,” said Reiner fondly.
“He says, ‘I don’t want to get a divorce,’ ” translated Regina.
Quaking aspen trees make clones of themselves to build colonies, becoming one large organism connected by its root system. They are able to survive forest fires because, although individual trees may burn, the roots underground remain intact. One colony in Utah is 80,000 years old.
Not to have to have children, I thought as I read about the aspens in Wikipedia, or at least not to have children that were separate from you—and yet to live throughout history, your family not only close around you for all that time but part of your own body.
Not to have to be alone.
I envied those aspens.
NAVID TOOK A TURN at the next meeting, shuffling his feet on the linoleum and clearing his throat nervously. I felt the attention of the group fasten on him: he must not have talked much before.
He’d been on set, he said, he loved being on set, and even though his job almost never required it, he did it as often as he could. He had one assistant, he said, just out of film school whose job it was to hang around a movie set all day and then, when finally a scene was ready to shoot, to text Navid so he could drive over. Best money he ever spent, he said, best money … he trailed off. I saw Kay catch his eye and smile at him, encouraging.
When he had started hearing, he said, it was a period of hard work and, he admitted, chronic drug use, and so his assumption was that what he heard was a cocaine artifact. Well, also crack, he said, because sex on crack, you know, was really excellent, he added awkwardly. “Or maybe you don’t know, ha ha,” and he looked around at the room of non-crack-users and emitted a nervous laugh.
No one else laughed.
His problem was, he said, he didn’t know where the voice was coming from—there were so many people on the soundstage that he couldn’t isolate it. He’d gone home to his house in the Hills when the shoot was over and hadn’t heard it there; the house was empty except for his housekeeper cook and one other staff and the big rooms hung heavy with quiet. But as soon as he was on set again—the same movie, but there was a large cast, there was a massive crew, it was a big movie—the voice started up.
It drove him crazy, he said, because visiting the set was the only real perk of his job. He’d never cared much about the money, he liked to be there seeing movies get made, it was the whole reason for his career, and this movie, this movie in particular was his baby, he’d nurtured it from the cradle, it was his project. He even tried not doing drugs, but that didn’t help (he smiled, self-mocking) so he went back off the wagon a couple of days later.
The voice performed speeches, he said, as far as he could tell it was speeches from hundreds of different films, scripted monologues and dialogues—not all of which he recognized. It might as well have been making its way through the AFI Catalog.
“I mean, I guess—” he interrupted himself, and looked at Don. “I guess I’m wanting to know what we’re all doing, like, what is this? Why me? I just wanted to do my thing, make the pictures and sell them, you know, stay on trajectory. I was making, like, this almost perfect arc. And then there was this—it was pretty much noise, like static, like really fucking annoying, I mean I’d punch walls, man, I put a hole in drywall once—which—and cracked a Lexus window—anyway. So this is what I’m saying—assuming it is some kind of higher power or whatever, then what’s the goddamn point of it? It fucks us over, and for fucking what?”
Instead of answering, though, when all of us turned and looked at him, Don just nodded.
“Go on,” he said gently, as though Navid hadn’t asked him a question.
“We come here, we talk, we tell our stories and whatever, say what we heard or felt, what our perception was. We have this—with the cookies and the donuts and that shit. Group therapy. But it’s, like, circles. Around and around. Are there answers? Will anyone ever fucking tell me why and how this shit happened to me?”
Don kept nodding solemnly.
We sat there in an uncomfortable silence. But Don was waiting too, clearly, as though he didn’t get that he was being directly asked—as though he didn’t feel the pregnancy of the pause. Still no one wanted to say anything. There was a force field around Don, it seemed.
“He means, Don, do you have an explanation for us,” said Kay softly.
The group seemed embarrassed, people fiddling with coffee cups or adjusting their positions on the hard chairs.
“Basically I’m one of you,” said Don, after a few seconds. “They don’t offer degrees in this, I’m afraid. I need you to understand that I try to be here for you, I want to do everything I can to help, but I’m not a credentialed expert.”
There were a couple of nods, but faces went slack and shoulders sank with a disappointment so tangible I could feel it even from the cheap seats, sitting behind a row of backs. They’d wanted him to explain in simple terms what had happened to them, they’d thought he might really have the key.
I had too. I was no different.
Someone’s cell phone rang from a bag under a chair and around the circle the guests shuffled their feet, started to pull on gloves and wrap scarves around their necks. I noticed they’d come bundled in full winter gear, even though most had only twenty feet to walk from their rooms.
“One thing,” said Don. “Navid. When you say why us, it’s not that we’re the only ones. We’re a subset—we heard more clearly than most. But we’re not the only ones by a long shot. None of you are alone.”
“‘My name is legion, for we are many,’” said Gabe.
There was a glazed look in his eyes.
Listless, wanting something to occupy me when I got back to my room, I searched for the quote online.
It was from Mark 5, when Jesus cast demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs.
He said to him, “Come out of the man, unclean spirit!”
Then He asked him, “What is your name?”
And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”
The unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them; and they drowned.
IN A SUDDEN acceleration they started holding the meetings twice a day. I built the meetings into my routine, though I always had my cell phone ringer on high waiting for Ned to call. Part of me lived only for the second when he’d call again, or even better—a perfect ending—the investigators would call and tell me everything was solved, Lena was there with them, safe and sound and beyond excited to see me.
My limbic brain waited for that, the call that would effect reanimation, while the rest of the neural circuits were dedicated to not feeling alone while Will worked, marking time as I listened and watched at the meetings. I abandoned this journal. I had no wish to think, I had no wish to record. Until I found her I would distract myself with whatever this was, some talk-therapy hunt for God or even more ominous possibilities—none of it frightened me anymore. That was the difference: the second-worst thing (not the worst: I blocked the worst) had already happened. Whatever phenomenon they were p
ainstakingly trying to uncover, there in the cafeteria beside the folding table of cookies, it was easier to consider than Lena.
Once I would have paid through the nose for a cogent explanation of the voice; now I sought that understanding mostly to stop agonizing over what I couldn’t do or was not doing to find her. Part of me stubbornly refused to believe I couldn’t just walk until I found her—treading through snow, knocking at doors—and felt a rotten guilt. Part of me couldn’t believe she wasn’t still neatly indicated, as I was, by a small blue dot on the map on my phone, moving as I did, going where I went.
I grilled myself over my incompetence, how I had come to let myself be roofied. Nights when I wasn’t with Will were the worst, but I couldn’t ask him to take care of me every minute so I pretended to need “time alone” some nights, whenever I could stand to. I often passed the time by retracing my steps in the hours before she was taken, seeing a simple blueprint of our room from above. In bird’s-eye view I moved around performing mundane actions, the oval of my head between the knobs of my shoulders, the tips of my shoes beneath. There was Lena, a smaller oval, the same shapes in miniature.
I tried to reframe each movement to determine how the drug was introduced, think of myself brushing my teeth—was it in the toothpaste?—or brushing my hair. Maybe it hadn’t been a pill at all, maybe it was some kind of narcotic that was absorbed through the skin. I played back that hour before I went to bed, when Lena was already sleeping. It couldn’t have been the toothpaste because she uses a different one—a children’s flavor called Silly Strawberry—and she must have been sedated, as I was, otherwise she would have woken up as they carried her out, she would have kicked and screamed.
Sedated or not, I told myself, I would have been woken by a scream. Since she was a year old I’ve jerked awake at the slightest sound, a murmur or one-word whisper of sleep talk.
The cops had taken away the half-empty wine bottle and the plastic motel cup I’d drunk from, claiming they were going to test them; the wine was all I remembered eating or drinking, after our restaurant dinner one town over.
But they didn’t report any results. They were useless, Don said, they’ve been bought off or distracted or co-opted, he had no idea how but it seemed to be the case.
There was also the possibility of a needle, that I was injected while I slept and never found the pinprick hole. I couldn’t figure it out no matter how many times I set up that blueprint in my mind’s eye. No matter how often I took us through the paces, I could never narrow it down.
We never found Ned’s recording device, and together the two unknowns obsessed me.
WHAT IF ONE of the aspen trees was cut down, while the rest of the organism remained? Did the remainder grieve?
TRYING TO AVOID images of how Lena was living in that moment I lay on top of the neatly made motel bed and stared at the ceiling. I thought how, in our normal, middle-class circumstance, we almost relish the idea of dark forces that lurk in the shadows. We watch movies, read books made glamorous by black-and-red palettes of horror, the hint of an otherworldly malice running like quicksilver through the marrow of our bones. We like to call the dark rumors demonic, like to have monsters to fear instead of time, aging, the falling away of companions.
Even people who scoff at the supernatural can embrace the demonic with a gothic fervor, hold in themselves an abiding fascination with that beauty of darkness and blood.
BIG LINDA HAD been working, she said—her work for decades had been training orcas like Shamu. She’s pursued that vocation for most of her adult life.
She hadn’t been doing the shows for a while, though, she’d gotten middle-aged and taken on more of a supervisory role, because to get in the pool with the animals you had to be in peak physical form. There’d been human deaths, of course, she said, maybe you read about them, saw them in the news, and trainers knew the real story, that it wasn’t trainer error that caused those deaths but rather psychosis, because the great, predatory whales lived captive lives of aching, maddening frustration, shut up in their small cement tanks.
Some were more aggressive than others. Tilikum, she said. Blackfish.
Of course killer whales aren’t whales in the sense of baleen whales, the kind of whales that cruise gently through the deep, slowly straining millions of krill and copepod through large maws full of white comb-like structures (she told us). The orcas were toothed whales, big dolphins really, though also apex predators, if we were familiar with the term. They were so highly intelligent that parts of their brain appeared a good deal more complex than our own—the part that processes emotion, she said, was so highly developed that some neurologists believe orcas’ emotional lives are more complex than those of humans.
We know so little about them, she said, even the scientists, but they have language, even different dialects. They have culture. There are three kinds of orcas in the wild, all with their different cultures.
“They are astonishing creatures,” she said, her voice trembling. “Some peoples hold them to be sacred.”
I think I wasn’t the only one to feel how much she cared, in the moment when she said that—how palpable her passion was—and how also, on this large, horse-faced older woman, passion like that looked almost pitiable.
Anyway, her favorite whale was a youngster who’d been bred and born in captivity, which is still fairly rare, she said, they die off more quickly than they can reproduce, the captive ones. His mother and father were popular with the crowds who visited the aquarium-amusement park where she worked (swiftly I shut down the mental link children, blocked an image of children laughing, splashed by the orca’s leap).
Big Linda was alone one morning at the pool—the pools they live in, she added, only have to be twice the length of an orca’s body. Main Linda cleared her throat, jerking Big Linda out of her sad reverie.
There was a silence, a pleasant tranquillity, said Big Linda. This was Florida in summer; there were palm trees overhead, the smell of heating pavement.
“I can’t say what it was like, exactly,” she went on, shaking her head and staring at the floor in front of her. The others also looked at the floor, as though listening to the shameful confessions of an addict. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
I saw Burke nodding slowly, pensive, also not lifting his eyes from the linoleum. I had no idea what Linda was getting at, couldn’t make sense of it in the least, and was gazing distractedly at the side table, thinking about eating a cookie—they had some that were an unnatural shade of pink, those long rectangular wafers stamped with a waffle pattern that seem like play food. Lena had play food—she had fruit and vegetables made of wood that you could slice and put back together with Velcro. She had berry pie slices made of plastic. No! Stop.
“First I thought I was making it up,” said Linda, “truth is I’d been real unhappy there lately, I don’t like how we keep the animals—you have to understand, we only stay, most of the trainers stay because we’re sorry for them, deeply sorry. We stay to do what we can for these creatures. For years I couldn’t leave because of that, I’m so attached to them, you know, the little guy especially. Not that little, of course, since he’s fourteen feet long.” She laughed nervously.
I got up, telling myself to block out the lingering image of Lena at play, and gingerly approached the snack table; I put one of the waffle cookies on the tip of my tongue. Like balsa wood with sugar, I thought, and sawdust between the layers—sawdust with sugar. Still I chewed it, studiously not letting my thoughts stray back to Lena with her toys.
“Point is I was stressed out. Still. I finally had to admit to myself that something was there. I mean not the clicks and whistles and chirps, the usual elements of calls that we occasionally hear, you know, the vocalizing … it wasn’t that.”
I stopped mechanically chewing the balsa wood/sawdust wafer and turned toward the circle, where others were also gazing at her, their faces unreadable to me. She meant she’d heard the killer whale, I thought, and had an abrupt u
rge to laugh.
Instead I swallowed the mouthful and sat down on my chair again, careful to make no noise. I wanted to be very polite. It was Big Linda, I thought, who’d always been so kind to us—to think of ridiculing her made me wince. I would be unfailingly polite, I would be more attentive than I had been before, and I would suppress the instinct to laugh. It’d be hysterical laughter anyway, I told myself: again I had signs of incipient hysteria, as I had after Ned heard the voice. Both euphoria and hysteria had risen in me as I jogged along our street in the dark. Now they threatened to rise in me again.
But I was still a wretch. My misery came crashing back. I felt no lightheartedness at all; I was as heavy as lead.
“I always heard it, whenever I was at the tank, and I couldn’t tell you how I got anything from it, but I knew—something about the way it was, somehow the rhythms were linked, how he’d be moving around and I’d be hearing it. I knew it was connected to him. He’d just been separated from his mother, you know, he’d just been weaned, but in the wild the male orcas stay at their mothers’ sides for their whole lives. He’d been taken away from her, you could tell he was lost, basically, and then there was this—it was a kind of wall of sound, I guess, a wall of sound that also felt like a wall of feeling.”
In the end—to me at least—a baby, a whale, there was nothing more nonsensical there than anywhere else.
Male humpback whales have been described by biologists as “inveterate composers” of songs that are “strikingly similar” to the products of human musical tradition. —Wikipedia 2015
I TRIED TEXTING Ned’s various numbers, the temporary cell phones he’d used recently as well as his old number, the one he’d had for years. I repeatedly typed messages such as I’ll do anything you want me to, I accept your terms, Give her back and I’ll do whatever you say. For several nights there was no amount of abjection I wouldn’t stoop to.
Finally I pulled up short and pretended to be made of granite, went from spineless to fossilized. There wasn’t a middle ground. I knew it wouldn’t last, either, the rock-like immobility, the erasure of my real life.
