Sweet Lamb of Heaven

by Lydia Millet

  8

  BONES THAT FED OUT THEIR COLD

  MY BROTHER’S APARTMENT IS SMALL. HE MAKES DECENT MONEY for a young guy working at a start-up, but this is Manhattan—where he was lucky to get five hundred square feet in a building with roof access.

  So he sleeps on the couch and Lena and I take the bedroom. He wakes us up by coming in to open his closet; Solly’s a sluggish awakener and every morning he stands there tousled and half-asleep, swaying faintly and staring at his row of shirts on their hangers. The shirt indecision paralyzes him.

  I promised we wouldn’t stay for long, this is a quick visit, but he waved away that promise when we arrived and said we could stay forever, if we wanted to. Lena nodded solemnly.

  “Forever, Uncle Solly,” she agreed.

  Forever means two weeks. I feel safe in this prewar ziggurat with its thick walls and overheated air. I don’t love the city at this time of year—the way white snow turns to gray slush, how the freeze of the sidewalk reaches right through your boot soles. But it’s good to see Solly, and I need a break before we go back to Maine.

  Whenever I call Will he brings up his worry about Ned, his fear that Ned’s going to have me hurt or killed. It makes the conversations strained. I was so pleased by his quiet bearing when I first met him, his calmness that had an almost mystical quality. But now that quality is gone, its glassy surface has been broken and doesn’t seem to be smoothing out again. He’s still soft-spoken and kind, but there’s wariness when he talks to me. I know he feels he should be here—whether he wants to or not, he believes he should be near enough to guard me, that it’s somehow his responsibility, which is preposterous.

  Conspiracy theories are a mostly male hysteria, it seems to me. That style of paranoia isn’t my own—it has a self-importance I don’t relate to. Even now, when I know for a fact I’ve been conspired against, it’s hard for me to believe in conspiracies.

  Ned acted against me not because of who I am but because of who he is—I’m just the one he happened to marry. And the kidnapping was only a conspiracy in that he hired some people and used others.

  Without Will in front of me, though, the attraction is more abstract. Was it only a wishful idea? It was my idea, I know that, I asked him out and brought him in—but the newness of knowing him and Don makes them feel less like fixtures in my life and more like bystanders. Only the Lindas, with their earthiness, seem concrete and reliable.

  Lena and I need relief from the closeness of the small apartment, so we do her lessons in a coffee shop. After the morning rush has subsided the place is colonized by mothers and their goggle-eyed toddlers, who stagger around banging plastic toys on the backs of chairs and gumming them; the women chatter to each other, brooding on nests of scarves and coats. Lena takes the roaming toddlers under her wing, holding their hands and showing them colorful objects. She’s popular with the mothers for this.

  Most days when Solly gets home from work the two of them go out to a nearby playground; she doesn’t mind the creaking freeze of the swings, the burn of the icy slide. Sometimes I walk out of the lobby with them, wave goodbye as they cross eastward to the park and then veer west myself. I walk to the Hudson River, past a bagel shop, bodegas, some kind of pretentious cigar lounge, and an opaque window whose neon sign reads HYPNOSIS. QUIT SMOKING LOSE WEIGHT MANAGE GRIEF.

  YESTERDAY IT WAS the Lindas first on Skype, then Kay. When Lena and Kay had finished singing together, a tuneless song about a mermaid, she ran off to build a LEGO castle and I slid into Solly’s desk chair in her place.

  I was dismayed at how Kay looked. She had the same hollow-eyed face she’d had when she first arrived at the motel—ghostly pale. She and Navid hadn’t reconciled; after her meeting with the linguistics scholar Navid had spun off, his behavior erratic. He said he couldn’t trust her again because she had concealed too much.

  But we don’t know how much we know, she said unsteadily, or we don’t know how little other people know. None of us ever possess this knowledge. We can’t know what others are thinking.

  “It’s like a kind of instinct we go on, right? After we get reassured we’re not crazy. You know what Don told me?” she asked.

  It was hard to hear her so I raised the volume on the laptop’s speakers.

  “He told me there are crowds of people who never get to that point, they never cross that barrier. People who hear and never stop thinking they’re just insane, spend their whole lives on Thorazine or getting ECT. Living their lives all alone. And sad. We’re just this small fraction of people who, basically, refused to believe in our insanity.”

  She hadn’t meant to keep secrets, she just hadn’t talked enough, she guessed. And now Navid was gone, flown back to Los Angeles. If all this was, he’d said, was some kind of off-brand encounter group, he might as well bite the bullet and do the real twelve steps. And when it came to AA, he had said, or NA or GA or CA, L.A. was the nation’s capital.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, watching her cock her head to one side in the jittery connection. I had the fleeting illusion that she was preparing to keel over sideways in slow motion.

  But she didn’t say anything, just gazed at me, so I kept on talking.

  “I don’t think you were holding out on us, but I still want to know everything you know.”

  “There are so many words for it,” she said.

  I felt alarmed as I gazed at the fuzzy image of her face, the brown half-moons beneath her eyes. She always looks pretty, with the waifish delicacy of a ballet dancer, but there was a distraction to her expression.

  She’s not paying attention to her own welfare and no one else is, either. She has no one to take care of her yet I suspect she needs help. I want to call her mother; I wish I had her mother’s telephone number.

  It can’t be my job, though, to look after Kay as well as Lena—not now, especially, when I’ve failed so dismally with my own daughter. I’m not equipped.

  “It is language,” she said. “The same kind that makes your body work without you telling it to. You know how the brain runs your kidneys, say, or tells an embryo how to grow in a pregnant woman? What’s the difference between that kind of implicit, like, limbic OS for our biology—and for the biology of all animals—and just a miracle?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s part of deep language that runs these operating systems for us. You see? It’s not the language we speak. I mean our language comes from it, like all language, but our own specific language is like the surface of the ocean, the very top line of the water. Just the line. Deep language—I mean I happen to call it that, but there are other names—it’s the rest of the ocean beneath, see, Anna? It’s the rest of the water below, and it’s everything the rest of the ocean holds, that makes that thin line of surface possible.”

  She was doing something with her hands behind her head—scooping her hair into a ponytail as wings of the hair fell forward around her face. She kept talking faster and faster and shook her head as she did this, making it hard for me to hear; the volume was already at maximum. I wondered if she was manic.

  That has to be it.

  “See Western medicine doesn’t come close to understanding the body, that’s part of what I learned in med school and my residency, for doctors, we have to act like we know things, ‘project an air of competence,’ is what they said to me”—here she used air quotes—“but let’s be serious, it’s a crapshoot, with anything in the least rare, whether you can get to a diagnosis that works and maybe jury-rig a cure for it. Medicine’s more guesswork than the AMA wants patients to even think about, if they knew how much of a gray area there is they wouldn’t believe a thing we said—”

  “Mama,” said Lena, behind me. “I can’t find it.”

  “Shh, honey. Just for a minute. I’m trying to hear Kay.”

  “We’d never be able to tell our brains how to manage the body’s systems, so much more sophisticated than our self-awareness,” went on Kay, and now she was fiddling with an ear
ring and in the process turning her face away from the computer’s microphone. “… colonies of microbes—billions! Not to save our lives! What I got from Infant Vasquez, what I didn’t have time to tell Navid, is that system … one aspect of deep language … the other—”

  “Mama,” repeated Lena, apparently deciding Kay’s desperate monologue was background noise. “I can’t find the bottom LEGO piece, you know the one you make into the floor? I can’t find that big flat green piece to even build them on, Mom. I swear, I looked everywhere!”

  “In a minute, honey, just a minute, OK?” I said, flapping a hand at her impatiently, but I’d already missed what Kay was saying.

  Then Solly and his new girlfriend burst in the door stamping snow off their feet, his girlfriend whom I’d never met before was smiling at me expectantly, so I made my excuses to Kay and got up from the computer.

  Language extinction has occurred quite slowly throughout human history, but is now happening at a breakneck pace due to globalization and neocolonialism—so rapidly that, by 2100, 50 to 90 percent of languages spoken in today’s world are expected to be extinct. —Wikipedia 2016

  LUISA WAS SITTING with Solly and me in his kitchen/dining room/living room (Lena had gone to bed) when we got the call from my mother.

  Solly put her on speakerphone.

  Our father had been losing weight and sweating at night, she said—so much that he soaked the sheets. They’d gone in to see the family doctor and the doctor had sent them to a specialist, where he’d been biopsied.

  “Why didn’t she tell us this before?” asked Solly, after punching the mute button. “A biopsy?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you, in case it wasn’t anything,” she said.

  I guess the mute button doesn’t work.

  “Sorry,” muttered Solly, but he was already distracted by the import of that.

  “I’m afraid it did come back positive,” she said. “A fairly common cancer of the blood. ‘Hematological malignancy,’ they said. We don’t have the staging on it yet, but we should know soon and I don’t want you to get too worried just yet. OK? It’s not necessarily a dire prognosis, depending on the staging, of course, whether it’s metastasized—it doesn’t have too low a five-year survival rate. More than half of all patients pull through. Maybe even three-quarters, we’ll see. So your father’s chances aren’t so bad.”

  Luisa squeezed Solly’s hand, her dark eyes glittering. Solly and I looked at each other steadily.

  “Do they have a treatment plan yet?” asked Solly.

  “There will probably be chemo,” said my mother. “Possibly radiation, possibly surgery. I’ll share all of that with you as soon as I know more, dear.”

  “Blood cancer,” I said, after a silence. I’d begun to feel uneasy—beyond even the facts of the case I felt a creeping apprehension. “That’s where … isn’t that …”

  “It’s where the white blood cells divide faster than normal cells, or live longer than they’re supposed to,” said my mother. “He has at least a couple of primary tumors, which they tell me is a common presentation. With this kind of a lymphoma.”

  AFTER WE HUNG UP I told Solly what Ned had said to me before: lymphoma. I described it to him before he left for Luisa’s place for the night, right before I took out my laptop and began typing this.

  But he shrugged it off as though the detail either wasn’t accurate or wasn’t relevant. Our father has a disease, our father has a potentially terminal illness of the kind we all fear for the insidious poison of its medicine, the emaciation of bodies, shedding of hair, desiccating of bones and aging of skin. That was all Solly had room for, and I can’t blame him.

  And our father will have to endure all that without ever understanding his illness. He’ll be like a child throughout the suffering, confused and blinking as my mother herds him gently on.

  I think of those scenes to come and I also think of my father when we were young and he was middle-aged instead of old—how he read us stories using different voices, some deep, some squeaky, here a quaking mouse, here a growling lion. I think of how he carried us on his shoulders—“so you can pretend to be giants.”

  He had so much dignity back then, but he was willing to cast it off to entertain his children. He tickled us until we grew out of being tickled, he made corny jokes until we grew out of those too.

  Now I feel an ache of remorse when I think how we stopped laughing at his jokes. I would laugh so hard, if I could have a do-over. I can see that to Solly we’re only losing my father now, where to me we lost him some time ago—or maybe it’s fairer to say that Solly seems to be able to lose him twice, while for me once was all I could do.

  Still Ned’s casual assertion a few weeks ago, his matter-of-fact statement that my father would get sick with lymphoma—which at that time I assumed was just a fictional element of the so-called narrative—vibrates so hard I almost get a headache. I’ve actually been taking painkillers when the thought of it starts to make my temples send out their thin flashes of pain.

  But Ned’s foreknowledge vies with the diagnosis for my attention and I can’t let it go. It may be coincidence—or maybe it’s information gleaned from surveillance. Could he be surveilling them as well as me, tracking my father’s diagnosis? Observed by Ned or his consultants, did my mother find out weeks ago and only tell us now? And what use would it be for Ned to spy on my parents anymore, when he already has my cooperation, when I’ve already done what he wanted me to do?

  I’m going to ask my mother tomorrow when she heard the diagnosis. I’ll reassure her that it’s not a problem if she decided to delay telling us—we understand completely. But I need to know when she heard.

  YESTERDAY, she said.

  And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech … And the Lord said, Behold: The people is one, and they have all one language … and now nothing will be restrained from them … Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. —Genesis 11:1–7

  I HAVE IT—I have it here on my desktop, a written record.

  It’s in the “templates,” as he and his staff call them: the schedule for the narrative, with our travel dates; the list of his positions on issues, which I’m supposed to know even though I won’t parrot them, and a partial list of planned public appearances, both with Lena and me and without us; the breakdown of campaign employees by job description, plus key volunteers. All this is supposed to be memorized before our next stint in Alaska.

  It’s so repellent that I hadn’t looked at it after a cursory glance, but here it is. The templates are connected to my laptop’s calendar, which I don’t use for anything else, with events assigned to months or weeks or days. The events pop up, color-coded, and I can’t take them off again—I tried once and it gave me a message about contacting the administrator.

  Apparently I don’t have permission.

  The developments connected to my father, and therefore my extended absences from Anchorage and Ned’s campaign, are lime-green bars extending across several different blocks of days on the calendar.

  They’re labeled like this, on various dates:

  LYMPHOMA STAGE 3. DIAGNOSIS, PROCESSING

  TREATMENT MODULE 1: SURGERY, CHEMOTHERAPY

  TREATMENT MODULE 2: RADIATION

  METASTASIS: BONE MARROW, CEREBROSPINAL FLUID

  And there’s one I didn’t notice before, a little further on.

  PALLIATIVE CARE/MEMORIAL SERVICE

  “Lymphoma Stage 3” is assigned to this month, the month we’re in right now: February.

  I called Ned, I left a voicemail for him asking how he knew, but I strongly doubt he’ll tell me anything at all.

  He typically has his staff email me when information needs to be exchanged; he and I don’t communicate.

  “STAGE 3,” said my mother, on the phone again.

  I’M PASTING IN an email I got from Kay, strange and dense. I think she may be bipolar.

  You said y
ou wanted to hear everything I know. So OK. So I have trouble explaining how I know it & what it is—writing isn’t my thing. I mean I was more the organic chem type!!! I used to get visions of like resonance structures & chair conformations & stuff, when I was holdig Infant V. But so. You know how I told you we r the only ones it leaves, what I meant was, it doesn’t leave the whales or the crocodiles, it doesn’t leave the plants & the trees, & that’s not because, like, theyre dumb. Theyre not. Deep language is in all living things but all the others, it stays with. Only not humans. Its because the other things, apes, cats, even the grasses in a field, don’t live just for themselves. They live for the group. They live for all, this whole of being. We used to be like that to, once a long time ago, once in our evolution, I don’t know when but once. But slowly it chaged & now we live for ourselves. So the deep language does’nt stay with us when we get our own, our surface language, you coud call it. We split off from it then & are forever alone. God leaves us Anna.

  God leaves us.

  I can’t tell how much is rumination or fabrication, whether some is intuition, how much she was given to know. In short I’m not sure if she has much authority.

  But I’m keeping her message. I read it over in quiet times.

  MORE GUESTS ARE leaving the motel, Big Linda reports, all vowing to keep in touch—I’ve started to check in on the Listserv, where so far Navid’s the only one absent. Regina and Reiner have gone back to their professions in the city, and Gabe has decamped too. He cited the needs of a lonely Bedlington terrier, pining away under the care of a neighbor back at the condo he shares with Burke, who’s soon to follow him home.

  And what did they accomplish with the meetings? I get Navid’s impatience, though I wish he’d been nicer to Kay. Unlike me, the rest of the guests knew about each other before they came—they had an earlier version of the Listserv. They’d already exchanged messages containing much of what they’d say later, alongside the table of watery coffee and stale cookies. So I was the only new element. And they can’t have got much from me.