UNCLEAN SPIRITS ENTERED THE SWINE
THE INVESTIGATORS IMPRESSED ME WITH A SENSE OF COMPETENCE as I looked at their faces on the screen or scanned the neat pdf records of their efforts and expenditures, the rows of line items. I thought how easy I must be to fool—experience had shown this with sparkling transparence.
My questions were lame and I was often sedated. So I made Don and Will, and also the Lindas, ask questions for me. They huddled around and gazed into the laptop’s camera. The investigators’ clean, concerned faces stared back at us from a gray office only a couple hours’ drive away. Were they really present, I wondered, in an office building in Portland? Or were they a shallow illusion of service?
Absurd how all transactions had become talking heads, the whole culture a mass of flat images of heads with mouths moving: we barely needed our bodies. There were hardly even dialogues anymore, rather there were a million monologues a day, each head with its mouth, each mouth with its talk. Still I listened with obsessive attention as the investigators fielded the questions, tried to show us they were pursuing all possible avenues.
Whether or not they were skilled or diligent, they hadn’t found Lena by the next time Ned texted me.
He wanted to talk, he wrote.
Four days had gone by, the longest days I had lived.
WILL HAD TO DIAL the unfamiliar, prepaid number for me, my hands were shaking so hard, and when we finally got Ned on the line he wouldn’t talk long—maybe in case someone was trying to trace the call. I don’t know.
“I’munna need a photo op at the announcement, at least one TV show in Anchorage, down the road. Ads, maybe. Events availability. Magazine profiles, what have you. Like I said. And if I don’t get ’em, this is just what happens, honey. Kid’s just not with you anymore. She’s gone. There’s no cops out there gonna help you. It’s my call what happens. If you want to fix it, I need your full onboarding.”
Onboarding, I saw Will mouth silently, gazing down.
“Anything,” I said. I could barely breathe—I was taking shallow breaths, quickly, afraid I might hyperventilate. “Give her the phone. Please. Ned. Please.”
“She’s having a good time with her toys,” said Ned. His tone was indifferent.
“I need to hear her voice, Ned, and I need her back, please. I’ll do whatever. Today, Ned, please, I need her back today. You win. Completely, Ned, you won, you win. Please?”
There was a long silence. With my free hand I grabbed the fabric of my skirt and scrunched my fingernails into it, into the tops of my thighs.
“Some other time, darlin’,” said Ned. “I want you to recall exactly how this feels.”
“It’s killing me,” I said.
But he’d hung up.
YOU DIDN’T NEED a picture ID to take a six-year-old kid onto a plane, I said to Will, perched on a stool at his kitchen island, a bottle of wine open in front of me. The shaking had stopped and I was self-medicating. There had been a small, odd reassurance in Ned’s saying she was playing with her toys, maybe just that I was able to picture her. You didn’t even need a birth certificate—nothing. No piece of paper attesting to the child’s identity, the child’s relationship to you. Unless you were trying to leave the country, they didn’t ask for anything. You could walk onto a plane with any kid in the world, as long as that kid didn’t open her mouth and give you away.
And the country was endless.
Children have no identity here, I said, no one cares who they are. Although the same could be said of adults, I added. More or less, the only interest our country takes in our identities is as taxpayers, consumers or criminals, I said. They could be anywhere, the investigators had reminded us, anywhere in the country, they could be in Vegas or Boca—they could be back in Anchorage.
I couldn’t easily picture Lena standing quietly while Ned checked her in at a flight gate, but it was possible. He might have made threats. He might have threatened her. Or drugged her again.
Or she might be somewhere offshore, I thought. Ned might have a boat. She might be on the ocean.
“Don’t think along those lines,” said Will, and put his hand over mine. “You have to stop yourself going down that road. There’s nothing helpful there.”
I looked at him and felt flattened and paralyzed: depression weakened my limbs. My whole body felt inert with the exception of a core of fear that burned with its own perpetual energy like a star being born, born, and reborn.
“Come,” said Will.
I stood with difficulty, with lassitude, barely moving until he took my arm. He made me lie down on the couch across from his fireplace, covered me in a blanket.
“But I have to be at the motel,” I said. “In case he shows up with her.”
Will said nothing, because he didn’t need to: I could hear the words he won’t without anyone saying them. He only lifted the back of my head and set a pillow beneath it, smoothing a lock of hair from my eyes. He turned off the overhead lights, leaving only a table lamp or two, and sat down in an armchair somewhere behind me, where he began reading. I gazed at the fire, absorbed in its abstraction, and listened to the crisp cut of a page turning.
Most women probably wanted a man who acted more like a woman, I considered—more like a mother, even. You wanted to be taken care of. As long as he wasn’t womanish, I thought, as long as he had central masculine characteristics such as strength and confidence, in most other respects an ideal man was more like a woman.
Later I fell asleep.
MORE THAN BEFORE, with Lena gone I lost myself in research. Whatever was said in the meetings was a catalyst for my searches. There was something necessary in the order that research gave me, in the finding of lists, the recording of definitions. This is what x is. This is what y is.
Soothing.
A recent area of development is the discovery that . . . the ability to produce “sentences” is not limited to humans. The first good evidence of syntax in nonhumans, reported in 2006, is from the greater spot-nosed monkey (Cercopithecus nictitans) of Nigeria, showing that some animals can take discrete units of communication and build them up into a sequence that then carries a different meaning from the individual “words.” —The Times of London 12.2013
AT THE SECOND meeting I’d taken twice the usual dosage of my tranquilizers but I’d also been drinking coffee steadily.
I still sat back from the others, mug in hand, but this time I leaned forward on my chair, almost perched. I succeeded in sealing off my anxiety over Lena only by pretending that my life with her, my devoted focus on her, did not exist at all. Fortified in this way, holding an image in my mind of a wall placed between emotion and me, between my life and myself—by blocking out my life outside the room—I was able to listen with a manufactured singularity of purpose.
Regina spoke first. I’d barely heard her talk before but now she was painfully eager. She has what I guess is a Dutch accent, and what she said corrected me: it wasn’t just preverbal infants. There too my assumptions had been unfounded.
I listened to what she said and it never struck me to disbelieve. She’d been exposed through someone named Terence, and though she didn’t describe him he clearly wasn’t a baby. She was an ad exec who began hearing the voice when Terence was with her in her corner office. At first it spoke to her only in ditties and slogans; whenever she was with Terence, these ditties and slogans were audible, though he didn’t seem to hear them. Almost right away it began happening when they were at home, too, she said, so now I assumed Terence was her husband—that they had worked together and gone home together too.
The man she’d come with sat across from her, nodding. But he couldn’t be Terence; the way she talked about the absent person was almost patronizing. She’d cycled through various fixed ideas, she said, one of which had to do with wires in the walls, the audio of her TVs, computers, and many other interlinked devices. In service to that idea she’d hired contractors to tear into the walls, looking for speakers, receivers, anything that could be transmitting—she watched the workers like a hawk to determine whether wires existed where they should not. She’d pretended to be opening the walls for other reasons, she’d actually pretended to want to renovate, she said, had her company pay through the nose to renovate her corner office. Then she renovated her home, where, as a pretext for opening the walls and having the electricians carefully inspect all wiring, she paid to install complex systems that controlled the house’s appliances, temperature, and lights.
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 painstakingly 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 urge 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.
It was unbearable to submit to my profound weakness and so the only choice was to shore up surface strength.
Plants might be able to eavesdrop on their neighbors and use the sounds they “hear” to guide their own growth, according to a new study that suggests plants use acoustic signaling to communicate with one another. Findings published in the journal BMC Ecology suggest that plants can not only “smell” the chemicals and “see” the reflected light of their neighbors, they may also “listen” to the plants around them. —National Geographic News
ONE EVENING AROUND dusk there was a call from a new number, and when I picked it up after one ring, as I picked up all calls—instantly, slavishly—I heard her.
“Mommy?” said Lena, on the brink of tears.
“I’m here! I’m here!” is all I remember saying.
The phone was passed from Lena to someone else, an adult voice I didn’t recognize. A contract was being faxed, it said, and I would have to sign it in front of a notary. We both understood, technically, that it wasn’t binding, wouldn’t hold up in court since it was being signed under duress, etc., but Ned also knew I knew that if I didn’t stick to its terms this would simply happen again.
“But worse,” said the person, inflectionless.
After I signed the contracts and they were delivered, Lena would be brought back to me.
These events unrolled quickly. The contracts were received and signed, Will and Don read them, as well as Reiner, who turned out to be a corporate lawyer. Will drove me to a notary at the fire station that stayed open all night, and after that a messenger took the packet from me. Then we went back to the motel and waited.
I took no pill and drank no wine, determined to be sober as a judge. Instead of drinking I walked around and around the outside of the motel, my heart beating fast, my cheeks hot, until my calves burned and the soles of my feet were sore. Freezing, I walked for hours. Every brief headlight near the end of the road made me breathless.
It was after midnight when the car pulled up and two men got out, two men I didn’t know, though I wondered in passing if I recognized one of them as a cop.
Then Lena was here, I had her with me again, and the motel guests were close, and Don and Will, Don’s father smiling widely as he leaned on his wavering cane. Everyone was hugging Lena or patting her, congratulating me, whatever. We were in the warm lobby without having walked there—we’d floated, I think now, and when I finally looked up there were no men and there was no car. Vanished.
SO NED HAS BECOME a condition again, a feature of life. Our end date is still the election, contractually, after which Lena and I should be released—but for now we’re indentured. We’re flying to Alaska next week for the official candidacy announcement, to do our duty as mannequins.
Ned’s staff booked the tickets; Ned’s staff booked the rental car. We’re staying in our old house for almost a week. Without speaking to me at all, only sending me emails containing flight confirmation numbers and the rental car details, Ned’s staff took charge of the arrangements.
Lena’s still saying little about her time in kidnapping—I can’t tell how deep the injury may go, though Don found us a counselor forty-five minutes away and we drive to see her three days a week. It doesn’t seem to be the case that anything of substance occurred while she was in Ned’s hands. That is, as long as she hasn’t blocked a trauma. All that happened, apparently—once the initial violation had occurred when she was drugged and taken from me—was that she stayed in a hotel suite with a babysitter. And of course she was frightened because they told her I was sick.
It sounds like it was one of those big chain hotels, more like apartments in an office park, possibly in Massachusetts somewhere, the PIs say, with generic but pleasant enough bedrooms off a central living room and kitchen. The babysitter had her own room, and so did Lena, between which the doors were left open.
Apparently she only saw Ned once. The first morning he stayed away and had the babysitter tell her that she was safe, I was safe, the illness wasn’t life-threatening. Everyone was safe, but she was staying there for her own protection in case the sickness was contagious. He made his single in-person appearance that evening, bearing ice cream and an expensive, wholesome-looking doll wearing a red-velvet ice-skating outfit. After that he sent her toys daily through the caregiver: animated movies, books, doll clothes.
She kept the doll for longest, toward which she felt a parental responsibility, but finally she asked me to take it to the same donation bin in the grocery-store parking lot where we’d taken the other items he’d sent. The gifts must have left a sour taste in her mouth.
The babysitter, a kindly, bland-sounding woman, prepared their meals: whatever Lena wanted, up to and including large ice-cream sundaes, chocolate layer cake, and piles of frosted cookies. For exercise she was taken to the indoor hotel pool, which, to hear Lena tell it, was always deserted, except for the babysitter and her. She liked the hot tub, which kids weren’t allowed to go in: she had received the babysitter’s special permission.
She watched a lot of TV.
Now that she’s back I can stand to hear about it, I want to know every detail she imparts. Her experience has taken her sense of security and consistency from her—her exuberance has been curtailed. She doesn’t sob or clutch at me, but she moves more cautiously than she used to, she’s more measured.
One afternoon a guest checked in—a tired man from Quebec who didn’t appear to hear any voices; he was so tired he barely even heard ours—and Don asked if she wanted to offer him a tour. She was polite and dutiful, mainly, I think, to protect Don’s feelings. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Yet the tour was subdued. She skipped the ice machine entirely.
I’m so angry at Ned for taking it from her, that free, unreasonable joy that was her greatest possession.
SO MY FEAR has turned mostly to anger, which is much easier to live with—I see now why it’s popular.
But I continue to need distraction so to expend my nervous energy, maybe dispel the rage, I scroll and scroll and click and click once she’s tucked in at night.
I’ve been going to the meetings faithfully, knowing we’re leaving, trying to absorb as much as I can before I say goodbye to this strange circle. I can’t take Lena with me to the meetings and there’s no one I trust to watch her when I’m occupied except Will, so I’ve been vague about the meetings, implying only that they’re about “recovery”—my own therapy, as she has hers. Fifteen minutes before they start I drop Lena at the library.
I’ve been trying to learn if anything unites the motel guests beyond the fact of having heard—whether, for instance, a message was conveyed to anyone. For me there hadn’t seemed to be a message, as I’ve written, for me the voice had been like weather, but I shared Navid’s questions, we all did: they were basic. I wanted to know if the voice had carried portents for others—if they’d felt like the Maid of Orleans, if any had believed they were receiving instructions or prophecies. It was a whale that spoke to Big Linda; well, whales have often figured in myths and stories. It seems well within the standard imaginative canon.
And just yesterday Burke spoke to the group at length.
“Chinese native,” he mumbled, looking down at his feet. Burke has the bearing of an absentminded professor. “Acer griseum. Paperbark maple. Beautiful, peeling red bark, this great, faded red I’ve never seen anywhere else. I remember having the impression that it was melodies made by the flow of cellular division, the phloem and xylem. The movement of sugar in the trunk.”
For him the voice—something like humming or singing, he said, a pure music sometimes like a chorale, sometimes like a Glass symphony—seemed to issue from a certain tree in the arboretum where he worked. The tree sang and its music was holy.
“But you know. Maybe it wasn’t really coming from the maple tree or Shamu,” said Navid. “Maybe they were both sort of like one of those ventriloquist’s dummies—like the sound or the song were being thrown onto them.”
I spoke for the first time. I said I’d been quite sure, when I was hearing the voice, that it was closely associated with Lena. It was either part of her or attached to her, but she was no ventriloquist’s dummy. I said how its monologues would follow the movements of her eyes, at times, commenting on what those eyes beheld.
“Assuming it’s not technology or communications from extraterrestrials,” said Big Linda, “maybe it can have many kinds of living hosts.”
“ET, really?” said Navid. “Hadn’t gone there. But now that you mention it.”
It seemed we were almost considering levity, or at least some of us were, and others were resisting and disapproving, at least that was how I interpreted the silence.
Kay spoke, softly as always.
“I know something,” she said.
Heads turned.
“I mean—I don’t have all the answers, I don’t mean that,” she went on carefully. “But I know part of it. I thought everyone did, until this meeting, hearing what Linda said, what all of you have, I thought we all knew that part of it, but now I think maybe that, with us hearing things, maybe I have this particular piece, and others have other pieces. I guess?”
Kay has that insecure person’s mannerism of ending her statements with question marks.
“What piece?” asked Navid.
“It—so what we heard is, how can I put it,” she said nervously. She was looking down at her hands in her lap, as though embarrassed by her claim to knowledge. “It exists in most things that live. It’s language, or the innate capacity for language, is a better way to put it. You could say it’s the language of sentience.”
“Trees don’t have language. Trees don’t have opinions,” objected Navid, kicking the floor with his toes.
Kay looked up at him. It was a different look from those she usually gave him, I realized. It was sympathy.
“It’s not that we’re the only ones who have it, or hear it, or are it,” she went on, so quiet that I had to strain to hear. “What’s different about us, different from how it is with the other animals and even the plants—what happened with Lena and Anna and in my case with Infant Vasquez? What’s different is that we’re the only ones it leaves.”
Communication is observed within the plant organism, i.e. within plant cells and between plant cells, between plants of the same or related species, and between plants and non-plant organisms, especially in the root zone . . . plant roots communicate with rhizome bacteria, fungi and insects in the soil. These interactions . . . are possible because of the decentralized “nervous system” of plants. —Wikipedia 2016
IT WAS A LONG meeting, a meeting that went on for three hours instead of one, and by the time we dispersed afterward it seemed that Kay had always had a clearer understanding than any of the rest of us—Kay’s hospital infant, an infant with a hole in its heart that lived for only three days, had somehow imparted more to her than the voice had told the rest of us in months. Even years.
Kay had heard more. Or Kay had listened with a greater aptitude for hearing.
I hadn’t thought I was special, just equal. Equal, at least, I always assumed. But by the time I left the meeting I was unsure, unsure and diminished.
After the meeting I suspected I wasn’t equal, and more, that there was no equality. Our idea of equality is a fiction useful mostly for the purposes of fairness, for law and economics. Elsewhere it’s an empty husk, a costume we put on when we get up in the morning. In the length of our legs and arms, the breadth of our shoulders, the tendons that give us strength or weakness, our beauty or lack of it, sharp or dull intelligence—we aren’t equal at all, and we never have been.