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 earring 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 you 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.
I never illuminated anything.
I account, on my fingers, for all the elements of these events I keep failing to understand. I wish I had an abacus—confusion like this calls for a deliberate, manual counting, a ritual of organization. Digits or beads, bones or a rosary. Even assuming there does exist an ambient language that underlies life, what some people call God, others possibly photosynthesis or humpback song or the opinions of a dog, I have the same questions that I always did. I want to know why I heard it, and why through Lena; why it fell silent when she slept; why it departed when she said her first word. I want to know not only its rules but its purpose, but all of that remains opaque to me.
There are the practical questions, too: How did I know to go to the motel? How was Ned able to find me? How did John know to contact him, when I took my car in to his shop?
And how did Ned know my father’s diagnosis?
On the face of it my questions about Ned are in a different category. And yet there’s the lymphoma diagnosis. This is new, this introduces a fresh mystery, and it counts just as fluidly on my fingers as the questions that came before.
It was recorded digitally, “Lymphoma Stage 3,” a number of weeks, not days but weeks, before the doctors even biopsied my father. It was set in stone then, it has a path, a history that can be verified—the fact that he had that information, or at least that he acted as though he had it.
Lymphoma Stage 3.
I WAS ALONE in the subway today, coming back from getting my hair cut, during which appointment Lena had stayed at home with Solly and Luisa. I was on a crowded platform at Columbus Circle with my bag over my shoulder and a book in my other hand—I must have been standing distractedly at the front hem of the crowd, my paperback curled back on itself in my hand as I read.
Then there were the lights and roar of the train. I felt a push behind me like a head butting against the small of my back and suddenly I was teetering, one of my legs over the edge, before someone grabbed my arm and my book flew out of my hand and I was jerked back, the tendons in my neck strained and one shoulder wrenched.
With a rush the train was screeching to a stop, people surging past me as the doors opened, jostling me and turning me around. I felt a weird heat prickle where my scalp meets my face, was breathless and seeing spots of light. Somehow I found my way to a bench, newly vacated and still ass-warm.
I never knew who pushed me or if it had been an accident, or who caught my arm and saved me either—maybe the push was just the movement of the crowd, that’s the likeliest explanation. Right? But as the train pulled away I noticed a child staring at me through a train door, a dark-hooded child with a white face, and the child’s head turned as the train moved, the child was staring at me fixedly . . . it had been a forceful push, so forceful it seemed it must have been purposeful.
Or so I felt as I sat there.
As soon as I got over the shock a wave of gratitude washed over me, a pure beam of gratitude struck out toward my unknown rescuer—how impossible it always is, I thought intently, to remember how lucky we are each second we remain alive.
When the train was long gone and the platform bare, I got up shakily and walked back to the edge. On the tracks was my book, ripped up and streaked with gray, its pages spread over the black. I gazed down at it for a while and then sat down again to wait for the next train. I wanted to call someone, maybe Will, maybe Solly, but of course there was no signal in the tunnel. And what had happened, anyway?
When the next train finally came rushing in I found I was trembling. I had to press my back against the cool, grimy tile of the wall. Presently I left and hailed a taxi.
Since then my day has been cast in a fractured light. I go back and forth between telling myself it was pure accident and wondering if Don and Will’s fears deserve more serious consideration.
I SENT AN EMAIL to Navid. Can I find out online, I asked him, who’s financing Ned’s campaign? I wouldn’t mind knowing who Ned’s backers are, what interests they represent and how deeply embedded their money is in institutions. Maybe one of them has connections to hospital records, who knows, some shadowy X-rays that were interpreted before the biopsy without my parents’ knowledge—some link that would provide an explanation for that premature diagnosis.
Ned left his family of origin when he was in his teens, left and never looked back. His father had disappeared when he was an infant, his mother was strung out or drunk all the time, and there were no others. He lived outside the house anyway, from when he was twelve or thirteen, only returning to sleep. This was what I had gleaned, anyway, from the couple of times he’d talked about it to me.
But somewhere, now, he has another family. I want to know who his new family is.
WALKING BY MYSELF to get a carton of milk, I suddenly spun on my heel and entered the business with the HYPNOSIS sign. I hadn’t planned it.
There was no receptionist, only a counter with a fiber-optic lamp sitting on it, an abstract medley of colored lights pulsing. I wondered how a hypnosis business made the street-level storefront rent in this neighborhood; I rang a push-button bell on the counter and heard an electronic chime. After a minute a woman came in from the back, a woman with a soft, homely face and wavy hair. She was about to close up for the evening, she said, could she help me?
There was a voice, an auditory hallucination I used to have, when my child was a baby, I told her. I wanted to remember it now—wanted to hear it again to see if I could figure out what it had said. Could that kind of memory retrieval occur through hypnosis?
She asked me if the voice had issued instructions, had told me to do anything I didn’t want to do.
I said no. No instructions.
She asked me a couple more questions I guessed were supposed to screen for mental illness, then hemmed and hawed briefly. She said there were no guarantees, that it was up to me, in a sense, what was accessed, but sure, she was willing to give it a shot. She could implant a suggestion that this “voice” return, she said; she could invite my mind to generate the “voice” again.
She had me sign a waiver and I made an appointment.
NAVID WROTE BACK saying he’d research Ned’s funding. He was good at following money trails, he said. Somehow he doesn’t seem to blame me as he blames Kay and Don; with me he doesn’t seem to have a bone to pick. Or maybe, because of what happened to Lena, he’s just sorry for me.
USING VACATION TIME, Solly’s going to visit my parents and taking Luisa with him. He wants to be there to help out, as he puts it, but has urged Lena and me to stay here in the apartment without him. All four of us descending on my parents would be a burden and not what the doctor ordered.
It is possible that all languages spoken today are related through direct or indirect descent from a single ancestral tongue.
—Wikipedia 2016
THE PRACTICE OF HYPNOTISM seems to hover in the alt-medicine gray area, near chiropractors and acupuncturists. It’s viewed as sporadically effective in treating certain bad habits and disorders, but tarnished by its history of showmanship.
The hypnotherapist had me lie down on a huge, brown recliner with wide arms—my arms had to be stretched out, hands laid flat, feet raised. She dimmed the lights, put on music, and asked me if the room’s temperature was comfortable.
And I had to admit the temperature was comfortable. The air felt like a soft extension of my skin, without too much moisture or too much aridity. I could stay here, I thought.
A person could remain.
“Remember, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” she said. “This is a completely safe space.”
She had me close my eyes and listen to her voice describing a wooden rowboat over a deep blue lake. Out we went into the lake, rowing, rowing. Maybe I dove off the side of the boat or sank into the water, deeper, deeper, deeper; or maybe I was just looking down, looking into the water from the dry bench of the boat. I recall the color blue, the clarity of the lake water.
During this tranquil immersion a jellyfish floated up from the depths. I don’t know whether it was associated with the therapist’s words or only with my thoughts, but I gazed at it—a pink-white bulb with tendrils rippling. Although I wasn’t asleep or dreaming I knew in the way of dreams, the passing of information that happens there where one thing is simultaneously another, that the jelly, having no place in fresh water, was an emissary from the ocean Kay had spoken of.
There was something to know here, something to discover. So when I left I made another appointment.
AROUND LUNCHTIME YESTERDAY we got a call from downstairs: Will was in the lobby.
We went down in the elevator to meet him and there he stood, talking to the doorman.
Lena ran to him and hugged him and then turned her attention to the doorman, her friend. Will stepped away from them and turned to me, a woolen cap in his hands, the shoulders of his coat sparkling with melting snowflakes, and I was so happy to feel my stomach flip, to know how much I still liked him. More, even. His eyes, skin, mouth.
“I brought your car,” he said.
I’d been selfish. I’d given him nothing, and I’d added insult to injury by doubting him. Yet here he was.
He didn’t ask to stay with us, in fact he had a friend’s place lined up, but then he did stay.
It was good but curious, after so long a time—like walking through a forgotten wood. Like wandering beneath old trees, whose faint smell reminds you of a person you may once have been.
Not only does Will know now about the motel’s Hearing Voices Movement—as I’ve come to call it privately—but he’s known about it all along.
He knows the backstory of the motel guests; he’s familiar with our group pathology. And he has known about it all, he says, since a couple of years after he got to know Don, when he first moved to Maine. Don has always lived there, as far as Will knows, like his father before him. He’s a feature of the landscape and has never seemed to do anything but what he does now.
“But that’s the thing. What does he do?” I asked.
Will shrugged.
“He’s a host.”
We were in bed. I was so glad to be there, though at first it took me a while to relax about Lena, who was fast asleep in the bedroom and still too near for my sense of propriety.
“So confused people who hear voices have been coming there for years,” I said. “All of us with that same complaint.”
“You don’t all seem the same to me,” he said.
The only unity I’d found in the guests was economic: none of them were poor. There were men and women, young and old, white, Asian and Iranian and Dutch Americans, straight and gay. We had no profession or other clear trait in common save money—everyone was at least middle-class, no one was on food stamps. I’m a former academic, Kay’s a med student, Navid a producer; Burke is a botanist and between them the Lindas have three master’s and a PhD.
“That’s true,” said Will. “Because the poor don’t weigh in on the channels Don uses to bring his guests together. He can’t find them because he can’t separate them in the social-service world from the population with schizoid conditions. They may be institutionalized or on the streets or just toiling, but they don’t tend to be online so much. He doesn’t have a way to get to them.”
But Don never found me online, or if he did I didn’t know of it. I wondered if Will knew that too.
“Why does he want to bring them in?” I asked.
Maybe it was just group therapy, as Navid had alleged, I was thinking.
“He says it’s just his role,” said Will.
After breakfast we sat on Solly’s cheap, caving-in couch, which pushed us together comfortably in the middle, as Lena played with a magic coloring book Will had brought for her. Depending on how you flip through the book, its pages are blank or black-and-white or startling full color. Lena had wanted to do the trick in our coffee shop, but only a one-year-old had been present, on whom the trick was wasted. Babies think magic is normal, she said.
She flipped through the book as Will and I sat against each other, my laptop on my knees, his arm around my shoulders. Then I brought up the schedule and stared at it. Where before it had annoyed me, now the bristling field of white seemed ominous. Onscreen it didn’t seem inert, as any other file would, but almost radioactive: it bore the weight of grim prediction.
By Ned’s reckoning, it appears—or the reckoning of his aide or campaign runner or secretary, whoever created this schedule—my father will begin hospice in June and die before Independence Day.
NAVID CALLED ME on the phone Will just bought me, his face popping up on the screen. I’d never bothered to use my cell that way before. He was wearing a headset and seemed to be sitting in a car: I saw the curves of a headrest behind him.
“Are you alone?”
I was trying to figure out how to hold the phone so that he didn’t see the inside of my nose or ear. “Lena and Will are here. Can we just talk normally?”
“Yeah. I wanted to see it was you,” he said. “Now I’ve seen.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“So his donors fall into two categories. Industry kingmakers, the ones that run the politicians, first. Then there are others—also rich but not as rich, one or two have as much as half a billion in revenue, sometimes their wealth is shared among smaller entities or they’re hidden behind so-called educational groups, these 501(c)4s—a big corporate entity of biblical literalists that owns hundreds of radio channels, for example. Those guys are his other backers.”
“It’s not so surprising,” I said. “He’s been talking the talk.”
“It’s how he found you,” said Navid. “Turns out these guys have citizen networks. I wouldn’t call it grassroots, there’s too much money moving around for that. Or let me put it another way: there’s money at the top and blue-collars at the bottom. Far’s I can tell, the money at the top talks about ending the separation of church and state, making biblical law the law of the country. Like sharia, right? But Christian. End-times bringers. They use this shit to get the blue-collars to do their dirty work. It’s cynical. So your husband’s friends put out their version of an APB, you go down as a threat on the list they give out to their little-guy helpers across the country, and you’re a target. I’m guessing it was your VIN that tipped them off. You took your car into the shop, right?”
“My VIN,” I repeated slowly.
I thought of Beefy John and the radio poster on his wall.
“Ned knew my father’s cancer diagnosis before the doctors told my mother. Before there was even a biopsy. So I’m thinking maybe there was a scan or something, maybe the doctors knew earlier but just needed the biopsy to confirm to the family. Maybe someone connected to him had access and knew the probability.”
“I couldn’t tell you for sure,” said Navid. “I can’t get into hospital records. There are people who can, but it’s not my bailiwick.”
It struck me after I hung up with him that he’d spoken faster than he used to when he was staying at the motel, he was energetic and focused but without the anger. High.
WHEN I PASSED along Navid’s discoveries Will gave me a look like I told you so—why I’m not sure, since there was nothing in what Navid had said that would link Ned to murder.
I keep trying to see clearly. There are clear signs out there, I feel sure, but all I can make out are the blurred edges. I feel a ghost of pressure on my lower back, the push that felt like the crown of a head. I remember a hooded child with a white face. Male or female, I don’t know, but whatever it was stared out at me from a window of the subway train.
Either it was a simple accident or it was Ned’s agency, no matter who was acting on his behalf. If it wasn’t connected to Ned it shouldn’t matter, since in that case it must have been pure accident. And it’s a characteristic of accidents that they don’t often identically repeat.
A programming language is an artificial language used to communicate instructions to a machine . . . thousands have been created rapidly in the computer field, and still many more are being created every year. —Wikipedia 2016
ALONE IN HER SMALL walk-up on Beacon Street, Kay took an overdose of sleeping pills last night. She lived but they had to resuscitate her, and now she’s in a coma.
There was a bipolar diagnosis, as it turns out.
I can’t bring myself to tell Lena. I should have been there to look out for Kay, should have done what I could: something. I seem to plod along in my own tracks, following footsteps I made before; this is always how I proceed, I don’t look sideways, I’m not willing to stop. I was inside my own concern, blindered like that—worried about abstractions, worried about the future when for so many people, Kay for instance, the present is already a state of emergency.
I overlooked my duty for the sake of my convenience.
Will tries to tell me it’s not my fault. I know I didn’t cause it, but I didn’t stop it either. I see what he’s doing and I know it comes from affection, but listen: This is what we do for the people we’re close to, all in the name of comforting. We ease the path for them to excuse their own failings.
We let them off the hook and call it love.
The truth is bare—I abandoned her, that tall, sad girl.
WHEN I WENT back to the hypnotist I was like an addict. I rushed out of the apartment with the usual weight of guilt clutched to myself. The sessions are the only times I’ve left Lena with Will. And I do trust him, but he’s not family.
I saw a city, mile upon mile of buildings, a cluster of tall commercial ones at the center and then, moving outward, the residential blocks, the tree-lined streets. The buildings were dilapidated but elegant, there was a detail of ornament to them like the tiny lines on an engraving, the careful, hair-thin lines of pictures on paper money.
The cave-in began in the distance, with the smallest, farthest buildings disappearing first, only visible as yellow clouds of dust billowed up and curled in. Like puffy hands clenching, I thought: beneath the furls of dust buildings were collapsing. Above them something dark raked down from a cloudbank, fouling the air.
I was standing in sand, sand that used to be an ocean and would be ocean again. I stood on the edge of the city as dust rose from the falling buildings. But these buildings were made out of words, locked into each other like bricks and beams—small words, minuscule words, inscrutable as seams.
Ned was coming, flying in from the west. His advent turned the distant sky black. Before him he whipped up a slave army, a crowd of gruesome flying things that drove billions of insects before them, clearing a path. The cloud was made of words too but the words were deformed, they meant confusion or blankness or insidious poison. What light filtered through them was cadmium yellow and leaked a slow disease.
I HAVEN’T SLEPT well lately; I often sit staring at the screen of my laptop while Lena and Will are sleeping. I sit there and stare as the screen resolves into dull letters or right angles of light and fades into disinterest again. It was open to my inbox and at some point I noticed, on the left panel of the page, that my spam folder said 172. I clicked on it and was about to Delete all spam messages now when I saw, buried between an Enlarge Your Manhood and Hot Women in Your Neighborhood, another email from Kay.
I felt sick for a second, scared it was a suicide note or a goodbye letter—so sure I sat there for a long time gazing out Solly’s window at the yellow and white squares in the buildings, tall rows of windows rising into the night sky. It’s a sight I’ve always loved, assumed everyone loves: columns of lights in tall buildings at night in the city. Beneath them was the irregular black solid of the park’s treetops.
Finally I looked back at the screen and it wasn’t as dire as I’d thought. The date and timestamp were there as always, on the right: Kay’s message hadn’t been sent the day she took the pills; it had gone into my spam folder two days before.
Still, five more minutes passed before I was willing to click on it. I sat on and on at Solly’s desk, counting the rows of yellow squares hovering midair, wondering what forms of life moved in the darkness of the park below.
The problem is, now, were going to be nothing BUT surface language. & no safeties, no backups, no checks & balances. The future is nothing but language, see, not languageS but language. Monolithic. The little ones are dying off @lightning speed. Programming Language, ad talk, 1 speech for all, a juggernot, that’s where we’re going Anna. All the native languages dead, all we’l have left is shells & false things & tongues spoken for profit &/or by machines. Don’t u c Anna this is the tru end of God. When everything that lives the deep language dies. This is the end of God and not the fake god made up to look like us, not that fake god anna, the real god, the god tht IS evolution & speciation & Life, a god that did make the world, u see?—b/c this god is the beautiful unconscious, it is billion processes & intuitions under all of biology & personality & art, the thousands and millions of cultures of both Man and Beast. We’re killing that deep god ana, the speakers of false language are suffocating the deep, they are the oil on the water beneath which all suffocates & dies
Satan is God weaponized
God weaponized by man
Now is the point of danger b/c true language is the Soul Anna, tru deep language the soul & the soul can be ruined. God needs us Anna, as much as we need god
I WONDER IF Ned’s allies are mostly true believers or, like him, mere opportunists.
Will believes, like Don with his geese and songbird migrations, that I found my way to them via some kind of homing instinct, since a couple of others over the years have showed up without prior contact. He thinks it’s part of the background orchestration of the deeper language, an urge that underlies our patterns of survival.
It isn’t that I learned nothing at the motel, only that as soon as I learned it I seemed to always have known it, yet still feel I know nothing at all. Burke with his speaking tree, Linda with her theme-park whale, Kay with Infant Vasquez—I picture Burke’s maple in its arboretum, planted halfway across the world from where it evolved, a lone specimen with a plaque in front of it bearing its names, both Latin and common. So unlike the aspen that grew not far away from that arboretum—those cloned aspen, connected underneath the earth, that lived as one for what could be millennia . . . I watch a pigeon strut around on Solly’s windowsill, dirty but free, and wonder about the orca in its pool, its home only twice the length of its body.
They did have something in common, all those the voice spoke through: they were captives. Even Infant Vasquez, who quickly died, or Lena, who lived on and spoke. All infants are kept creatures, after all. I remember how snatches of poetry were given out to unfortunates when we passed them; I think of prisoners and victims and martyrs, the persistent notion of their closeness to God. I think of how a tinge of the divine rests on the hurt or unfortunate, how so many of them wear a kind of halo of gilded pity.
But if the injured and wretched are closer, what does it point to? Likely we give the poor and weak and sick their halos reflexively, I think, to make it easier to detach from them and not have to do fuck all. We give them sympathy in the place of help. We say they’re not like us, they’re sanctified and only half-human. They might as well be on a cross.
I recall acutely how abjection makes you a part of a herd. The kidnapping left me feeling robbed, not just of my assumptions about freedom but of my personality—no one has personality when their leg’s being amputated, no one has personality when their eye’s being poked out. You don’t have any selfhood when you’re suffering extremely: in suffering you could be anyone. Whether that makes you everyone, though, is a different question.
And I don’t like the proposition that suffering puts us closer to each other. That suffering isolates the sufferer—this is equally valid.
So Will has comforted me over Kay. He’s trying to be kind, of course, and I’d do the same if our positions were reversed, you don’t question the rightness of trying to comfort someone. As behaviors go, it’s universally acclaimed. Yet he told me there wasn’t anything I could have done, when in fact there was: I could have done more than nothing.
I think of the duress that can be brought to bear on a soul, how selfhood, which we depend on so completely, is a luxury good.
I turn my palms up reflexively, thinking of those who suffer their whole lives. As though the gesture would make me one of them.
WE LEAVE SOON, after one last hypnosis session. Kay has been moved to a hospital in Boston, near where her parents live. We will visit her there on the way to see my parents.
LYING IN THE RECLINER I found myself walking along an institutional hallway, following green footsteps on the white floor—the footsteps were color-coded to the different wings and there were colored lines along the ceilings, too. I walked with deliberate steps until I came to a room.
An older woman sat in a chair, knitting with blue-gray yarn. The nightstand was crowded with propped-open cards. But instead of lying inert in her coma, Kay hovered above the bed. Her levitation had a Buddhist quality—though her posture was comfortable, not a straight-backed, cross-legged stance as in meditation or yoga. She slumped a bit, relaxed, and remained in the air smiling down at me, with a serene quality that’s rare inside the confines of real life.
I wanted to rise to where she was, but I couldn’t, so at an angle from each other, she high and me low, we gazed out the window. Out there was the crumbling city of words, much as I’d seen it before, though farther in the distance, dust rising from its slow-motion collapse. Kay nodded and stared. Her face had a kind of shining, imperturbable sadness like a bronze statue in a park, somehow civic.
I followed her gaze back to the window again and saw it wasn’t a window after all but a computer screen.
She wouldn’t explain at first, though her face kept on gleaming with a smooth and oddly official grief: yes, her grief seemed ceremonial. It was a stately mourning, like a dignitary presiding over a state funeral.
Expository words scrolled quickly along the windowsill.
IF Our symbols are corrupt. IF Our tools are made of symbols. IF We are made of our tools. ∴ We are made of our symbols. ∴ WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE
The last sentence ran on repeating forever, scrolling across the bottom of the screen like a stock-market ticker tape.
“Think of social-media websites,” said Kay.
For some reason she insisted on speaking silently, using a comic-book speech bubble.
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“Think of all those sites, all those apps, the billions of selfies. Now we filter ourselves through them. Sometimes it’s our whole presentation of ourselves to the world. That’s all that enters the social sphere—that imprint of our ego is all that ever meets up with the collective.”
“Seriously?”
I was sorely disappointed that here, under hypnosis, an oracle appeared and spoke to me, and the subject turned out to be social media.
The oracle had actually said the word apps.
“Lena will be all symbols, by the time she’s grown up,” said Kay. “I’m sorry to inform you. It’s a fact. Nothing but symbols, your little girl.”
The lights dimmed in her room, and in the corners dark beings flitted. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were only half-alive, hybrids of flesh and machine, and they moved through the pipes in the walls, among the wires and conduits. Those too, the long tubes and threads that were supposed to be inanimate, moved sluggishly behind the drywall. Between the girders they pulled themselves in. Closer and closer they approached.
“Why do you pretend to know everything?” I asked her. “Are you right about it all? Or are you just sick?”
Kay’s face kept on shining, turned away from me, but the knitting mother looked up from her bedside chair. Now the hands in her lap, holding a panel of blue-gray yarn that might have been a scarf, were made of metal: robot hands, with clicking needles. Her face was contorted with rage.
“This isn’t a dream, Kay. It’s more like a horror movie,” I said.
She was supposed to be trustworthy—she’d watched over my daughter’s sleep, cried to me and told me about her life. But telling a feeling isn’t the same as knowing someone, I thought regretfully. We think it is. A piece of the Freudian inheritance. People tell their emotions, tell their emotional story, and think that equates to knowing each other.
The pipes in the walls turned from ducts or sacks to the old bones of patients, bones that fed out their cold onto me so that the hairs rose on the back of my neck and my forearms. Yet when I tilted my head back the ceiling hadn’t gone brittle at all but was warm and rotten, like pink foam breathing.
Kay turned her head slowly and looked at me, and when she smiled I saw her teeth were gray, not regular teeth but some kind of ugly digital code that shifted and moved in her mouth.
It looked a bit like hieroglyphs, a bit like 1’s and 0’s.
I thought: What have they done to her?
Suddenly her mouth opened wide, wider and wider, far too wide. And something ugly streamed out.
“Your little girl won’t even need her face,” she said.