Sweet Lamb of Heaven

1. HALLUCINATIONS, EVEN IN THE SANE

WHEN I INSISTED ON KEEPING THE BABY, NED THREW HIS HANDS into the air palms-forward. He looked like a mime climbing a wall — one of the few times I’ve ever seen him look clumsy.

Then he dropped his hands and turned away, shaking his head. It was a terminal shake. Afterward his schedule got fuller, his long work hours longer, his attention more completely diverted.

And I have to admit it wasn’t just him who turned away. After we differed on that point, the point concerning the baby, I began to give up on Ned too.

So I was alone preparing. It had been an accident, technically more his fault than mine, but who’s haggling? And once it happened I felt I needed to accept it — I wanted to. I drove by myself to buy the various infant containers. I chose the doll-sized pieces of newborn clothing, set up a nursery and glued stars on the ceiling; I crept in at night sometimes to see how they glowed. I went alone to doctor’s appointments to listen for the heartbeat and see the first pictures, and when the time came I went through labor with mostly just medical staff keeping me company.

Ned did stop by the hospital, apparently, and spent some time talking on his cell phone in the lounge, but he stepped out again for a work lunch, later for work cocktails, and finally for a late work dinner. After dinner he drove home and went to sleep.

None of this was too far beyond the pale, I guess, when it comes to unfortunate marriages. After about twenty hours I lay against the pillows holding her slippery body. Her eyes, against my expectation, were wide open and there was a perplexing chaos of sound in my ears, too many voices in the room for the number of people — soundtracks that overlapped. A kindly nurse was telling me about the other babies he’d seen born with their eyes open when a stream of words intruded, covering his. I heard it most distinctly when the nurse paused.

Later I would hear volumes and forget almost all of it, but the first phrase I picked out stayed with me despite my exhaustion. It started out as a string of foreign words, only one of which resolved, to my ear, into anything recognizable — something like “power,” powa or poa. And then it was English: The living spring from the dead.

Delirium, was what I thought, and I dispensed with it by falling fast asleep. It was only when I woke up later, and the baby was brought back to me, also awake, that the stream of chatter started up again and was impossible to ignore.

AT FIRST I was mostly irritated, and went to get my ears looked at. Once, when I was a kid, I’d had an infected ear and heard a wavy music when I pressed my head against the pillow. Maybe this had a physical explanation, maybe some ear-brain interface was being disrupted. But my ears checked out fine. The baby didn’t enjoy the doctor’s visit, and the voice talked on — only for me, of course — throughout her noisy crying.

Next I made an appointment with a neurologist and insisted on an expensive scan: nothing.

For weeks I combed through psychology case studies, ready to discover the evidence against my sanity. I read up on post-partum depression, though I didn’t feel depressed. Of course I might be in denial, I knew; I had a newborn baby, after all, and a husband who had no time for either of us.

But I didn’t feel sad. I suffered from no flatness of affect. I was tired and confused — I felt besieged by the noise — but it was frustration, not despair.

I also gave schizoid conditions due consideration. No mother wants a woman with psychotic features bringing up her child, even if that woman is her. So reading accounts of patients who heard voices became my avocation for a while, since, as it turns out, mental illness isn’t required to hallucinate. Hallucinations, even in the sane, are quite common. They accompany certain drugs and medicines and an impressive list of diseases; they can be caused by blindness or sensory deprivation or even seem to come out of nowhere.

A stream of advice is often heard by people in extremis, fighting injury or the elements. Voices are heard by the sane in wartime or under other forms of duress, prison or isolation or grief. Sometimes the voices have no obvious cause, their origins buried in the electric labyrinth of the brain.

I was prepared to accept the hallucination hypothesis — the baby’s presence, her rapt attention caused me to hallucinate voices speaking to me — but I was curious beyond that and needed to cover my bases. I also went to worst-case scenarios, to the bizarre and outlandish. I studied the occult, including demonology, for instance — spent hours on the Internet reading myths and legends of demonic possession. I made trips to the library, the baby snug in her carrier, and moved from articles about people with auditory hallucinations to those who identified their visitors very specifically, brooking no disagreement.

Demons, they said.

They saw demons with claws, horns and pointed teeth, of course, but often demons appeared in the shape of seductive women and yet others were amorphous shapes that shifted beneath the faces of loved ones. Briefly those faces would distort, then swiftly resume their devious guise, pull over themselves the skin of normalcy.

Or people heard demons that had no physical form but only spoke, mostly in biblical tongues like Aramaic or Hebrew. Experts were consulted and that was often their verdict: what the demon-visited persons were hearing was Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek. The demons tended to speak in dead scripts, as though frozen in the time of early Christianity — the demons clung to the old, reluctant to embrace the new.

I was glad Lena’s mouth didn’t move when the words issued, as in some possession stories. Because it was only sound and words, invisible, the experience also conjured TV shows involving ESP. I looked into spoon-bending hoaxes and watched shows that featured ghost-finding teams that crept through haunted houses trying to capture stray ectoplasm.

I was worn down by the elements of my routine — the stream of words and my bewilderment during the days, the nights half-sleepless, a mesh of hours spent fitfully dozing or nursing my daughter when she woke up. Ned had moved out of our bedroom while I was pregnant and never moved back, claiming his restless sleep would bother me. Often he didn’t come home at all, in those first months when Lena’s crying disturbed the nightly peace, but stayed over at the office. It wasn’t long before I began to understand that at the office was a euphemism.

And when the baby was sleeping but I couldn’t sleep, I wallowed in pulp fiction. I read thick paperbacks set in old houses, where the devil took the form of flies and buzzed on windowpanes, or in upscale prewar apartment buildings in Manhattan, where babies were fed evil baby food and raised by Satan cults. Plus there were the movies about antichrists and child possessors, the one with the black-haired boy named Damien, the one with the blank-faced girl who floated over her bed, rasping obscenities. When I was too tired to read, with the baby mostly sleeping and the speaker fallen silent, I’d curl up in front of the screen with cheese popcorn.

But in the end the B-movie fiends were too showy for me to take seriously, almost self-parodies. Besides, the stream of words wasn’t malicious and my daughter committed no alarming actions. She ate and slept, lay bundled in my arms. Time passed and she rolled over, sat up, crawled; also gurgled and drooled.

She never fixed upon me a bold, sinister eye.

So by and by I let the demons go, telepathy I dismissed out of hand, schizoaffective disorders I further renounced.

I went with the hallucination theory.

Hallucination has the qualities of real perception: vivid, substantial, and located in external space. It is distinct from a delusional perception, in which correctly sensed stimuli are given additional, often bizarre, significance. —Wikipedia 5.10.2009

PEOPLE WITH MIGRAINES see colors and shapes fading and forming anew on the wall. Others, with visual hallucinations, believe strangers are sitting beside them dressed in old-fashioned garb. Next to these people’s apparitions my own affliction didn’t seem so grave.

It was true that the disturbance was constant, and I didn’t find an identical case in the articles I read, but this struck me as more or less a technical detail. At first I called it the voice, as others like me did. Because I wasn’t alone: there were whole support groups given over to non-psychotics who heard things, including a so-called Hearing Voices Movement (its mission: to empower chronic voice-hearers). There were affirming Listservs.

I avoided them studiously. I began to write in this Word file instead, a diary whose sporadic, rambling texts I’d tinker with for years. Over time I redacted, adding and subtracting until the entries formed a narrative that clarified my own story — at least to me.

I spoke to no one about what I believed I heard. I sought out no company in my infirmity.

WHERE WE LIVE now is a seaside motel in the off-season. We’re on the edge of rocky bluffs, so I can see a car coming when it’s a speck on the long gravel road.

There are few guests this time of year; in summertime they get the kind of tourists who, says Don the motel manager, bicker sharply over the bright-orange sandwich crackers in the vending machine re: advisability of purchasing.

But in the wintertime it’s quiet here and there are weekly rates. The carpets aren’t much to write home about, having an ashy cast. The tables in the rooms are brown Formica with black cigarette burns; our shower curtains are mildewed. I like their pale-blue imprint of daisies. I also like the cliffs, the rocks, the trees and the gray water stretching to the east. I like the sharp nearness of pine needles against a blurry sheen of sea.

And my little girl loves it. She loves the people and the place; small events make her giddy with pleasure. She spins, cartwheels, races and laughs easily. She doesn’t have much, but she doesn’t need much. She has her books and toys and art supplies. Some of the toys are old and bedraggled, since she doesn’t want to throw out anything — the second I suggest a disused toy might be taken to the charity bin in town she feels a rush of protectiveness and clings pathetically, lavishing praise upon the object that had been utterly forgotten until then.

Watching her protect a ratty mouse, a dog-eared, broken-spined, finger-smeared picture book, it’s almost possible to believe that everything in the world is precious, that each humble item that exists has a delicate and singular value.

It’s possible to believe that all matter should be treated tenderly.

LENA WAS BORN in a hospital in Alaska. Up to that time I taught as an adjunct at the university and her father was in business: and he’s still in business today, though he’s expanded his purview.

I was fond of Anchorage. It’s a sprawling city of mostly ugly buildings, but no other city I know has bears roaming downtown. I’d be picnicking with the baby near the central business district, watching the sunset from the Cook Inlet shore, and black bears would come rustling through the undergrowth a few feet away. Feeling a tug of panic, I grabbed Lena and retreated to the car, but still I treasured having them so close. The moose roamed Anchorage too, and you could encounter them on a casual run through city parks — more dangerous than the bears, if you believed the statistics.

Of all the actions I’ve taken, leaving Alaska was the hardest. Not because I enjoyed living there, though I did, but because it’s a bold move to take a child so far away from the man who’s her father. Even when he doesn’t accept the position.

I did have his approval at first for our departure. The part of the split he resented was financial: he didn’t like that I took half the value of our savings account and our CDs with me. (I left the stock, I left the mutual funds, but still.) Aside from money quibbles he was glad we’d left, at first; for more than a year he didn’t mind at all. He’d been indifferent to me for a long time, as he’s indifferent to most people who aren’t of use to him.

As for Lena, he hadn’t wanted her in the first place and he never warmed to her. Our leave-taking gave him the same liberty it gave us — namely the open-ended chance to be who we were, instead of trapped.

I’d send him the occasional email telling him what she’d learned, what she was doing, an anecdote here or there to keep her real. I clung to the belief that any father would want that, and more than that I felt I owed it to her, to try to keep him existent as a father, however marginal. He rarely responded to these, and his occasional replies were brief and rife with hasty misspellings.

But over the past few months he’s decided to make himself a candidate, and candidates want family since family looks reassuring on them. So now we’re useful again and he’s searching for us. I think he wants a moving snapshot for the campaign trail, two female faces behind him as he stands on the podium.

When I first met Ned he claimed not to have any politics. I should have known enough to be wary of that, but instead I made excuses to myself. Politics were for crooks, he said. But later politics grew in him like metastasis, branching into a network threaded throughout his veins and nerves and bones. It’s not that he’s left the business world behind, it’s just that he now believes politics are a sector of his enterprise.

His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which “values the sanctity of every human soul,” and also “believes in the greatness of the American family.” The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren’t you. Ned believes in “the American family” the same way processed food companies do, companies that make products for cleaning floors or unclogging toilets — the kind of easy code that makes public speech moronic.

But even if he’d been a genuine family man, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of his platform.

Once he nearly caught up with us, before I understood that emails can be traced. It was stupid of me and caused a close call and as a result I’m wiser now — or craftier, in that I don’t send emails anymore. We move, we don’t use credit cards, I don’t write my own name when I sign things. I bought a fake driver’s license from a computer-savvy teen in Poughkeepsie. If a cop pulled me over I’d have to use the real one, which matches my registration, but I drive cautiously and keep the car in good repair and so far that hasn’t happened.

I’m not in any system, that I know of, I’m not a fugitive. Ned wouldn’t report me. It would make him look bad, defeat his whole purpose in reclaiming us.

The only authority I’m running from is him.

EVEN THOUGH it’s cold out, we spend a lot of time on the beach, the rocks and pebbles and sand. At dawn we take the first walk, following a narrow path down the face of the cliff. I carry a thermos of coffee and she carries a basket divided into one section for treasures, another for litter. Not every form of litter is welcome: she can’t pick up medical waste, newly broken glass, rotting food, or old, yellow-white balloons.

I’d like for us to settle down and live a steady life, so she can go to school and have friends. Lena begs not to go to school and claims she wants our life to stay the same forever.

She’s six years old. She doesn’t know better.

It seems to me that if we can escape his grasp till after the election, we may have a fair shot at an undisturbed existence. If he wins he won’t need us.

On the other hand, if he loses and decides to take another shot in another cycle, he may search harder. He may get more determined.

When we discuss her father, who’s only a vestigial memory for her, I rely on platitudes like “Our lives took different paths,” or “Sometimes people decide to stop living in the same place.” The matter of the separation, unlike the matter of the voice I used to hear — on which I hope always to keep my own counsel — will one day require unpleasant conversation, but so far she’s satisfied with generalities. She’s not overly interested, since she never saw much of him. Much as she never caught his interest, he never seemed to capture hers either. When we did share an address he seldom came home: he traveled, he worked late, he cultivated his casual friends and many acquaintances. He never read bedtime stories or sat down with us for meals.

He was a sasquatch in a photograph, a fuzzy obscure figure moving in far-off silhouette.

DON, WHO’S BEEN so good to us, is a pear-shaped man. This feature endears him to Lena, whose favorite stuffed animal is a plush, duck-like bird with a small head and giant baggy ass. Don has a shuffling gait, seems erudite by hospitality-industry standards, and like us appears to be hiding here — not hiding from one person but from crowds of people, possibly, or from a faster pace. He has a job that involves people, true, but seldom too many at one time, and when people do show up they’re in his territory, his cavernous and dimly lit domain.

I imagine he keeps the motel ramshackle so as not to attract too much traffic — so as to keep the trickle of company thin. His family owns the business and seems to accept the small returns.

When a stray overnight guest comes through, Don’s civil but hardly overjoyed. Lena, by contrast, is always excited. She acts as though she, not he, is the owner: she’s the mistress of all she surveys, with the hosting duties this brings. To her the motel is first-rate; she sees no mildew or cigarette burns. Because I can’t leave her with strangers, this means I meet many guests too, tagging along in the background as she gives them the tour.

Most are highly tolerant of her — eager children receive a plenary indulgence, especially dimple-cheeked girls — and her exuberance is contagious. She explains the rules about clean towels with gusto, as though the rules, if not the towels, are sacrosanct; she showcases the antique ice machine with pride of ownership.

“This ice is only for people’s drinks,” she says sternly. “So don’t pick it up and put it back, OK? And don’t stand with your hands stuck in the ice, even if you like the shiver.”

WHEN NED CAUGHT up with us we were staying at a cabin in New Hampshire near the summit of a low mountain. It was a large, wooden cabin with a dozen bunk beds for hikers and three caretaker-cooks. Only a few dozen feet from the porch was a waterfall with a flat-topped boulder at its edge, where Lena liked to sit trailing her hand in the water and basking in the sun. The water wasn’t deep.

We only got away that time because Ned made a mistake; he did a flyover. Maybe he wanted to preside from the air while his employees cornered us; maybe not. I still don’t know if he was personally there.

But helicopters were rare along that part of the Appalachian Trail, coming in only with major equipment or for medical emergencies. I was on the porch with one of the cooks when that one chop-chop-chopped overhead and she looked up and said, “Huh, a private helicopter. It’s not the local guy.”

That was all I needed to pull Lena off her sunny rock and leave our sleeping bags behind. I did it only because my stomach twisted when the cook said what she said: I followed my instincts and we bushwhacked down the mountainside — I said it was a game, going off-trail, and the one who made it to the bottom with no scratches on her legs or arms would win a double-scoop cone. When we reached the road I had some light scratches on my forearms while Lena had none; new mosquito bites itched and swelled around my ankles, and our shoes were soaked from slogging through a stagnant creek.

Still, Lena was gleeful at the prospect of her ice cream reward.

The car wasn’t parked in the trailhead lot most of the hikers used but in a shaded pullout I’d found. After a short walk on the shoulder of the road we got in and drove off.

And I knew we’d been right to run when the cook, who had become a friend, called me. She said four men had come, two from each direction since the trail stretched out on either side of the cabin. They converged on it fifteen minutes after we’d left. They weren’t dressed for hiking: their shoes were shiny leather ruined by mud. So she told them only that we’d left the day before, and after some unhappy muttering and some prowling around the grounds and questioning of other guests, the four men went away.

NED MARRIED ME for my family’s money, because he had none of his own and wanted some; I married him because I thought it was love. I was wrong too, it wasn’t love — I don’t mean to pin it all on him. I had a crush, if I’m being honest, and I didn’t know the difference.

Ned’s a very attractive man, a man many people use the word handsome or magnetic to describe. Even straight men have said this of him, the same way they’ll concede it, often grudgingly, of famous actors or athletes. Both before and after we were married, men and women alike would confide in me about their attraction to Ned. He makes people covet him, inspires a desperate greed. And he knows this all too well — it’s key to his strategy for gathering investors. Ned is his own asset, his own front man, a property that sells itself. Both men and women want to own him or sleep with him, but failing that they’re just grateful to be part of his enterprise.

It goes far beyond standard-issue good looks.

He always had a talent for captivating an audience. From the first moment he meets you he establishes eye contact, and he doesn’t relinquish it easily. But he’s not only a mesmerist. He can embody audience convincingly as well, when listening is called for. When he receives a personal disclosure he seems to listen intently, even adoringly.

In fact he isn’t listening but intently, tactically appearing to listen — no mean feat in itself.

He’s humorless, though, which for me proved slowly deadening. Ned always laughs when others laugh, taking the social cues, but laughter doesn’t come naturally to him. And while he could occasionally say a funny thing, back in our early days together, it wasn’t intentional.

There were other, more minor details of Ned that should have been red flags for me too — his allegiance, for example, to a certain brand of cologne. Before Ned I’d never been with any man who wore cologne. The smell of it didn’t bother me: this particular cologne was inoffensive, even subtle. But once, when a bottle of it was knocked off a bathroom counter and broke on the tile floor, I saw a strange edge of rage in him.

In general I had no eyes for red at all in the infatuated months before we got married. Any flags of bright color were lost in the hills and dales of a hazy, indulgent country.

And my feelings were irrelevant, in the end, since he had close to none for me. I was surprisingly late to this realization. We tend to believe what we wish to, and I was no exception. I hoped that Ned loved me, and hope shaded into assumption without me recognizing it.

Before I got pregnant he found me attractive enough too, I guess, but this disappeared with the pregnancy, which he found repulsive. He pursued other women with unqualified success. He had no lasting feelings for any of them either, as far as I could tell, but each was new in her turn, and Ned prizes novelty. Novelty and momentum are his two passions.

In saying he married me for money, I don’t mean to imply I was an heiress — my family had the complacent, middling inherited wealth that passes without much notice unless you happen to be Ned, brought up in poverty, entrepreneurial, and with an incentive to research. He could have held out for someone with far more money and far, far better connections, for I had none.

Now, looking back, I’m surprised he didn’t. I was a small fish, very small. I had barely enough. But he was impatient to get his enterprises off the ground. And his disinterest in the marriage probably reflected his own awareness of that hasty choice — the fact that he’d settled for much less than he was capable of getting.

WITH A HANDFUL of exceptions I found that when I tried to write down what the voice said, I couldn’t. A fog would descend. Phrases that seemed sharply etched to me when I heard them, sense and structure cut like a skyscraper against a crisp sky, would crumble and fade as soon as I tried to record them.

I heard the words in the stream as English or French or Spanish, or sometimes it would be modern English in an accent or dialect, say Australian English or an English with Welsh accents. Other times it was English that sounded like Shakespeare or Middle English, like Chaucer maybe, which I’d read in college. But whenever the format changed I half-forgot what had come before, as though the switch between lexicons and grammars occurred imperceptibly. Since I couldn’t identify the languages that weren’t English or Spanish or French I figured my imagination was making up a stream of nonsense, sounds that resembled other tongues but were only a sham.

That was a game I’d liked to play when I was a kid. I even played it a few times with Lena, speaking in rapid-fire gibberish, pretending it was an unknown exotic language, say Urdu or Tahitian.

And the voice never went silent, except when Lena was sleeping. It changed from low tones to high, speech to singing, singing to humming to clicking sounds that had a rhythmic quality, on occasion devolving into grumbling or even yelling. I drew the line at yelling — at those times I’d call a babysitter and go out.

I’d shut the door behind me and step into the street, and right away I didn’t hear a thing.

WHEN I LEFT Ned, I took enough money to live on for a while. It was only a fraction of the legacy from my family that he’d funneled into his businesses, but I didn’t want to fight over money. Ned wanted it more than I ever had and taking too much would bring out the edge in him.

So I took only what I felt I needed. I made a budget carefully, knowing I wasn’t going to work again until Lena started school. I’d worked steadily all my adult life and I thought I could use a break; I was well pleased to be only her mother and teacher for those years. I didn’t plan to have a second child.

The money keeps us afloat, Lena and me, and in that respect we’re fortunate.

I PUZZLED OVER the link between the baby’s presence and my hallucination. There wasn’t generally supposed to be such a clear connection, in the hallucinations of the sane, between what was heard or seen and the fixations of the hallucinating person — not in the descriptions that I read, anyway. This made my case seem more psychological than purely neurological, and I worried about it periodically. Because the presence of my infant carried with it a voice that had the appearance of fluency in all tongues and gave an impression of encyclopedic knowledge — some kind of frightened projection of my overpowering responsibility as a mother, possibly, was one of my interpretations.

Sometimes the stream of sound wasn’t a voice but music, welcome relief: old standards, dramatic epics by well-known composers, folk tunes, pop riffs. It liked Woody Guthrie, whose music I didn’t remember encountering before except for the song “This Land Is Your Land,” which I knew from summer camp. Research on the snatches of lyrics I could recall yielded his name, and I thought I must have been exposed as a child, and quashed the recollection.

But most often the content was words — what sounded like recitations of texts of all kinds, poems, fictions both literary and mass-market, movie scripts and stage plays, histories, dictionaries, textbooks, biographies, news stories. The subjects were as diverse as the genres: single-celled organisms, hockey scores, feathers on dinosaurs, celebrity suicides, the pattern of Pleistocene extinctions, the fate of the tribe known as the Nez Perce; relativity, particle accelerators, Greek myths, the troubled term Anthropocene, the chemistry of a callus on the hand of Heidelberg man.

I was impressed by the knowledge base from which my mind appeared to be drawing. I marveled at it, even. Buried in my unconscious must be some capacity for photographic memory, I thought.

That surprised me.

Nothing salacious ever came from the voice — that is, there were curses, there was profanity, there were even vague references to sex and reproduction, but there was never a suggestion of lechery directed toward me personally. Still, I felt perversion was implicit in the combination of a baby nursing while a stream of elevated diction flowed up from somewhere beyond the O of her mouth. I had to distance myself from the voice when I was nursing her: it might be my hallucination, but, much in the way I might detest my head lice or my chicken pox, should those happen to manifest, I was forced, at those times, to treat it as a pest.

On occasion I’d try hard to write down what I heard despite my confusion, with doggedness but a lack of clarity, determined to record the substance of the hallucinated event. I still carry with me some scraps of paper — deep in the trunk, where I stuck the file after the last time I picked through it. I’d had to write the words down fast to get any of them, seldom had time to get to the keyboard, so the notes are scribbled on the backs of envelopes, grocery and housewares receipts, once along the edge of a worn dollar bill. Many seemed nonsensical: Windlessness = illusion planet is static in space ∴ windlessness entropic. Or “social animals + writing: ERRATUM.”

Neighbors and friends came over fairly often in the first year of Lena’s life and (of course) they never heard the voice, not even the faintest hint of it — I made sure. I’d ask, in a roundabout, casual way, if anyone was hearing anything unusual as we sat there, but my questions always met with offhand dismissals.

Joan of Arc had heard a voice advising her to help raise the siege of Orleans, but as far as I could tell the voice had no specific instructions for the likes of me.

I PASSED THROUGH stages with my hallucination. Sometimes I wished I could hide from it, other times I was determined to study it steadfastly until I could pick out the details and know it more perfectly. After almost a year I fit myself into a certain orbit, adjusting my routine to its disruptions. I shrank and disappeared in the brightness of its perpetual day but at night, when it was silent and so was Lena, I tracked across the dark relief in solitary flight.

I relied heavily on the fact that babies sleep for longer than adults and I also depended on her midday nap, an hour and a half like clockwork. The babysitters gave me some time off, and for the rest I’d found ways to fit myself into the spaces between words, to distract myself sometimes, at other times to tolerate nearness and even, when well-rested, to listen.

In general I felt besieged, my defenses walled up around me, but every now and then something in the fall of words would strike. I’d feel my throat clench in grief or recognition, be on the brink of tears and then not be.

At those times — it’s hard to describe and I feel like a fool even trying — I didn’t understand why emotion was overwhelming me but I also didn’t waste time belaboring the question. I had distinct sensations and I stilled everything to feel them: sometimes I thought I was being cut bloodlessly, cut so that a clear, frigid air entered me and the rest of the outside followed; or possibly I spilled out, it may have been the other way around. I’d feel as though I had the long view, past the end of my life, past the horizon, dispersing into ether.

I loved that feeling the way a drug might be loved, I think, quick as it was, freeing — but also with an icy burn, a searing touch I imagined as the cold of space and couldn’t stand for long. There was the euphoria of ascent, the vertigo of height.

Then the feeling would vanish abruptly. I’d just be there, in my house or on the street or in a store, wherever, with Lena. And I’d be desperate to see her clear eyes gazing at me with no interference — to be alone with her instead of in the company of slime molds, cyanobacteria genomics, cuneiform or the dancing of bees.

And finally it wasn’t the substance or character of the voice I resented but its proximity — the fact that it was so close, and that it never ceased. I urgently wanted to be rid of the torrent of sound and image, the stream of convolved murmurings that often evoked either oppressive problems or, at the very least, the broad dramatic canvas of a universe that went on forever beyond our cozy walls. What I wished for was my child by herself, the child I’d counted on only with me — the two of us in peace and privacy.

I wanted the normal pleasures of babies, the smell of her soft cheek against my face, to hold her in my lap at bedtime and be able to read picture books to her without hearing, as I read, the constant burble of a parallel story.

But I adjusted, for the most part. I felt I knew the voice for the invention that it was, unconscious, a product of haywire neurology; albeit with some resistance, with some anxiety, I’d learned to live around it.

And then that changed.

WE WERE HAVING a rare family moment. One of Ned’s affairs had just ended in a mildly humiliating way (I figured out later) and at the same time he’d had a major setback at work — failed at a takeover of a small company that made some minor machine part for shrimp trawlers. He’d flown in that afternoon from Dutch Harbor and was home for dinner, albeit with the crabby attitude of someone who’s racking his brain but just can’t think of somewhere else to be. I stood at the stove cooking as the baby sat in her high chair eating spinach puree and cheese; as always, in those days, the voice was droning on in the background.

“Turn off that racket, for Chrissake,” said Ned irritably, before he’d finished his first drink.

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was accustomed to talking over the noise in the background when I had company.

“Turn what off?” I asked, and looked around me as if to see the source.

“That AM radio, that shock-jock shit you’re listening to,” he said.

I cocked my head and caught a few obscenities. The voice didn’t shy away from coarse invective: this piece must have been some standup routine, a foulmouthed rant. It liked to take a run through those, from time to time. I was pretty sure the FCC wouldn’t have let those words onto the airwaves and got distracted for a second thinking Ned should’ve realized that too.

Then I realized the implications of what he had said — the sheer impossibility — and after a double take I walked away from the stove and sat down, stunned.

He was hearing it.

“Well, shit, OK. I’ll turn it off myself,” he said, and went to the radio on the stereo, where he overlooked the darkness of the control panel and spun the volume knob to zero.

The voice didn’t miss a beat and Ned said fuck, it must be coming from the neighbors’ and he wasn’t in the mood to walk over there and yell at them. There followed a tirade about said neighbors, who were hippies, a category Ned reviled. He ranted about their refusal to wear deodorant and their seaweed-harvesting business; he shoveled his dinner down, took an aspirin and went to bed with earplugs in.

Earplugs had never worked for me.

I’d lifted Lena from her high chair and she was sitting on a mat with arches over it, soft toys that dangled from the arches. When Ned disappeared down the hallway I heard the voice, rising again and switching into a milder patter. For once I was able to record what it said — a couple of quotations. On my laptop I found attributions to famous writers, and I wrote the quotes down. “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” “None so deaf as those who will not hear.”

While Ned and Lena slept I went into a panic. I stayed up all night; I tried to fall asleep again and again, but I couldn’t, and so by 3 a.m. I gave up and put sneakers on and went walking — at times even running — in the dark, in the cold, through the silent neighborhood.

The houses all seemed like statues, the cars, the trees all seemed deliberately placed to me. Of course, most of them had been deliberately placed, deliberately built or planted there, and yet their placement suddenly possessed a different character. It was as though they watched me, as though their positions had been decided by some unified and motive force. . I was getting paranoid, I thought: first a delusion of hallucination, and now paranoia had come for me.

Ned had heard it. Ned, indifferent, superficial, and seemingly sane as the next guy, had heard the voice. Someone else had heard it, therefore it couldn’t be purely hallucination. I had been wrong.

Starting at that moment when Ned cursed, and on and on forevermore, in my mind, it could not be and was not a hallucination.

It was something else.

MY PARENTS’ RELIGION had always seemed like a curious habit to me. While I was growing up I drove to services with them on Sundays, I said grace before evening meals, I went through the motions agreeably. But as soon as I was old enough to have my own opinion their churchgoing fell into a category like the next-door neighbor’s golf hobby, the macramé wall hangings accomplished by a wall-eyed teacher I had for fifth grade. I saw the neighbor bundle his clubs into the back of the car on days with pleasant weather; I watched the teacher sorting wooden beads to string into an orange owl. I wondered what shaped the particular details of their interests, where their strange avidity came from.

I thought about mortality, sure, and I felt the pull of soulful music, but I never met with elevated feeling sitting beside my parents and listening to their minister. For me it couldn’t be found in the cramped and unlovely building of their church, the boring sermons, the congregants next to us (mostly aged, with skin tags and wadded sleeve-tissues). It would have been as out of place there as it was, for me, in the plaid of the neighbor’s golf bag, the yarn of the owl.

What seemed as though it might partake of the awesome or sublime was away from these close-up elements, away from the grainy texture of everyday. It was in cloud passage, in the galactic sweep; it was the stars beyond count, footage of herds of beasts thundering over grasslands or flocks darkening the sky in migration. I saw it in the play of light over rivers, the rush of multitudes, large beauty: a utopian sunset, the black cloudbank of a looming storm.

Meaning can be attached to it or not, I thought when I was younger, but either way the sacred has to live apart.

Later I saw that the sacred was the apart, the untouchable and the untouched. Divinity is only visible from afar.

THE NEXT MORNING I watched Ned like a hawk as soon as he woke up. I stared at him when he came into the kitchen and poured his coffee (with the voice nattering on to me the whole time as usual). But he said nothing. He didn’t seem flustered or confused in the least, only impatient as he always was to get away — impatient to begin the real life of his day, out of our house, with people who mattered.

He never seemed to hear the voice again, or if he did, he never mentioned it.

Had I believed I was psychotic, no doubt I would have been relieved by what had happened — would have construed his hearing the voice as evidence of my sanity.

But I hadn’t gone with the psychosis explanation in the first place, so I hadn’t been seriously worried for my sanity. I’d comfortably believed in the power of a faulty and deeply complex neurology, and now that had been taken from me.