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.