In the corner is a crate of my old records, on top of which an LP lies flat. It bears a once-famous logo, a black-and-white dog staring into the cone of a gramophone beneath the words His Master’s Voice.
When I looked into this Word file to see what I might have written during my lost spring, all I found after the cut and pasted-in email from Kay’s parents were two fragments.
I assume I wrote them, but have no memory of it.
Say God is a complex grammar that doesn’t coexist with our own language, its ego-driven structures. Say Kay is right and dolphins or whales can be its hosts for their whole lives, instead of funneling it briefly as Lena did, because the form of language that emerges in those animals doesn’t displace the deep grammar the way ours does. Say that deep language, whose name may also be God, stays with them because their communication systems, though capable of individuation, are not devoted to the self. Say we’re left on our own, as Kay had it, when we pronounce our first words and God deserts us, and it’s in that respect that we’re different from the other beasts and different from the aspen trees. Then it has to be said also that instead of being raised above the other kinds of life—instead of being special as we have always claimed—we’re only more alone.
That one was peppered with errors of rapid typing that I’ve fixed. The other was this:
Some people hear more, some less, some nothing at all. What we hear is what we can hear, its content minutely tailored to our character and biases. That means, if I believe her, that even we, who should be outside the range of any dogmatic faith, even we only ever know the God our personality describes.
Lena, living out a fixation on the cute, has made the screen on our tablet into a picture of a fawn in a snowy forest glade, looking over its shoulder with big dark eyes as flakes fall and soften the world around it. The only moving elements are its eyes, which every so often blink, and the snow. I look at it now, while she runs through the sprinkler in the backyard with Will.
I can see them out my window if I scooch my desk chair sideways—there. Better.
The fawn with its dark, slowly blinking eyes takes me back to Ned’s beautiful girlfriend, the young model or model lookalike. Where is she now? I could do so much good mischief if I had just a little time-stamped footage of her and Ned together.
Of course any action I take is a risk to Lena and there’s no way to attack him from anonymity. Everything’s obvious now that I know he actively wishes me harm. It’s transparent that nothing binds him to the norms of decency—no guarantee exists, none ever did. There was never a contract to rely on, some solid agreement that could be wielded in a court, only my naive belief that such abstractions have any weight at all.
All my credulity is out the window now, that frail screen of written-on paper I let myself believe would keep the world predictable. Ned’s handshakes add up to less than nothing—or nothing but the flag my gullibility flew on. Don and Will and their fears, well, those fears were only a slice of the malice that Ned is.
Maybe the knowledge is chilling—it is, when I don’t block it out stubbornly—but it also means I have no reason to jump at his command anymore, there’s nothing left to make me do what he wants me to. So he’s now lost his postcard family. He shouldn’t have shown himself, and I wonder why he did, because he could have strung me along forever, practically, while I still believed he could be bargained with.
Now I know he doesn’t bargain. He only pretends to.
And he has nothing left to get from me. Nothing but the last thing.
It must be his narcissism that’s to blame, maybe he couldn’t help showing me how powerful he is. Maybe he had to flaunt it.
And all I have left is this: my girl and her uncertain future.
She used to look forward to every new day.
THE OTHER MOTEL GUESTS insisted on staying close, crowding around Lena and me as we walked across the parking lot. We’d left Solly and Luisa and my mother at home, my mother so she could help the caterers clean up, Solly and Luisa so they could pack to leave for Manhattan the next day. But they urged Will and me to take Lena out. Let the child see the bombs bursting in air, at least, on this death-textured day.