I’VE BEEN HELPING my mother with the funeral aftermath. Solly had to go back to work, so we said goodbye to him and Luisa and waved to them from the front porch as they drove off.
After they left we moved at our leisure through tidy rooms, curating the many vases of cut flowers as their rotting stems sloughed off into the clouding water. We sorted clothes and shoes into boxes for donation, read and acknowledged condolence cards; we cleaned out my father’s desk, his chest of drawers, the file cabinets and high-up shelves at the back of his closet. I drove my mother to the bank to fill out forms, went online to switch her utilities and other services out of his name, made sure she filed a claim with the life-insurance carrier.
While we were going about these dull tasks, Will walked with Lena to a nearby park, a nearby pool. He took her to the movies, to a beach in Connecticut, and once to a state fair, where they went on a Tilt-A-Whirl, ate funnel cakes with powdered sugar and, by shooting a water gun, won her an orange stuffed giraffe.
Those public places, open to the world, the two of them were able to wander through in liberty.
For me it was a melancholy, dreary time with a curious softness. I kept waiting—I wait even now—but so far I’ve found no moral torment in being a murderer.
None at all.
IF WHAT SLIPS through to us from the deeper language is filtered and textured by our own interests and affections—our ties to babies or animals or trees—maybe I heard only what I could.
Maybe our gods are as small as we are or as large, varying with the size of our empathy. Maybe when a man’s mind is small his God shrinks to fit.
Because if you’re the kind of person who wants to know what’s at the end of the universe, what’s at the edge of being, and you grow older and older and comprehension settles on you that you’ll never know, despair can well up. The question of what we don’t see, what’s beyond our capacity—in the space where the answer should be, in the knowledge that nothing will ever give us that answer—we have to pass through all the dark nights we live until we die. Never to see what’s at the end of infinity, never to see the future of what we love, even the hidden lives of our children—
the knowledge breaks our hearts. It nearly cracks us open as we walk.
It’s enough of a burden, that futile desire to know more than we ever can. But worse than the mind’s natural limits, far worse is the invasion of its privacy. Ned’s desecration of my thoughts, that was a distortion I could never have kept living with, that conversion of the world’s airy expansiveness and wild unknowns into gray squares. Compared to that violence the presence of divinity was gentle.
With language, with the splendid idea of an intelligence that lasted forever, at least I still had my own perceptions, my own moods. I had room for doubt, plenty of space for movement. That room and space could be inhabited. But Ned’s monotony of empty assertions in the service of self-promotion, self-replication and mastery for its own sake, his reach that extended past the boundaries of even the body—that was a weapon without end.
DON CALLED ME tonight, just called me on the cell phone. Slowly I’m learning to live with his pronouncements. It wasn’t over, he said, as I had to know: in fact we were still at the start. My husband happened to be the first we met, he said, the first we encountered personally, but another had already risen to take his place. There are many like him.
They are legion, said Don. They speak in false tongues and want to own the world.
No, scratch that, he said. We both know they own the world already, but now they want even more.
Now they want to make it over in their own image.
“Are you ready?” he asked me.
I THINK OF what Kay wrote in her mania.
Deep language is in all living things but all the others, it stays with. Only not humans . . . God leaves us, Anna, God leaves us.
Yet we’re the children of that language—not the only children, that boast was always a rookie mistake, but among their multitudes. We still swim in the shallows of that vast and ancient sea, the water that runs through us, a coding of genes and flesh that lives on in beings and cultures. We are those bonds that make our nervous systems, our circulation, our lungs exert their miraculous intelligence without our direction—the beneath and always, the insane, preposterous motion of life.
Let God leave us, Kay, if what you mean is constant company. Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it’s our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.