She has an air of recovery, or so I thought as my daughter took her through the tour. She was nice to Lena in the cautious way of people who aren’t used to the company of children but react graciously when it’s imposed on them: patience, no talking down, a genuine interest.
Lena says the woman is a princess—probably because she’s slim, tall and pretty, with long hair—and has spun a tale about her already. The princess fell from her throne through the deeds of an evil troll. She awaits an act of magic, here beside the sea. Lena says a team of seahorses will arrive pulling a giant white shell, and in the shell the princess will be borne away to her own kingdom.
At this point the story gets convoluted, because the princess can’t be taken away; that would mean her leaving us. Instead she will sleep in a shimmering palace on the waves, a palace hidden from us now that hovers invisibly beyond the whitecaps. A bridge of waves will stretch from the beach outside the motel to the princess’s ancestral home, a white castle of pearl, and we will walk over this bridge to banquets held in our honor, for we may live there too. Inside the castle keep, a special room will belong to us, connected to the princess’s royal chamber by a spiral staircase. The chamber is full of sparkling fountains and cushions of cloud. It features a four-poster canopy bed and live-in midget ponies.
The ponies are velvety to the touch and curl up on the bed like dogs, their legs tucked beneath them.
But Lena reassures me that we won’t have to sacrifice our lodgings at the motel for this resplendence. No, we’ll still treasure our motel home. We’ll still frequent these faithful lodgings with their yellowing shower curtain and moldy grout between the tiles. We’ll have two houses, she says, that’s all—“one for regular and one for special occasions.”
I’d go with her. I’d take the miniature dog-ponies and the pillows of cloud.
PEOPLE WHO SAY they feel the presence of the Almighty hovering close to them, their personal savior, or tell how faith dwells in their hearts—the advantage they have is that if God overwhelms them, they’re free to retreat. Or if the knowledge is so overwhelming it can’t be contained, sometimes they let it out with shaking and strange articulations, crying and falling, ecstasy. I admire the idea of this, though I’ve never shaken in ecstasy myself.
I like to imagine I could, under the right conditions.
My point is, abandon to the spirit has an appointed time and place: the spirit can’t be on you all the time. I never thought of the voice as God, while it was with Lena and me; such a thought would have been an outrage. When I write about God right now, that three-letter word—so loaded, so presumptuous—it’s a word that I use in hindsight, as close a description as I can get of that stray cascade of ambient knowledge that distinguished itself from the static of everything else and filtered down to me.
So the voice wasn’t God to me then, but in the months after Ned heard it, when I couldn’t think of it as hallucination anymore, I was confused and stowed my questions in a locked compartment. Some things were unexplained; well, some things had always been. But I listened to it differently once I couldn’t believe it was my own confabulation anymore. I gave it more credibility.
My brain’s a little above average, according to standard aptitude tests, but not far above: I was always bad at calculus, I had no patience for high school chemistry. Whatever intelligence I have isn’t rated for the ornate subtlety of the divine. Most of the time the voice was still wallpaper or elevator music as it streamed past and over me, citing, listing, cajoling, eulogizing, heckling. If I stopped what I was doing and concentrated on it, it quickly dazzled the faculties.
But there was no aspect of feeling chosen, no conviction of being purposefully anointed. We might have been sitting in a lounge chair on the green grass of my lawn, reading, when suddenly a bank of cumulus moved in and rain began pattering onto the pages of my book and the skin of my arms and we had to go in. I never believed the nimbus had chosen her or me or us on the basis of special qualities. I have other failings but I’m not subject to visions of personal grandiosity.
When I looked at holiday crèches or paintings of the infant Jesus I recognized the parallels—that Jesus as an infant had been believed to contain divinity, at least in retrospect—but there the similarity ended for me. I didn’t think Lena was a prophet or a messiah.
More or less, in the time after Ned heard, I put off the question of causation, deferring inquiry.
The question of origin was too much for me.