Sweet Lamb of Heaven Read Online Free

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