Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet

Author:Lydia Millet
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

6

UNCLEAN SPIRITS ENTERED THE SWINE

THE INVESTIGATORS IMPRESSED ME WITH A SENSE OF COMPETENCE as I looked at their faces on the screen or scanned the neat pdf records of their efforts and expenditures, the rows of line items. I thought how easy I must be to fool—experience had shown this with sparkling transparence.

My questions were lame and I was often sedated. So I made Don and Will, and also the Lindas, ask questions for me. They huddled around and gazed into the laptop’s camera. The investigators’ clean, concerned faces stared back at us from a gray office only a couple hours’ drive away. Were they really present, I wondered, in an office building in Portland? Or were they a shallow illusion of service?

Absurd how all transactions had become talking heads, the whole culture a mass of flat images of heads with mouths moving: we barely needed our bodies. There were hardly even dialogues anymore, rather there were a million monologues a day, each head with its mouth, each mouth with its talk. Still I listened with obsessive attention as the investigators fielded the questions, tried to show us they were pursuing all possible avenues.

Whether or not they were skilled or diligent, they hadn’t found Lena by the next time Ned texted me.

He wanted to talk, he wrote.

Four days had gone by, the longest days I had lived.

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