The Flame Alphabet (13 page)

News of the quarantine issued through the car radio on my way down to the Oliver’s. It would be temporary. The neighborhood would be restricted to children, protected, necessities provided. Details were given about the gate, the fence line, the use of dogs. It was time for everyone else to go.

A diversion would be created for the children. Something involving the school. Or was it the prison?

They were giving us a day, a day and a half, to pack our things and leave.

Some suggested destinations followed. Shelters, towns, mostly fanning to the south. Wheeling, Marion, Danville, the quad county district, Albert Farm. Towns with undeveloped space, meadowland. Counties with soil still soft enough for digging, where the salt was naturally repelled by the winter air systems. The list was not long.

The way I heard this was:
Do not go to Wheeling, Marion, Danville
.
Avoid the quad counties and Albert Farm
.

I pictured Claire under blankets in the backseat of the car as I drove all night, wondering where to stop. She was not ready to travel, especially with no destination, no promise of comfort or safety when we arrived.

Wherever we ended up, we would need to be separated from our volatile fellows. The toxicity had spread beyond children. Not everywhere, not fully, but that was the trend. Everyone would make everyone sick, with children the lone immuners. We should not, according to the report, even be together, unless we could refrain from speech, take a pact of silence.

We urge you to travel alone. Consider this an allergy to people
.

I was as bad for Claire as Esther, or would be soon. Earlier today, when I found Claire after the report on LeBov and subjected her to my lengthy, defensive apology and watched her shrink into the bed while I spoke, it wasn’t only because she had grown sick of the sight of me. It was my language as well. It was that I had spoken at all.

If we traveled together we had better hold our goddamn tongues.

The radio report followed in robotic tones, with cautions, locations to avoid, roads that were closed. Rivers and bridges, the Sheldrake, Wickers Creek, the Menands Bridge. Something about the airspace of Elmira and a marine warning near the Mourner’s Sound. A different station was given for the full, updated list of closures, but I did not switch over. I could wait to hear the names of places I should not go.

At a stop sign I heard a sharp noise and something hit my car. A whimper floated up, perhaps from my own mouth. The streets were dark, boiling circles of light spreading from the streetlamps. A pack of children tore across a yard, fled from sight. I locked my doors. Then a soft thing fell into the car and the car lifted, as if someone were out there, trying to push the car over.

I stepped on the gas, revved it hard, but the car was blocked by something. It whinnied forward, the engine straining, and seemed to elevate in the back.

One of them pressed his little face into the driver’s side window, so close. He smiled, his lips moving, as if he were singing. With his finger he tapped on the glass, made a twirling motion for me to roll down the window. His hands formed a posture of prayer under his chin and I believe he mimed the word
please
.

He wanted to talk.

I hammered down on the gas again and the car whined, lifted, then released with a squeal over whatever had been blocking it and I sped away.

In my rearview mirror a few of them crouched over something, not even looking my way. They formed a circle, went to their knees, and that was all I saw.

It was just kids, out in the street after suppertime. That’s all it was. Kids playing in the road.

In the Oliver’s parking lot I sat in the car to listen to the rest of the broadcast.

The emergency report was delivered in clipped tones, the voice of a woman who seemed unable to hear herself, as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically.

An escalation in the toxicity had been observed in places like Harrisburg, Fremont, with more reports coming in. Something had happened in Wisconsin. Wisconsin had experienced an incident. There was, according to reports, a complete absence of speech originating from Wisconsin. This was no longer a poison from children. In Wisconsin all language, no matter the source, was toxic. The children alone were immune.

The station faded to static. I spun through the pre-sets and found nothing else, just sharper or lower-toned hissing, from one end of the dial to the next.

The parking lot of the Oliver’s was crowded with vans. From one of them came a fat tunnel of hosing. Little wisps of smoke spilled from its papery surface as the hosing curled away from the van, dropping down a fenced-in manhole.

The smoke smelled clean, fruity. Whatever work was going on was soundless.

A man wearing a clear vest stood by the manhole with a clipboard. After vigorously massaging my face to prepare it for speech, I asked him what was going on.

He smiled, shook his head, pointed to his ear.

This meant, what, he was deaf?

I pointed at the manhole, shrugged, and mouthed: “What is it?”

The man shook his head in the negative again.

A worker climbed from the hole as I walked away. He picked clumps of a wet cheese from his face. Tethered to his waist was an orange cable as thick as a man’s leg, and he dragged it from the hole where they pinned it in place on a specimen table. I’d seen that cabling before. The man with the clipboard grabbed his radio and, instead of speaking into it, held it out at the cable, as if whoever was on the other end of the radio needed to hear this.

But then I heard it, too, and it was unmistakable. From that orange cable, with no listener attached, came the voice of Rabbi Burke, singing one of his songs. A song I’d heard before.

In the lobby of the Oliver’s I looked for Murphy.

People hurried around breaking things down, packing boxes. A stack of crates sat at the door, waiting to be loaded into the vans. The crates had breathing holes drilled into them, arrows painted on their sides, pointing up. The sweet, gamey smell of a zoo was in the air.

A young man in coveralls sat at a table up front, seeming official. When I asked him if Murphy was here, he could only repeat the name back to me, as if I’d issued a math problem he was not expected to solve.

I explained that Murphy had invited me down here. Spitting image of LeBov, I didn’t say.
Rest his soul
.

It was hard to understand him through his respirator, a steamed-over mask covering his mouth.

“Invitations aren’t required,” I think he said, pointing at the open door.

An elderly couple swept into the lobby. They clung to each other, looking at us as if we were wild animals. The woman cried out, fell. From nowhere rushed two guards with blankets. They covered up the couple and dragged them away.

“We’re open to everyone,” said the young man.

He pushed his respirator to the side, wiped his mouth, then carefully fit it back on. With a handheld mirror he checked the straps that cut across his cheeks.

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t. “But Murphy thought my research might benefit, or that, what I mean is, people here might benefit from the work I’m doing.”

The man returned the sort of smile professionals are trained to give no matter what you’ve said. I could have threatened his life, my own. I could have asked for the bathroom. I’d get the same lunatic smile.

He leaned in close, placed his finger over my mouth.

He wanted me silent. I supposed I understood, so I didn’t reply, only nodded, looked away.

From a box he retrieved a white choke collar, mimed for me to put it on. It was smeared in what smelled like Murphy’s grease, cold on my neck. My face relaxed when I fastened it on.

He said Murphy’s name aloud, as if that might jar his memory. Finally he said, “I’m sorry. I’m not very good with names.”

I wanted to say: Red hair, large face. Excels at ambush. Perhaps immune to the problem we’re all here to solve. Not who he seems to be? That Murphy?

I couldn’t say
LeBov. It’s LeBov I’m looking for, because I have reason to believe that he’s still alive, operating under a different name. Murphy. But you probably know all of that, don’t you?

“Is there someone else I could talk to?” I asked.

And say what? And do what?

“I’m afraid the time for that is over.”

Literal language was useless for what I’d come to do. This man was refusing to read between the lines, acknowledge any subtext, and thus we were locked in a prison of exact meaning, impossible to shed.

It would turn out that LeBov’s language protocols, as practiced by his staff, prohibited nuance, inference. They were nearly moot now anyway.

He stood up, gathered some papers, among them what I took to be a copy of
The Proofs
.

I pointed at it. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

He pointed at a pile of them sitting on another table.

Right. He would victimize me with facts, fail to elaborate, force me to excavate an ultra-specific set of questions to which he would then show his dumb, blank face.
Quiet uncertainty is perhaps the most medicinal mode
. I was not going to like this new form of speech.

He pushed a pamphlet at me. “You might want to look at these protocols. Some things to keep in mind when you speak, if you really must speak. You’ve mentioned yourself a few times, and it’s probably worth avoiding. It’s not personal. Or I guess actually that it is. It’s really personal. It’s just that the studies are pretty conclusive about this stuff.”

“The studies?” I asked. “Is that what you’ve been doing here?”

A low growl issued from one of the crates, triggering a chorus of animal cries throughout the lobby.

“Or talk all you want,” he said, bored. “But do it somewhere else.”

His smile had a little bit of clear shit in it. I could smell it.

I took the pamphlet, stared at it without focus. The text was slightly darker than the white paper it was printed on. My hands were unsteady and the text wobbled, as if it hadn’t been fastened to the paper. I felt sick, a tightness in my chest.

“It only
seems
harder to read,” he smirked. “It’s much, much easier on the … you know,” and he tapped his head. “We’re probably going to see a lot more of that soon.”

I pictured seeing more of something you could hardly see to begin with. That great unused resource, the invisible air. We’d fill it with text, the nearly translucent kind. That would solve everything.

“Sorry to run but you’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “We’re closing up. This Forsythe is probably not going to meet again. Maybe that guy you’re looking for,
Murray
? Maybe he’s in Rochester?”

Murray of Rochester. In my mind I hacked at him with a long knife.

It was dark outside and the Oliver’s staff had finished loading their vans. They drifted out of the lobby into the parking lot. I guess they would go home and pack now, maybe get an early start and hit the road later tonight, before the sun came up. Beat the traffic.

It’s hard to describe people who are silent as a matter of life and death, who move through the world in fear of speech. You can hear the swishing of their limbs, the music of their breath. None of them spoke. They left the building with small waves of the hand to each other, faces down, and walked out into the night.

As the man in coveralls walked off I asked him if he’d had any news, if he knew anything. I tried to raise my voice but the white collar on my neck seemed to limit my volume.

“Go home, stay inside,” he said, over his shoulder. “Do not talk to anyone.”

“Right,” I said. “But do you know what’s actually happening?”

“We’re telling people, just to be safe, to say their good-byes.”

I watched him leave. He embraced an older, well-dressed woman on the way out. She was crying. He kissed her cheek, then disappeared into the throng of vans.

There was one place left to try. It would involve parking the car at Blister Field, ducking under the fence, and trekking through the woods until I reached the stream. The stream would be dry now, maybe iced over, and I’d have to traverse the bank in darkness, groping on hands and knees until I found the half-rotted footbridge that would bring me across.

Then the far bank would need to be climbed and tonight it would certainly be slippery. Slippery and sharp, with stones pushed up from the frost heaves, the bitter ends of tree roots bulging out to collect heat from the air.

I never went to the hut at night. But tonight would seem to be an exception to the rule. These last months were an exception, if one wanted to be strict about it. It was hard not to feel that the codes of access at our hut were written for unexceptional times. All the guidance I knew was written for unexceptional times.

I climbed the last of the riverbank and bushwhacked through low, dry branches until finally I reached the little footpath that would lead me along the southern approach to the hut.

Before I even arrived I saw the wild glare of a flashlight. An oily glow zoomed through the woods and I ducked down to watch. The hut had no window, just a framed hole long relieved of its glass.

On warm days Claire sometimes sat in the empty window frame while I readied the transmission.

Now inside our hut a man crouched and shook, peered out at the forest. Parts of him were all I could see. I stayed hidden in the trees, watching that smooth, preserved face, the orange hair boiling on the head.

LeBov was alive and he was Murphy.

He looked from the window hole with the light under his face, showing himself to the dark woods.

I circled quietly, keeping my distance. From behind a tree I watched as he went in and out of the hut, sweeping his flashlight in small arcs of discovery.

Occasionally the flashlight settled on something and he dilated the lens. He’d stoop over, pick something up, examine it in the light, then, invariably, he’d toss it to the ground and resume his search.

LeBov circled behind the hut, dragged over a crate, and climbed up on the roof. From there he crouched, seemed to pick at the shingles, and then slid down and disappeared, the glare from his flashlight strobing in the high branches.

I dug in against the embankment. LeBov’s flashlight retreated into the far woods behind the hut, and then I heard nothing, saw no more light.

I sat back to rest. I’d give it a little bit more time.

I should have gone home. At home there was still so much to do. We had to pack, ready the house. Claire would need help. Perhaps I could lift her into the bath, let her soak. More than that, she might need persuading. I had to think about how I would explain our next move, how to remove all choice from my presentation.

She’d want to stay. Beg to stay. But I couldn’t let her.

Staying wasn’t staying. They’d find you and wouldn’t have stayed at all.

Beyond that were my medical supplies, just a bare minimum, and where to put them. The key gear, and then at least a suitcase’s worth of medicine. I’d want to resume my work as soon as we relocated. To lose momentum now would be a mistake.

But I didn’t go home. The woods were fully quiet now, the light was gone. LeBov had no doubt finished with his defilement and moved on to other fine projects. I’d missed my chance to confront him and I will admit that I was relieved.

I groped into the darkness toward the hut. In front of me I could not even see my hand. With each step I braced myself for a collision, something sharp to strike my face.

I’d spent so many days here, thoroughly explored the grounds, dug shallow holes each time I buried the listener. Claire and I had walked home thoughtlessly, paying no attention to our surroundings, and we’d never been lost, never felt scared by unexplained sounds in the woods.

Now in the darkness, hours before we would leave town for good, I was completely helpless just steps from the hut. I wish to remark on the darkness of this place without resorting to hyperbole, but I do not think that is possible.

I reached out my arms, leaned, then fell into the dirt.

It was easier from there to move on hands and knees, but I needed to keep one arm up to guard my head. I crawled through frozen mud, butted into a tree stump, then corrected my attack and crept forward. Finally I struck the wall of the hut, and from there I guided myself until I collided with the staircase.

When I opened the door, a flashlight switched on. LeBov had wedged himself into the floor, his legs dangling down the hole.

“There you are,” he said.

Across the hut floor he slid the grease tin, and I scooped some of it into my mouth.

He gestured to his neck, so I spread some there as well, pasting the white collar tighter on my skin.

It took hold in my face, softening my mouth, and my vision sharpened. When the tightness in my throat released, I found I could speak more easily, even if the ability brought nausea along with it.

“This is private property,” I said quietly.

“Oh? I’d love to see your deed.”

I stepped inside, leaned against the doorway.

“Maybe first you could let me know to whom I am speaking,” I said.

“You’re not the only one who can use a fake name.”

“Apparently not.”

His legs seemed trapped in the hole.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

I wanted him to be aware that I could take two steps up to him and deliver a sweet kick to his face. He would not be able to get away from me in time.

“No, thanks,” he said, oblivious that I was sparing him. “I have everything I need.”

He reached across the floor and grabbed a duffel bag, which clanged as he dragged it.

“I was saddened to hear of your death,” I said. “It’s a great loss. For all of us.”

“Thank you. You sound sad.”

“Yes, actually. I am sad. I’m sad that you’re here where you do not belong. It’s private, and there’s nothing here for you.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I wouldn’t call this nothing.”

He held up my listener. It was ripped down the middle, coated on its underside with something shiny. The bottom pouch was leaking and the gel had spread over LeBov’s hands.

“Okay, good for you. You must be so pleased.”

“I am fairly pleased,” he said. “I thought that I might need your help, but I don’t. Now I need to get myself down this hole.”

He screwed himself farther in, squeezing his hips past the floorboards.

I’d never gotten in that far, but I’d never had to.

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “There’s nothing down there. You’re missing the point.”

LeBov was submerged to the shoulders now, holding his bag above his head as if he were about to wade across a stream. He was trying to vanish down the little hole in the floor that normally housed our transmission cables.

“Believe me,” he said. “I am not missing the point. I think that you’re the one who has missed the point.”

Something was wrong. LeBov was straining, turning red. He couldn’t force himself through, so he squirmed out of the hole and retrieved a saw from his bag. From a position on his stomach he reached into the hole and started sawing, stopping to examine his work with the flashlight. When he finished sawing, he sat up and raised a finger as if we were meant to listen for something.

We heard the clatter of wood falling away from us, but we did not hear it land.

Probably the rubber balls at the bottom of the hole absorbed the impact.

“Maybe now,” he said.

I told LeBov that I felt obliged to ask him some questions.

“That sounds like a burden. Unburden yourself. By all means. You have about forty-five seconds. If that’s how you’d like to use your remaining time, feel free.”

“Okay. Why did you do it?”

LeBov didn’t even take a minute to think. It was as though I’d asked him a question he’d rehearsed all his life. From LeBov I merited the canned response, deflection delivered with a hint of superiority. I hated people who could answer questions like these. Any kind of questions, maybe.

“There are certain boundaries that I’d prefer not to observe when it comes to my own identity,” LeBov said. “There’s a lot of behavior that I want to accomplish, but I don’t need all of it, or really any of it, attributed to me. Attribution is a burden. In that sense I’m less like a person, a person as you might think of one, and more like an organization. There’s also behavior that I need to undo, to take away, and this is often best accomplished by others, people who can erase action, alter ideas. I have a staff who work for me, of course. It’s always startled me that people are so cautious when it comes to who exactly they are. It’s almost the only thing we actually get to control. What a missed opportunity, really. For instance, you don’t even know that I’m the real LeBov. But it’s hard to grieve the choices made, or not made, by uninspired people. The sympathy allotment doesn’t extend that far.”

“So you change your name, fake your death.”

“Look, that’s nothing. That’s cosmetic. Not even cosmetic. I moved around some grains of sand. Or not even that. I can’t invent a small enough metaphor for what I’ve done. It’s that insignificant. It adds some maneuverability, that’s all. Some spaces open up. Everyone’s presumed dead now anyway, as of tonight, after the radio darkness. Today was the last chance to die and have it reported. I hit the last news cycle. My death was the last story before the blackout. The world’s last obituary. You should be congratulating me.”

I looked at this redhead squeezing through the floor of my synagogue.

“Congratulations. And if in the process of this important work you hurt someone?”

“Then, uh, they feel pain? Is that a trick question? Is that really what’s at issue right now, your hurt feelings? Could your perspective be any smaller?”

“You spoke to my wife.”

“Someone had to. At least she actually listened. So much for your unified front.”

LeBov reached into his coat and removed a long darning needle.

“Here,” he said, rolling it over. “If you don’t jam it in too hard, you won’t do any permanent damage.”

“To myself?”

“To
anyone
. Jesus, you are so self-centered. Thousands of years of Judaism, topped off by exclusive, secret access at your hole, for ultra-rare religious guidance, and this is all your people have come to?”

He gestured at our surroundings as if I, too, was meant to examine them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but this place is sad. I examined your, what do you call it, your Moses Mouth? Your enabler? You all have different silly words for it.”

He was referring to the slashed-up listener in his bag.

“Listener,” I whispered to him. I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud.

“You examined it?” I asked.

“And you didn’t even bleed the withers, or whatever that fucking extra skin is called. It’s completely engorged. You only used it to tap into Burke. That’s insane. I’ve never seen such a rudimentary listener, and I have a good collection of them now. Anyone can listen to Burke, because
there is no Burke
. You don’t even need a fucking listener. I can drop a copper wire into any conductive soil and pick up that signal. Probably with my landline telephone I could dial it up. It’s completely unsecured. Public domain. Probably ham radio. I bet people get it in their houses. I bet you could pick it up off a filling in your molar. You spent all this time out here with this amazing device and you never wondered if you were hearing the
right
broadcast? The deepest feed? Instead you fucked on the floor like animals. Honestly, sometimes I had to look away. You didn’t care and you fucked in a pile of musty sweaters. I’m kind of astounded. The Burke sermons were recorded years ago and play on a loop.”

“Right. And you’d know that how?”

“Uh, because I’ve memorized them? Because they repeat? Burke’s sermons are decoys for people like me who hack into the transmission, to appease us, to make us stop looking.
They’re not real
. They’re bait, you fucking kike. You’re supposed to
activate
your listener to pick up the real transmissions. Even the morons down in Fort Wine figured that out. What do you think that box is for that I got from your house? You didn’t even slide in the
glass
. Those tools were untouched.”

“It was never broken,” I whispered.

“But it fucking hell was! It was dead. How could you not have noticed?”

LeBov was ready to go, his tools packed, his bag strapped to his chest.

“You still have time on the clock,” he said. “Any more questions?”

I stared at this man filling the hole in my hut.

“No?” he said. “I have a question, then. I’ll use your remaining seconds. We’ll say that I owe you. My question is, for whose benefit is it?”

“Is what?”

“Your complete inability to understand what’s going on.”

“I don’t see that it benefits anyone,” I admitted.

“Oh. I was just curious. That strategy is really unfamiliar to me. It kept me fairly interested in you. I figured you had a deeper play. I thought that perhaps I was missing out on the angle and I wanted to see what you’d do, but then you didn’t do
anything
. I guess that’s your play?”

LeBov gave some genuine reflection to this idea.

“You have a novel way with confusion. In another world inertia might have helped you, might have seemed genius. But even this thing with Thompson. I mean, you really believed that, that he was a
rabbi
? You didn’t recognize my voice?”

“You want me to believe that you were Thompson, too?”

“No, not particularly. It’s more interesting when you don’t believe deeply obvious facts. That’s far more fascinating to me. I like to surround myself with mistaken people. I draw strength from it. It increases my own chances for success.”

“Agreement is a poison, right?”

“That’s part of it.”

“So the medical approach Thompson prescribed,” I started.

“I needed it done and there you were, needing to do it. It occupied you, didn’t it? It took your eye off the ball. I didn’t think you’d take it all so seriously, but thank you for obliging.”