The Flame Alphabet (16 page)

In the Forsythe parking lot I fell from my car and crawled over hot asphalt, circling an endless fleet of red busses, looking for an entrance to the building.

Forsythe was not a government structure with its typical transparent woods, or one of those low, glass laboratory compounds where clear smoke worked like a lens, sharpening the air over the roof. Forsythe was, instead, just a high school, a research lab embedded within the old educational structure that still had the mascot carved in its face. A game cat whose teeth jutted out from the facade. The name of the school was covered now in a swipe of rust.

Some men were waiting at my open car when I realized I had crawled full circle, gone nowhere. They fell on me softly, lifted me into the air as if they’d throw me into the sky and discard me.

Someone grabbed my keys and the taillights of my car squirreled through the nighttime air, then disappeared around a building.

There went everything I owned.

My helper spoke through a plastic mouth fitted over his face, but what he said was so foreign and airless that I cannot here transcribe it.

The message traveled so fast into me that I felt torn open. The phrase, whatever it meant, was like an act of sudden surgery, the kind that cuts the rotted thing from your body, leaving you empty, healed, exquisitely released from pain. That’s all I remember.

I woke inside a light-scorched hallway. A salted object filled my mouth. Someone shoved it deeper, his fist jammed into my face, as if he was trying to hide his whole arm in my body. I breathed through my nose and tried to keep up, but my mouth was too full with the gag of salt.

My escorts held me close and I let their bodies guide me. We moved from hallways to small rooms, waited at doors, then passed through tight corridors until we mounted a steep, narrow staircase and came up on the floor where I would be staying.

I tried to keep my sense of direction throughout this interior maneuvering, but the compass I conjured in my mind had only a single direction, the needle in a palsy over a symbol I didn’t recognize.

A man in a lab coat removed the salt object from my mouth and something tore as he pulled it out.

I felt hands on me, sharp pieces of bodies that stank. Someone with a practiced touch lifted my arms, removed my shirt. He’d done this to many people, I could tell. Disrobed them while they slumped over in a stupor, readied them for some miracle.

I was held in place while something pinched under my arm, deep against the bone. It is hard to know if I made any show of my feelings. I looked down as a syringe pulled from a perforation under my arm, the skin hugging the needle as it retreated.

This was no medicine I had tried before. It brought my eyes halfway shut and I could do nothing to open them again.

The man spoke in that foreign, airless language, his breath oily in my mouth, and this time his phrasings made me cry. I cried in the most childish, open-faced way.

I let myself fall into his arms.

With a thumb jammed between my shoulder blades, he worked a finger from his other hand deep under the bone of my sternum. He had a hand on each side of me and he crouched, readied himself in preparation.

I draped over him, unable to stand.

When my lungs were empty, he squeezed, as if his thumb and finger might meet inside my body. I believe he succeeded.

The sensation came too quickly for me to cry out. My face tightened, a blast of pressure leaking from my eye. He slipped out from under me and I fell.

He left me in a heap on the floor.

The medical procedures at Forsythe, at least those I received in the parking lot and outer hallways of the recovery wing, belonged to no speech fever treatment I knew. Hebraic phrases delivered through a prosthetic mouth, triggering ecstasy, promoting unconsciousness. Perhaps these were the healing phrases Murphy—LeBov, I should say—had mentioned. Then there was the profoundly painful bodywork, the deep-tissue manipulation and extreme compression. Crushing. These practices had not been discussed publicly.

Against the cold wall of my room, in clothes that reeked of my travels, I spoke for a time with Claire. I spoke to her in private tones, words dismantled into grunts, because Claire did not need anything spelled or even sounded out for her, she never did.

Sometimes I could summon my wife’s voice, no matter where she was. Sometimes she would talk back, even if it was only me willing it so.

I found myself arguing for the family, trying to make a case that we needed to stick together, and as I did that, I could see Claire’s face, a stricken look of disbelief on it, a really appalled look that I would even begin to suggest she did not
also
want that, which of course I agreed to as fully as I could, but I could tell from her face that it was too late, I had cast myself as the one who wanted unity, I had excluded her from this desire, and how dare I do such a thing?

Stick together?
She didn’t need to ask.
This from the man who drove off without us?

What’s important now, I started to say to her. What’s important now … What’s important is that we …

I pictured Claire waiting for me to say, waiting for me to actually
know
what was important now. She stood over me.

Dig yourself out of this
, she didn’t need to say.
Go ahead. Get down on your knees and start digging your way out of this. I’d like to see how far you get. I’ll be right here, watching you disappear into the earth
.

My days in this northern hole of Rochester were speechless and dark. I saw no sun, never felt the sky darken. No authentic sky prevailed in the Forsythe recovery wing, no windows through which the light might fail.

Ruptured mattresses littered the floor, sleeping bags with the bottoms kicked through. A brittle pillow bore the facial welt of the last patient who slept here.

A man’s work shirt had been chewed, swallowed, spit up in a glaze of bile.

Mesh baggies of hair hung from the ceiling, repelling flies. Possibly the hair attracted them instead.

Most rooms were furnished with wooden chairs, seats scarred by fire. Rope railings hung from the corridor walls. The blind could pull themselves to the bathroom without falling. The blind, the sick, the tired.

These quarters so far I occupied alone, with the exception of a man left too long to spoil in what I came to think of as Room 4. His face was so white, it seemed painted.

It was early December. Year of the sewn-up mouth. The last December of speech. If you were not a child, safely blanketed in quarantine, bleating poison from your little red mouth, you were one of us. But to be one of us was to be something so small and quiet, you may as well have been nothing. If we had last messages, we’d crafted them already, stuffed them in bottles, shoes, shot them out to sea. Words written for no one, never to be read. When pressed for something significant to say, most of us said so little we seemed shy, could not speak the language. We wrote down our names, our dates, the names of our mothers and fathers, the towns we lived in. On notebook paper we sketched pictures. Our last words weren’t even real words.

Claire was wherever they took people like her, still blinking and breathing, camouflaged against a hillside of salt.

Esther was thriving in the world she must have always craved, where the washed-out idiots of preceding generations had finally been banished, rags crammed down their throats. I worried for her without a world of older people to loathe. Now she lived with a population of her own kind, where self-hatred meant you gnashed at whomever you saw. And they you. How much time did Esther have before her own face was
touched
, before her tongue hardened and grew cold in her mouth?

Oh, of course I did not know where Claire was. I did not know where Esther was. Even as to where
I
was, I was hardly sure. But my ignorance did not slow my mind from its suspicions, and these held a vivid persuasion all their own.

At Forsythe my sleep was not patterned enough to signal the hour. With no smallwork to perform, the time of day failed to matter. What did matter was so far beyond me, I sometimes could not even see it. But still it hovered out there in dark shapes, however much I wished it gone.

LeBov would find me. He’d hear of my arrival, come get me, bring me into some important fold, if there was a fold. LeBov needed me, if only to practice those black tasks no one else could carry out. I’d let him use me again. Better that than having no use at all.

Rabbi Burke never used the word
devil
. The universal coinage was worthless, in his view. Words that mask what we don’t know. But he spoke about dangerous people who orbited the moral world, building speed around us, rendering themselves so blurred, they looked gorgeous. Burke spoke of refusing dizziness, latching on to these satellite monsters, of which one must count LeBov, so we could travel at their velocity, see them for what they were.

For now I slept in my sweaty room, ate the briny lobes stuck to my hallway food stand, rested wide awake, venturing into the carpeted hallway only when I needed to pee.

Outside my door stood a wire magazine rack filled with a stash of refreshments, unlabeled glass cylinders of water, cloudy pouches of juice. Whatever I drank was so heavily salted, my mouth became scoured. At the urinal I peed a heavy, white pudding. But I lacked the strength to discharge all of it. Sometimes it sat low in me, an anchoring sediment, as if I were meant to carry this slow water forever.

The bathroom was dank and its lone faucet, protruding from the wall, blew debris-laden air from its nozzle. If liquid rode in this stream, it clung to the sand that blasted out. I held my hands under the nozzle, beneath a wind that scarcely moistened my fingers. I bent to it and swallowed jets of wind so fierce, they knocked me against the back wall of the bathroom.

The air sped through me with such turbine force, I sensed a bird’s violation when its beak opens, wind penetrating every last space inside its body.

When I pictured Claire, she crouched in the woods, caked in mud so the dogs couldn’t smell her. In my wishful thinking, which amounted to all my thinking, Claire had fled the truck, scattered to the tree line, then vanished into the woods. From there she watched our house. In her gown she strained to get a safe look at Esther. She strained and failed. When I pictured this, Esther remained hidden from Claire, would not show herself, and her mother did not relent, crawling through the woods for every advantage of perspective.

No matter how much I wanted to, I could not get Claire to see Esther, even though I should have been in charge of my own imagination. It should have been child’s play to picture these events, but somehow this imagery was blacked out in me. When I moved Esther and Claire together in my mind, a darkness fell and they turned into distant, weak shapes. Even if I could collide these shapes, at that point they were not even people, just blocks of cold darkness that looked nothing like my wife and daughter.

Early in my stay, I discovered a way to access Rabbi Burke, but the method had difficulties.

At some point I woke up to an engine shrieking overhead. It was day, it was night, it was early, it was late. The time was best judged, if it needed to be judged, by how thirsty I was, and now my tongue was as dry as a sock in my mouth.

Above me, jets of smoke poured from a ceiling fixture. I reasoned it to be
intentional smoke
, a smoke meant for me,
the patient
, as opposed to exhaust fumes from an accident elsewhere at Forsythe.

Finally they were medicating me so I could get out of there. A nozzle in the ceiling pumping vapors into the recovery wing.

The flow was loud and cold. No matter where I huddled in my room it reached me, pouring cloudy fumes over my face. In the hallway it pumped. In the other rooms, even Room 4, covering in fog the man on the floor.

Sometimes the machinery behind the spout whined and the smoke spewed faster from its hole. When I tried to stop it, thinking perhaps the spigot could be dialed down, I discovered that the cork ceiling panel it protruded from was unusually soft. Soft and easy to remove.

I stood on my chair, ducking the putrid smoke, rotten and icy at its source, and pushed aside the panel. The drop ceiling disguised a tangle of plumbing ducts and power lines, but something else snaked through that space as well: a bright orange cable such as the one that pulsed up from our Jew hole.
A shining orange piece of conduit
. I’d recognize it anywhere.

I wanted to think that this cable could have been anything. It probably was a coincidence. Plastic orange insulation could not be exclusive to the forest Jews who deployed a Jewish radio. But when I gripped the cable it warmed in my hands, pulsing as if fated with a heartbeat. It gave off the same heat, the same nauseating smell, as the cable of our hut.

To be sure, I checked the other rooms, the hallway. I dragged my chair throughout the recovery wing, pushed aside ceiling panels, and found the orange cable wherever I looked. In Room 4 I stood over the fallen man and found the orange cable buried in his ceiling as well.

When I traced the cable out of the recovery wing, I struck a concrete wall and could follow it no farther. The cable flowed up from somewhere and retreated, never revealing itself from the recovery wing ceiling. It was tucked away. It was traveling elsewhere. To some other Jew’s hut, perhaps. Why it detoured through Forsythe, a building that was once a high school, and not even a Jewish one, was beyond me. Clearly it wasn’t meant to be found.

But I
had
found it, and now I wanted to listen in. If LeBov could intercept the feed without a listener, then so could I. I’d worked my own orange cable for years, learned a thing or two about the secret Jewish radio.

The wire magazine rack was easy to dismantle. I straightened the curved frame, rotating a small length of wire like the hand of a clock until it snapped off. With this short wire I climbed back on the chair, grabbed the warm meat of the cable, and pierced the shielding until the wire penetrated the cable’s core. A sudden antenna.

On the chair I braced myself, thinking I was bringing together two powerful forces that might knock me to the ground.

But nothing happened. No transmission, no sound.

I’m not sure why I thought there would be. I’d bridged no signal, simply pierced the cable and possibly deferred one channel of the transmission into the air of my room, where it died out inaudibly.

It’s true that the medical smoke briefly faltered in my room when I pierced the orange cable, sputtering from the nozzle, but that might have been a coincidence.

What I needed to do was extend the wire from the orange cable to a grounded point of metal conduction, then parlay the transmission into something that could pass for an audio speaker. Then I’d be able to hear the feed. If there
was
a feed. If this was a Jewish transmission at all.

From the straightened coils of the magazine rack I snapped off a clutch of longer wires, crimping them onto the short piece that pierced the cable, and in this way I wove a necklace of wire from the ceiling cable to the electrical outlet in the baseboard.

From here I used the final length of wire to bridge the signal into the best point of conductivity I could think of, the most natural audio speaker there is, at least when you have no other radio equipment on hand: the flesh inside of one’s own mouth.

I coiled a tight nest of wire using the last scraps of the magazine rack and stashed it under my tongue. This was elementary antenna work. When I was ready I would feed the wire from the electrical outlet to the nest in my mouth, consummating the transmission. Perhaps then Burke would speak. Burke would make himself known through my mouth. My rabbi could be heard again.

My face was cold, as rough as an animal’s back. LeBov’s ointment last week had bought me some time, softened my palate enough for me to speak in ways I didn’t understand. But that had worn off by now and my face had the buzzing, numb feeling of a sleeping limb. It therefore did not concern me that I was delivering the Jewish voltage to my mouth. My mouth was probably the safest place to test this bit of smallwork.

I sat down on the floor with the conducting wire, gripping the chair leg for support. At this point I should have taken stock, given some last thought to my Esther in the quarantine, Claire barely alive. I should have paid my respects to what little was left of the world I knew. But instead I touched the wire to the metal nest inside my mouth and fell at once into a tremble.

My vision blistered, blackened, and a seizure surged through my body. A darkness came over me, and in a great rush of sound, the Jewish transmission gushing from my face at a shattering volume, I blacked out.