The Flame Alphabet (20 page)

In his early writings, Thoreau called the alphabet the saddest song. Later in life he would renounce this position and say it produced only dissonant music.

Letters, Montaigne said, are a necessary evil.

But are they? asked Blake, years later. I shall write of the world without them.

I would grow mold on the language, said Pasteur. Except nothing can grow on that cold, dead surface.

Of words Teresa of Avila said, I did not live to erase them all.

They make me sick, said Luther. Yours and yours and yours. Even sometimes my own.

If it can be said, then I am not interested, wrote Schopenhauer.

When told to explain himself, a criminal in Arthur’s court simply pointed at the large embroidered alphabet that hung above the king.

Poets need a new instrument, said Shelley.

If I could take something from the world, said Nietzsche, and take with it even the memory of that thing, so that the world might carry on ever forward with not even the possibility that thing could exist again, it would be the language that sits rotting inside my mouth.

I am a writer, said Picasso. I make my own letters.

Shall I destroy this now, or shall I wait for you to leave the room, said his patron to Kadmos, the reputed inventor of the alphabet.

Kadmos is a fraud, said Wheaton. Said Nestor. Said William James.

Do not read this, warned Plutarch.

Do not read this, warned Cicero.

Do not read this, begged Ovid.

If you value your life.

Bleed a man, and with that vile release spell out his name in the sand, prescribed Hippocrates.

No alphabet but in things, said Williams.

Correction.
No alphabet at all
.

Sometimes an assembly was called, heralded by a long, dissonant bell.

Here the researchers, scientists, administrators, and the animal handlers who worked their tests in the walled-off southern wing could settle into the surgical theater and view the latest work on display, the experiments with comprehension, the medical tests.

Usually I sat through these assemblies inside a deep facial paralysis. The gatherings had a grueling familiarity to them, and to me they smelled of sport and torture.

Onstage we’d see language spoken through every kind of contraption on the mouth: filters, dampeners, horn-shaped protrusions that must have addressed an acoustical toxicity and turned subjects into ragged, costumed clowns, although by the results witnessed at assembly, they did not soothe the acoustical toxicity, but inflamed it instead.

We observed the testing of a whistle language, delivered through the gashed-open faces of mannequins. Subjects could tolerate, and moderately comprehend, the signals, but when they were forced to whistle, employing a rigorous system of codes, they declined rapidly, showing clear signs of toxicity.

Gesture was tested, mostly on the sick, to see how rapidly they would expire if exposed to unceasing and explicit mime.

Again a mannequin was commanded by remote control to produce the behavior.

We saw every kind of semaphore, like a silent and benighted exercise class conducted by the dead, from the arm-waving style, to be viewed at a great distance, to the single finger-sign languages developed on the middle north wing of the lab.

We watched through perforated masks, distributed upon arrival, lest some of the sickening stuff leak into our senses. Of what we saw, we saw as little of it as we could, which was more than enough for me.

With bloody persistence researchers tested how complex a language of touch could really be. Technicians sat with test subjects and, wearing gloves tipped in abrasives, tapped out rudimentary communications, of distress, of commerce, of desire.

The subjects, reclining in their wheeled hospital beds on the dark, oak stage of the theater, generally endured this work, but only at first. And when they did not endure it, when they made profound protests to the material that was clearly undoing them in every significant way, we were marched from our seats, led from the hall, and corralled as usual back to our offices.

Everything I’d seen so far had prepared me to pay as little notice as I might during these mandatory sessions. And this is right about when a new paradigm was presented to us at assembly, and everything changed.

It was late in my stay in the research wing, when I had already ruled out the efficacy of ancient scripts, had sent reams of alphabets downstairs for toxicity testing, only to have them return in the sleeves reserved for failed research, and I had moved on to the equally unpromising grotesqueries of modern script.

It was a morning around that time when the long bell sounded and we took our seats in the surgery. The lights dimmed. Onto the stage came an old man, his head draped in testicle skin. When he rubbed it and blinked into the lights I saw it was merely his face, beset with a terrible, taffy-like droop. I did not want to reflect what sort of experiments, or what sort of life, had led to possessing a face like that. Behind him wheeled a creaky IV cart.

It was pushed by a child, who was tethered to the thing itself.

I would say that a hush fell at the sight of this man, or more correctly at the
uncommon
sight of a child, especially one who did not seem to be under guard, but a hush had already fallen. We were steeped in hush, drowning in it. The room was sickeningly quiet. I knew nothing of my colleagues, saw almost nothing of their robed and lab-coated bodies, and could detect little from their impassive, gestureless faces. The lack of speech, the absence of language to build us into full people, had turned us into a kind of emotive cattle. Perhaps a raucous inner life produced shattering notes inside us, but with no extraction tool, no language to pry it free and publicize it, even if it was moronic, one sensed that the whole enterprise of consciousness had suddenly lost its way. Without a way to say it, there was no reason to even think it.

Our faces, without the exercise of speech, had atrophied into slack, piggish masks.

Some of us, I would guess, had not spoken in months, more.

That morning a sheet of glass descended from ropes over the stage, walling off the man and the child.

Once they were enclosed, the man looked up, having apparently heard sounds. He studied the ceiling and then, to what seemed like his own astonishment, he began to speak.

There was nothing to hear. All sounds were sealed from us. On the whole it was an unremarkable spectacle, except for when it came to how this feat of nontoxic language exchange was being achieved.

Our jaws were supposed to drop in amazement that an old man could speak. A year ago none of us would have cared. We would have run screaming from what this man had to say. No doubt he’d have trafficked in platitudes, the most killing forms of banality. He’d use speech to tyrannically reaffirm what we all already knew and we’d only be tortured when he spoke. At the very least we’d have been deaf to his message, and even if he lay bleeding at our feet we’d have stepped over him on the way to our group picnic, where we’d feed each other sweaty cubes of honey rolled in salt. Now we sat in our important seats and were meant to marvel over this reinvention of the wheel. Not even the whole wheel, but only a lug nut of it.

And I’ll admit that it was impressive. He spoke with no apparent agony, without the clenched pain and contortions every single one of us expected to see. Put him in a tuxedo, I thought, and he’s
almost
a gentleman.

On a side-mounted video monitor, the spectacle unfolded in close-up, but what the camera seemed most interested in was not the man or the child, but the apparatus that held the transparent business that I had thought was the man’s IV bag.

Indeed it was a bag of
fluid
, but it dangled from the little neck of the child, puckering from his skin into the tube.

From this it flowed directly into the man.

Allowing him to speak, one presumed.

A fluid drawn directly from the child
.

Like most important solutions throughout history, this one seemed inevitable. Our own dear children, immune to the malady that is killing us all, must have within them a resistance that,
with a long enough needle
, our best scientists should be able to extract. Finding such a solution was just a matter of time.

Everyone will soon come over to this approach
, LeBov had said to me that freezing night back in the neighborhood.

It needn’t cause any trouble. In the spirit of science
.

After the assembly, the glass sheet lifted and the man shuffled from the stage. Were we meant to applaud or weep for him? We did neither.

The child had to be carried off, but first they threw a sheet over him. The tube that joined them was severed by one of the technicians. It was too far away for me to determine if this liquid was clear or dark. But it hung in a clump from the severed tube, suggesting viscosity. Working quickly, they squeezed the remaining stuff into a vial. Whatever it was they’d withdrawn from this child, they didn’t want to waste it.

Assemblies after that featured similar spectacles, and this fluid factored as the golden constant. Whenever it appeared, frequently under guard, always sourced by some oddly well-dressed child who seemed styled for his first music recital, we were supposed to leap from our chairs and rush the stage in order to drink the slimy dregs of it from the tube. The child was never the same one, though sometimes the man was. He was a tired specimen and his face, as I’ve said, hung badly off his head. But as we moved into summer and the uncirculated air of Forsythe began to stink of blackened medicines, this man, who early on seemed to have been thieved from the morgue and filled with a last-ditch animating dose of adrenaline, began to look functionally dead, dead in all the measurable ways. When the serum was pumped into him he bled freely from his ear. They began to plan for this in advance, packing gauze on the bad side of his head. But even that darkened quickly and slid sometimes down his face during the presentations.

I suppose it wasn’t so terrible to become a guinea pig during your last days.

It wasn’t hard to piece together what they were showing us. The assemblies never featured text, we were never addressed. If there was sound, it was the kind of dissonant code music that was precisely designed to evoke nothing.

In most of the presentations the subjects were plugged into something, a child, a bag, or a machine offstage, perhaps, suggested by the medical tubes snaking under the curtain.

They clobbered us with the obvious. Okay, I get it, I wanted to say. You’ve struck gold in those kids. But until they released this fluid into our own labs, until they even
gave
us a fucking operational lab with actual equipment, what were we supposed to do about it, and how impressed was I supposed to be that you needed to be fed by a live connection to a living human child in order to cough out a few unimportant words?

Unplug one of these motherfuckers, I thought. Unplug him from the child and let him run around barking his silly words. Then maybe I’ll be impressed.

It happened pretty soon after that.

I had finished work early and was on my way to the entertainment suite. Perhaps I’d stare blankly at some faceless television until the coffee cart opened, at which point I’d drop a tap on my partner. On days like this, Marta offered the most reliable respite from a sense of futility, and with Marta I’d never experience the shame of having confessed frustration or despair, or having confessed a single thing, because we did not speak.

Nothing had come of my projects today, as usual. More slogging, more obviously failed scripts, more redundant work that was doomed in advance. Yet I sat there and wrote the deathly language until my eyes watered with exhaustion and my back ached and I wanted only to tap Marta, then try not to drag her to the consort room, where we’d have our angry physical exchange and she’d stare with admiration, with admiration and awe, at something just beyond my face that I would never understand.

But none of that was to be tonight.

I took my usual route from the office to the mezzanine, following the brown hallways that had been scrubbed of every directional marker and now featured only windowless, oval doors every so often, behind which I never heard anything.

I must have been rounding a corner when a team of technicians walked out of one such room, quietly fell on me, covered my head with something hot, which was tied tightly at my neck, and dragged me into a room.

I was thrust into a darkness made swamp-like by my own breath, which steamed up over my face inside of what seemed like a woolen blanket.

Something heavy was dragged across the room, scraped the floor so violently it shrieked, and then I heard the clicks and manipulations of a machine. A fan switched on and a chill settled through the room.

Inside my hood I pitched my breath down over my chin to keep it from reeking up my space. Whoever the technicians were, they were breathing hard, and I registered a worrisome silence until one of them pressed his weight against me, removed some piece of my clothing, and brought a cool solution that felt like alcohol over my skin.

A sleeve was cut free of my shirt and I felt the tickle of a razor shaving the hairs of my forearm.

They were prepping me to receive an injection, and I waited for the sharp insult of a needle, but it never came.

Throughout my captivity I did not struggle. I went limp, tried to comply. But it was hard to comply when I didn’t know what they wanted me to do.

And so I settled into the dark, felted cocoon they’d made for me, wondering why I’d been singled out for this molestation, and what kind of procedure was in store.

Nothing I’d done seemed to warrant the attention of anyone powerful. Most of my morning had been spent in futile paroxysms of invention, itself too strong a word. The work was a chore, but I forced myself to do it. After a quick breakfast of peaches at my desk, I’d looked into yet more defunct writing, undeciphered and disappeared scripts, scripts that had failed or been abused or misused or just gravely misunderstood.

I moved from Olmec to Meroitic. In Rongorongo I burned letters onto wood. Always throughout the testing of defunct scripts, I paired Roman samples as a control.

Then I stepped away from the visual side of scripting and began to wonder how content figured into the revulsion. Was our aversion to language based on what we said to each other: the cryptic things, the direct things, the disappointing things, the neutral ones? Was it because of what we didn’t say? Had we failed to say or write something that would ensure our survival, and now this failure had grown too massive, become irreversible?

These questions I dodged. They were too big, too hard.

But more came. Was language rich in information, filled with verifiable detail and data, worse than language that lied? Which diction made us sicker? Could abstract language, the kind that skirted anything visual and posited ideas and qualifications over the concrete, be less harmful? Were expressions of love safer than threats?

Everything I produced and sent down to the yard for testing suggested that it was comprehension itself that we could no longer bear.

The days of understanding were over. The question I could not even formulate was this: What was it we were now supposed to do if it was medically impossible to even understand each other without a rapid, ugly sickness taking hold? This was not a disease of language anymore, it was a disease of insight, understanding,
knowing
.

I thought about all of this as I sat in a Forsythe room with a blanket over my head.

My captors pursued a soundless agenda. The room was chilly and smelled of nothing, and I had a sickening fear that whatever aggression they might have planned against me would be nothing compared to simply being abandoned there to expire under a blanket in a side room no one ever visited.

I resolved to make myself as quiet as possible, to silence my movements and breath in order to determine what was going on. I would
listen
my way out of this dilemma.

Then someone cleared his throat, unwrapped my hood.

Standing over me, holding the dark blanket, was the redhead LeBov. It looked like someone had vacuumed the extra flesh from his head and body. He didn’t seem older so much as deflated. He smiled, as if our wonderful meeting had been scheduled long ago and now it had finally arrived.

LeBov helped me to a chair, slid me in, then took himself to the other side.

“You’re looking … not so well,” he said.

He was not supposed to be able to speak, and I was not supposed to be able to hear it. We were long past that. My face wasn’t hardened so much as lifeless now, a phantom face where my real face once was.

I cringed as a reflex, at the sight of LeBov’s mouth moving, waiting to feel the hot speech pour over me, tighten me into crippling spasms. I gripped my chair, braced as if a car was about to hit me.

But something else happened instead. Nothing. Like the night in the bushes when Esther marauded through, and LeBov filled my mouth with grease. I still felt the muscled roughness of speech, almost like a smoke too thick to inhale. But instead of a toxicity, it was cold and oily in the air.

I coughed, tried to swallow.

“You’ll get used to it,” LeBov said, bored. “Just keep listening. Let it take hold. It’s fucking weird at first.”

LeBov was right. As he spoke, his speech felt solid in the air. It seemed like I was trying to breathe underwater, and with concentration I could
barely
do it. I could allow his speech in and it would pose no danger.

I looked at my naked arm, which felt heavy and weak. They must have injected me after all. I wanted to say: But I never felt a needle go in.

“It’s impressive, right?” said LeBov, noticing my amazement. “Those guys are good.”

On my arm a cold bead of blood crawled out of the puncture. I stared at it as if it were a jewel. They’d shot me with something, and now I could speak, could listen again.

My first spoken words in months came out in a cracked whisper.

I said, “Can I ask to what do we owe this conversation?”

LeBov sat back in his chair, looked at me without disguising his excitement.

I found I knew the answer without his help.

“It’s that stuff, right? The stuff you gave the old man up onstage?”

LeBov chuckled. “Yeah. We call it ‘that stuff.’ How do you like it?”

My voice came out weak. It did not sound like me. “So children are fueling this conversation?”

“This very one. Better make it count.”

On the table LeBov had gathered some of my work, a stack of scripts, some of the 3-D models, slabs of stone. He made a show of looking through it, scowling at the sheaths of letters, squinting to communicate his displeasure. He passed through it so rapidly, and with such disdain, he could not possibly have given it the attention it deserved.

“What are you doing with this stuff?” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”

I’d never seen my work exposed like that, cut free of the self-disguising paper. It stunned me that we could spread it out on the table and not retch with illness. My technique was messier than I expected, incoherent in places, letters dropping off pages, failing to come together, breaking into pieces. Imperfections everywhere. I felt ashamed to see it unclothed like that. And yet I wanted to grab the materials from LeBov and rush back to my office. If I could take it all in, if I could
actually fucking look at my own work
, I might be able to really do something effective.

LeBov flipped through more of it and then pushed it all aside. “Are you serious? Do you honestly believe we haven’t thought of this already? You’re sitting here creating fucking
alphabets
? How small exactly is your mind?”

I tried not to look at him too closely. His teeth had the quality of fossils.

When I spoke my voice was quieter than his, less convincing.

“It’s the work you seemed to want,” I offered. “There’s no equipment here, nothing. So I’m creating scripts, alphabets. You said yourself that the solution was in scripts, visual codes.
You
said that.”

“Correction.
Murphy
said that. Slightly different person. Dead to me now, in any case. Along with his so-called
ideas
, thank god.”

“Well, how would I know?” I said. “There’s not exactly an open channel of communication. If I could get my gear, I think I could get back to some of the medical stuff.”

“We have real doctors for that. We have people who actually know what they’re doing. Your little purses of smoke, I popped them over my children’s heads to make them laugh. Kids love their own little mushroom cloud. They’re tchotchkes, and they stink. Seriously. They smell awful. That’s probably why your house is still abandoned.”

He checked his watch.

I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to say. This was the first conversation I’d had in months, and the muscles of my face had gone soft.

“Maybe I should give you a tour of the real research wing,” said LeBov. “We should have ‘Bring a Naïve Pretender to Work Day,’ and then I’ll let you check out the pros.”

I did not respond. The antagonistic foreplay had lost its appeal. In my limbs, in my head, I felt the heaviness of what they’d shot me with. It was rough, unrefined, but I wished I could get my hands on it.

I had questions, too. How long did a dosage last? What were the side effects? What exactly
was
the fucking stuff, and … I didn’t even want to think through this last question, but at what cost comes this serum? What does the extraction do to its … host?

LeBov held up one of my finer pages of cuneiform, some Presargonic panels I’d written about a poisoned body of water in the netherworld. Experimenting with one of my Aesop’s templates.

“Has it occurred to you that these things are useless if people can’t decipher them? You’ve given cuneiform to people who barely read English?”

“Yeah, that did occur to me. Right around the time that you were drawing fluid out of children’s bodies.”

“But you did it anyway? See it through to the end even if it’s obvious?”

“Well, have you stopped to wonder why that very script, which you say they can’t understand, is still making them sick? Isn’t that a little bit curious to you?”

LeBov checked his watch again. He closed his eyes in some exaggerated show of irritation.

“Do you have any confirmation that we’re even
showing
them your stupid alphabets? Have you verified that?”

I thought of my time on the observation deck, watching the subjects spoil in the heat, get carted off. Wagons of paper were brought to them, unloaded, shoved in front of their eyes, and they pored over it like dutiful patients, scrutinizing it until their vitals flared and someone called a code. This
was
my work that sickened them, even if I could not see it precisely. It must have been my work they saw. But I knew that I was never on-site confirming that, never actually down there to be sure. Such vigilance hadn’t occurred to me.

It should have been a relief to discover, to even consider, that I had not caused more pain for all of those people.

But I somehow did not feel relieved.

LeBov stood up, pushed my alphabets into the trash. “C’mon,” he said. “We’re going for a walk.”

He helped me up. I didn’t realize I needed it, but I was unsteady, a bit nauseous once I got out of my chair. His hands under my arms felt like metal tongs. We’d be back soon and I’d feel better, LeBov assured me. There was something small he wanted to show me, something he thought might be of interest.

Into the halls of Forsythe we went. We climbed the ramp and came upon the assembly area, but this usually hectic space was empty. Everything was quiet.

We took the stairs to my wing. On the landing we stepped through the side door that brought us to the observation deck, where I’d only ever stood with crowds of other scientists, looking down at the testing below.

Again I saw no one, just the decontamination procedures outside in the courtyard, a man curled up under the harsh ministrations of a hose.

Here I tried to take a step that wasn’t there and I stumbled. LeBov reached for me, but I fell, and for some reason I couldn’t get my hands up in time.

My face smashed undefended against the floor.

I scrambled back up but wobbled, tipped, and fell again. The walls were spinning. Above me stood LeBov, studying me.

“That’s something we’re working on.” LeBov stuck out his hand for me. “There are some balance things we need to tweak.”

I got up without his help but as we walked to the observation deck I held his arm in case I fell again.

We were still alone. Since I’d left that room with LeBov we’d seen not a single person.

“Where is everyone?”

“I don’t care for this place outside of lockdown. The bustle and whatnot. The human contact. I find it distracting. It’s rather nice not to be seen, don’t you think?”

It didn’t really feel nice.

A trickle of blood fell from LeBov’s nose and he caught it with a tissue. Then the tissue blackened, started to drip.