The Flame Alphabet (21 page)

He laughed, his head tipped up to stop the blood, which ran from the tissue in a trail down his wrist, right under his shirtsleeve.

“C’mon,” he said, through a bloody hand, “I want to show you something.”

LeBov’s hands and wrists, I noticed, had been badly burned. That would have been the gel from the listener he stole.

We took a hallway that I’d not seen open before, stepped into a side room that featured a narrow spiral staircase, and then descended several flights until the light from above shrank into a star before disappearing, shutting us in darkness. I hugged the railing, took small steps, and kept my eyes down. Something had scrambled my balance and I felt wrong in the head.

At the bottom of the stairs we went through a double door, moved down further hallways that at first I thought were painted brown, but when I came closer I saw that the walls themselves were glass, pressed dead against sheer cliffs of dirt outside. We were underground, in a basement corridor built into hard-packed earth.

LeBov opened a tall door and we stepped into a space that, at first, seemed entirely empty.

“Welcome home,” he said, and he gestured me inside.

The room had no finished floor, just soil, with stone walls climbing several stories. In the center, lined with benches and some small generators, was a hole. A perimeter of klieg lights dumped a wretched blast of light down its center, so it looked lit from below. And from the mouth of the hole came the prettiest sight: a bouquet of bright orange cables as if retched up from the center of the earth itself.

I commanded myself to show no reaction.

They’d found themselves a Jewish hole, and it looked like they’d been working it hard.

LeBov said, “So what do you think?”

I moved to the rim of the hole, looked in. They’d roughed out scaffolding down there, reinforcing the crumbled sides of the hole with long, warped two-by-eights. A double-wide ladder, black handprints smeared on the rungs, disappeared deep into the pit, and a braid of extension cords passed the orange transmission lines on their way down.

Was there a hut over this hole once, before it became a high school? I looked over at LeBov, who allowed me my scrutiny. What a curious accident that they’d have one of these down here.

I made a point of showing no interest in the orange cables. I gave them no second look, did not stoop over them to even examine if the outlets had been converted to the Jewish standard. These were thicker than the cable in the ceiling of the recovery wing. Thicker, and there were more of them. As far as I was concerned, the cables were hiding in plain sight and it was perfectly normal for fat cables to pour from the earth from some unknown source very far away.

Under a tarp at our feet wriggled something that seemed to want to get out.

“Is that a balloon?” I asked.

LeBov paused, touched the tarp with his boot. “Not yet,” he said.

In the space above the hole they’d carved out a few of the higher floors of the basement, vaulting the room into a huge atrium, but there were no windows.

One wall, however, was devoted to something I was careful not to look at too closely. It was a collection of listeners, perhaps forty of them, nailed to plywood. They differed in size and shape. Some glistened, others were shrunken and dry. They were lobes, or orbs, or limb-like. Most were deep brown in color. A rail at the top of the wall misted some fluid in a cloud that rained down over them, keeping them moist. Beneath each listener trailed a piece of thin, white cabling that joined in a fixture at the bottom of the wall and traveled over to a table covered in a black blanket.

The listeners pulsed generating a low, dark hum. On the top row, in the middle, was my very own listener, shriveled and pale, like an oversize raisin cast in cement.

I turned my back to it.

“Nice hole,” I said.

“Right,” agreed LeBov. “We think so, too.”

I walked back to the door. “Can I return to work now?”

“Well, that’s why I brought you here. What would you think about working here instead?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I enjoy the view from my office. It’s kind of dark in here.”

I imagined this massive space filled with listener’s gel, LeBov and me swimming around in it, trying to strangle each other before we suffocated and sank. It was like a vast, desiccated aquarium, the sort of space whose bottom surface should not be traversable on foot. And then there were the throbbing, brown listeners, like a collection of human livers. I wanted to get out.

I tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it opened and we stepped back into the hallway.

LeBov was casual, as if he was asking me to join his softball team. “So will you help us?” he asked. “It could be an interesting project.”

“I thought you had what you needed. You said that yourself. What you took from me when you left.”

I remembered the punctured listener leaking down his wrists as he tried to wriggle through the hole. Along with his burns, it could have been a cause of the nosebleeds.

“Well, I thought so, too. But I didn’t. Your listener has proven stubborn to us. That’s why we need your help. The original owner of the thing, certain administrative rights, the ability to modify the property in ways we require. Something about you people is a catalyst.”

“Us people. How frustrating for you to have something you don’t control. But I’m not sure I understand. Why don’t you force me?”

LeBov broke into a fit of coughing.

“That’s a really good question,” he said, when he’d recovered. “It’s a pet topic of mine. Our studies show that coercion has a fairly poor track record. Otherwise, of course, we would.”

“Then no, thank you. I do appreciate the offer, though.”

“That’s not the whole story,” said LeBov, and I thought,
Too bad. It never is
.

“We saw what you did with that wire when you first got here, that little act of ventriloquism. That was of enormous interest to us and that’s why we pulled you out of isolation. You channeled a prayer none of us had heard before.”

“You were watching me?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And we’ve tried to duplicate your work, connecting wires to the mouths of Jews, to mannequins, to anyone, but no one else is
conductive
like you appear to be. Something about your mouth we’d like to study. And that prayer you were transmitting, that prayer doesn’t even … exist. We can find no record of it. It’s not a
real
prayer, which confirms to us that there’s something out there that we need to hear more of. There’s a territory of wisdom we don’t own, and that’s troubling. We need to get you connected in here.”

“You want to nail me to your wall and use me as a listener?”

“Well, not if you don’t want to.”

“Good, because I don’t want to.”

LeBov checked his watch.

“Whoops. We’d better get you back.”

This wasn’t the last word on the hole, obviously. LeBov’s mildness on the subject was unnerving. But he didn’t bring it up again and he seemed in a hurry to get rid of me.

On our way back to the spiral staircase, LeBov stopped at a door and looked in the high window.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Take a look,” he said, standing aside.

Inside were children, seated in rows, like in a classroom, except this wasn’t a classroom, it was some kind of hospital ward. The children were drawing, reading. Others stared at a television.

When I saw the medical carts, the tubing, a masked technician bending over one of his subjects, who smiled up at him as the needle was raised, I turned away and walked off. I wanted to get out of there, and I wasn’t waiting for LeBov.

LeBov started laughing. A feminine laugh like a cat getting killed.

He fell into step with me, and we made our way back to the staircase.

“Shall I congratulate you?” I asked.

“You shall not, I fear.”

LeBov
did
want to be congratulated. He seemed so proud, cheerfully indifferent to my outrage, almost pleased by it.

However they were harvesting their serum should not have mattered to me. But I had questions.

“And the test subjects. Why don’t you give them this serum from the children?”

He laughed. “Test subjects? Are you fucking kidding me? Is that what you actually call them? We wouldn’t waste it on them. It’s too precious, too difficult to, uh,
make
.”

LeBov narrowed his eyes.

“Well, why are they here?” I asked. “How do you get them to submit to these tests?”

I thought of the endless crowds, clamoring to be let into Forsythe.

“Your mind has been wasted on small questions. They
want
to be here. It’s called choice. They come from all over and beg to be let in. We have a security issue, really. There are too many of them. If they weren’t so collectively uninspired, so unspeakably”—he paused, searching for the right word—“
stupid
, they could launch a pretty effective attack on us.”

“Right.”

“Of course the pictures we’ve gathered of their
children
don’t hurt. A photo of a child is such a strangely powerful tool. Family pictures are funny. Sometimes they are the most boring material on the planet. Literally. There is nothing that causes more agony than someone else’s family photo. I weep with boredom at the sight of these things. They could almost be used as a medicine to cause indifference. And yet, if you show one of those very same photos to a parent who has, for the moment,
lost track
of that child, or even voluntarily surrendered that child for medical safekeeping on one of our busses, and you suggest, through mime, because language would fucking kill those miserable, anxious parents, that you might know where that child is, uh,
presently residing
, well then suddenly that photo has turned into what we call here an outstanding piece of leverage. Currency for the mute time. The new money. It’s a pretty straightforward economy.”

On our way up the staircase LeBov’s nose started to bleed again, and as we hurried up the narrow passageway his breath grew wet and ugly. We stopped to rest and he coughed a slurry into his hands, mumbling something. Again I hugged the railing, shutting my eyes against the spinning walls, and followed.

I was released upstairs later that night, disoriented and hungry, as the last protection from the serum fizzed away. I found myself back in the land of the mutes and I was relieved.

Down on the mezzanine I raced to the coffee cart, hoping to find Marta, or anyone. There was no way I would be alone tonight. I would have tapped the old man from the tests if he’d have me. I would have led him to my room, peeled down his robe, and tried whatever I could get away with against his body until he dragged himself from me in exhaustion.

There was no one at the coffee cart. The scientists had paired off already. Tripled off. Gone back to their rooms to nurse their sense of specialness and to marshal every kind of argument for themselves that what they think, what they feel, has any value at all.

I returned to my room, closed the door, and suffered the long, violent seizure of alertness that had come to pass for another night of sleep. Waiting. Thinking. Not sleeping. Never really sleeping.

I avoided the observation booth after that. I did not like to join the other scientists for the afternoon stroll, the old thoughtful walk we took with our great brains towering over us, down our serious corridor that ended in glass, where we could watch the good people of Rochester bleed from the mouth, trembling with sobs, while they tried to endure exposure to our work.

Once I knew my scripts were pre-classified as doomed, never even shared in the courtyard, or, if they were, used on the test subjects merely to confirm a
previously held certainty
, a certainty that written language, no matter how inventively conceived or destroyed and then remade, could not safely be read again for very long by people over a certain age, I began to keep some experiments to myself, substituting credible symbol systems and scripts for the technicians to take away, while concealing anything promising—the project that might deliver me from this facility—beneath a pile in my desk drawer.

I even sent down alphabets that had already been tested.

For the decoy work I faked my way to bedtime. When I did not use letters soaked with ink I used objects, mostly bones. These were brought to me in a wire basket, with a set of burnishing tools, abrasives for sanding, some picks, little chisels, a mallet.

This decoy work could not be too amateur. I thought I could go down to the courtyard myself, in person, and use a small hooked knife to slice a divot of skin from myself, then flick that skin over a subject, a language of the body, piece by piece, until I expired at the table.

Or we could perform suicide by fairy tale. Issue a classic tale to each test subject, each technician, which would include the motherfucker LeBov. We could give a fairy tale to every unnamed person of Forsythe, and then on cue, we could commence to read our little tales.

I knew the fairy tale that I would select for my last obliterating language. I knew it inside and out.

Then we could finally bring an end to this thing, a lovely end, death by reading. How many sentences in would we get? Could we get to the part where the wolf is waiting in the grandmother’s bed, or would we have collapsed in agony already? Would we miss the best part?

It was a matter of choosing which form of failure to ride out to the spectacular, bloody end.

If I produced the decoy scripts fast enough, and had them available for the technicians when they came, I had enough time to think about my real work, and this, inevitably, had to involve a complete rethinking of the Jewish script.

From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.

With this material I fussed throughout the day, doing mock-ups in ink, laying down string for patterning, making textile samples of this lettering and wrapping the material around different lengths of iron rod.

The script, when I erected it on pins and experimented with small jets of air, looked like the folds of a brain.

I staged it in arrangements that might constitute sensible order, the logic of words, but not the sort of words we’d ever use.

It was foolish, maybe, but I wouldn’t be sharing it with just anyone, and if it wasn’t harmful, then this was the work I wanted to do, these were the letters I preferred to be near. The Hebrew letter is like a form of nature. In it is the blueprint for some flower whose name I forget, and if this flower doesn’t exist yet, it will. It is said that the twenty-two Hebrew letters, if laid flat and joined properly, then submitted to the correct curves on a table stabbed with pins, would describe the cardiovascular plan of the human body. And not only that. That was child’s play.

The absolute key was that this letter would, by necessity, need to be orphaned from the flame alphabet, toxic to it and in no way capable of joining its system. No matter what else you could communicate with it, it was imperative that this letter could never indicate the Name, or be part of a word or words that did, however indirectly. It would be the flame alphabet’s bastard letter, and I knew who would be the first to receive it.

When the technicians came for my materials, I swept this work aside, passed them Dravidian syntax instead. When I thought they needed something new, I gave them some Foster, one of the more recent, specialized languages, invented solely to promote doubt and uncertainty.

If I deployed the Hebrew script in the predictable ways, using it in words we already knew, it was still too sickening to use. I had tested enough of it on myself to know. But this only suggested to me that standard forms of communication were off-limits.

I hung my secret Hebrew letter on sticks, enlarging the aperture on the pinhole over sample words. These were words that were not even clearly defined and, to my mind, could not possibly exist. Something of their design, the precise way the details of the letters converged when placed together, fused so quickly into the shape of a toxic emblem that I felt an instant chill of comprehension.

But with this comprehension did not come the crushing. My gag reflex was not triggered. I felt a mild revulsion and that is all.

This is what I wanted. It is what our old poisonous alphabet must look like to an animal. Unpromising, of no interest. If it could not be eaten or fucked, what other use could it possibly have? Ambivalence was a starting point. When I studied the letter, looked at it from every angle, I was indifferent, unmoved. I just did not care. This was, if you’ll accept the phrase, a breakthrough.

I enlarged the pinhole, allowing more language to fill my field of vision. And every day I—I’ve never used or even thought this word before—but I fucking
rejoiced
, because when I looked at what might be possible with this alphabet, when I spelled with it by severing it to pieces and using its parts, omitting vowels with it and some crucial consonants, and wrote the safer words with it and then deployed those words into word strings that fell just shy of forming sentences, I was not so fully blinded by sickness that I collapsed unconscious in my chair.

I may have retched, I may have felt the room spin off its moorings as if I’d suddenly been launched from my window over the countryside of Rochester, but foul as these symptoms were, they did not of themselves seem killing, which meant the Hebrew letter had more promise than anything I’d ever seen. I may have been repulsed by the script I made with it, but because it did not finally destroy me, I felt that I had the beginnings of a solution.

With this new Hebrew lettering paradigm I began work on a non-alphabet, a system revolving around one symbol that could never be used in a word, a letter that did not even exist yet, a letter whose existence was merely inferred by the other letters. This letter could fluidly receive or reject ornament, be layered or cloaked, snap open and release, and ultimately be totally disguised, but I had yet to complete the instructions, I had not actually loaned this symbol into a vocabulary, and to one of the test subjects it would look and sound too much like the alphabet that already sickened us. I imagined a single-letter alphabet, one you could hold in your hands. Not that I planned to show this thing to just anyone. This I would be keeping to myself. Myself and maybe one other person.

It would require redundancy and nonsense built in, ligatures that expressed merely noise, to soften the harshness of meaning, extend it, disguise it. I saw it as a foam I needed to add to my system, a cloaking agent. I wondered if it could be built into a person’s body, to be activated by touch, by the absence of touch. This, too, must have been tried. We did not precisely understand how to control which symbols were perceived as nonsense, and which ones suddenly came to mean something. In fact, we understood nothing.

When I finished the first prototype, an inflatable letter vacuumed of air so that it looked like a miniature collapsed building, my idea of what had been missing from the Hebrew alphabet all along, I realized that I had inadvertently constructed an artifact that was, in appearance if not in function, very nearly identical to something from our Jewish hut, an item now confiscated. A listener, a Moses Mouth. But smaller. A baby one. New to this life. I’d finally found my smallwork. I could keep something from the motherfuckers who would abuse it.

I put it in my pocket and went out.