The Flame Alphabet (22 page)

A few days after my encounter with LeBov, and my first dose of the child chemical that triggered brief fits of speech and illness-free comprehension, I left my office, rounded a corner, and was abruptly ambushed by one of his people. Someone with a covered face hugged me and below my buttock I felt the cold potion flow.

LeBov was waiting for me in the cellar, outside the door to their Jew hole. He was attended by technicians hidden behind goggles, their heads wrapped in flesh-colored rags.
Enough strips of foam insulate to cover a large man
.

On LeBov’s neck a stained, brown bandage peeled up over a wound, threatening to fall off.

LeBov wanted to know if I had changed my mind, if I’d consider helping them.

The fluid from the injection activated, shooting through me like a rope of electricity. Immediately I felt that this dose of child fluid was
different
, laced with something harsh, a ballast of amphetamine, a numbing agent. They’d been tampering with it, pushing it through betas.

My speech resources were back. In my face a buzzing commenced, to be relieved only by talking. This medicine didn’t seem to just allow for language, it
demanded
it.

I looked through the window to the cold, vaulted space where the hole was.

Something pink was tied off to a pole, floating out of sight. It looked like a person hovering in the air.

LeBov asked, “Are you in?”

“You must have others,” I said.

LeBov said, “We do. Nine of them. Foresters. You’ll meet them. They’re a lovely crowd, and your participation, as they say, would round things out nicely.”

Nine of them. And I would make ten. Someone had been doing his reading, a little elementary Jewish procedure, put abroad into the world by our clever elders only to mislead the curious. It astonished me that people expected us to share our holy text, our rules and rituals, with just anyone, or even with each other.
Sharing
. What a tragic mistake. While the other religions begged for joiners, humping against the resisters until they yielded and swore themselves forever to their principles, we set about repelling them, erecting barriers to belief. It was how I preferred it. And LeBov had taken the bait. The so-called quorum of ten Jews required to ignite proper worship. This rule was one of our better decoys. I marveled at how off track he was. Whoever was running Forsythe thought a Jewish tradition, invented in the first place, was going to assist their decipherment of the transmission, a rigorously difficult act not tied to mystical belief whatsoever.

“You think a minyan is going to help you here?”

LeBov coughed with wretched force, while the technicians kept him from falling. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.

“Well, you tell me,” he said, heaving. “Enlighten me, please. Tell me what
will
help. I’m at your mercy.”

I looked away from him and said, “I wish you were.”

LeBov waved aside his technicians, but they didn’t leave, only took a step back while continuing to hold him up.

“How about this?” he said to me. “Let’s go take a look at something.”

I paused. LeBov’s show-and-tell had its downside. The last time he’d offered to show me something, it was a room full of children having their essence sucked free into a cup, to be boiled down somewhere into a speech-releasing agent. An essence now forced into my body twice. I didn’t get to see what happened to those children after the fluid was withdrawn, and I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see anything new that this man might have to share, but, despite myself, I was already following him.

We went up one level to a low, ankle-height window. You had to crouch to see out, pressing your face sideways against the cold floor, but this required too much strain for LeBov, so he reclined on the floor with his face at the window and invited me to join him. It was like we were testing a bed together in a department store and the headboard was a window we could see through.

Together we looked into a wet, stone room that held a crowd of people who seemed to be test subjects, potential ones. An endless supply of test subjects seemed to appear at Forsythe, and here was yet another holding tank. This group was no different from those I’d seen, and I was relieved; at least I’d not be shown some gruesome sight today. I knew I should feel pity for these people, but their endless numbers, their compliance, made sympathy difficult. These people today who we saw from the low window apparently had made it through most of the admissions process and were here waiting for their final decontaminating showers.

A jet of water shuddered through the room every so often, and someone stepped up to take his turn, twisting in the spume.

Among this group, huddled against the back wall waiting her turn, was my wife, Claire.

She looked calm, even pleased, as if she was waiting on a bench for the doors to open on a movie she wanted to see.

I tried to animate the months she’d spent since I’d left town, but could not will a picture of the extraordinary narrative that must have unfolded. I could only see her gasping on her back in the woods, trampled by a feral child, or scratching at the door of our house while Esther and her friends barked debilitating language sounds inside. I could not will her image into any functional mode, modes of escape, flight, competence—she had been so
ill
—such as what might have been required for her to first survive, and then to get all the way to Forsythe.

“So,” said LeBov. “The plot thickens.”

“The plot sucks.”

“Well,” he replied, as if there were some debate.

“Go on,” I said. “This is the part where you spell out the blackmail.”

LeBov took that in, said, “That seems tiring, though. Must we really get into that?”

In the stone room Claire had found a friend to huddle against. He seemed nice, a man with no hair. Not fat now, but probably once fat, because he had too much skin everywhere, skin hanging off him. I guess that meant he’d had trouble finding food. He wore large, women’s glasses and I wondered if he walked around expecting to be killed. He had accepted Claire into his arms as if she were a pet, stroking her hair. Maybe he was protecting her.

“What’d you tell her?” I asked LeBov.

“Well, it didn’t take much. Actually it took no telling. No wonder she married you. She thinks we have Esther in here. I waved a photo at her. Those family photos again. I’m not even sure it was actually a photo of your daughter. Maybe it’s a soft spot for children in general that your wife has?”

I asked, quietly, “And
do
you have Esther here?”

LeBov smiled. “It’s amazing what people will believe.”

“Would you have us believe nothing?” I said, so softly I hardly heard it myself. I knew I was taking the bait. I couldn’t help it.

He paused, gave it some thought. “Well, I do have that also. I have that right now, with some of my workforce, and I quite enjoy it. I have them believe nothing. And then with people like your wife, I have them believe what I require, which is slightly more than nothing. It’s not even that impressive. Is there anything more basic than having people believe things? It’s an elementary strategy of control, to get people to believe things. There’s not even that much artistry required. You should try it.”

If someone was operating the faucet in the holding tank where Claire waited, I couldn’t see him. One by one the potential test subjects rendered themselves nude before the cold jet of water, brought their speechless bodies into collision with the liquid blast. But it wasn’t strictly water, because what collected in the drain had a soapy, black foam in it, a dark brew of bubbles bearding up on the floor.

Soon it was Claire’s turn. She shed her coat, stepped from her nightgown, and with self-conscious charm flipped her hair back before submitting to the fierce spray.

She was really quite lovely, my wife.

LeBov seemed transfixed by the shower spectacle. His mouth had gone slack on the window, mist flaring over his face.

So he’d indicated to Claire that they had Esther in here, and now Claire thought she might just come in and get her? It was hard to think that Claire’s stubbornness had persisted over these last few months, had not yielded even slightly to the crush of reality. Esther would be too old for their purposes by now. At Forsythe teenagers were on the brink of illness themselves, but there was no way Claire could know that.

Or there was every way Claire could have known that, and more. I should have reminded myself not to think I had some advantage of perspective here.
What you are most certain of is what will undo you
, had said Rabbi Burke, once long ago. I had scoffed. It sounded like the mantra of a high school teacher who trafficked in homilies that no one believed.

The naked Claire stepped behind a curtain.

“And your plans for her now?”

“She’ll serve as an associate tester for us,” said LeBov, bored. He motioned his technicians over and they helped him up.

I pretended to know what that meant, and LeBov caught me trying to decipher what he’d said.

“You think we don’t rank them?”

“Does it matter what I think?”

“Good point,” he admitted.

He went on to explain that her class of test subjects would not die immediately. Claire would be exposed to materials that had not formally been ruled out, scripts, historical speeches delivered in a spectrum of accents, languages laced into ambient room sounds at subvocal thresholds, even though prospects were …

LeBov did not finish saying what Claire’s prospects were.

“It’s possible she’ll even get to read one of your funny little alphabets. What a nice reunion that will be. Maybe you should encode a message to her? ‘Dear Claire, how are you today? I am fine. This script, by the way, I made it myself! And … it will kill you. Love, Sam.’

“Turns out it’s not too late to apologize after all. What’s the hieroglyph for ‘I’m sorry’? In fact, let’s arrange that,” LeBov said.

He laughed. “Don’t you love closure?”

LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really
say
what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel the words of an invader. This kind of concealment was supposed to create tension, build mystery. We spoke in code, but no one was listening in, and we no longer knew the original language to which our niceties would be translated back. We were trapped in the code now for good. A language twice removed, stepped on, boiled into a paste, and rubbed into an animal’s corpse.

We returned to the door outside the Forsythe Jew hole.

I thought of Claire covering herself with the robe they dispense to the subjects, moving into the final processing line, waiting with the others. I thought of her standing there missing her daughter, looking strong and indifferent on the outside, but missing her daughter so hugely that she worried it would show, it would show and then she’d do something wrong, something that would only hurt her chances of seeing Esther again, so she braced herself further, hardened her look, erasing all signs of desire, of interest, of anything. Such erasure of one’s appearances, how can it
not
seep into the interior, even a little bit? What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?

I pictured Claire going to bed tonight. I didn’t even know where the subjects slept, and under what conditions, but that just made it worse. It could not be good, they were not providing comfortable hotel rooms for these people. She’d go to sleep tonight, I thought, and she’d be thinking,
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll go to where the children are, and they’ll show me to my Esther, and then, and then …
 And maybe Claire would fall asleep before working out those details, because those details could not be worked out. Maybe she’d not be too hard on herself by realizing how little she knew and how little she’d planned ahead for any of this.

I returned more seriously to LeBov’s request that I change work assignments.

“And is one medicated for this work, poking around in that hole?”

LeBov registered this shift in my resistance. I saw the shit in his eyes, the shit that appears when he knows he’s getting his way. It filled his eyes and some of it spread onto his face, and even though he had blackened teeth and a festering wound on his neck and his cough seemed like the worst, scariest cough I’ve ever heard, he beamed with pleasure.

“Sometimes,
in theory
, you’d be given the serum, but it’s going to depend on some issues surrounding supply. Supply and priority.”

“Well, count me out of these medical trials. I can do my work without speaking.”

“But you can’t,” said LeBov. “Seriously, are these really the conditions that will allow scientific progress, working mutely in a mute room with mute fucks wandering by who can’t tell you what the mute loser down the hall is even doing, or even how what you’ve just done, what you’ve tried to pass off as adequate research, is more mute loser work that is only a setback for everybody? Don’t you find it hard to be productive when you can’t communicate with anyone?”

LeBov paused, pretended to think.

“Oh, right. You’re not productive at all.”

The chemical from the child serum left a taste of berries in my throat.

“I won’t be fed this liquid,” I said.

“Won’t you? Without
this liquid
you wouldn’t even be able to tell me you don’t care for it. You see the problem, I’m sure.”

I remained silent.

About
this liquid
, LeBov remarked that the children were not too pleased to part with it. What resulted, after enough of
this liquid
had been withdrawn—I got no specifics—was a person not quite a child, not quite anything. LeBov said that there might be abilities, or talents, for these children post-procedure, but that these were still, and here he paused,
undiscovered
.