The Flame Alphabet (23 page)

“Maybe you can write stories for them. They can still read. I mean, we don’t take away their immunity to language. But their comprehension levels are quite low. What we’ve found, though, is that people with very low comprehension levels, people who fail to understand things, did not get sick so readily when the toxicity first hit. If your wife got sick faster than you, it means she understood more. Does that ring a bell? Some pretty smart people died instantly. It was nice. It cleared space for lots of less intelligent people to take over.”

“Can’t you duplicate this liquid in a lab?” I asked. “Make a synthetic version?”

“Have at it,” he said. He winced, gently touched the bandage on his neck.

I wished he meant it. Instead, I was having at something they had all agreed was futile. I didn’t want that anymore.

I asked who else was using this liquid, what the other side effects were.

“What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a
LeBov
? If you want access, and information that doesn’t even fucking
concern
you, then do what I’m asking, fix the motherfucker for me. Get some secrets out of that hole before I rip someone’s face off.”

The exertion triggered something in LeBov and he fell to the floor, coughing. Around him crowded his technicians, and by wagon one of them dragged in something covered by a blanket. It wriggled under there, groaned. A wet spot soaked up through the wool.

I thought of Claire waking up tomorrow morning thinking
This is the day
, stepping over the badly slept bodies of her cohorts, and then getting led down hallways and corridors and through rooms and out, finally, into the sickening light of the courtyard, where she could finally, she just knew, run to Esther and hug her close, and even if they could not speak, couldn’t they be near each other, maybe find a shelter somewhere to enjoy each other’s company in silence? Why, after all, would anyone want to keep Esther from her?

But instead there’d be no children greeting her in the courtyard, just a table and chair, and Claire would take a seat as the technicians approached her with a foil envelope.

What would be inside it? she’d wonder, as the faceless technicians opened the seal and removed the contents, page after page, to place before her eyes, retreating quickly to the safety of their shielded rooms.

Now what could this be?
Claire might wonder, picking up the materials.

This is when I agreed to help. I would join the crew at the hole, help them fix the transmission, if I could, and leave them to eavesdrop on messages—the old Jewish services that no longer worked—that were none of their business.

It took some time but we worked out the details, polishing LeBov’s blackmail until it had a disgusting shine to it.

“I’ll need some assurances,” I said.

“Of course you will.”

“Something I can count on.”

“What, Sam, do you want something in writing?”

His smile revealed a slick, black film that had crept all over his teeth.

I didn’t, no. I didn’t want anything in writing ever again.

We were about to part when I asked LeBov a question, something that had been on my mind.

He sat on the floor, breathing through a respirator. The mask fed into a dark wooden box resting in the wagon.

“When I first met you,” I started.

“Memory lane?” LeBov asked, removing his mask. “You want to talk about the old days?” He checked his watch, then signaled to a technician, who appeared to convulse at the signal, folding his body inward as if he’d absorbed a cannonball, like one of those old-fashioned performers.

“When I first met you,” I continued, “you were getting sick in the bushes. Vomiting. You were sick.”

“Oh, the good times.” LeBov took a desperate breath from his mask.

“But were you actually sick? Was that real?”

LeBov dropped the mask, hacked into his towel.

“That’s mirroring. I learned it in fucking first grade. You adopt the behavior of your opponent, then escalate it. Saw it on one of those film strips about insects. If he’s susceptible, you gain his trust and he thinks he’s found an ally for life.
Finally someone who suffers like me! A friend!
Works pretty well on Jews, who usually think they’re unique. Maybe even in kindergarten I learned that. With Mrs. Krutz. She was a fucking genius, actually. Mrs. Krutz once …”

“You didn’t
gain
my trust. I was already suspicious of you. I felt sorry for you. But up at Tower Ledge, that couple you were harassing? What did you want from them? What happened to them?”

“Which couple? There were so many.”

I told him which couple. I told him when.

“Oh, I ate them alive, probably. Isn’t that what you think? I cooked those bastards in a sauce. Can you picture that? This is ridiculous. Your questions are the questions of a two-year-old.”

“Did they have a listener that you wanted?”

“I already had their listener. Spent some time alone with it. Punched it into shape. Have you ever punched one? It’s amazing. It’s like punching a baby. You know? I mean it’s
just
like that. Their listener is nailed to the wall now. A hand-forged copper nail, in case there’s any residual current in it. That part was easy. They kept their listener in a cigar box because, believe it or not, they never went out to tie it off on a cable.
Bad
Jews.
Very
bad. They’d stopped going to synagogue. But their
boys
, those were harder to acquire. Negotiations were more … demanding.”

“Were they your first?”

“My first? My first
what
? Mother was my first, and then Father. And after that my brother Stewart. They were my
first
. Then I went back for seconds. Because I was still
hungry
. Do you think the demon speech began out of nowhere a few months ago and swept through town all of a sudden? A little suburban catastrophe? Is that really what you think? You think I fucking work
alone
? You think there’s not a human machine the size of the world that didn’t anticipate this
transition
?”

“You know,” I said, “rhetorical questions, even with your fucking potion, make me sick to my stomach.”

LeBov fell to coughing again, and when he returned the mask to his mouth and continued to cough, the sound of his hacking was rendered hollow, echoing as if from outside the halls of Forsythe, like a secret code in the forest being shared among animals.

With LeBov in distress, attended by faceless, hose-wielding technicians, I was released too early back into the facility that afternoon. Before I was escorted away, LeBov started to seize, then yelled something through cupped hands, his hands shaping his cry into a curious acoustical object, as if he’d built a bird from pure sound. I grew suddenly light-headed, and one of the technicians fell to the floor, twitching.

It might have been wiser had they returned me to the holding room and wrapped the blanket over my head until the dosage expired. Instead, I was at large in the halls of Forsythe, where I enjoyed strong minutes of language power before the fluid wore off, a protection that surged into my evening encounter with Marta, which I will relate in a moment. First I hurried back to my office so I could work on the Hebrew letter in full view, without the pinhole device, without the impediment of the self-disguising paper that denied nearly everything of an object. None of those cautions were needed today. These were the working conditions I had craved, and I didn’t want them to go to waste.

It was a poor decision.

At my desk, with my language immunity still juicing through me, I surveyed the whole letter, if that’s even an accurate way to describe it; this wasn’t a letter anymore but a gristled cluster of cells, nearly bone-like, smitten around the rim with hair. It required the moisture and warmth of a hand to activate, at least if I would have my way, and I started to deploy it into communicative service, producing with it a script of a
distinctly personal nature
. As a complete object, liberated from its concealing medical tape and propped against a plywood backdrop, the letter repulsed me, but I took no interest in my own reaction. My own reaction, my own interpretation, my own feelings, for that matter, held little useful meaning for me.

Whoever said that had been right.

Without language my inner life, if such a phrase indicates anything anymore, was merely anecdotal, hearsay. It was not even that. It was the noisings one might detect if a microphone were held against a stone in the woods. Too much effort is required to divine activity within things like persons. There is a reason this subjective material is trapped inside people and cannot be let out. As such, my thoughts, when I bothered to have them, bored me, especially if I could no longer unleash them into the world with my mouth and effect some kind of response from people, so I ignored them and set to work.

I’d never held a shrunken head, but this was what one must be like: a cold, wrinkled organism submitted to a blistering round of dehydration, then crushed down to alphabet size. There were letters based on body parts, activities, feelings, but this was different. This letter, composed of what was missing or inferred in all the other Hebrew letters, was a species unto itself, and while I worked under the bright shield of the child serum, immune to the sluices of resonance, of comprehension that flowed so jarringly into me, my experimental letter gave off the unmistakable stink of organic matter left too long in the sun.

I pierced it with a needle. I pierced it and then squeezed it, examining the hole with a magnifying glass, but no matter how hard I squeezed, no black fluid beaded up. Not even a puff of dark powder.

Several times I gagged on the fumes, which only confirmed to me that it was nearly ready.

The potential was here for a self-disguising object that might be used as languages once were. Even though I could not assess its toxicity today, since I was protected by the serum, I recalled that under no protection, days ago, I had not been durably sickened. Even without the serum this letter had not wounded me. I had to believe the letter would allow for some elementary, nonfatal communication. Serum or not, I had to think this letter would work.

Such was the flawed reasoning I practiced.

As a test I would embed a message Claire would instantly know, something that could only come from me.

My focus felt cold and clear. I did not ask for the serum that made this work possible; I wished it never existed. Yet since it did exist, since someone
had
discovered that a child might be siphoned in order for our speech to resume, I could not now deny its merits.

I pictured the children surrendering it through tubes in an underground room at Forsythe. Not just Forsythe, but elsewhere, at facilities in Wisconsin, Denver. I’d lost track of where the important work was being done.

I pictured myself in charge of this extraction. I lacked discipline when it came to the imagination, and here I was in my own mind leading a team, holding down children, some of whom grew distressed during the procedure, withdrawing the essence that protected them from the toxic speech. Withdrawing it so people who mattered—who had
tangible communicative aims
that they would soon enact,
for the benefit of every living person
—could ingest it and carry on in the world. This was simply about loaning a resource from a surplus site and shuttling it to an area of deficit.

Not everyone needed to speak. We’d have delegates, elected language users. Public servants.

Resource management involved compromise, but the gains could be so glorious.

For reasons totally other than moral,
completely outside of the so-called human implication
, a child-fueled communication system was problematic.

I knew that. And yet when my first dosage wore off I felt a skin peel away, and a skin, and another skin, and it was a great loss, a technical, objective sadness. Not my own, but a sadness belonging to the situation. Unprotected, the air was suddenly a salt on the body, and the overhead lights were a salt, and when I moved too quickly I felt a blast of granular salt at every turn.

An anecdotal observation, meant to illustrate how much protection this serum offered, regardless of its source. It was an exquisite thing, and without it we would be walled off from one another forever.

If the serum was high and burning in my blood right now, I would use its defenses to finally tackle my work with all of my faculties in play.

The first time they’d shot me with enough fluid to endure the session with LeBov, but this last time the antidote lasted longer, and I forgot myself.

I finished work and left my office, testing my power in personal whispers as I went, talking to myself
out loud
. Through the corridors and halls and then on the entertainment byway I walked with a weapon, one that could not hurt me, past my fellow scientists and the technicians and the women in white business attire, some of them dragging bright wagons that carried the same kind of old oak box they used on LeBov.

In the television room the facially distorted children ran as a group into the sea and did not come out.

Out in the hallway nothing was happening on the high monitors. The video feeds of the world offered the same dull exteriors. One feed revealed a man on a scooter whisking down the highway. On another feed a meadow spread out into the distance, disrupted by strange swells. These were shelters, but if people came and went, if people even existed, one saw no evidence of it.

At the child quarantine monitor a small clutch of scientists had gathered, studying the screen. They stood there pretending they were not hoping to catch sight of a child of theirs. They studied the screen as if their interest was merely professional, when in reality they were window-shopping against the glass that held the last possible hope that they might see their children.

I went to the coffee cart and found my sexual partner straightaway, and together we moved quietly back to my quarters, our hands lightly touching.

The ordeals of the day had demanded a trip to the coffee cart. Seeing Claire undergo the shower sequence, prepped to serve inside the facility as a test subject, seeing her endure the decontamination proudly, as if she’d been selected for special service based on her unique abilities, and, further, agreeing to change my work assignment in a few days and begin to help decode the transmissions from the old, abandoned Jewish hole hidden beneath the facility, all of these things led me to the coffee cart, where I felt a sexual engagement was now appropriate.

Tonight with a paralyzed face Marta unzipped my jumpsuit, gathered it up, and placed it folded on the dresser. This was kind of her. I dropped to the bed and watched her undress.

It would have been nice to see Marta undergo the horizontal shower spout where they prep the test subjects, if only because she would handle it gracefully. I felt strongly that it was not a harsh treatment to be sprayed that way, just a forceful one with a specific aim, but it allowed a naked body a particular luminous beauty, absorbing propulsive blasts from the water jets. Marta would have sustained such a treatment nobly, and if I could have watched it facedown against the floor looking through that low window—even if LeBov, wheezing through his blackened teeth, had to join me—I would have gladly done so.

During intercourse with Marta, the last traces of the serum still fizzing in me, I tested the air with a word.

In bed, in the early part of our expressionless exchange, when sexual release seemed so distant as to not even be likely tonight, no matter what techniques were deployed, I spoke by mistake or on purpose, or, more likely, I spoke from a mixed motive that had not been properly examined, and Marta tensed in my arms, tensed and grew cold.

I cannot remember the word I spoke, but I do remember what it felt like to have my hands on Marta when I did it, to feel the violent rejection shake through her body at the release of
a single word
. I was able to hold her body in my hands and speak, and there was no stronger demonstration of how the acoustically delivered word was simply violating.
A disease born straight from the mouth
. How she reacted as if I’d pushed a knife into her ribs and then kept pushing, when it was no longer funny, leaning on her with all my weight.

Marta shot from the bed, rolled against the wall, and came to rest panting. From the chair she grabbed her things and hurried into them. Only then did I start to see what might technically be considered a
feeling
from her. I’d unleashed something, and I wondered, hypothetically, what more words might do, a sentence, several sentences, if I managed to lock the door and bar her exit while I held forth on some topic that might have concerned me, or even addressed the growing bond between us, since we had never once spoken about our relationship.

I had all the power of a child.

As she got dressed and made her way out of my room, Marta looked at me plainly, as if she was curious, in the detached, scientific sense, why I would have any interest in hurting her. I’d seen that face before, and I hadn’t realized it was a face that could be shared, used by more than one person, but it had appeared on Claire, and I had always thought that it was hers alone, to use only on those special occasions when I had disappointed her. But apparently this was a face that Marta had access to as well.

Marta’s unspoken question—why I had caused her harm—was one I would not have been able to answer. There was a small, decisive advantage to the language toxicity here. One did not have to stand there explaining oneself, inventing motives that might make sense to someone. Explanations of any kind, in fact, were simply extinct.

Among the many rhetorical modes that had perished, it was this one I was not sorry to see go.