The Flame Alphabet (5 page)

At dinner we tried to extract the details about Esther’s trip, but all she did was eat and mumble. The trick was to make this conversation unlike an interrogation, to conceal our basic curiosity, which is what Esther found to be our most appalling trait.
How dare you care about something? Don’t you know what a breach it is?
When we let down our guard and showed interest, Esther’s anger flared up.

My tricks of reversal were never any match for her, either. I could say, “It sucked there, I heard,” and she would grunt. I could say, “Your mother made love to a horse once,” and she would scoff. I could say, “Eloise (the nickname we’d privately given her grandfather) will be surprised to hear how well you’ve learned to fire a pistol.” Nothing, no response, ever.

So we fell into the old cajole. We prodded, she resisted, we sulked and put our own irrelevant feelings in the air, and Esther suddenly, after we had cursed the whole transaction and felt disgusted by the topic, got talkative, after which we tuned out and quietly longed for her to shut up.

The medically definitive moment came with the story of the horse.

Esther had much to say about a horse there named Genghis, a great old roan, a sergeant of the New York grass. This horse, apparently, had shown Esther some exclusive, rare affection. Or so claimed the instructor, who was evidently impressed that Genghis, who did not care for people, had made an exception for Esther. But people are always telling kids that a particular animal likes them. Kids are told that every person likes them, too, when in fact most people do not, or could not be bothered. And yet this horse really, really did like Esther, in some kind of different way, which in the end couldn’t but impress Esther, who in her diligent way made a singular effort to distinctly
not
be liked, which made this horse in my view an idiot, and could she maybe get a horse, you know, for real, if she saved her allowance and did what we asked of her and promised not to want anything ever again?

I did not appreciate how easily Esther had been fooled by this sort of thing. Where was the old suspicion, the doubt, the more or less unchecked hatred? Why didn’t she mistrust this horse the way she mistrusted, for instance, us?

I said, “Whatever happened to: any horse that likes me isn’t worth a damn?”

Claire shot me a look. Slow it down, she didn’t need to say. Don’t spoil her enthusiasm.

“And who names a horse Genghis?” I continued.

Esther stabbed at her food.

The best part of the trip, she told us, was the last day, because they were allowed to take the horses on some back trails. The kids went off alone, she said. The kids rode unsupervised all day and even got to put the horses away and do stuff the counselors usually did. And then they got to eat whatever they wanted that night because the counselors didn’t feel like cooking, supposedly.

Didn’t feel like it.

I had to ask, and the counselors, well, they’d come down with something, hadn’t they, some really nasty, uh, flu?, and the timing wasn’t so good but they’d all gotten pretty sick, so they sort of rested while the kids stayed up late and talked and it was the best night ever.

Dinner provided the first localized site of language exposure since Esther had returned from her trip, and what happened to our bodies would prove to be textbook.

We did not know it yet, but LeBov had already issued guidance that the toxicity was perceptibly worse after you’ve broken exposure from it, the reaction far more visceral. From Esther’s mouth came something that was causing a chemical disruption, like a mist borne on the climate. That’s the only way to explain it, and this was when any notion of a toxicity not connected to Esther’s language seemed instantly absurd. This wasn’t her hair or clothing or rural dander. This was nothing that could be washed off. The evidence was pouring right out of her face and we were bathing in it. There was a soiled quality to her words, something oily that made them, literally, hard to hear.

Later philosophers of the crisis, like Sernier, would mock the poetics of all this. He’d decry the absence of facts, the vague and personalized anecdotes that inevitably pollute the possibility for real understanding. Personal stories, Sernier would say, are the most powerful impediment to any true understanding of this crisis. As soon as we litter our insights with pronouns, they spoil. Ideas and people do not mix.

I would agree with everything Sernier says. But I’ll point out that bugs crawl from his mouth now, and there’s no one left to read what he wrote.

I looked over at Claire, who had been awfully quiet. Usually she stayed quiet on purpose, in retaliation, to allow Esther, as she put it, to discover herself out loud. To Claire, I was the obstacle as we battled for a foothold as parents. She would say that I offered so many listening prompts to Esther, such eager receptivity and sentence finishing, that I obliterated our daughter’s conversational flow and actually caused her reticence. One can be adversarial, apparently, through aggressive attention. My signs of interest, and their vocal accompaniment, claimed Claire, were the problem.

I looked over at Claire after Esther’s monologue, and she had vanished into herself, ghosted out with her long stare. Her hand covered her mouth, seemed to want to disappear inside it. In her eyes I saw nothing. They had gone to glaze.

There’s our answer, I thought.

Welcome to the relapse, I wanted to say, but Claire lurched from her chair, mumbling, “Excuse me,” and Esther and I looked away from each other as we heard confirmation from the bathroom, the sound of someone we loved trying mightily to breathe.

I produced some elementary noise interference with my utensils on the plate, but my food, some kind of porridgy loaf that was supposed to be a risotto, oozing over my plate like the inner mush of an animal, was bringing up my own small swell of nausea.

I cleaved into it, breaking its gluey shell, and a thread of steam released over my face.

Esther broke the silence first, her mother heaving in the background. “Wow,” she said. “Glad to hear you guys are on the mend. I was beginning to worry.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I pushed back from the table.

In the closet I grabbed a towel and went in to help Claire. I dampened the towel in the sink, knelt behind her at the toilet, held back her hair, which felt dry and breakable in my hands, and I brought my body down softly against her, feeling each of her shaking spasms deep inside me.

When Esther approached the bathroom I pushed the door closed, and Claire and I stayed in there until her footsteps retreated.

Even then we waited, catching our breath, which didn’t come back so well. For what felt like hours we sat together on the bathroom floor with the faucet in full thunder, until outside the streetlights sizzled out and we could be sure that Esther had finally gone to her room for the night and closed the door. Only then was it safe to come out.

At noon each Thursday, before the illness began to deter our worship, Claire and I collected religious transmissions from the utility hut on the county’s northern back acre.

As Reconstructionist Jews following a program modified by Mordecai Kaplan, indebted to Ira Eisenstein’s idea of private religious observation,
an entirely covert method of devotion
, Claire and I held synagogue inside a small hut in the woods that received radio transmissions through underground cabling.

The practice derived from Schachter-Shalomi’s notion of basements linked between homes, passageways connecting entire neighborhoods. But our sunken network existed solely as a radio system, feeding Rabbi Burke’s services to his dispersed, silent community. Tunnels throughout the Northeast, stretching as far as Denver, surfacing in hundreds of discrete sites. Mostly holes covered by huts like ours, where two members of the faith—the smallest possible
chavurah
, highly motivated to worship without the
pollutions of comprehension
of a community—could privately gather to receive a broadcast.

Our hut stands where Montrier Valley dips below sea level into a bleached, bird-littered marshland, and the soil rests under a rank film of water. If we took a direct path from home we could be listening to Rabbi Burke in under an hour. But monthly we had to change our route to the hut, switch approaches, delay arrival. Sometimes we spent half a day on detours so elaborate that even we became lost on our way to the woods.

Such huts were the common Reconstructionist camouflage of the time, erected over the gash in the ground, huts with gouged-out floors and a fixture called a listener to welcome the transmission cables and convert the signal sent from Buffalo, Chicago, Albany into decipherable speech.

Huts could be anywhere, disguised in the woods, hidden in plain sight. Yards would host these huts. Sometimes a field. Huts were marked with a star that only glowed with soil rubbed on it, affixed with a surveillance camera. To repel the curious, its walls might be armored in dung.

Generations ago, on Long Island and elsewhere, holes like ours were lined with stone, made to pass for wells. Mock pulleys and bucket systems were propped over them, every manner of concealment employed. The holes were guarded by boys, protected by a wolf, filled in with sand, prettied up with gravestones. Tradition tells different stories about how our predecessors channeled the rabbi’s word and none of them much matter. In any case, I don’t care so much for stories.

Our hut was assigned to us early in our marriage by Rabbi Bauman, and it was ours alone. If other Jews gathered there to worship, then we never saw them in that sector of woods. The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything. Bauman was firm on this, said our access would be revoked if we breached. You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise. Children were not allowed access to the hut. Their relation to you alone did not automatically qualify them. They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates. Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family,
even Esther
, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness. Burke called it a ploy against our own relationship to uncertainty. You can know nothing of another’s worship,
even when they try to tell you
. To desire that information is to fear a limitation to your own devotion.

There were rules of appearance as well. A hut could not look maintained. We tended the grounds, kept the landscape looking unvisited. In the fall I cleansed the surveillance camera, its lens gummed up by summer, by steaming heat and the moths that melted into slurry against the glass.

Build nothing of splendor over the hole, was the rule. If it were not for hostile visits, a naked hole would be ideal, a hole not hidden by any hut.

Rabbi Ira no doubt envisioned a hut-free world, where anyone could stop at a hole, crouch down, and avail himself of a sermon flowing up from the earth. The religion would be
on
all the time, would pour from the earth. But the world didn’t accommodate this ideal. Disguises were required.

The technology of the hut was a glowbug setup. The hut covered a hole and the hole was stuffed with wire. From our own hole came bright orange ropes of cabling, the whole mess of it reeking of sewage, of something dead beneath the earth. This wiring was grappled to the listener, and the listener, called a Moses Mouth by Bauman, even while we were instructed to never refer to it, was draped over the radio module. I’m understating the complexity of this. But on a good day, it just worked.

Transmissions flowed into the hut on Thursdays, usually at noon. Sometimes no messages came, or they arrived in broken notes from the radio and we suffered through services in languages too foreign to know. Our gear was faulty and old. The glowbug had one dry little input that always needed grease. In the winter it cinched shut and I’d have to stretch it back open with my finger.

Sometimes it was not word that we received at the hut, but a hissing silence, months of it, even as we waited for guidance, freezing in the hut under a pile of rotted blankets, groping beneath each other’s clothing to dispatch little moments of pleasure.

We did what we could, within the bounds of the rules, to make the hut cozy. We filled a wooden crate with extra hats, sweaters, mittens, then painted on it, instead of our names, the word
Us
.

Each time we visited the hut we brought a pink rubber ball to feed into the hole. We took turns dropping it in, listening for the distant, wet bounce. We wondered how many balls it would take, how old we’d be, when the balls piled up so high in the hole that they overflowed into the hut.

If we missed a visit sometimes we could coax a summary from the archive, my private term for the expired messages festering in the wire. But the summaries, if I released them, were skeletal, in bones of language that often could not be joined for sense. Such messages were often hammered flat, their meaning ripped out, as if the rabbi’s mouth when he spoke had been filled with glue. Transmissions expired into garbled tones if we did not enter the hut in time. But if we squatted in the hut and waited, if we slept there or overstayed, the transmissions receded, failed to issue in language we could understand.

From Buffalo the connection could be severed at any time, when tampering or illegitimate listening was attempted, and of course it was attempted all the time. Which meant that if the line was dead for too long, someone was out there trying to hack into Rabbi Burke’s broadcast.

The secrecy surrounding the huts was justified. The true Jewish teaching is not for wide consumption, is not for groups, is not to be polluted by even a single gesture of communication. Spreading messages dilutes them. Even
understanding
them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin. Bauman told us the only thing we should worry about regarding the sermons was if we understood them too well. When such a day came, then something was surely wrong.

At the hut a few days after Esther’s return from camp, when there could no longer be any doubt about what was sickening us, Claire scooped grease from the tub in the bin, then lubed the orifice in the floor by plunging her entire hand inside. I crouched behind her and when her hand popped out, I draped the listener over the fixture.

The listener, a warm bag filled with conductive gel, stripped away the hiss to reveal the underlying speech. Ours was scissored for us by Bauman from a larger bolt, and he gave us a quick course in its care. A small box of maintenance tools was entrusted to us, but I’d never needed it. I’d stashed it in my bedroom dresser, a box with a chisel, a thimble, some rubber clips, and clear sheets of what looked like gelatin.

The listener could not endure sunlight, nor could we risk hiding it in the hut, so we kept it buried in an unmarked grave that rotated according to season, and we retrieved and cleaned it for each visit.

Today the listener gripped the fixture as it siphoned out a broadcast, sputtering sound into the hut. On the steps we waited as the system hissed to life. Claire huddled inside her parka, stiffening when I touched her.

Burke’s service, when finally it crackled on, centered on blame and how we might distinguish ourselves through its broader adoption. But first we had to listen to songs, Burke’s melodies distorted through copper wire. From the radio came warbled noisings filtered through miles of earth. It is possible that in person Burke possessed a beautiful singing voice that transformed the dull language of song lyrics into transcendent moans. Transmitted all the way to our hut, Burke’s incantations only made us feel that we were listening to the death throes of an old man in bed, someone uttering his last.

When the service began, Burke held forth on the opportunity called blame. In blame is a chance to step into responsibility, to make of our bodies absorbent parcels for the accusations of others. Burke discussed how we might extinguish doubt in our neighbors, make their fears small. He insisted that blame can have no literal meaning; there really is no such thing when you love the Name, our term for Hashem. Blame exists only in our desire to bestow cause locally, and there is no such thing.
No such thing
. When people seek to place blame, it means they have nothing left to give. It reflects their inability to appreciate the inscrutability, the all-knowingness of the Name. Taking blame is then a service, and now we are called upon to offer this service again.

“A tremendous opportunity has arisen,” Burke said. “We have the chance to take the blame for something extraordinary, an incomprehensible affliction.”

Claire and I sat together on the cold floor of the hut. I could feel her listening next to me. She had tightened with attention.

Burke started shouting, the higher registers of his voice distorting the speaker.

“We can take this blame as a curse, and rage against it, crying out about unfairness. How can my child be blamed for anyone’s sorrow? My child is innocent! Innocent! Or we can receive this blame as a gift to us, which is what it is. So much of what we must do today is sculpt our understanding to accommodate what we cannot bear. Now we must help people who do not understand, even if we are lost ourselves. This is our role. And we do this by stepping forward, saying,
I
, it was
I
who did this.
I
did this to you. Not my child.
I did it
.”

Claire sounded like she’d been struck in the chest.

“Understanding itself is beside the point,” Burke said, more calmly. “Do not make of it a fetish, for it pays back nothing. That habit must be broken. Understanding puts us to sleep. The dark and undesired sleep. Questions like these are not meant to be resolved. We must never believe we know our roles. We must always wonder what the moment calls for.”

Rabbi Burke did not officially exist in public. There was no such person. Our system of worship was likewise kept secret, which means that our practice at the hut suffered its share of misinformation and rumor. The more we concealed it, the more it troubled people, so they invented actions for us, ascribed false powers to the radio. It was guessed to be a hole in some secret location that speaks only to Jews. From the hole came bits of data: sound, word, and pulse, that Jews alone could decode, using their oily gear, their hacked electronics.

We endured lurid speculation on what we might be doing in the woods. We were called forest Jews and in newspapers cartoons depicted what awful work we’d undertaken. The Jew, in these images, sits on a jet of steam that charges him with special knowledge. God’s air, heated to a vapor, is blown over the mystic. The Jew fits his sticky red mouth over the nozzle and sucks. Into a vein in the Jew’s leg comes the cold, clear liquid.

And then the speculation on the dark electronics of such messaging, how a system like this could even work. A radio console with a flesh underside is postulated. Modules sheathed in gauze, lubricants siphoned from children, injected to flow through custom gears.

In our defense spoke only those who said we did not exist. We’d been invented by our enemies to give them something to tear apart with their teeth. How convenient, a Jew with important secrets. How self-serving to you, they said. These were our defenders, but to them we were a fiction. It was not clear that we owed them gratitude.

The Jewish person who has not received an assignment at a hole, and the Gentile who has only heard rumors about the gear that governs the hole’s ritual, have missed the elemental purpose of these transmission sites:
the Jewish transaction is a necessarily private one
. I am thinking of people like Murphy who would plunge his fists into it, believing he could extract some perfect remedy for the speech fever.

The topic was a common one in the broadcasts. Burke returned to it often. What others, with no information, might make of us.

Let such errors stand, he always said. Their mistakes put good miles between us. There is no better blessing for us than to be unknown.

If a knowledge is to be made public, went the saying, it should erect a shell around our secret. Such is true of the Torah, the Talmud, the Halakha we appear to follow. When we communicate, we do so to throw them off our scent.

Claire and I had done our part. Said nothing. Never indicated for a moment that we were members of this faith.

“To be a Jew is to let them be wrong about you,” said Burke today. “If we cannot allow this, then nothing is possible.”

He always lowered his voice when he was nearly finished, an emphatic whisper he used to hammer home his final point.

“There is nothing like being profoundly misunderstood. Let others expose their secrets, advertise their identities, neutralize their mysteries with imprecise language. A Jew must project behavior distant from his aim, must cast up a puppet world for those who are watching. Puppets made of real flesh. Puppets who weep, bleed, die.”