The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  She did it without thinking, and she did it to herself, and it was we alone who were sickened.

  But of course we’d find out it was others, too. Others and others and others.

  What she said was bitter, and we sipped at it and sipped at it, her mother and I, just ever so politely sipped at it until we were sick, because this was the going air inside our house, our daughter talking and singing and shouting and writing.

  Whatever we thought we wanted, to hug or kiss our daughter, to sit near her, it was our bodies that recoiled first. We cowered and leaned away from her words, we kept our distance, but Esther was a gap closer, bringing it all right up to our faces. Some sort of magnet was in effect. A father magnet. A mother magnet. As we fled, Esther gave chase. We covered our ears and she talked louder. Our daughter seemed not to care who was listening, and we were ready at hand, ready to service her needs. We stood up to it and took it like parents, because doesn’t the famous phrase say: shit on me, oh my children, and I will never fail to love you?

  We’d heard this at the forest synagogue from Thompson during an intermission, when Rabbi Burke allowed his staff access to the radio transmission, and we’d sat in the hut nodding our abstract consent to such a promise. Yes, of course we would love our daughter no matter what. How ridiculous to think otherwise. Ridiculous. It was so easy to agree to what did not test us.

  The sickness rode in on my name. Loaded and weaponized. Samuel, which Esther was old enough, her mother and I thought, to call me. A little grace note of parenting, which seemed to work for other people, and which we proudly took up as though we had invented it. But Esther wasn’t impressed by this privilege. She barked my name until it became an insult, said it louder, softer, coughed it up and spat it at me.

  We had missed the warnings on this one, phrases transmitted to our synagogue, the rabbi’s droning cautions. And they were killed with their own names. From the Psalms. Beware your name, for it is the first venom. Revelations. These warnings had always seemed like metaphors, the wishful equations of some ancient person’s mind. Little comfort, in the end, and it wasn’t my name alone that was toxic, but all of them.

  It came in hello and good-bye and any little thing she said. Except Esther didn’t much say hello. When she didn’t use my name she said Hey and Daddy. She said Ciao and Okeydokey on her way out, language she shared with some of the gender-neutral underlings, incapable of eye contact, she prowled around with, and with fingers I dragged my mouth to smile, even though it fell slack again when I dropped my hand.

  The reasoning, when reasoning seemed possible, was simple. Better to stand up to those happy moments, if that’s what they were, and give Esther a father who wasn’t such a spoiler, who didn’t turn pale on the occasion of even the most basic speech. But my face leaked force each time. A daughter was someone to pretend to be healthy for. A daughter shouldn’t see such sickness. Your child will be the end of you, Rabbi Burke had not yet said. I could speak back to her, and I could hear, technically I could. I could ask about school, or the feuds that consumed her, the massive injustices, often by omission, perpetrated by her friends, but the words felt foreign, like they were built of wood. A punishment to my mouth just to extract them, like pulling bones from my head.

  That this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in ever more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.

  4

  At first we thought we were bitten. Something had landed on our backs and sucked on us. Now we would perish. It was September, and the air was still soaked in heat, a nasty fried smell in the yard. Claire and I traced our lethargy, the buzzing limbs and bodies that we dragged around like sacks, to a trip to the ocean, where we succumbed to ill-considered napping atop a crispy lattice of seaweed and sand gnats that left us helplessly scratching ourselves for days.

  If we looked closely, a spatter of red marks spread across our backs. Map fragments, like an unfinished tattoo. Not freckles or moles. Possibly the welters from a bite, some rodent eating us while we slept.

  Claire spread out on her belly and I straddled her for the examination, but this was the wrong, sad view of her. Her bottom flattened beneath me, as if relieved of its bones, and the generous skin of her back pooled onto the bed.

  Esther walked in, looked at us with disappointment. I waved her away, mouthing some scold, hoping Claire wouldn’t notice that she’d been exposed in this position.

  “Really?” Esther said, louder than necessary. “I mean you couldn’t even close the door?”

  One should not look too closely at a spouse’s back, should not pin her this way to a bed. This was ill-advised scrutiny. I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. Claire squirmed under me, tried to hide from Esther’s sight.

  “Mom’s not feeling well,” I said, climbing down.

  “Then maybe you should leave her alone, Dad.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “Hm,” said Esther, using her face to freely show what she thought of that.

  Hadn’t Esther, her skin unspoiled, still tauntingly clear, napped on the same tangled nest? We’d set up camp on burnt sand, waiting our turn in line to splash in the fenced-in patch of ocean. The three of us ripped through a bag of salted candies, then fell into one of those blissful afternoon beach comas, sleeping in the sun, our limbs fat with heat.

  Claire had an explanation. The old, the tired, the ruined, got done in by bites. Turned into leaking sacks of mush. Whereas the young, they swigged venom to the lees and it supercharged their bodies. They could not be stopped.

  Conversations from the museum of the uninformed. It troubled us that our common sense had so little medical traction. There were doctors, and there were armchair doctors, and then there were people like us, crawling in the mud, deploying childish diagnostics, hoping that through sheer tone of voice, through the posturing of authority, we would exact some definitive change of reality. Perhaps we thought the world we lived in could be hacked into pleasing shapes simply by what we said. Maybe we still believed that.

  The medical tests, when we sought counsel, came back clear, the numbers low and dull. The doctors shooed us out. We had not been bitten. We would shake it off when the weather broke and the cold air came in. When the understaffed apparatus of our immune systems decided to take notice and erect a defense.

  Who even said anymore that fresh air was supposed to help anything?

  Drs. Meriwit and Borger did. Dr. Levinson did. Dr. Harris did. Nurses did, and interns at the clinic did, and the evening advisories did, as long as your doctor did.

  This was hobby diagnostics. This was troubleshooting by the blind. The hindsight on this isn’t just twenty-twenty. It sees straight through walls.

  As Murphy would later say: We are in a high season of error.

  The early diagnostics were sad and random, experts holding forth confidently on the unknown, using their final months as language users to be spectacularly wrong. We have unverified complaints, moaned the news.

  In Wisconsin the trouble was pinned to dogs. Animals took the blame up and down the coast. From Banff, from almost everywhere, came the question of pollutants, which wasn’t so wrong. Something in the air, something in the ground, a menacing particulate in the water. Something from the child’s mouth, it took them too long to realize. Drink less water, drink more. Use this filter. Put this filter in your fucking throat. Stop breathing and cease listening for a little while. Victims were dried out and saltless. Salt played a role. Of course it did. Streaking dunes of salt collecting first in the Midwest, sweeping to the south. Drifts and ridges and swells. Attractive in the landscape, if you didn’t know what it meant. Children themselves, their noxious oral product, were not yet being blamed, unless you counted the outskirt finger-wagging of LeBov, which too few of us did. But people were noticing that among the ill numbered no children. No one cared to connect the line from Lamentations that declares, And not one child fell to the plague. A u
niversity silo in Arizona published the theory that the impact of speech can be measured, with high dosages producing symptoms of the little death, the evening coma, a rictus in the legs. That would have been someone from LeBov’s staff, operating under a fake name, floating the notion.

  Before all names were fake. Before all notions had floated so far off, you could no longer see them.

  No one important was really looking into history yet, uncovering precedent, so much of it that the foreshadowing was embarrassing. It was not yet discussed that from Pliny comes the idea of the child who speaks the poisonous word, who uses certain mouth shapes to spread pestilence. In our reading of Galen we had not yet connected several mentions of disease originating in the child’s mouth. Herschel’s cone, termed by Vesalius, describes the spray radius of speech, a contact perimeter for exposure, and this we did not know. Nor did we know that an acoustical rupture is observed in Herschel’s cone by Paracelsus. Or that 1854 sees a medical exhibit in Philadelphia featuring the child-free detoxification hut, a prototype only, never adopted. Or that in the end Pliny had shielding nailed to his walls and sought immortality by banning children from his presence, dying only days later.

  Our symptoms at first were too vague to name, too easily linked to how we always felt: a bit of sludge in our systems so that we dragged around the house and slept long and looked away from our food. Pushed our plates to the side. Caught ourselves staring into space, drool flooding from our mouths. Friends smirked. The childless ones, underexposed so far. The old loners. The selfish mates who perfected hobbies and tended their own interests instead of turning over their lives to what Claire called a stewardship of the small and crazy. For a while they were fine. Just for a while.

  In retaliation we limited our evening drinking, took aggressive walks, performed the recommended stretches and bodywork. But our joints were hardening and our muscles were tight, and when I bent over I could no longer easily breathe. At night we filled ourselves with water and slept more deliberately, with silencing and darkening gear, when we weren’t waking up to dry heave. But we were every day stiffening, growing sicker, paler, more exhausted with what Esther could not stop doing.

  A decline in our appearance came next. Claire’s own hair had come to look like a wig, as if her body might reject it all at once. Her hands had the dimpled plastic cast of a mannequin, a body painted with something fake, then cooked. She had never worn much makeup before, but now she was pasting her face with it and she shuffled through the house with the clownish features an undertaker smears on his bodies.

  I smiled her way, a little too wide, because the display concerned me. I produced superlatives and praise, in chivalrous phrases that sounded like a foreign language, but I couldn’t get the tone right. I couldn’t scrub my voice of worry. If she returned my look she did so defiantly, daring me to say what I was really thinking. But I had already stopped doing that.

  A death mask aesthetics arose, and it occurred to me that Claire was making herself look worse on purpose. Which the sick will do. One can never be sick enough. Even the stricken can milk it.

  Some nights Claire and I pushed through the air as if it were solid, our bodies cleaving into fuzz, and then we came to a halt in it, locked up as if in a thick paste.

  “What’s wrong with you guys?” Esther snapped one night, looking up from the book she was reading as we drifted through dinner. Those words alone tightened my face and I tried to cloud what I heard so I could breathe again.

  Clouding. A good word for the strategic inattention one needed to practice around children.

  This was October, before my medical smallwork began, the interventions I conducted to protect myself and Claire. Smallwork, the techniques to keep you alive, at large, prompted from instructions received at our synagogue hut, when it was time to take matters into our own hands.

  On our bookshelves we had yet to install the speakers that would pump fine washes of hiss into the room, an acoustical barrier that would mostly fail to cloak Esther’s language.

  In our town, in the sweet spot of our county, we were like dark lumps of flesh moving through plasma. In a thousand years, perhaps, our descendants might evolve into creatures with a morsel of understanding at their core, some insight to untangle their gnarled dilemma, but for now, at this moment in our unevolved history, we were blessed with no skill for diagnosing our withered, exhausted state.

  We groped about, and if there was a harm’s way, we plunged into it so deeply that we were smeared up to the neck with the very stuff, the greasy paste, that was slowly killing us.

  We were tired, is what we said, which was like saying we were alive. Of course we were tired, who wasn’t? Asleep is the new awake, Claire conceded, tossing her hair back to reveal the muddled watercolor lady she’d made of herself. We weren’t worried yet. Don’t let your children see you worry: a rule we pursued, because in our hands a public show of feelings was not sporting. Claire and I had a way of smiling gamely at each other, which meant an admission of illness would be seized upon and punished. We would summon great blame. Our marriage, among its other features, had blacklisted claims of weakness.

  “I’m sorry, Sweetie,” I said to Esther. “We’re fine. We should go to bed early tonight, that’s all.”

  Issued as a gentle command from one ashen father to his family.

  Esther had turned back to her book by then, reading with the glaring superiority that suggested that this adventure story, or whatever she happened to be reading, was so far beneath her, she could hardly see it, idiot language engraved into paper by morons. And then when our food was already wilted and cold, after the conversation had expired, we heard the barest muttering from her. “If we go to bed any earlier, we might as well not get up.”

  The symptoms worsened. Someone from Forsythe, one of the medical research labs, called it a virus, menacing to the old, the weak. Menacing to the living, he might as well have said. Claire and I looked dipped in ash. Claire smelled sour, and given the distance she kept from me, I must not have smelled so fine myself.

  Something streamed down my legs when I coughed, when I breathed too hard. Something as warm and slow as blood.

  Soon we had to work at the basic behavior. It was work to walk. It was work to get dressed. To get undressed was work. To pee, to drink, to groom, forget it.

  With no official diagnosis forthcoming, we troubleshot at home, white-boarding the safer explanations first. Maybe this wasn’t a sickness so much as us getting older. Who knew what we were supposed to be feeling, anyway? We assessed our self-care and charted our intake. On principle we ate the better foods. Was one meant to be perfect at nutrition, otherwise be sickened? At first for dinners we had nuts and greens and the healthy oils. Plates of firm white fish crusted up in a glowing pan, shards of salt littered on top. A handful of salad on the side. For dessert a flavored ice or some crisp, cool fruit.

  Not anymore. The food burst into rotten morsels in my mouth when I ate. I thought I was chewing on skin, maybe my own. Frequently I spat sad things back onto my plate, and if I ate at all, I waited until Claire and Esther were asleep, snuck into the kitchen, and sucked on a rag soaked in apple juice, which offered cold relief.

  Our weekly trips to synagogue, trekking to the woods each Thursday, were robotic, if we even went. Until October we heard only the usual services, Rabbi Burke’s sermons lightened by occasional broadcasts of Aesop’s tales. At synagogue we sat in stunned exhaustion, taking in nothing, and we barely got ourselves through the woods back home again before collapsing.

  Claire and I started making way for each other, the small courtesies one shows a sick person. Wide berths in the hallway and boundaries observed in bed. We slept in lanes, did not visit each other in the night, even for the sexless embrace, to extinguish each other’s insecurities, to see what comfort there wasn’t in someone else’s cold frame. Skills arise to suit this sort of work. I could turn over without breaching Claire’s side of the bed. A person wants his space when he feels like that.
Even our functional kisses—good night and, less happily, good morning—were drily offered at a distance, faces braving the infected space, bodies angled away as if leaning into a terrible wind. Separately we showered and bathed and soaked in salts, we rinsed with astringents, dutifully pursuing what hygiene we could manage, but something wasn’t washing out, and I was versed enough in rotting, spoiling, putrefaction—we all have our specialties—to know that these odors of ours were not the oils of the skin or the tolerable foulness of sweat.

  If Esther banged on the bathroom door and so much as shouted “Hurry!” that word alone tightened my throat. I’d go to my knees, the wind knocked out of me.

  The evidence was mounting, but I seemed to have a pact against insight, a refusal to name my poison. Esther had no such inhibition. Esther knew, in the precocious way of nearly everyone but us. She might have thought it was what she said that hurt us: the actual words in their scathing specifics, as if meaning itself ever had that kind of power. But she could have been singing us love songs, cooing little melodies of affection, and the effect would have been the same. By now, or maybe always, the meaning failed to matter.

  I required Esther’s total silence. When I looked at her—a young girl dipped in a shell of unkillable health—it was with pure, scientific ambition. I had a technical, professional need, and it wasn’t personal, or of course it fucking was. I needed my daughter to disappear from my sight. If I could have had a wish, I would have wished her away.