The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  Claire tucked some cookies in her mouth, moving them around with her tongue as if they had bones.

  I would have liked to believe in her recovery, but the evidence was impossible to ignore. On our carpet Claire looked like one of those terminal patients let out of the hospital for a final field trip to her favorite restaurant, a ball game. A pity outing. She was thin and pale and when she smiled something dark shone from her mouth.

  I would not oppose what Claire claimed about herself or argue her from her position, so I said nothing of the bruising on her hands, the dried blood crisped over one of her ears. Instead I scooted next to her and felt how little she was, how even through her coat I could feel the long cage of my wife’s bones. When I hugged Claire, with sick people strewn in the field, I felt the shallow swell of her breath and she seemed to me like a bellows that I could control, opening and closing her to the air of the world. I thought if I held her I could always be sure she could breathe. I could just squeeze her a little bit, and when I released her the sweet air would rush in to revive her.

  From our portable radio came word that studies had returned, pinpointing children as the culprit. The word carrier was used. The word Jew was not. The discussion was wrapped in the vocabulary of viral infection. There was no reason for alarm because this crisis appeared to be genetic in nature, a problem only for certain people, whoever they were.

  It was probably only contagious within a certain circumference.

  Allergy is such a broad word, claimed one of the experts on the news. Of course, to some degree, we are allergic to everything. But we react at different rates, sometimes so slowly that we never show symptoms.

  I imagined myself tearing up this man’s credentials, burying him in a hole.

  As our tools of detection improve, we see more symptoms.

  At this point it was not a terrible idea, if you felt you fit the category, to bring your child in for testing.

  When they started listing counties, I turned off the radio.

  The day defaulted with small eruptions of chatter until the air fell cold at the appointed hour. The sun looked ready to falter. Our neighbors drifted off, helping each other from the field in a long, slow shuffle until Claire and I were alone.

  This was what we wanted. We usually waited late into the afternoon for everyone to leave so we could have the last bright minutes of the day to ourselves.

  At a high southern swell in the field, past the fire pit, a sight line down the ledge into the tangle of evergreens allowed us to see the rough location of our forest synagogue, a little two-person hut hidden in the woods.

  If our hut had an antenna, perhaps it would surface through the trees and serve as a landmark. Maybe on a day like this we could look down from the field and see it. But our hut used no antenna, so from the field you could never see the structure itself or even the little trail we took each Thursday up from the creek bed to get there. From above you couldn’t see anything but woods. From above you couldn’t be sure that our synagogue existed. Sometimes even inside it, while Rabbi Burke’s sermon pumped from the strange radio, I felt the same way.

  Claire and I held hands as the field darkened and we said nothing. Our silence was a rule of the synagogue, something we swore to when we were first entrusted with membership. We did not discuss what we heard there, nor did we discuss the hut itself. Even just looking at it from this elevation in the field we remained, by mandate, quiet.

  But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The enforced silence was a relief. Because all talk was banished we could not disagree, we could not mutually distort what we heard during services. There was nothing to debate, nothing to say, and the experience remained something we could share that would never be spoiled with speech.

  On the footpath back to the car, we passed people huddled in the woods, voices warped in dispute. A man wept and a woman seemed to berate him in whispers. Normally when couples fought, Claire and I put our heads down and charged past them, congratulating ourselves later for getting along so well. We’d never fight like that! Out in public! We were better than that!

  But this didn’t seem like a domestic argument.

  Through the trees, in the grass, sat a man and woman I recognized from the picnics. They had two kids I didn’t much enjoy, boys who belted each other and fell down so often, they seemed immune to pain and probably the higher feelings as well. But I didn’t see the boys now, only the parents.

  Standing over them was a large man with red hair, wearing an athletic suit. He was not one of the regulars from the field. I didn’t know him.

  “Everything okay?” I called into the trees.

  The couple didn’t respond, just whispered harder.

  “We’re good,” the tall redhead finally answered, and when the man groaned, the redhead seemed to shush him.

  Are you speaking for everyone? I didn’t ask.

  The redhead looked back through the trees, weaving to get an angle on us, but I’m not sure what he could see.

  Claire pulled on my arm. “C’mon,” she said, “let’s go.”

  It was getting darker and colder and Claire and I were too tired to have been out this long. She tugged on me and leaned downhill, pleading.

  “Maybe I should call someone,” I whispered to Claire, pulling against her.

  But the redhead must have heard me.

  “We’ve already called someone, they’re coming. Everything’s taken care of.”

  He didn’t look our way. He seemed to be trying to block my view of the other two. If I could have examined them, would I have seen the facial smallness, felt a hardened callus forming under their tongues? Would there have been a yellow stain in their eyes?

  Claire started off downhill without me, said she’d meet me at the car.

  The redhead went to his knees, folding his huge body over both of them as if he might protect them from a blast. Then a distant, small sound, a kind of high-pitched whine, pierced the air. But it could have been anything, really. It probably was.

  I waited and heard nothing, then struck off down the path back to the car.

  When I looked back one last time, the redhead had emerged from the woods and stood by himself on the path. He didn’t see me, just started heading uphill, back to the field, which was empty by now, and certainly growing dark.

  I couldn’t think what a man like that would want up at a Jewish picnic field at night.

  This was Murphy, walking away from me. I would formally meet him in a week, and not by accident. He was already canvassing Jewish families, probably had been for months, or even longer. Canvassing might not be the word for what he was doing. Cornering, manipulating, extracting. There is no precise word for this work. There can’t be. In the end our language is no match for what this man did.

  6

  That evening we got to work on Esther’s welcome-home dinner. We cooked in silence. This was us at our best, stew building, salad making, sweating, and braising. We cleaned as we went and we bussed each other’s dishes. Maneuvering around each other with polite touches on the arm. Claire and I were suited for joint tasks, parallel play. We were proud of how well we got along in the kitchen, when married couples were supposed to drive each other to violence while assembling a sandwich. Harmony came easily for us, and it was perhaps our most salient statistic, the least problematic of our virtues.

  When Esther returned, we didn’t know it at first. She slipped quietly into the house and went to her room. The bus must have dropped her off, but we heard no greeting when she came in and our little welcome home ceremony never happened. Claire was putting some laundry away as I was setting the table when I heard her yell, “Oh my god, you’re back!”

  A blast of one-sided chatter filled the air. Countered by the return fire of Esther’s silence. I saw no reason to intrude on their reunion. I waited at the table as Claire’s voice muddied into nothing against some part of Esther. This would have indicated the hugging and nuzzling, the probably exaggerated joy. I could picture Esther ha
lf squirming away, too embarrassed to openly enjoy the affection of her mother, but not cold enough to flee it entirely. I was bracing for her ambivalence to mature into a more liberal hostility.

  “Esther’s home!” Claire shouted.

  I held my ground.

  Esther’s allergy to ceremony was predicted by all the guides we’d half read about teenagers. We saw it coming, then put our heads in our own asses. We were warned, but still we insisted on basic politeness as part of some dim instinct we had to remain in control. Esther abhorred all the functional vocal prompts one bleated in order to stabilize the basic encounters, to keep them from capsizing into awkward fits of milling and hovering. Hello and good-bye and thank you to strangers; good morning and how are you. These phrases were insane to her. She would pick the simplest rituals, the most basic behavior that people keep in their back pockets and whip out without a fuss, and wage dark war against them, scorning us mightily for caring about the exchange of niceties.

  “What have you learned, Samuel, when you’ve asked me how I am?” she sniped once.

  “Maybe I’ve learned … how you are?”

  “Right,” she nodded. “And you can’t tell that by looking at me? Is that really your best way to find out what you need to know?”

  “Sweetie, talking to you isn’t just about gathering information.”

  “Apparently not, because you don’t remember a single thing I say. Your gathering mechanism is fucked.”

  Had Esther just said mechanism?

  She seemed in her element during these conversations, glowing with the power she had over me, as if I should enjoy it, too.

  I’d parry with oily fathery lameries. “Doesn’t it feel better to say things to people?”

  “Feel better? It feels like shit. It feels entirely like the worst kind of shit.”

  Little did she goddamn know.

  “Okay, darling, I’m sorry.”

  And thus a rhetorical marvel was engineered: I apologized to Esther, regularly, for her refusal to be queried on her well-being. I regularly failed to mount cogent justifications for any of the human practices. They turned out to be indefensible to her. In the end I was a poor spokesman for life among people. Such were the victories of language in the home.

  After they’d snuggled and debriefed, Esther trailed Claire out of her room. Esther looked heavily guarded, as if to say, I have been at horse camp and I have changed considerably, in ways you could never understand, so let’s not waste each other’s time, you old asshole. Stay away from me, you tiny, silly creatures, for you have not been to horse camp.

  Out of consideration for her privacy, I did not strive for eye contact.

  Leave the little gal alone, I reminded myself, give her space, even though I wanted to hug the crap out of her and maybe get a smell of those horses I had paid for her to play with.

  Such admonitions against trespass kept me afloat with Esther. But she was adorable-looking, which I wasn’t allowed to mention, and the one thing I most wanted to do, to hold her and tickle her and just be next to her, was the one thing that was definitively not on the table. Not even near it.

  Esther’s usual poker face couldn’t really hide her suspicion. She had deep energy reserves for uncovering contradiction and hypocrisy. When she smelled it she jumped into action. This new bit of news—Mom and Dad are feeling better—was vulnerable to attack, obviously. Clearly she’d been clued in to our ostensible recovery.

  I saw her mind working away at the weakness of everything she’d heard from her mother, the great dismantling project going on not so secretly in the twitches of her face.

  “You’re better,” she announced, unimpressed, as she flipped through the week’s worth of catalogs that had come.

  This bedside manner would help her one day, no doubt. Rhetorical mode number forty-fucking-five. Death through obviousness, insistence on the literal. I will show you that your basic claims about yourself are insane, simply by repeating them back to you.

  Then it graciously changed into a question. “You’re feeling better?”

  I breathed hard from my nose, as if to say: “According to some,” but what came out was a scoff. Sometimes if I took the same sarcastic tone as Esther we’d remain allies for a bit longer, but I always failed when it came to the music of the sarcasm, and even that phrase, “music of the sarcasm,” should be a giveaway that I was out of my league. The acoustics changed every year, or more often than that. Usually I produced the sort of tonal errors of speech that made her seem to hate me even more. I was one of those dads who gladly gave up his own identity in order to act like someone Esther might hang out with at school—as if a wet-faced, overweight, middle-aged man with adolescent speech habits that were slightly out of date did not trip any number of warning signs and send up alarms all over the neighborhood. Sometimes my desire to please meant that Esther still ignored me, but without hostility, and these were the spoils I greedily enjoyed in my role as her father.

  “Dinner’s soon,” I said. “If you want to get cleaned up and … you know.”

  Esther looked at me with what seemed like pity.

  “Oh, I do know,” she said. “You don’t even know how much I know.”

  “Okay,” I laughed, even though I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

  7

  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.