The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  “If you get up I can put this under us,” I said.

  With a show of labor, her body in pain, Claire pulled herself up and stepped from the hut. I rolled out the blanket and brought Claire back in, lowering her down again. Without removing her shoes she shucked her leggings to her knees, then turned on her stomach.

  “Okay” was all she said, not even looking up at me. She was ready.

  I did not yet know if I was aroused.

  Claire was quiet today, but sometimes our best intimacy occurred after the most difficult sermons. We could not speak of them and I don’t think either of us was even tempted. Our minds worked away in private at what we heard, but our bodies sometimes wanted the busywork of a cold joining of parts.

  Burke’s sermons reminded me of what I did not know, could hardly ever honestly feel. “You come here because of what is missing,” he always said. To listen to Burke was to believe I could be curious about something. In theory I felt a great awe for what could not be explained, but in practice I felt too alone. Always I worried that I lacked the great appetite for uncertainty that Burke demanded. What if uncertainty held no appeal for me?

  A distant hissing reported from the radio, the searching work of the listener, divining the wire for a signal. Before I dropped down over Claire for our intimacy, I put my coat over the radio. Sometimes vestigial sound poured out, accidents in the broadcast, and we preferred these stifled so we could concentrate.

  Claire stretched long and I covered her. Beneath me, even clothed, she felt bony. I worried my weight was too much for her, so I held myself up with my arms, letting my face settle in her hair.

  We worked the messy connection by shifting clothing, Claire’s leggings in a ruffle around her knees. The moment of insertion was abrasive, but soon a moist warmth engulfed us, and we settled into a dutiful pursuit of pleasure, sharing the labor as equally as we could. Fairness always, even in these grisly animal matters. When Claire took the lead from underneath, I held my breath so I could feel her against me. When it was my turn to provide the motion, I shut my eyes and put all my weight, it would seem, on my face, which pressed into the filth of the blanket.

  It was here, one guesses, that our toxic Esther was conceived. Certainly it was here.

  We coupled under the hiss of the module until Thompson’s broadcast kicked on, and we missed the first part of it, heard only the coat-muffled drone of Burke’s second rabbi, a rabbi with more technical, practical concerns.

  My completion, when it came, did so without my full knowledge. I noticed it drooling across my leg when I looked down, felt myself shrink and go cold.

  “I’ll be outside,” Claire said, before I’d even gotten off her.

  We kissed and I helped her up. She never seemed interested in Thompson’s information, so she’d wait in the yard, stretch her legs, get some sun, if she could find a spot not too shielded by trees. I don’t really know what she did out there while I stayed inside and cleaned up. But Thompson often provided more concrete information and I always wanted to hear him out.

  Thompson spoke in warnings today. Warnings and guidance. Usually he followed Burke and simply reaffirmed the need for secrecy, urging us to a deeper privacy, reminding us of the levels of disclosure we succumb to every day without even knowing. Disclosures in the face and eyes. Disclosures in our bearing, our dress. Disclosures through omission, everything we fail to say and do. The Name is the only one who does not disclose. When we find no evidence of the Name, that is when we can be most sure of him. But we, we wake up and reveal ourselves until everything special vanishes. Our privacy drains from us no matter what, said Thompson.

  And now that weakness merited ever more vigilance. We would be queried on our affiliation, he said. That is not new. We might be followed. A threat I never took seriously. It seemed so grandiose to believe anyone cared how Claire and I spent our Thursday lunch hour. But Thompson said our hut visits should only be conducted with special watchfulness.

  Then it was doctors who received his scorn, doctors and experts of any kind. We were to take matters into our own hands. The doctors are scared. Of course they are. From doctors we would receive no insight. If we could gather our own statistics, we would be better prepared. Thompson fell into a list of technical details and materials, read quickly in a desperate voice, the transmission flickering in and out.

  There was, it seemed, smallwork to be done now, and this was how to do it.

  Sometimes when Thompson spoke I had to touch the wet belly of the listener to ground the signal. Otherwise it shorted, fell mute. This rarely happened with Burke’s sermons. I used the back of my hand against the listener’s cool, slick exterior, pushed up into the softness until I felt resistance, as if deep inside the listener, if you gouged enough jelly from it, was a long, flat bone.

  Thompson provided the details that would inform my first round of smallwork, the tests and procedures I might perform, taking matters into my own hands, to keep Esther close to us.

  When the service finished I unseated the listener and wrapped it in plastic before burying it behind the hut. Back inside I stuffed the cables into the hole and covered up the hole with a floorboard.

  Claire and I made no sign to each other outside, only stared at the yardless plot of dirt that circled our hut. It was our right to ignore what we heard. Burke always said there was no true reaction to the service, no single response. “Bafflement is the most productive reaction,” he said. “This is when the mind is at its best. This is all we are in the face of the Name’s mystery.”

  We walked the perimeter of the hut and finally groped our way into a conversation about the brush, beating it back, knowing that we’d never do it so long as the rules were in place. But we indulged these conversations about gardening anyway, let them fill the air so we could use our voices again, which always sounded so loud and wrong in the air outside the hut, after so much of our own silence. We thought it’d be nice to plant some grass here one day, and we’d better do it soon, hadn’t we, before the grotesque wall of trees crowded in too close. Before the trees grew into the hut itself.

  This would almost make a kind of home for us, wouldn’t it? Just in case? We could do some work on the land, build an addition onto the hut. It would not be terrible. Couldn’t we live here someday if we needed to, if it came to that?

  You weren’t supposed to, but who would know? How could that be bad, to make this place prettier and livable? There is no possible way that could be bad. Making a place nicer was a good thing to do. No one could argue with that. No one would have to know.

  9

  LeBov, by radio—broadcasting from a secluded location for his own protection—brought his diagnosis public, called out the toxic Jewish child. A disease seeping beyond its circumference, radiating from the head, the face, the mind.

  There are particulars I do not wish to share, said LeBov. A secrecy that made his claim seem more true.

  It was hard to disagree, but everyone did. They protested out of conviction or denial or fear or real scientific understanding. The diagnostic debate played out with proponents and detractors firing evidence back and forth across the massive pit of confusion we all swam in.

  The culprits, the carriers, the agents of infection, were Jewish children, all children, not just children, some adults, all of us.

  The culprits were infirm only, or maybe just the healthy, or maybe only those who’d eaten dirt, or not eaten enough of it. An autopsy was called on the whole living planet. The expertise in each case was minor and romantic and you could hitch your fate to any of it, so long as you didn’t mind being wrong.

  To challenge matters, a child-free settlement in Arizona produced victims with identical symptoms: facial smallness, lethargy, a hardening under the tongue that defeated attempts at speech. No exposure to a child, let alone a Jewish one.

  LeBov wasn’t bothered. “I’m speaking of the cause,” he said, “and this cause spread fast a long time ago. Our forest Jews know what I mean. Just ask them.”


  When the affliction crystallized on a map, colors coding the victim radius, the image was pretty, a golden yellow core radiating out of inner Wisconsin. Whatever was happening seemed to happen there first. But there were flares of activity everywhere, and every day they changed, the whole map strobing over time into one blinding sphere.

  Activity was the word for people finally hardening in their beds for good, sewn up in frozen limbs from speech and its offshoots. Activity was the diplomatic word for its reverse.

  Whatever anyone knew, they knew it with desperate force and you were crazy not to believe them. But when you melded the various insights to forge a collective wisdom, you had total venom pouring from every speaking creature. The common thread among the theories was that whoever was to blame, children alone were resistant.

  It was a piece of evidence not lost on the children.

  At home, in the weeks after Esther’s return from camp, I traversed the dirty five-mile wedge of boulevard that insulated our house from the woods, chasing the question of the Esther perimeter. Basic smallwork prompted by Thompson’s sermon. How far away from our daughter did we need to remove ourselves to experience an abatement of symptoms or even, one hoped, the ability to breathe enough air to stay functional and conscious?

  On my evening walks, initially to Culpin Boulevard on the north end, or to Blister Field and its adjacent parks just south of the synagogue prison, where the narrow, tree-clotted streets give way to plantless swaths of gravel, I tracked the distance that would be required from Esther for the sickness to retreat.

  Men my own age wandered by, smothered in winter wear, their eyes locked to the footpath. From their mouths curled thin ribbons of steam. Women with the same gray face as Claire’s wheezed under the cover of trees. One of them offered a shy wave I chose not to return. Or perhaps her raised arm was meant to ward me off.

  Nothing much lived in the air. The occasional sickly bird chugged past overhead, its body translucent. These birds were so undefended, so slow and stupid at flight, I felt I could grab them from the air.

  When it was children I saw, particularly the older ones who roved together and glowed with obscene health, I changed my direction. Slowly, though. Careful to disguise my caution.

  In our neighborhood, anyway, these children were not just Jewish. This was a mixed, feral pack, drawing from vast bloodlines. And together, when they spoke in unison on their nighttime tours, their weapon was worse.

  Sometimes it was hard work, the air too rough with sleet, my body unfit for hiking so far afield. My equipment was awkward and heavy, like carrying a squirming person against my chest, and I would forget to turn it on. Or the battery pack overheated, burned through the shielding, raising welts on my skin beneath the warm metal plate.

  I stopped to rest on benches, in the grass, against the knee wall at Boltwood Park, and then hours later I struggled to my feet and hoped I recognized my surroundings well enough to return home. Not that home was where I wanted to be. Sometimes I suffered shallow sleep on a bench until it was dark and then woke to wet, frozen pants at my crotch and a shard of drool solidifying into ice at the corner of my mouth.

  On such nights I was critically chilled and scraped absolutely raw from such contorted sleep, but I walked home under streetlights and felt so lucid, so glaringly vital, that it scared me to open the door to my house again and fight back through the awful air to my room, where I would fail to sleep in noxious proximity to something my body could no longer endure.

  On days of minimal exposure to Esther, I conducted perimeter and fence line ambient air quality tests and sent in the results for analysis. Sediments of speech, airborne now, might indicate different toxicity thresholds throughout the area.

  The numbers that returned offered no insight I could use.

  I utilized a real-time aerosol monitor with data logging, purchased secondhand from Science Exchange. Collecting air samples was straightforward, and I looked like any citizen out for a night of hobby work, gathering bugs in a jar, not that anyone ever stopped to question me.

  This after administering a full broad-spectrum heavy-metals panel, inconclusive on us both.

  This after following the standard collection protocol for poisoning, testing our blood, hair, saliva, and nails.

  Such samples I scraped from Claire when she slept. Humors for a futile investigation.

  You’ll gain no satisfaction through tests of the air or water, was a sentence making the rounds.

  Point the testing wand into the child’s mouth, was another favorite.

  Or, fill the child’s mouth with sand.

  The walks each evening were my prescribed escapes from the home, and they became a necessary after-dinner regimen. I performed smallwork with salts, knowing little of how to modify my tonic, knowing nothing of a delivery system through poultice applications on the sweeter nerves inside of my arms, the so-called Worthen site, proceeding only with some unmodified antiseizure agents as a foundational syrup.

  Laughably amateur modifications, yet ones I hardly understood. I needed to believe Thompson that my own understanding played no role. I could execute a procedure without knowing why. I had to believe, per Burke, that my own insights, if I even had them, were an impediment to survival.

  At our home, since Esther’s return from camp, little household habits emerged that soon were absorbed into our schedule. A scattering after dinner, improvised medicine injected into the fatty softness of the leg from a Windsor needle, then flight outdoors. We practiced, with full complicity, an avoidance altogether of family time.

  For once, Esther’s disgust for us was mutually convenient. An altogether necessary disgust. We exploited it, allowed her to think we were keeping our distance at her request. But we saw her sometimes looking in at us from doorways, without her scowl, her body free of its habitual disdain. She stood in her pajamas and watched us, radiating something very close to concern.

  Most nights Claire disappeared into the crafts room, or had never come out of it in the morning. Technically no crafts emerged from this part of the house. We named it once with the hope that someone, sometime—a future child of ours, perhaps—would go in there and be productive, make something pretty or useful or interesting. Such were our speculations for the children we might have. They would fashion objects that glowed or spoke, and we would sit in wonder as we held their tremendous work in our hands. This was, apparently, one reason to bear children. It would guarantee some future astonishment, restore to us our sense of surprise. Our children would solve some fundamental boredom we could not escape, and it would happen here. We could not wait to feel proud of something like that.

  Now the room contained a guest cot and an unplumbed sink, with one window painted shut. Some tub buckets and a little footlocker and a fridge lined the floor. The linoleum was buckled in the corner, beneath a baseboard that had grown so sodden and soft that I finally pushed a night table against it to block it from my sight.

  The occasional brownish rag came out of Claire’s room and a stack of clean rags went in.

  10

  On the night I met Murphy, dinner was abandoned. Perhaps it had never been attempted. Esther slipped into her room, where gelatinous bird sounds flowed out, half-words and astringent syllables that produced a low-grade menace.

  I’d braved a conversation with her, counting on her angry silence, which she delivered with force. I asked her, nervously, to limit her speech, with every expectation of getting shouted down, of getting mocked by our skilled and vicious little mistress. She smirked off, sparing me any response, and in the following days she launched a campaign of sonorous gibberish whenever she thought we were in earshot, and that earshot was something harder and harder to escape.

  Earshot. Such a very true word.

  My plan was to track my symptoms without appearing too conspicuous. Beneath my coat I buckled my DRE Axis 4 portable vital signs monitor. The tubing had gone yellow, and cabling was exposed through the insulation, but the device held a ste
ady charge for my outings and collected reliable data.

  At the corner of Hospring and Woods, where the evergreens hung skeletal and brown, with sick branches that looked burnt by wind, I stopped for a one-mile readout.

  A row of privets concealed the single-level houses that ran south along Hospring, and there in the unweeded mulch bed at the roots I saw, for the second time, the strange man from the picnic trail, the redhead who’d threatened the Jews. He was retching into the weeds, giving it his all.

  He had seemed daunting when I first saw him off the trail, hulking over the Jewish couple as if he might carve into their backs and eat them. Now he was ill, on his knees.

  I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke’s sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was weakness, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller’s need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning.

  I stood closer to the hedge, tried to see the redhead’s face, thinking that at least he’d hear scuffling and turn to acknowledge me.

  When I approached him, a pale cylinder of liquid birthed from his mouth, his lips stretched to allow its passage. A faint hiss followed, almost pretty, like crickets in the trees at night, but then a sour smell filled the air.

  He was decorous in his expulsion and it appeared to come at no visible cost to his body. I reasoned that he must vomit with some regularity. He made it look natural, as if his face occasionally needed to void itself.