The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  “On the contrary,” said Murphy, “that’s exactly what I think. As always, people will court the gravest misunderstandings. People are driven to be wrong in the most spectacular ways. There’s fame in it. We are in a high season of error. But don’t fool yourself. There aren’t going to be too many more books. We’re not going to see a lot of documented analysis or any kind of analysis. This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us. Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language. This is a plague among cavemen, and soon we’ll only be grunting to each other about it. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is. And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause.”

  Murphy fell silent and we walked through the cold streets back into my neighborhood. It would be morning soon and I wanted to get to sleep before Esther woke up. My gear was heavy and hot on my body and I was tired.

  “I guess this is me,” I said, stopping short at a buckled brick path.

  It wasn’t my house we stood in front of, but I didn’t want Murphy to know where I lived. I pictured him the other day in the woods, harassing the Jewish couple, and I hadn’t seen them or their violent boys again. I figured I could say good night, walk around and hit the alley, then cut back over to my house.

  “Here we are, huh?” Murphy looked at the house and then back at me with a grin.

  I had picked a difficult house to lie about. There was a windowless store with a side entrance dormered onto the residence. The sign said it sold ribbons, cartridges, adhesives. A portion of the roof was exposed, with blue Tyvek badly nailed over a hole. It would be too cold to live there. Whatever construction that was under way must have been abandoned for the winter.

  “All right, uh, Bill, or whoever you are,” said Murphy.

  The name I’d given him was Steven. He was testing me. I let it go.

  Manage your disclosures. The problem was that, by lying, I’d made him more curious. I needed him to feel he had picked me clean.

  “You should come to the Oliver’s. That’s where we’ve been meeting. But you’d better get right with meds, and soon, no matter what you believe. You need to start dosing. Have you been to the Oliver’s?”

  I stalled. “Sure.” I pictured myself in a long, beige room trying to climb over a wall.

  “Obviously you haven’t, but that’s all right.”

  Murphy seemed less amused, rubbed his face so hard it hurt to watch. From his pocket he took out the grease again, pushed a tuft of it into the roof of his mouth, smacked his lips.

  “Bill, I’m not the devil. I’m not evil,” he said. “You’re not alone is all. It’s perfectly all right to work together on this thing. But I think I understand. Privacy and all that. You have your little hut, I presume? Your forest worship? Maybe you’re one of those? People are wondering if there’s some, you know, in those locations.”

  Some, you know, what?

  Murphy paused, waited for me to roll over on my back with my legs in the air, begging him to take me.

  “It would seem that secret channels of insight are obliged right now to open up, reveal their wares. This is definitely not the time for secrecy.”

  Oh, but yes it is, I thought. I gave him nothing.

  “I hope it works out for you,” he added.

  This was bait I would not take. I smiled, lacking all the required skills for this conversation. My lies were glaring, but Murphy remained polite.

  “Here,” said Murphy. “Here’s the address, and my number.”

  I looked at the script on the card and my eyes watered, lost focus.

  Murphy nodded up at the house that wasn’t mine.

  “You’d be lucky if you really lived here,” he said.

  I stared at the house without really seeing it.

  “Check your vitals,” said Murphy. “No children in there that I can tell. I bet your heart is thriving right now. I wish to fuck that I lived here.”

  He was wrong. My heart wasn’t thriving. It felt tight and cold, strangling inside my rib cage. I needed to get out of there.

  We stared at this house as if we were tourists looking up at a great cathedral.

  “Anyway,” Murphy finally said, “don’t court too much blame out there. You know, blame is interesting, but be careful. It’s a dangerous strategy.”

  Blame. I’d said nothing to him about it.

  “I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

  Not if I can help it, I didn’t say, whoever you fucking are.

  11

  It was early November. The Forsythe drug trials sped through testing, and the basic anti-speech agents were released for free to the public, dumped into empty newspaper bins on corners.

  The drugs were a medical slush short on real medicine, soggy little tonics desperate for vast strengthening. It was the wrong time for placebos, for liquid vials of nothing. When we injected them, they only stupefied us until we sputtered awake in a different room. Instead of healing us, this medicine seemed only to bring on spells of afternoon death. A rehearsal, maybe. A warm-up.

  In the days after my run-in with Murphy I rigged a lab in the kitchen, following Thompson’s orders. On my conscious nights I milled speculative medicines designed to keep us healthy enough to hold our ground at home. Such nights were coming less often, but when I was able to crawl from the rug in my home office, where I had erected a person-size humidor in which to test the inhalers, and when the evening was cleansed of potential encounters with Esther, I started boiling down drugs.

  From the kitchen’s single crusted naval port window, as I waited for my solutions to cool, I watched the emergency vans cruise down Wilderleigh at night, sampling the air with roof-mounted saucers and testing wands that spoiled from their bumpers like fins.

  No such vans roamed the streets in daylight. A medical truck might have parked on the corner, but I suspect this was for the personal use of a neighbor, the private removal of a loved one who’d just fallen to the toll. A yellow hearse roamed the neighborhood, opening its doors to sheet-covered gurneys. And the occasional diesel helicopter pitched north of us through the upper Montrier Valley, taking aerial surveys, but it was a skeletal effort that could not have yielded much useful information. If officials wanted data on the predicament, they gathered it at night from the vans, and this I knew because nighttime was best for lab work. If there was medical forensics being practiced in our neighborhood, I’d see it through the window.

  Esther was no threat at night. At night she slept, or she left the house, teaming up with the other underage weapons in the neighborhood.

  The lab was piecemeal, outfitted with equipment I swapped for at the Science Exchange. On the kitchen counter I looped tubes between a trio of beakers, and I flipped the circuit to the furnace so I could plug in the micro finer, which pulverized whatever organic matter I required as ballast, without causing a brownout. Working with no furnace made for cold nights so I repurposed our silverware drawer to hold a stash of sweaters and socks. Hats and whatever else I kept in a wire basket in the pantry. I had a separate handmade Valona machine for fats.

  With an induction burner I reduced solutions of saline, blended anti-inflammatory tablets, atomized powder from non-drowsy time-release allergy vials, and milled an arsenal of water-charged vitamins, particularly from the B group, along with binding agents and hardened shavings of an herb dust I’d crushed in the mortar. The salted protein sheets, rolled out from bulk supplies of medical gelatin, I stretched on the dish rack until they resolved as clear as glass, and once they’d hardened I cut them into batons and hollowed out their middles so they could be injected with medicine.

  With a cold-reduction process I isolated lead—quivering, gangly worms of it—which served as a jacket around the pills I fed poor Claire. These weren’t time release so much as time capsule. Health bombs to go off only when the exposur
e was intense. Or so they were designed. I planted secret weapons in my wife and she swallowed them down without a fuss. My logging was steady now. All these trials and procedures are documented.

  We told ourselves, when we spoke at all, that it was helping.

  I mentioned this work to Murphy the next time I saw him. I didn’t want there to be a next time, I never did, but there always was. He admitted there was a small chance, statistically insignificant, that it could help. Medical shielding, a chemical serum. It wasn’t technically impossible.

  We’d run into each other by accident a few nights after our first meeting—I had little reason to think otherwise—in the bitter early morning hours down near Esther’s school. I wasn’t even checking my vitals. There really was no need anymore.

  He found me resting on a bench, as if he happened to be walking by, and I filled him in on my kitchen lab work. He seemed sympathetic at first. Sat down with me and really listened.

  “Failures have their place in our work,” he admitted, after hearing me out. “I’ve had my flirtations with failure. There is a small allure there. I commend you for seeking out failure so aggressively. But this idea people have of failing on purpose, failing better? Look at who says that. Just look at them. Look at them very carefully.”

  I tried to picture the people who said that, but saw only my own head, mounted on a stick.

  “They talk about failure all the time,” said Murphy. “They’re obsessed with it. Really what they’re doing is consoling themselves for being ordinary, boasting about it, even. They’ve turned their incompetence into a strange kind of glory. They have entered the business of consoling themselves.”

  And you think that’s what I’m doing? I didn’t ask.

  It was a cold, awful night, and my only consolation, solitude, was gone for the moment.

  “You’re testing on two people, and you’ll probably be dead before your work will help anyone. You need a much, much broader test population for your studies to lead anywhere. You know that, right? It’s not as if you want only you and your wife to survive, right? You’re doing this work because you want to stop the epidemic, right?”

  Right, I thought. Right. I think.

  Murphy repeated his invitation to the Oliver’s. Or Forsythe. I wasn’t really clear about the naming. I didn’t care.

  What wasn’t failure? I wanted to know. Was there something that was working?

  Murphy spoke of a vaccine derived from children. When he said that word he grew quiet, looked around as if we were being observed. He didn’t like to believe this, he didn’t want to believe this, but if the children harbored the poison, then they no doubt contained the antidote to it as well. No doubt. It stood to reason. He mumbled on about blood, marrow, building tolerance, immunity, controlling the circumstances. This was a favorite word of his. Circumstances. It sounded so odd when he said it, one of those words designed to make me forget other words, the whole language.

  Murphy felt that we should be drawing blood from our own kids, informally, gently, of course. Everyone will soon come over to this approach. It needn’t cause any trouble. In the spirit of science.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about drawing some of, what’s your daughter’s name again? Her blood?”

  I had not told him Esther’s name, had not even told him I had a daughter. Just called her my kid. If I had thought of drawing her blood, a nighttime withdrawal while the girl slept, I would not reveal that to Murphy.

  “You have the source of the disease living in your house and you’re not even curious what her blood might reveal under a microscope?”

  Profoundly incurious, I thought. Deeply, hugely indifferent. I looked down and smiled as if he were being hypothetical.

  Murphy waved the question away, letting me off the hook, repeating that if I’d only come down to the Oliver’s, I could see what was being done.

  I pictured children linked by medical tubing to one of those vast, overhead syringes. I pictured a wolf climbing a slippery wall, on top of which sat some glistening piece of meat.

  I thanked him and said good night. Had to be getting back. Work to do. Pretty tired now. But Murphy didn’t respond, didn’t move.

  Among other things, Murphy excelled at a refusal to release me from our encounters. It was a strange power of his, to pretend a conversation had not ended.

  “Wait,” he said, his head cocked, listening.

  I wanted to go home, get away from him, but I stopped, quieting my breath. You could hear the engines running the neighborhood homes. Furnaces and water heaters droning on. Above us came a hum from the telephone lines.

  Murphy gripped my shoulder, raised his other hand in concentration, his eyes closed. And then I heard it, too.

  A din rose out of the north field beyond the school, and as the sound bloomed it grew piercing, wretchedly clear, borne so quickly on the wind, we shuddered when it hit. Voice-like, childlike, a cluster of speech blaring out of the field. The sound crushed out my air. Behind the noise ran a pack of kids, so shadowed and small at that distance, they looked like animals sprinting across the field. Coming right toward us.

  In front of them came a wall of speech so foul I felt myself burning.

  Murphy scrambled, grabbed me, and we ran for cover. In the bushes I felt his cold hand in my mouth, a greasy paste spreading against my gums, his fingers reaching so far into me, they touched the back of my throat.

  I gagged over his hand, fought to breathe. Murphy wanted to reach all the way into my lungs. I tried to relax my mouth, my throat, but I could feel my lips stretching, starting to tear. Murphy’s weight was on me, his own scared breath against my neck.

  I gave in, exhaled, letting the man cover me, spread his medicine deep in my mouth. Then finally Murphy pulled out his hand, wiped it on the grass next to my face. The release from this agony felt sweet, and I could breathe again.

  The kids cleared the field, ran past us, their voices sounding—I wasn’t sure how—harmless to me now, as if I’d only imagined the effect before. The awful wave had passed through and now I felt no acid in their speech. Just kids’ voices squeezed against the higher registers. Sharp and annoying, maybe, but safe. I had a fruity taste in my mouth and I had to keep swallowing. The paste triggered a gush of saliva that I did not want to give up. I drank what released in my mouth and watched. Everything out on the street under the lamp seemed gorgeous and clear.

  One of the kids stopped on the sidewalk across the street from us. He’d caught someone and now he was going to attack. He crouched, his hands cupped over his mouth, and he started shouting. A series of single word cries, projected through his hands, as if he were launching ammunition from his face.

  But this was no abstract show of force, this was an attack on someone who hadn’t found cover in time.

  Sprawled on the street beneath the boy was someone who wasn’t moving, and the boy made sure of that with repeated volleys launched right over the body, a relentless flow as the body twitched on the asphalt each time the kid spoke, as if a cattle prod shot electricity from his mouth.

  Then the body stopped twitching and the boy relented.

  When the boy stood up we saw his face in the streetlight, so long and solemn and awful to behold.

  Except the kid wasn’t a boy. It was my Esther. Her hair was wild and she wore an outfit I didn’t recognize, some long coat that was too big on her.

  From our hiding place in the grass we watched her.

  “Be careful of that one,” whispered Murphy into my neck.

  I tightened at the warning. That one. That one was my one and only.

  Esther looked down at the person at her feet, seemed to whisper something. Then she ran to catch up with her friends, dwarfed by her coat. On the street that body still didn’t move.

  Murphy climbed off me, sat back in the grass.

  “That one is trouble,” Murphy said. “I’d like to see a sample of her blood, wouldn’t you?”

  In my mouth I felt that I had eaten
a piece of terrible meat.

  “What did you give me?” I asked.

  “A gift.” Murphy handed me a tissue.

  I didn’t thank him. I wanted to be sick.

  Murphy crawled up to me, held my face tight.

  I felt that I should go after Esther, if slowly, carefully, but I was afraid to move.

  “Now say thank you,” Murphy said. “Or have you forgotten your manners?”

  His hand gripped my face so hard, I could barely form the words, but I did it, I thanked him, and he released me.

  Murphy relaxed, sat back.

  “Well, you’re welcome,” he said. “It was really my pleasure. But now I’m curious about something.”

  The man on the street groaned, rolled over. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to disappoint Murphy that the man was not dead.

  “I’m curious,” he said. “I’ve done something for you. Now how do you propose paying me back?”

  12

  The next day I struck out for the hut alone, Claire too ill to join me. I offered to drive right up to the trailhead for her, perhaps all the way down past Boltwood, if we could get the gate open and sneak our car through. For Claire I would even drive down to the northern foot of the stream where it ponds and there’s a small turnout. From there I could strap her to a sled and drag her up the embankment. It’d be bumpy but we could line the sled with pillows. She would hardly have to walk. I’d carry her that last leg, if she wanted. We could bring extra blankets, a thermos of soup. It would be good to go to the hut today. Good for us. It might help.

  I wasn’t sure I believed this, but I needed to sound hopeful for Claire.

  It didn’t matter, because she declined the invitation. She didn’t even decline, just failed to answer, staring with dread focus at her own little finger, as if she could will me from the room by exercising that top knuckle back and forth, back and forth.

  Without Claire I took the cautious route, down Sedgling to 38 for one exit’s worth of highway, only to return to town from the north, dropping into the valley from the old Balden Road, which is so steep that no matter how slow you take it, riding your brake the whole way, you fairly skid along the sand to the bottom, where the Montrier electrical tower sits planted inside a guarded park.