The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  In future issues of The Proofs, a final theory of rashes was pledged. We’d see working drawings of the Perkins Mouth Guard. The thirty-word language would be revealed, the least toxic words in our lexicon, but these words would primarily be place-names.

  The Proofs was conspicuous for its absence of conclusions. One was not sure it was not simply the stitchery of Murphy, whose motives were somehow other. Deeply other. Unguessable. If The Proofs was advocating something, it did not say. It was not for sale. How many copies there were, I didn’t know.

  Before folding up my evening reading and stuffing it back in its envelope, I saw in smaller print, bound by a box, a paragraph of text with the title Take Heart!

  What a thing to do, and how very much I wished I could.

  14

  The red busses of Rochester pulled in that week, parked outside the school to collect their cargo. They came from Forsythe, a universal F scratched into their hoods. These were not busses so much as engorged medical waste canisters, motorized and fitted with tires, dipped in brilliant red paint. The medical waste being our children.

  The cockpits of the busses, should passengers become vocal, were wood-boxed, soundproofed, blackened, double-locked.

  An optional alleviation, these busses were called. Your children, went the pledge, would not be subjected to medical tests. Nothing invasive. They would be kept safe, held for you, in order for local recoveries to flourish. Medical babysitting.

  Segregation was the strategy. Divide and conquer. But this was more like divide and collapse, divide and weep.

  Minnesota was a destination, a low-activity coordinate. The toxicity couldn’t linger with those thermals. You wanted to be where the wind was. A certain species of it. Some kind of grassland facility in Pennsylvania was listed as well, where a new form of ventilation was being attempted.

  A picture of the destination floated around, an empty field with a horse trotting through. The imaginary landscape of a travel brochure. We were meant to envision a clean, new settlement, a territory free of peril. Your children will be safe. Maps for the evacuation were taped to lampposts, peeling away to litter the street. Track your child. You’d see one of the sad fathers standing alone in the road, examining one of these maps, which depicted a future that did not include him.

  The busses filled with children. Some orphans—mothers and dads fled already—mounted the stairs alone, taking a snack from the basket in the aisle. When parents appeared, they held their kids’ hands. Their faces showed something no one could decode, mouths stretched into grins. They delivered their children into the hushed busses, then bent down to the cargo bays to stuff in a suitcase. Children with labels stitched across their coats, their names rendered in scrawls of yarn, as if they weren’t already lost. Walking toxics, before we fully understood the poison of scripts: the slower, awful burn of writing when you saw it. Children should be neither seen nor heard, especially if they carried names on their clothing. Then together or alone the parents returned to their cars and drove home.

  And the busses roared from the neighborhood. Headed elsewhere, carrying part of the problem away from us. For now.

  Because this exodus was optional, some children still remained. Including Esther and her friends. But was friends really the word for that group, who lorded over the neighborhood in our final days, creating barriers of speech so putrid you could not cross them?

  Per Thompson, I escalated my smallwork in the kitchen lab from solid medicines to smoke. Even if this succeeded to numb our faculties and kill off input, it would be the mildest sort of stopgap. At best I was buying us dark minutes, prolonging the stupor. At worst I was rushing us closer toward some highly unspectacular form of demise. If we were dying I wanted us to die differently.

  Otherwise we’d be found in sweat-stained pajamas leaning against the toilet. We’d be found on the low bench we’d installed in the closet under the stairs, for hiding, Claire’s face stuck to my hair. We’d be found deep under our blankets in whatever bed we’d made for ourselves that night. Or we’d not be found, because one of us would have wandered into the yard and then the woods, confused, only to collapse in a ravine.

  In those last weeks at home Claire sometimes shuffled into the kitchen and surveyed my lab work. She pulled up a stool and sat at the counter as I fed our medicine through the bottle-size smoker.

  Claire watched while I freebased for her one of the mineral trials, using a kitchen apron draped over her head for a vapor hood.

  She endured the exposure without coughing and I detected gratitude in her eyes. I could tell even without looking that she was smiling at me while I worked, content to be together in the evening.

  The medicinal smoke was bitter and I swept it from her face when she finished a dose. She looked at me so gently, and when I held her for a neck injection her skull felt small and cold in my hands. When I needed Claire’s vitals she accommodated the kit over her ribs, opening her robe for me without complaint. She even did so without my having to ask.

  Every few days, it seemed, she graduated to the next belt buckle on the kit, her body losing size, her face retreating on her head, taking on that awful smallness.

  I wanted only to provide Claire with some medicine that might help her sit near Esther, to endure her company without symptoms. After precisely timed doses, she dragged herself through the house and tried to visit with her daughter, if by chance her daughter was home. A narrowing of her motives had led to this small desire, but it remained difficult, and Esther had little patience for a chilled and sick mother who only wanted to cuddle.

  One night I heard Esther yell, “You’re disgusting,” and walked in to find Claire sprawled on her back, smiling up at me. She’d gotten what she needed. She’d hugged her daughter, and the retaliation had been worth it.

  Esther, inside her large coat, headed out the door.

  If the smoke from whatever powders I’d scorched was thick enough to hang in place, I captured it in bags, to create smoke purses, little sacklets of fumes that could be punctured by a juice box straw if I required a small dose.

  In the spice cabinet I kept wicker baskets filled with these smoke purses, labeled in black marker. If I had data relating to Claire’s response to the inhalation, I noted it on the back of the purses. I wrote things like no change. I wrote muteness. I wrote talkative, erratic, nervous. I wrote giddy. I wrote, and this I wrote most, no data. Or I wrote nothing at all. The writing was strange to my hand. Sometimes before writing on the pillowy bags I had to practice on paper, and I could not always recognize the script.

  I suspected that if I wrote the wrong thing, the wrong way, the lettering would harm me. I’d excite some new sensitivity in my perception, and I would collapse.

  Those were quiet nights. Claire and I took breaks outside, bathing our faces in the cold November air. Our neighborhood was chilled and flat and all green growth was gone. I loved it so stripped down and frozen. There was something sculpted to the shapes, as though our streets had been carved from ice, colored with pale dyes squirted from a dropper. I loved the frost on the cars at night and the steam that flowered in marble-smooth shapes from the yards, like perfect gray ghosts made of balloon material. To be outside without our coats in such cold raw air was exquisite. Sometimes puffs of breath rose from a porch down the street and we heard the muted voices of our last neighbors. But usually no one was out, and if there were lights it was the blue glow of the streetlamps. These lamps only sharpened the darkness, radiating a pure blue smolder that made the night feel stronger. A final absence of light that would take hours of sunshine to boil off.

  When the vans drove through, they did so quickly, with so little noise, their engines seemed swaddled in silencers. Or perhaps they had no engines and glided past our house on a perfect slick of air.

  It was Claire one night who offered that perhaps we didn’t need the medicine we’d just finished scalding our lungs with. She seemed to be suggesting a change of strategy.

  “It’s so good of
you, Darling, the work you’re doing,” she said, staring at the street.

  We sat bundled in a shared blanket on the steps. The cold air felt intense in my chest. I knew how wrong it was to feel happy, but I could not help it.

  I didn’t look at her. Work was a wishful word for my failures in the lab. Nothing was good of me. Claire’s compliment was only necessary because of how obvious the failure was. Whatever I was brewing and pumping into her was nothing I should be thanked for.

  “I know you’ve probably thought of this,” Claire said, her words slurred, “but maybe it’s not the best thing for Essie with us taking all this new medicine, in terms of how it might make her feel.”

  “It’s not for her. It’s for us.”

  I knew I was missing the point, but I couldn’t tiptoe around the euphemism. Esther’s well-being had become a distant concern, like worrying about the flesh wound of a god.

  “Is there something, or are we …” Claire started.

  I waited, but the sentence never finished. It dug a little hole in the air between us, and the hole throbbed, until I realized it was there for me to fill.

  “The busses,” I said, giving it my worst guess. There was a chance Claire wanted me to finish her sentence this way, didn’t have the heart to do it herself. Maybe I was the one who had to say it out loud.

  “We could bring her down there and see,” I continued. “That would remove her from anything unpleasant at home, and then we wouldn’t need to interrupt our work. Best of both worlds, maybe.”

  “Best of both worlds?” asked Claire. “Really.”

  She shook her head, wouldn’t look at me.

  We could, I thought. Esther would not even need to know why we were going. A field trip, a vacation, with horses certainly. I’m sure there will be horses! Just look at this picture. We could pretend Esther didn’t know what these red busses were, and it would join that larger field of perceptions, insights, and facts I also pretended Esther did not possess.

  The logistics of getting Esther strapped in a bus seat evaded me, led me into thoughts and plans I did not wish to have.

  Was I not meant to think the unthinkable? Hadn’t our hut training led exactly to this, courting unbearable circumstances as a matter of principle?

  Claire sighed, but in such a kind, noncombative way that it disarmed me. It made me sad to think that she’d been rehearsing this conversation for days, probably, hoping to sound kind and wise and open-minded. She wanted off the medicine. I think she wanted off more than that.

  “Esther’s not going anywhere, Sam. You don’t get to make that decision, and I’ll never agree to it.”

  It was always awkward to hear my own name in her voice. We never did that. Never. We openly discussed that we never did that. It was somehow unbearably intimate and deeply hostile at the same time.

  I nuzzled up against her. “I know. I’m just saying.”

  Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t saying anything. What I particularly wasn’t saying was that I could never send Esther on a bus, either, but by taking that position I could keep Claire sympathetic to the medical trials. She’d see it as an either-or situation. I saw no other way for us to stay at home.

  “I don’t think medicine is the answer anymore,” she said. “I think there is no answer. I just want to be with Esther when it happens.”

  When it happens? I didn’t want to ask.

  “Will you let me?” she said. “Could you arrange it?”

  I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back, which once meant that things were fine between us, a language of anxious grips that we exchanged to rescue ourselves from disagreement. Now, it was code for nothing. You translated it and it yielded speech vacuumed of meaning.

  “I promise you it’s not going to happen.”

  “You can’t, though. You can’t promise me anything.”

  Claire’s breathing changed and I felt her sobs in my body before I heard them.

  I tried to stop what was coming by saying her name, but this only triggered it harder.

  “This is my fault,” said Claire, shaking. She gestured at the street, as if she were taking responsibility for the whole world outside our house: the people, the trees, the weather. She’d done this.

  I reached for her but she pulled away, repeated her claim. It was her fault. All of it. The entire thing. It was all her fault.

  “Please, Claire.”

  “I am to blame.” She raised her voice, shouted into the street. “I did this!”

  I ducked, as if I needed to show my embarrassment to any invisible person watching us from the dark exteriors of the neighborhood.

  I told her it wasn’t true. I reasoned with her, asked for evidence. There was no evidence.

  “Yes, but he told me it was my fault. He told me! What kind of person does that? He must have a reason. If the rabbi is not right, then I will never forgive him.”

  I said, “We shouldn’t even be talking about this. We can’t be talking about this. You know that.”

  “Why?” she shouted. “Why the fuck not? How can we not talk about it? How do they expect us to do that? It’s impossible.”

  “The rules,” I whispered. Instantly I hated how this sounded.

  “The rules? From Bauman? How do we even know who that old man was? He was no one. A fucking weirdo. He’s gone. We’ve never seen him again. We haven’t seen anyone! There’s no one to see.”

  “But there doesn’t need to be,” I said. “What would that even do? It’s a distraction.”

  “Speak for yourself, you bastard.”

  Claire cried hard into her hands. Hoarding, monstrously, this unknowable thing all to herself.

  I said, “I won’t discuss this with you, Claire. I can’t. This is a conversation you have to have with yourself. We keep our own counsel.”

  “Talking to myself is not a conversation! I have no counsel to keep. I’m alone. You are, too. How can you stand it?”

  “You’re upset. Let’s get you inside and maybe try a different dose. I think I know what I did wrong.”

  “Oh, you have no idea what you’ve done wrong. No idea. You’ve done enough. Just keep that fucking medicine away from me.”

  I stood, tried to walk it off, but it didn’t come off. I couldn’t shake it.

  “So this is your fault?” I said. “You really believe that?” I asked her. “Fine, let’s fucking talk about it.”

  Claire nodded up at me. “It’s the first thing that’s made sense out there for me in years. It’s the first thing I heard that felt true and real.”

  The first thing? In years?

  “It wasn’t true and real. It was a sermon. You’re not meant to believe it like that.”

  “Oh? Then how the fuck am I supposed to believe it? If I don’t believe it, then why are we going out there? Is it a joke?”

  I didn’t know what I was saying now, but I kept talking.

  “The lessons are abstract, something to think about.”

  She scoffed. “Maybe to you they are. If you want to escape all responsibility, that’s your business, Sam. Do that. If that’s what you call keeping your own counsel.”

  “Well, if it’s your fault, if you actually believe that, then fix it,” I said.

  Claire seemed confused.

  “Make it better,” I shouted down at her. “Make this go away, Claire. Undo it. I’m going to fucking wait here until you do.

  “You see?” I said. “It’s meaningless. Your claim is fucking meaningless. It’s the most selfish thing of all for you to take the blame, as if you had anything to do with this.”

  She looked at me in high disbelief.

  “Selfish?” she asked.

  “I’m serious,” I yelled, and she flinched.

  “If it’s your fault, do something about it, Claire. Otherwise shut up and never say that again. Never open your mouth about this again.”

  This stopped the crying. I watched my wife draw in her forces, sealing herself off from not just what I said, but from me as wel
l, from the evening, from the days that had passed. A project of wall building, face hardening, secret fortifying of everything that mattered to her. All done without moving, an inner construction project Claire seemed to command until she was, in all the ways that matter, gone. Sitting on the steps Claire receded, drifting farther and farther away from me until she looked up at me with the stare reserved for a stranger, all intimacy erased.

  “It’s not your decision,” I said to her, softer. “You can’t break faith because it also breaks mine. I can’t go out there without you. You know that. It doesn’t work. I already tried it. We have to go together, to believe in it together.”

  She laughed. “But we don’t have to, Sam. We actually don’t. Find someone else to believe in nothing with. I’m done.”

  “It’s not your choice,” I whispered.

  “Oh, I think it is. And, anyway, it’s for the best. I have it on good faith that if I stop going, Esther will be safe. Someone’s made a promise to me, and, unlike you, I think he can keep it.”

  “Someone?”

  “Yes, Sam. Someone. You don’t know him.”

  “Claire, please,” I said. “This person.”

  “Forget it.”

  “He came to the house?”

  “I said forget it.”

  “One question.”

  “No. No questions. No questions and no answers.”

  “Claire. Did this man call himself Murphy? Does he have red hair?”

  My wife did not respond, but she gave me such a queer, searching look, and then it was a long time before she looked at me again.

  Together we sat staring out at the street, the final exhausts of Claire’s sobs gasping out. She slid to the far end of the steps, kept to herself for the rest of the night. She was perhaps too weak to bring herself inside.

  Salt blasts had streaked into the neighborhood. You couldn’t see them at night, or even so well in the day. Mostly it was the pellucid salt already washed clear by the wind. But you felt it crunching under your feet, some living thing recently crushed into grain.

  I looked east toward the man-shaped silhouette between two houses where the sun would appear in a few hours, but there was nothing there to suggest a sun could ever heave itself into the sky again. I would never get used to that.