The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I could not ignore how that space looked forever immune from any illumination. Places give no warning that they might soon be erased by light. There is never a single thing to suggest that some grotesque change is coming that will reveal all, and soon.

  A language solely of place-names. What would we possibly say to each other?

  Sitting with my wife, whose disgust pulsed over me, I laughed to myself over these assessments, thoughts of a final or irresolvable darkness. There was textbook wisdom surfacing a little too easily. Sentimentality was no doubt a side effect of the speech fever, compounded by the side effects of all our failed medicine. The side effects of fighting, the side effects of knowing nothing, the side effects of being done with it and somehow, for no reason I could detect, still alive. One uses one’s deathbed energy to project meaning where none can be found. How does the species possibly benefit from such an action?

  Your feelings will matter to you and to you alone, would say LeBov. You will surge with emotion over situations that have no bearing on the crisis. It’s a tactic. A trick. Believe in it at your peril. Better to bury yourself alive than give these ideas any due.

  LeBov’s wisdom, like anyone’s, most fitting for those who wished to live, who had tasks in mind they still hoped to complete. For the others, like us two on the steps that night, wisdom is a high-handed scold, a reminder of what you’re not capable of thinking, some bit of behavior you can’t even reach for. Whether or not LeBov would prove to be right would remain to be seen. That night I wanted to expire on those steps, breathing in the perfect, cold air.

  In many ways, that would have been a preferred outcome.

  It still seems important, given all that’s happened, to report that across the street from my house, there was a hidden piece of the deadest air. No glow whatsoever, even from the streetlamps. I felt I could shine a lamp into it and the light would be extinguished. Just a swollen patch of darkness that seemed to throb the more I stared.

  15

  By early December we huddled at home, speechless. If we spoke it was through faces gripped in early rigor mortis. Our neighborhood had gone blank, killed down by winter. It was too cold even for the remaining children to do much hunting.

  I don’t know how else to refer to their work, but sometimes they swarmed the block, flooding houses with speech until the adults were repulsed to the woods.

  You’d see a neighbor with a rifle and you’d hear that rifle go off.

  The trees stood bloodless, barely holding on in the wind. We sat against the window and waited, spying out at the children when they roved through. The children—they should have been called something else—barking toxic vocals through megaphones as they held hands in the street.

  I hoped they wouldn’t turn and see us in the window, come to the door. I hoped they wouldn’t walk up the lawn and push their megaphones against the glass. And always I hoped not to see our Esther in these crowds, but too often there she was in the pack, one of the tallest, bouncing in the winter nighttime fog, breathing into her hands to keep warm. She’d finally found a group of kids to run off with.

  If there was an escape to engineer we failed to do so, even while some neighbors loaded cars, smuggling from town when they’d had enough. The quarantine hadn’t been declared, but in our area they weren’t letting children through checkpoints, except by bus. Basic containment. If you wanted to leave, you left alone.

  Even so, bulky rugs were thrust into trunks. Items that required two people to carry. Usually wrapped in cloth, sometimes squirming of their own accord, a child’s foot poking out. A clumsy game of hide-and-seek, children sprawled out in cargo carriers, children disguised as something else, so parents could spend a few more minutes with what ailed them.

  Claire retired as my test subject. She stopped appearing in the kitchen for night treatments, declined the new smoke. When I served infused milk she fastened her mouth shut. If she accepted medicine from me she did so unwittingly, asleep, whimpering when the needle went in.

  I couldn’t blame her, falling away like that, embracing the shroud of illness. But I did. I conducted nightly campaigns of blame and accusation, silently, in the monstrous internal speech that is only half sounded out, a kind of cave speech one reserves for private airing. In these broadsides Claire spun on a low podium and absorbed every accusation.

  If I prepared a bowl of steamed grain and left it on the table for her, salted as she liked it, pooling in the black syrup, she passed her spoon through it, held up a specimen for study, and could not, just never could, finally slide it in her mouth. For Claire I cut cubes of meat loaf, and at best she tucked one or two in her mouth, where she could suck on them until they shriveled to husks.

  Claire no longer slept in her bed and she seemed too listless even to maneuver to the crafts room, to the guest room, to anywhere she might be able to fall unconscious in private.

  I was always trying to offer her shield, a modesty curtain, so she could come undone alone and unseen. She shouldn’t have to collapse in hallways. If necessary I helped her along, at least to a corner, where I could erect a temporary blind.

  Once I found her asleep in the bathroom, one eye stuck open, leaking a speckled fluid. I crouched down and closed the eye, blotted it with my shirt. It opened again and she whispered at me.

  “Hi there.”

  I looked down at her and she blinked, perfectly alert.

  Claire must have thought she was smiling, but that was so far from a smile. With my fingers I tried to change the feeling, to reshape her mouth. I couldn’t have her looking at me like that.

  Her lips were cold and they would not stay where I arranged them. Her face had the weight of clay.

  “Go back to sleep” was all I could think to say, and I draped a bath towel over her, leaving her to rest on the cold tiles.

  At home I took charge of what remained of our dwindling domestic project, the blending of food into shakes, the cleaning of all our gray traces. I formed a packing plan, a strategy with regard to the luggage, mapped a route to outskirt lodging. Our pajamas, robes, towels, dishrags, these I washed every day, closing myself in the laundry room where the hot engine of the machine drowned out noise and thought. Against the hum of the washer I was, for a little while, nobody much, and this was how I preferred it.

  I left Esther’s warm, folded clothes in her bedroom. Often they went untouched. Or later, after Esther had plowed through the house before returning to her gang, I’d find the pile toppled onto the floor, a heap of black crumbs, like someone’s ashes, dumped over it.

  Claire’s robe went mostly unwashed, because she didn’t like to take it off, and if I ever found her half asleep and staring into nowhere from her resting place, she wouldn’t respond when I asked if I could do any laundry for her, she’d just smack her lips to indicate thirst.

  “It’d be nice to have fresh clothes, right? I could clean these and have them right back to you.”

  I tugged at her robe and she pulled away from me, threw an arm over her face.

  “Your robe will be nice and warm out of the dryer. We could get you covered in extra blankets in the meantime. It’ll be nice to be clean. You’ll feel better.”

  I spoke to Claire as if she understood me, but she only stared. I spoke to her through a stiff, heavy face that seemed fitted on my head solely to block me from speaking. I sounded like a man underwater.

  As our tolerance departed for the speech of children, so, too, did our ability to speak. Language in or out, we heard, produced, or received. A problem any which way.

  To keep Claire hydrated I’d have to peel back her hospital mask, prop her upright, and press the sippy cup straw through the gluey seal of her lips.

  I lowered the mask when she was done and flowery welts of orange juice soaked through the fabric.

  When it was time to clean her, I filled a bowl with warm water, settled it over a towel at her bedside. With a washcloth I soaped her neck and face. She lifted her chin, gathered her hair out of the way. I s
queezed little pools of water over her throat. I placed another towel under her feet, then lifted and washed each leg, rubbing as softly as I could, watching the little streaks of redness follow my cloth.

  Claire’s legs rose too easily in my hands, as though they’d been relieved of their bones.

  With the last of the water I reached into Claire’s robe and washed her stomach, the skin that once held her breasts. I peeled her from the bed so I could wash her back, pushing the washcloth under the robe, feeling each hollow between her ribs, a sponginess I did not want to explore. Then I settled her back down again, pulled up her covers, lifted the mask from her mouth so I could replace it with a clean one.

  She forced a smile, but a shadow had spread under her gums, a darkness inside her mouth.

  When I brought her soup, warmed the long bread she loved, or offered Claire some of the candies that usually she could never refuse—baby amber globes with a cube of salted caramel inside—at most she would roll over, heave, pull the quilt above her head.

  It was only when the front door swung open and Esther came in the house sweating, crazed, in clothing I’d never seen, that Claire sat up, drawing on some last reserve of power. She always wanted to catch sight of Esther, to watch her from a doorway, so she followed her from room to room, keeping her distance, and Esther tolerated the stalking. You could see in her whole body the effort she made to endure this attention she loathed.

  Esther had changed. Her face was older, harder. Filthy from her outings, but spectacularly beautiful. Of course I must think this, I’m her father. Fathers do not easily succumb to assessments of ugliness where their children are concerned. Esther had never been a cute child, but she’d grown threateningly stunning in the last few months. She let her mother watch from a safe perimeter and she was considerate enough not to turn on her with speech, to stop and speak until Claire fell. Esther saw her mother in doorways, looked away, said nothing. It was her greatest kindness to us, that silence. I will always appreciate the restraint she showed in those last days.

  16

  Esther’s birthday fell on a Sunday. Claire was oblivious, wheezing beneath the medicated linen I’d dipped for her. I realized what the day was late in the afternoon after crawling on the floor of the shower, the water softening my face.

  What was called LeBov’s Mark had grown in fast, a hardened lump under my tongue, anchoring it down. The shower seemed to help. On the tiled floor I could tilt my face into the spray, let the heat loosen my throat. In the bathroom I exercised my voice so that it would not flow from me in shapeless moans.

  Last year, when Esther turned fourteen, she’d wanted no party, just money and privacy. She used those words exactly, then said: “Why would you even ask me what I want if you have no intention of delivering on it?”

  Delivering on it was her phrase. To which Claire and I could only shrug, agree, say Okay, sure, we can give you that, Honey. And then we wondered, How much? How much money, how much privacy does she want?

  Esther wanted us to promise that we’d not talk about the birthday, not mention her age, absolutely not remark on how she’d grown up or changed or stayed the same, not reference what she was supposedly like as a baby, since why would I want to know, she’d asked, what you think you used to think of me? She claimed such a detail was an obscure statistic, a piece of information that future corpses—her phrase—stored in their bodies as a charm.

  Esther reasoned that, in any case, we never felt fondly toward her at the time, that we loved her best in hindsight.

  It was true. Our family suffered from issues of calibration.

  “Even now,” she said. “It’s happening right now. Years from now you will have distorted this moment, which is an awful moment, into something nice, and you’ll badger me with that memory until I agree, which I’ll only do to make you stop talking. You are professional distorters, incapable of simply seeing a situation for what it is.”

  Years from now. The things we will do. In the end Esther really did underestimate us.

  Memories of any kind, for Esther, were similarly off-limits. Shed the skin and burn it, apparently. Memories that asked Esther to picture herself doing something she no longer recalled, like skating in a rope chain of children, when she was seven, down the traffic lines of an iced-over Wilderleigh Street. This was the week the elm fell to lightning and we built a snow fort circling the trunk. Or climbing a ladder stretched flat on the grass and pretending it was vertical, so that each time she let go of it she fake-tumbled to the bottom.

  Such images were an attack. They caused physical pain, and why did we insist on hurting her? Why did it seem that we were instinctually driven to cause her pain? It was not right to hurt her on her birthday. Especially on her birthday. What kinds of parents were we, after all?

  We’d grown so accustomed to hiding our feelings around Esther that it seemed easier to just not have those feelings in the first place.

  You people and your memories, she’d said through a sneer.

  Esther requested that her birthday not serve as an occasion for us to pretend that we were closer than we really were, since why should that random date, a date based on the most flawed and sentimental calendar, make us suddenly tell lies about how we really felt?

  “Sweetie,” I countered.

  “See, like that,” she said. “There’s a lie right there. You think that a generic endearment will somehow show how you feel toward me, talk me out of how I actually feel. One word is going to do that, a word used for pets? How many people use that exact word to hide what they feel? It’s like you’re throwing up on me, actually. I feel like you just threw up on me.”

  But in the years before these revelations and rules, before she was overwhelmed by insights she felt compelled to share with us, we’d had birthday parties. We staved off tantrums and avalanches of greed, accommodated in our home the children who seemed to function—if barely—as Esther’s friends. Along with these preteen colleagues we welcomed skulking parents, who would invariably let one of their babies—babies had not been invited, but there they were, there they always were—go off on a shelf-clearing campaign. Then a parent would quietly retreat, without the baby, to the off-limits master bathroom and take a toilet-wrecking shit that could never be flushed, only to emerge with the blissful look of someone whose own home is not being destroyed at this very moment, stepping half-apologetically, but really with relief, with genuinely visible relief and perhaps even a kind of lurid joy—this party is really fun!—over dumped cupcakes, grinding them further into the rug we should have pulled up before the party, but did not, because in the end we always failed to imagine how savage these people could become.

  “There you are,” the parent would scold the baby, as if it was the baby who had disappeared. The baby would crawl over, try to stand, hold up its arms in supplication to be carried, then topple over.

  Depending on the baby, it would either sob, laugh, or be gorgeously oblivious to all mortal proceedings. One of those three behavioral paths.

  “Come smell the shit I took,” the parents never said.

  Instead the one-sided, rhetorical, patronizing dialogue would commence: “What did you do? Huh? What did you do?” the parent would interrogate the baby, picking it up and seeming to study it for evidence.

  A theater of mock blame the parent should have been directing to the mirror.

  “Why not ask someone who can actually answer you?” I wouldn’t say to them. “I’ll tell you exactly what your baby did. Would you really like to know? Can you handle a conversation with a real, live adult?”

  I stood and stared at these people and they serially failed to read my mind.

  Instead they would be locked in some kind of airborne mouth-tickling activity with the baby—holding it aloft and, to all appearances, trying to eat it—a baby who by now, so many years later, as a seven- or eight-year-old, I’d guess, was probably shouting that same parent into a corner, turning the parent pale, speaking with so much force that the parent was
husking, shelling, dying in a house somewhere probably not so far away.

  Had those parents built a locker beneath the stairs, as we did? Cut in a peephole, lined the little room with pillows? Had they shielded themselves from the speech of their offspring, effaced their hearing, or damaged the little ones themselves, stopped the reeking language at its source? Were they pumping white noise from the old slab radio, and did it not fully hide the child’s speech? Or perhaps the parents had already fled upstate. If they were smart. If they knew how to shut down their attachment apparatus and see their children for what they really, most essentially, were. Agents of such terrible mouth sounds that, relation or not, one hoped never to see them again.

  On Esther’s final birthday in our house I went to the kitchen to get to work on the cake. There wasn’t much food left in the cupboard, just some pancake mix and a blend of baking powders I’d dumped into a bag. From the meaty, mineral smell I figured this would give a lift to the cake, at least if I got the batter down to room temperature and shocked it into a hot oven so it might have some spring.

  For liquids I had an egg and some buttermilk, the custardy sludge from the bottom of the carton.

  I could boil the buttermilk to kill off bacteria, then flash freeze it before dumping it into the batter. The egg, too, would need flame, because it was likely spoiled by now.

  I broke it into a pan, stifled a gag, then whisked it over a simmer until it frothed up, sputtered, and grew clear again. Mostly it did not congeal. The hardened parts were easy to flick out. When the pan cooled I slid it into the freezer, went to work on sifting the powders.

  For sugar I reduced the last of the orange juice until it thickened into a syrup, then whipped in a thread of honey. This would have to do, because I needed the last of the sugar for frosting. I liked to feather it on lightly, then comb it up while hardening it with the medical cold blower, as if the cake had a fright wig.