The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  She’d want to stay. Beg to stay. But I couldn’t let her.

  Staying wasn’t staying. They’d find you and wouldn’t have stayed at all.

  Beyond that were my medical supplies, just a bare minimum, and where to put them. The key gear, and then at least a suitcase’s worth of medicine. I’d want to resume my work as soon as we relocated. To lose momentum now would be a mistake.

  But I didn’t go home. The woods were fully quiet now, the light was gone. LeBov had no doubt finished with his defilement and moved on to other fine projects. I’d missed my chance to confront him and I will admit that I was relieved.

  I groped into the darkness toward the hut. In front of me I could not even see my hand. With each step I braced myself for a collision, something sharp to strike my face.

  I’d spent so many days here, thoroughly explored the grounds, dug shallow holes each time I buried the listener. Claire and I had walked home thoughtlessly, paying no attention to our surroundings, and we’d never been lost, never felt scared by unexplained sounds in the woods.

  Now in the darkness, hours before we would leave town for good, I was completely helpless just steps from the hut. I wish to remark on the darkness of this place without resorting to hyperbole, but I do not think that is possible.

  I reached out my arms, leaned, then fell into the dirt.

  It was easier from there to move on hands and knees, but I needed to keep one arm up to guard my head. I crawled through frozen mud, butted into a tree stump, then corrected my attack and crept forward. Finally I struck the wall of the hut, and from there I guided myself until I collided with the staircase.

  When I opened the door, a flashlight switched on. LeBov had wedged himself into the floor, his legs dangling down the hole.

  “There you are,” he said.

  Across the hut floor he slid the grease tin, and I scooped some of it into my mouth.

  He gestured to his neck, so I spread some there as well, pasting the white collar tighter on my skin.

  It took hold in my face, softening my mouth, and my vision sharpened. When the tightness in my throat released, I found I could speak more easily, even if the ability brought nausea along with it.

  “This is private property,” I said quietly.

  “Oh? I’d love to see your deed.”

  I stepped inside, leaned against the doorway.

  “Maybe first you could let me know to whom I am speaking,” I said.

  “You’re not the only one who can use a fake name.”

  “Apparently not.”

  His legs seemed trapped in the hole.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  I wanted him to be aware that I could take two steps up to him and deliver a sweet kick to his face. He would not be able to get away from me in time.

  “No, thanks,” he said, oblivious that I was sparing him. “I have everything I need.”

  He reached across the floor and grabbed a duffel bag, which clanged as he dragged it.

  “I was saddened to hear of your death,” I said. “It’s a great loss. For all of us.”

  “Thank you. You sound sad.”

  “Yes, actually. I am sad. I’m sad that you’re here where you do not belong. It’s private, and there’s nothing here for you.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I wouldn’t call this nothing.”

  He held up my listener. It was ripped down the middle, coated on its underside with something shiny. The bottom pouch was leaking and the gel had spread over LeBov’s hands.

  “Okay, good for you. You must be so pleased.”

  “I am fairly pleased,” he said. “I thought that I might need your help, but I don’t. Now I need to get myself down this hole.”

  He screwed himself farther in, squeezing his hips past the floorboards.

  I’d never gotten in that far, but I’d never had to.

  “That’s not how it works,” I said. “There’s nothing down there. You’re missing the point.”

  LeBov was submerged to the shoulders now, holding his bag above his head as if he were about to wade across a stream. He was trying to vanish down the little hole in the floor that normally housed our transmission cables.

  “Believe me,” he said. “I am not missing the point. I think that you’re the one who has missed the point.”

  Something was wrong. LeBov was straining, turning red. He couldn’t force himself through, so he squirmed out of the hole and retrieved a saw from his bag. From a position on his stomach he reached into the hole and started sawing, stopping to examine his work with the flashlight. When he finished sawing, he sat up and raised a finger as if we were meant to listen for something.

  We heard the clatter of wood falling away from us, but we did not hear it land.

  Probably the rubber balls at the bottom of the hole absorbed the impact.

  “Maybe now,” he said.

  I told LeBov that I felt obliged to ask him some questions.

  “That sounds like a burden. Unburden yourself. By all means. You have about forty-five seconds. If that’s how you’d like to use your remaining time, feel free.”

  “Okay. Why did you do it?”

  LeBov didn’t even take a minute to think. It was as though I’d asked him a question he’d rehearsed all his life. From LeBov I merited the canned response, deflection delivered with a hint of superiority. I hated people who could answer questions like these. Any kind of questions, maybe.

  “There are certain boundaries that I’d prefer not to observe when it comes to my own identity,” LeBov said. “There’s a lot of behavior that I want to accomplish, but I don’t need all of it, or really any of it, attributed to me. Attribution is a burden. In that sense I’m less like a person, a person as you might think of one, and more like an organization. There’s also behavior that I need to undo, to take away, and this is often best accomplished by others, people who can erase action, alter ideas. I have a staff who work for me, of course. It’s always startled me that people are so cautious when it comes to who exactly they are. It’s almost the only thing we actually get to control. What a missed opportunity, really. For instance, you don’t even know that I’m the real LeBov. But it’s hard to grieve the choices made, or not made, by uninspired people. The sympathy allotment doesn’t extend that far.”

  “So you change your name, fake your death.”

  “Look, that’s nothing. That’s cosmetic. Not even cosmetic. I moved around some grains of sand. Or not even that. I can’t invent a small enough metaphor for what I’ve done. It’s that insignificant. It adds some maneuverability, that’s all. Some spaces open up. Everyone’s presumed dead now anyway, as of tonight, after the radio darkness. Today was the last chance to die and have it reported. I hit the last news cycle. My death was the last story before the blackout. The world’s last obituary. You should be congratulating me.”

  I looked at this redhead squeezing through the floor of my synagogue.

  “Congratulations. And if in the process of this important work you hurt someone?”

  “Then, uh, they feel pain? Is that a trick question? Is that really what’s at issue right now, your hurt feelings? Could your perspective be any smaller?”

  “You spoke to my wife.”

  “Someone had to. At least she actually listened. So much for your unified front.”

  LeBov reached into his coat and removed a long darning needle.

  “Here,” he said, rolling it over. “If you don’t jam it in too hard, you won’t do any permanent damage.”

  “To myself?”

  “To anyone. Jesus, you are so self-centered. Thousands of years of Judaism, topped off by exclusive, secret access at your hole, for ultra-rare religious guidance, and this is all your people have come to?”

  He gestured at our surroundings as if I, too, was meant to examine them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this place is sad. I examined your, what do you call it, your Moses Mouth? Your enabler? You all have different silly words fo
r it.”

  He was referring to the slashed-up listener in his bag.

  “Listener,” I whispered to him. I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud.

  “You examined it?” I asked.

  “And you didn’t even bleed the withers, or whatever that fucking extra skin is called. It’s completely engorged. You only used it to tap into Burke. That’s insane. I’ve never seen such a rudimentary listener, and I have a good collection of them now. Anyone can listen to Burke, because there is no Burke. You don’t even need a fucking listener. I can drop a copper wire into any conductive soil and pick up that signal. Probably with my landline telephone I could dial it up. It’s completely unsecured. Public domain. Probably ham radio. I bet people get it in their houses. I bet you could pick it up off a filling in your molar. You spent all this time out here with this amazing device and you never wondered if you were hearing the right broadcast? The deepest feed? Instead you fucked on the floor like animals. Honestly, sometimes I had to look away. You didn’t care and you fucked in a pile of musty sweaters. I’m kind of astounded. The Burke sermons were recorded years ago and play on a loop.”

  “Right. And you’d know that how?”

  “Uh, because I’ve memorized them? Because they repeat? Burke’s sermons are decoys for people like me who hack into the transmission, to appease us, to make us stop looking. They’re not real. They’re bait, you fucking kike. You’re supposed to activate your listener to pick up the real transmissions. Even the morons down in Fort Wine figured that out. What do you think that box is for that I got from your house? You didn’t even slide in the glass. Those tools were untouched.”

  “It was never broken,” I whispered.

  “But it fucking hell was! It was dead. How could you not have noticed?”

  LeBov was ready to go, his tools packed, his bag strapped to his chest.

  “You still have time on the clock,” he said. “Any more questions?”

  I stared at this man filling the hole in my hut.

  “No?” he said. “I have a question, then. I’ll use your remaining seconds. We’ll say that I owe you. My question is, for whose benefit is it?”

  “Is what?”

  “Your complete inability to understand what’s going on.”

  “I don’t see that it benefits anyone,” I admitted.

  “Oh. I was just curious. That strategy is really unfamiliar to me. It kept me fairly interested in you. I figured you had a deeper play. I thought that perhaps I was missing out on the angle and I wanted to see what you’d do, but then you didn’t do anything. I guess that’s your play?”

  LeBov gave some genuine reflection to this idea.

  “You have a novel way with confusion. In another world inertia might have helped you, might have seemed genius. But even this thing with Thompson. I mean, you really believed that, that he was a rabbi? You didn’t recognize my voice?”

  “You want me to believe that you were Thompson, too?”

  “No, not particularly. It’s more interesting when you don’t believe deeply obvious facts. That’s far more fascinating to me. I like to surround myself with mistaken people. I draw strength from it. It increases my own chances for success.”

  “Agreement is a poison, right?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “So the medical approach Thompson prescribed,” I started.

  “I needed it done and there you were, needing to do it. It occupied you, didn’t it? It took your eye off the ball. I didn’t think you’d take it all so seriously, but thank you for obliging.”

  “And your promise to my wife?”

  “I’m proud of that. You don’t often find someone so ripe for turning. She’s a wonderful lady. I enjoyed her company tremendously. Reverse conversion, talking people down from their beliefs. Pretty standard. Anyone can feed a doubt. I gave her hope, which is more than you were doing for her. You treated her like a lab rat and now if you even speak to her she’s going to die.”

  “She’s not going to die.”

  LeBov laughed.

  “At least your denial is consistent.”

  Then LeBov dropped down into the hole and disappeared.

  I crept over, ducked down to see, but there was nothing, just the smell that seemed to follow me around, the sour fume of sleeplessness and decay.

  From the depths of the hole I heard LeBov’s voice.

  “Listen,” he called up. “I’d invite you to Forsythe, but there’s that wife of yours. You realize that you’re hurting her, right? Every time you talk to her? You probably think you have her best interests in mind, but believe me you don’t know what they are. Her best interests don’t involve you. Her best interests require your absence. Until death do us part, though? I hope that works out. But if you change your mind, we could use your help.”

  It turns out that I did have a last question for him, one that I was still trying to form. I whispered it down the hole, afraid, for some reason, to raise my voice too loudly.

  I asked—certain that LeBov was still down there, plotting his course beneath us—about the Jewish children. Early in the epidemic, those reports that the Jewish children were the only toxic ones? I needed to know if that was true, if the epidemic really emerged that way. Was Esther among the first? Or had he, had LeBov, influenced that information? I whispered this down the hole.

  “Did you make that up, too? Did you spread misinformation?”

  I waited for his response, jets of cold air from the Jewish hole rushing over my face. But LeBov didn’t answer.

  He was already gone.

  20

  At home that night Claire fell asleep in Esther’s bed. Not the sleep that people can easily be roused from, but the leaden hibernation that resists all signaling, raising a carapace on the shell of the sleeper that cannot be pierced by mere shouting. The heart rate slows, the hands grow cold, and life inside the body begins to spoil. Once the vigilant waking person has succumbed, the body consumes itself. A fume rises from the torso as it molders.

  It happened sometimes, the little death when Claire slept. Perhaps it happened more now that Esther was spending most nights out of the home. Her bed became one more resting ground for Claire, who toured our rooms in the night looking for the bed that would be the best staging ground for her nightly disappearance.

  Her daughter’s bed, one must allow, had become her favorite site for this project.

  But tonight Esther came home to be alone, missing her pretty little room, and there was trouble. I’m pretending to know what drove her. I do not know. The exercise of guessing at Esther’s actions, her thoughts, is an advanced one, requiring skills I do not have. But wherever she was and whatever she was thinking or feeling tonight, she came home, and when she did, she encountered something that caused her to give liberal voice to her feelings, to use a voice that for many weeks had been bottled up in our home.

  Maybe when Esther came home she crawled into bed, only to find her mother’s dry body under the sheets. The rank-smelling hair, the bruised neck. Perhaps the mouth guard that her mother used to keep her from gnashing into the exposed nerve pulp of her teeth, perhaps this mouth guard had come unseated and was hanging from her mother’s lips like a piece of meat.

  It caused her to climb up on her mother and assume a feral crouch, opening her throat for the pure injury to pour out.

  By the time I arrived Claire was facedown, holding the pillow over her head. She had woken up only to swoon again. It looked at first like a posture of defense she had struck, but when I checked her she was far from seeing or knowing me.

  Claire’s blackout was stubborn. I felt as if I were hacking away at the sleep that covered her. It did not help that Esther was in full tirade, producing a language so rank that I failed to breathe, lost control of my hands.

  The air was clogged with speech and I fell from the bed. It was coming from everywhere, a wall of sound bearing down on my hips—the pressure seemed to be coming from inside me, something trying to force itsel
f out—and I crumpled, started to retch.

  I couldn’t block the sound with my hands, and I felt myself blacking out.

  I remembered LeBov’s needle and grabbed it from my pocket. I jammed it into an ear, but missed the hole, piercing the cartilage on the outer ear. I tried again, slower, letting the tip of the needle fill the ear hole, then, when I was sure of my aim, jamming in the needle until it passed through the thinnest part of the inner ear, which presented no more resistance than a tissue.

  I did this without thinking, with no sense of how much pressure was required.

  If you do it right, you’ll cloud your hearing for about an hour, maybe longer, LeBov had said.

  He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask. An hour earlier, sitting with LeBov in the hut, I didn’t think I’d drive a needle into my head so that I could deafly handle the vocal cloud of a child.

  The pain was deep. For a moment I heard distant crying. A person, a bird, a siren. Warm liquid filled my ear, poured down my face.

  I touched it, expecting to draw back bloody fingers, but the liquid was clear. Clear and warm.

  LeBov’s needle didn’t work. I could hear perfectly from the punctured ear. I only hollowly contemplated approaching the other ear with the needle, ramming it in to balance the pain.

  Esther had stopped speaking by then anyway. My activities with the needle had rendered her mute. She stood watching me, a mostly convincing look of fear on her face. An effective display of crying, soft crying that she seemed to want to suppress, came next. She performed her grief for my benefit, but I had other things to do. The house was calm now. The only sounds were from our Claire, who mumbled something from the bed, rolled deeper into her covers.

  These were such reassuring sounds to me, the sounds of Claire not yet gone.

  Esther crouched next to me, her finger crossing her lips to show she would not speak. A sign I once might have trusted. She brought her shirttail up to dab at my ear, to wipe free some of the discharge, and it seemed for a moment that she was intent on hugging me, but I pulled her hand away. I pulled it away, stood up myself, and walked strongly with my daughter out of her room, dragging her with me, through our house and out the front door, where I left her alone in the yard.