The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I tried not to look at him too closely. His teeth had the quality of fossils.

  When I spoke my voice was quieter than his, less convincing.

  “It’s the work you seemed to want,” I offered. “There’s no equipment here, nothing. So I’m creating scripts, alphabets. You said yourself that the solution was in scripts, visual codes. You said that.”

  “Correction. Murphy said that. Slightly different person. Dead to me now, in any case. Along with his so-called ideas, thank god.”

  “Well, how would I know?” I said. “There’s not exactly an open channel of communication. If I could get my gear, I think I could get back to some of the medical stuff.”

  “We have real doctors for that. We have people who actually know what they’re doing. Your little purses of smoke, I popped them over my children’s heads to make them laugh. Kids love their own little mushroom cloud. They’re tchotchkes, and they stink. Seriously. They smell awful. That’s probably why your house is still abandoned.”

  He checked his watch.

  I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to say. This was the first conversation I’d had in months, and the muscles of my face had gone soft.

  “Maybe I should give you a tour of the real research wing,” said LeBov. “We should have ‘Bring a Naïve Pretender to Work Day,’ and then I’ll let you check out the pros.”

  I did not respond. The antagonistic foreplay had lost its appeal. In my limbs, in my head, I felt the heaviness of what they’d shot me with. It was rough, unrefined, but I wished I could get my hands on it.

  I had questions, too. How long did a dosage last? What were the side effects? What exactly was the fucking stuff, and … I didn’t even want to think through this last question, but at what cost comes this serum? What does the extraction do to its … host?

  LeBov held up one of my finer pages of cuneiform, some Presargonic panels I’d written about a poisoned body of water in the netherworld. Experimenting with one of my Aesop’s templates.

  “Has it occurred to you that these things are useless if people can’t decipher them? You’ve given cuneiform to people who barely read English?”

  “Yeah, that did occur to me. Right around the time that you were drawing fluid out of children’s bodies.”

  “But you did it anyway? See it through to the end even if it’s obvious?”

  “Well, have you stopped to wonder why that very script, which you say they can’t understand, is still making them sick? Isn’t that a little bit curious to you?”

  LeBov checked his watch again. He closed his eyes in some exaggerated show of irritation.

  “Do you have any confirmation that we’re even showing them your stupid alphabets? Have you verified that?”

  I thought of my time on the observation deck, watching the subjects spoil in the heat, get carted off. Wagons of paper were brought to them, unloaded, shoved in front of their eyes, and they pored over it like dutiful patients, scrutinizing it until their vitals flared and someone called a code. This was my work that sickened them, even if I could not see it precisely. It must have been my work they saw. But I knew that I was never on-site confirming that, never actually down there to be sure. Such vigilance hadn’t occurred to me.

  It should have been a relief to discover, to even consider, that I had not caused more pain for all of those people.

  But I somehow did not feel relieved.

  LeBov stood up, pushed my alphabets into the trash. “C’mon,” he said. “We’re going for a walk.”

  He helped me up. I didn’t realize I needed it, but I was unsteady, a bit nauseous once I got out of my chair. His hands under my arms felt like metal tongs. We’d be back soon and I’d feel better, LeBov assured me. There was something small he wanted to show me, something he thought might be of interest.

  Into the halls of Forsythe we went. We climbed the ramp and came upon the assembly area, but this usually hectic space was empty. Everything was quiet.

  We took the stairs to my wing. On the landing we stepped through the side door that brought us to the observation deck, where I’d only ever stood with crowds of other scientists, looking down at the testing below.

  Again I saw no one, just the decontamination procedures outside in the courtyard, a man curled up under the harsh ministrations of a hose.

  Here I tried to take a step that wasn’t there and I stumbled. LeBov reached for me, but I fell, and for some reason I couldn’t get my hands up in time.

  My face smashed undefended against the floor.

  I scrambled back up but wobbled, tipped, and fell again. The walls were spinning. Above me stood LeBov, studying me.

  “That’s something we’re working on.” LeBov stuck out his hand for me. “There are some balance things we need to tweak.”

  I got up without his help but as we walked to the observation deck I held his arm in case I fell again.

  We were still alone. Since I’d left that room with LeBov we’d seen not a single person.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “I don’t care for this place outside of lockdown. The bustle and whatnot. The human contact. I find it distracting. It’s rather nice not to be seen, don’t you think?”

  It didn’t really feel nice.

  A trickle of blood fell from LeBov’s nose and he caught it with a tissue. Then the tissue blackened, started to drip.

  He laughed, his head tipped up to stop the blood, which ran from the tissue in a trail down his wrist, right under his shirtsleeve.

  “C’mon,” he said, through a bloody hand, “I want to show you something.”

  LeBov’s hands and wrists, I noticed, had been badly burned. That would have been the gel from the listener he stole.

  We took a hallway that I’d not seen open before, stepped into a side room that featured a narrow spiral staircase, and then descended several flights until the light from above shrank into a star before disappearing, shutting us in darkness. I hugged the railing, took small steps, and kept my eyes down. Something had scrambled my balance and I felt wrong in the head.

  At the bottom of the stairs we went through a double door, moved down further hallways that at first I thought were painted brown, but when I came closer I saw that the walls themselves were glass, pressed dead against sheer cliffs of dirt outside. We were underground, in a basement corridor built into hard-packed earth.

  LeBov opened a tall door and we stepped into a space that, at first, seemed entirely empty.

  “Welcome home,” he said, and he gestured me inside.

  The room had no finished floor, just soil, with stone walls climbing several stories. In the center, lined with benches and some small generators, was a hole. A perimeter of klieg lights dumped a wretched blast of light down its center, so it looked lit from below. And from the mouth of the hole came the prettiest sight: a bouquet of bright orange cables as if retched up from the center of the earth itself.

  I commanded myself to show no reaction.

  They’d found themselves a Jewish hole, and it looked like they’d been working it hard.

  LeBov said, “So what do you think?”

  I moved to the rim of the hole, looked in. They’d roughed out scaffolding down there, reinforcing the crumbled sides of the hole with long, warped two-by-eights. A double-wide ladder, black handprints smeared on the rungs, disappeared deep into the pit, and a braid of extension cords passed the orange transmission lines on their way down.

  Was there a hut over this hole once, before it became a high school? I looked over at LeBov, who allowed me my scrutiny. What a curious accident that they’d have one of these down here.

  I made a point of showing no interest in the orange cables. I gave them no second look, did not stoop over them to even examine if the outlets had been converted to the Jewish standard. These were thicker than the cable in the ceiling of the recovery wing. Thicker, and there were more of them. As far as I was concerned, the cables were hiding in plain sight and it was perfectly normal for fat cables to
pour from the earth from some unknown source very far away.

  Under a tarp at our feet wriggled something that seemed to want to get out.

  “Is that a balloon?” I asked.

  LeBov paused, touched the tarp with his boot. “Not yet,” he said.

  In the space above the hole they’d carved out a few of the higher floors of the basement, vaulting the room into a huge atrium, but there were no windows.

  One wall, however, was devoted to something I was careful not to look at too closely. It was a collection of listeners, perhaps forty of them, nailed to plywood. They differed in size and shape. Some glistened, others were shrunken and dry. They were lobes, or orbs, or limb-like. Most were deep brown in color. A rail at the top of the wall misted some fluid in a cloud that rained down over them, keeping them moist. Beneath each listener trailed a piece of thin, white cabling that joined in a fixture at the bottom of the wall and traveled over to a table covered in a black blanket.

  The listeners pulsed generating a low, dark hum. On the top row, in the middle, was my very own listener, shriveled and pale, like an oversize raisin cast in cement.

  I turned my back to it.

  “Nice hole,” I said.

  “Right,” agreed LeBov. “We think so, too.”

  I walked back to the door. “Can I return to work now?”

  “Well, that’s why I brought you here. What would you think about working here instead?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I enjoy the view from my office. It’s kind of dark in here.”

  I imagined this massive space filled with listener’s gel, LeBov and me swimming around in it, trying to strangle each other before we suffocated and sank. It was like a vast, desiccated aquarium, the sort of space whose bottom surface should not be traversable on foot. And then there were the throbbing, brown listeners, like a collection of human livers. I wanted to get out.

  I tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it opened and we stepped back into the hallway.

  LeBov was casual, as if he was asking me to join his softball team. “So will you help us?” he asked. “It could be an interesting project.”

  “I thought you had what you needed. You said that yourself. What you took from me when you left.”

  I remembered the punctured listener leaking down his wrists as he tried to wriggle through the hole. Along with his burns, it could have been a cause of the nosebleeds.

  “Well, I thought so, too. But I didn’t. Your listener has proven stubborn to us. That’s why we need your help. The original owner of the thing, certain administrative rights, the ability to modify the property in ways we require. Something about you people is a catalyst.”

  “Us people. How frustrating for you to have something you don’t control. But I’m not sure I understand. Why don’t you force me?”

  LeBov broke into a fit of coughing.

  “That’s a really good question,” he said, when he’d recovered. “It’s a pet topic of mine. Our studies show that coercion has a fairly poor track record. Otherwise, of course, we would.”

  “Then no, thank you. I do appreciate the offer, though.”

  “That’s not the whole story,” said LeBov, and I thought, Too bad. It never is.

  “We saw what you did with that wire when you first got here, that little act of ventriloquism. That was of enormous interest to us and that’s why we pulled you out of isolation. You channeled a prayer none of us had heard before.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. And we’ve tried to duplicate your work, connecting wires to the mouths of Jews, to mannequins, to anyone, but no one else is conductive like you appear to be. Something about your mouth we’d like to study. And that prayer you were transmitting, that prayer doesn’t even … exist. We can find no record of it. It’s not a real prayer, which confirms to us that there’s something out there that we need to hear more of. There’s a territory of wisdom we don’t own, and that’s troubling. We need to get you connected in here.”

  “You want to nail me to your wall and use me as a listener?”

  “Well, not if you don’t want to.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to.”

  LeBov checked his watch.

  “Whoops. We’d better get you back.”

  This wasn’t the last word on the hole, obviously. LeBov’s mildness on the subject was unnerving. But he didn’t bring it up again and he seemed in a hurry to get rid of me.

  On our way back to the spiral staircase, LeBov stopped at a door and looked in the high window.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Take a look,” he said, standing aside.

  Inside were children, seated in rows, like in a classroom, except this wasn’t a classroom, it was some kind of hospital ward. The children were drawing, reading. Others stared at a television.

  When I saw the medical carts, the tubing, a masked technician bending over one of his subjects, who smiled up at him as the needle was raised, I turned away and walked off. I wanted to get out of there, and I wasn’t waiting for LeBov.

  LeBov started laughing. A feminine laugh like a cat getting killed.

  He fell into step with me, and we made our way back to the staircase.

  “Shall I congratulate you?” I asked.

  “You shall not, I fear.”

  LeBov did want to be congratulated. He seemed so proud, cheerfully indifferent to my outrage, almost pleased by it.

  However they were harvesting their serum should not have mattered to me. But I had questions.

  “And the test subjects. Why don’t you give them this serum from the children?”

  He laughed. “Test subjects? Are you fucking kidding me? Is that what you actually call them? We wouldn’t waste it on them. It’s too precious, too difficult to, uh, make.”

  LeBov narrowed his eyes.

  “Well, why are they here?” I asked. “How do you get them to submit to these tests?”

  I thought of the endless crowds, clamoring to be let into Forsythe.

  “Your mind has been wasted on small questions. They want to be here. It’s called choice. They come from all over and beg to be let in. We have a security issue, really. There are too many of them. If they weren’t so collectively uninspired, so unspeakably”—he paused, searching for the right word—“stupid, they could launch a pretty effective attack on us.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course the pictures we’ve gathered of their children don’t hurt. A photo of a child is such a strangely powerful tool. Family pictures are funny. Sometimes they are the most boring material on the planet. Literally. There is nothing that causes more agony than someone else’s family photo. I weep with boredom at the sight of these things. They could almost be used as a medicine to cause indifference. And yet, if you show one of those very same photos to a parent who has, for the moment, lost track of that child, or even voluntarily surrendered that child for medical safekeeping on one of our busses, and you suggest, through mime, because language would fucking kill those miserable, anxious parents, that you might know where that child is, uh, presently residing, well then suddenly that photo has turned into what we call here an outstanding piece of leverage. Currency for the mute time. The new money. It’s a pretty straightforward economy.”

  On our way up the staircase LeBov’s nose started to bleed again, and as we hurried up the narrow passageway his breath grew wet and ugly. We stopped to rest and he coughed a slurry into his hands, mumbling something. Again I hugged the railing, shutting my eyes against the spinning walls, and followed.

  I was released upstairs later that night, disoriented and hungry, as the last protection from the serum fizzed away. I found myself back in the land of the mutes and I was relieved.

  Down on the mezzanine I raced to the coffee cart, hoping to find Marta, or anyone. There was no way I would be alone tonight. I would have tapped the old man from the tests if he’d have me. I would have led him to my room, peeled down his rob
e, and tried whatever I could get away with against his body until he dragged himself from me in exhaustion.

  There was no one at the coffee cart. The scientists had paired off already. Tripled off. Gone back to their rooms to nurse their sense of specialness and to marshal every kind of argument for themselves that what they think, what they feel, has any value at all.

  I returned to my room, closed the door, and suffered the long, violent seizure of alertness that had come to pass for another night of sleep. Waiting. Thinking. Not sleeping. Never really sleeping.

  38

  I avoided the observation booth after that. I did not like to join the other scientists for the afternoon stroll, the old thoughtful walk we took with our great brains towering over us, down our serious corridor that ended in glass, where we could watch the good people of Rochester bleed from the mouth, trembling with sobs, while they tried to endure exposure to our work.

  Once I knew my scripts were pre-classified as doomed, never even shared in the courtyard, or, if they were, used on the test subjects merely to confirm a previously held certainty, a certainty that written language, no matter how inventively conceived or destroyed and then remade, could not safely be read again for very long by people over a certain age, I began to keep some experiments to myself, substituting credible symbol systems and scripts for the technicians to take away, while concealing anything promising—the project that might deliver me from this facility—beneath a pile in my desk drawer.

  I even sent down alphabets that had already been tested.

  For the decoy work I faked my way to bedtime. When I did not use letters soaked with ink I used objects, mostly bones. These were brought to me in a wire basket, with a set of burnishing tools, abrasives for sanding, some picks, little chisels, a mallet.

  This decoy work could not be too amateur. I thought I could go down to the courtyard myself, in person, and use a small hooked knife to slice a divot of skin from myself, then flick that skin over a subject, a language of the body, piece by piece, until I expired at the table.

  Or we could perform suicide by fairy tale. Issue a classic tale to each test subject, each technician, which would include the motherfucker LeBov. We could give a fairy tale to every unnamed person of Forsythe, and then on cue, we could commence to read our little tales.