The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I cannot remember the word I spoke, but I do remember what it felt like to have my hands on Marta when I did it, to feel the violent rejection shake through her body at the release of a single word. I was able to hold her body in my hands and speak, and there was no stronger demonstration of how the acoustically delivered word was simply violating. A disease born straight from the mouth. How she reacted as if I’d pushed a knife into her ribs and then kept pushing, when it was no longer funny, leaning on her with all my weight.

  Marta shot from the bed, rolled against the wall, and came to rest panting. From the chair she grabbed her things and hurried into them. Only then did I start to see what might technically be considered a feeling from her. I’d unleashed something, and I wondered, hypothetically, what more words might do, a sentence, several sentences, if I managed to lock the door and bar her exit while I held forth on some topic that might have concerned me, or even addressed the growing bond between us, since we had never once spoken about our relationship.

  I had all the power of a child.

  As she got dressed and made her way out of my room, Marta looked at me plainly, as if she was curious, in the detached, scientific sense, why I would have any interest in hurting her. I’d seen that face before, and I hadn’t realized it was a face that could be shared, used by more than one person, but it had appeared on Claire, and I had always thought that it was hers alone, to use only on those special occasions when I had disappointed her. But apparently this was a face that Marta had access to as well.

  Marta’s unspoken question—why I had caused her harm—was one I would not have been able to answer. There was a small, decisive advantage to the language toxicity here. One did not have to stand there explaining oneself, inventing motives that might make sense to someone. Explanations of any kind, in fact, were simply extinct.

  Among the many rhetorical modes that had perished, it was this one I was not sorry to see go.

  41

  In the days after that, the serum fully discharged from my system, my immunity depleted, I braced myself for assault. I waited to be ambushed, then hauled off and injected with vile stuff. I didn’t just wait for it. I wished for it.

  It happened again a few days later.

  When my hood came off, a technician was putting drops on LeBov. From a baster he squeezed a pearled fluid over LeBov’s face. It smelled of flowers. LeBov clenched in his chair as if the substance burned. The technicians leaned over him, tilting on their toes to press all their weight into holding him down.

  The puncture wound on my arm, where the needle had gone in this time, was rimmed already by a shiny black scab.

  To LeBov I said, “Was that really necessary? I’d have come to you willingly. I honor my agreements.”

  He stood up, coughing into a towel, and waved me after him. It was my first night of work at the Jewish hole.

  But two things happened the night before that need to be related first. Two things, and then I’ll report on my first engagement with the hole.

  The night before, I went to the coffee cart and, from behind, tapped Marta, maybe a bit too hard. We’d not been together since I had repelled her from bed with language.

  Maybe I struck her on the shoulder. Not a blow to knock Marta down, although it happened to do so, and not a blow to injure her, because that was not a desire I knew about having, even though I had recently caused her pain in pursuit of a broader curiosity, but a firm tap of the sort one delivers to an object to keep it from moving. An anchoring gesture, one might call it. And when I did it Marta buckled to the floor, a surprisingly soft fall, executed with a dancer’s grace.

  The scientists at the coffee cart looked down at their fallen colleague. We’d all of us developed, in our time at Forsythe, the remotest style of curiosity. We looked at fallen people with the clinical gaze of someone assessing an old painting. What do have we here? If my colleagues had any reaction, I was grateful that I would not learn what it was.

  Marta was not long for a posture of collapse.

  When she stood up to join me, showing no distress at having been knocked down, I saw that it wasn’t Marta I had tapped.

  It was Claire.

  Here was my very own wife in a scientist’s disguise on the grounds of Forsythe. LeBov had kept his promise. He’d brought my sweetheart to me and she was safe.

  Poor Claire’s face was small, her hair too thin. I wanted so much to hold her, to take her to the video feed where I thought I’d seen our old neighborhood. But I had an agreement to honor.

  I clutched my wife and together we hurried through the Forsythe hallways. At the door to my room the technicians rushed her with the serum and she did not cry out. She was so brave.

  I gripped Claire’s hands, forced her to the wall. She couldn’t know what we were doing. I would explain later. LeBov had urged this upon me—when the time comes you must control your wife—and I had agreed.

  The injection would need to penetrate Claire’s back. Protocol. I kept her hands from thrashing while the technicians readied the needle. I jammed a knee against her bottom, forcing her to submit.

  Poor Claire did not really struggle. She gave me such a trusting look as I restrained her, a shy smile to suggest she would have done anything, anything. And so would I, I tried to silently say back. This was me doing anything right now. I swear I am doing this for you.

  When the needle went in, Claire sputtered from the throat, tried to summon a voice that had fallen so slack it could not even moan. Only a drowning sound came out of her.

  I know, I wanted to say. I know, Honey. I do. I know.

  Inside my room the technicians plugged in a tape recorder and settled the yellow headphones on the desk. Then from a foil bag I knew too well, they retrieved the toxic tapes, the whole sonic archive I’d stashed in the car. The last record of my daughter. Our own Esther’s voice, recorded when I thought that one day I’d need to study her words to figure out why we could not bear them. Oh, one day.

  Claire curled up under the sting of the injection, twitched softly on the floor. A technician caught some of the froth that poured out. I stroked her hair, waited for her to open her eyes. It’s all right, I didn’t say.

  You could see the child serum start to activate in her, a mineral deficiency erased with one honey-colored syringe, the person brightening again to a world that had been closed to her.

  The technicians flashed miniature tools, the instruments of a dentist, a botanist. Fingernail-size mirrors on gleaming, chrome sticks, measuring the moisture in her breath, clamps made of something the color of skin. With a dropper they squirted the same pearled fluid I saw them use on LeBov, but this they squeezed into Claire’s mouth. She sucked the dropper like it was a pacifier.

  Claire sat up, rubbing her face, and before I could hold her—she seemed confused and scared now—the technicians pulled me into the hallway. They shut me out of my own room and guarded my door. I’d have to sit out here and wait for Claire to be done. I could picture her inside listening to Esther’s voice and this would have to be enough.

  This was because I’d be getting no dose of my own. Only Claire would get to listen to the Esther tapes. That was the deal. Claire could hear her daughter’s voice. Even if her daughter was only reciting lists, Claire could finally listen to her with no ill effects. None. This was all I knew to give her. It was all I had.

  The agreement with LeBov was worked out in stages. If things went well with the Jew hole, then my turn was next.

  If things went well. What that meant, apparently, was whether or not I could summon LeBov’s wall of slick listeners in tandem, because each listener faltered in the presence of another, and the problem was not just electrical. Get the motherfuckers to work together. Braid the orange cables into some kind of sisterhood, then prize them into the dark brown apertures of the listeners. Sneak the conduit into its appropriate cavity, escalating the detection frequency to x, to n? Put a maximum latch on that cable so Rabbi Zero could be heard, whispering from his Buffalo
fortress.

  But more important, let them thread any gauge of wire into my mouth. My mouth would no longer be mine. From now on my mouth belonged to them.

  We’d hear beyond the rudimentary transmissions of the fraud Rabbi Burke. What a joke. Beyond the hierarchies of middling low-level so-called rabbis on the closer reaches of the radio, into the darker, more exclusive terrain of … whom, whom?

  LeBov wouldn’t say.

  Because maybe LeBov didn’t fucking know? Because maybe there was nothing to know. There was no one else out there? No unspeakably wise rabbi, Rabbi Zero, issuing guidance beyond the toxicity, advising survivors on some life we are meant to lead after language, since the human sound on our lives had been turned off, and our mouths had been seized, and even our minds, little and dim as they were—I make no argument here—could no longer bear to understand the smallest things?

  And if this all worked, it wasn’t just the tapes of my daughter I’d get to enjoy under the spell of the child serum. Claire and I would be allowed to leave Forsythe. The only solution I saw. The only one. I wanted nothing of the feeds or some phantom rabbi, because there was nothing to know. What a fucking joke. Knowing of this kind was only a harm. I would have killed to know less than I did. I wanted to finally be gone from here. Claire and I would be safely escorted somewhere downstate. Maybe they’d put us in one of the red busses, drive us out to the countryside.

  Give me four walls of soil and a breathing tube. And a knife. Give me a supply of water. And give me my wife back, you goddamn monsters. Even silent. Return her to me. Then promise you’ll leave us alone.

  Unless LeBov was deeply full of shit again, sticking his hand into my whole life and squeezing the pieces until they broke. Because that’s what people named LeBov do. Because restoring the language to a people was only one small piece of his work. Child’s play, I bet. Smallwork is right. In the end it’s too small, isn’t it? Easy enough to shoot everyone with a fluid so they could shout insults at each other again, launch their campaigns of vocal blame. Easy. He would do more than that. LeBov would also erase a belief system, remove love from the air as if it were only an atmospheric contaminant. Love was just a pollutant you could blow clear of a person, right, LeBov? If only you had the proper tools.

  I had to believe that LeBov’s ambition extended beyond my imagination, into territories yet more awful. I had to believe this, because it kept coming true. I had to start working harder to imagine the worst.

  42

  When Claire finished her listening session with Esther’s voice, the technicians monitored her by console until her language immunity expired. The injection worked for an hour at most. I did not get to see her during this withdrawal, but from the hectic procedures outside my room, I could guess they were deflating their equipment, ensuring that their patient could no longer hold a word.

  How they test that I don’t know, but I hoped they did it without hurting her.

  Claire was in my bed when I was permitted back into my room. The technicians would give us a little time to ourselves now.

  I would say that Claire looked like she’d been crying, but everyone looks that way. Faces wrecked and wet, eyes red. Everyone always seems to have just wept their hearts out before rounding a corner and forcing out a fake smile for whomever they saw.

  I locked my door and went to her. Under my sheets she was cold, still clothed, stiff in my arms.

  She looked at me only briefly, then looked away. Claire seemed stunned, tired.

  Perhaps it was too much to let her listen to Esther like that. Perhaps she had heard something—our daughter reaching into the future to disturb us—that made her want to be alone now.

  What was it Esther even said in those recordings? Numbers and names, I thought, vocal specimens to flesh out the medical picture. A story or two. Could such a listening regimen be so disturbing? I’d never listened to the tapes myself. By that point it was getting to be too late.

  When the child serum wears off the face settles back into lockdown and it doesn’t feel good. Claire’s little face was hard and she looked at me as if I were not her living husband but a frozen exhibit of him that she could study while entertaining an old memory.

  It might be easy to presume that, had Claire and I really wanted to that night in my room at Forsythe, we could have spoken. We could have, had we really wanted to, weathered the convulsive speech, the air-shredding toxicity that brought us to our knees.

  None of that, it could be argued, should have stopped us. Hardened faces, docked tongues, throats stuffed with bloody wood. We had not seen each other in months. Intimacy overpowers such literal impediments, does it not? Haven’t the great loves conquered far more than this, surpassed difficulties that made a literal language barrier, such as what we suffered, seem trifling?

  Yes, I suppose the great loves have done this.

  And ours, that night, did not. Our love that night was minor and it was hard to find. Our love could not overcome the medical dilemma. As the night wore on I became more afraid of what Claire would say to me if she could say anything. The barrier tonight was only a relief. Thank god the language had died between us. Some things should go without saying forever.

  In bed we groomed and stroked each other, we rubbed each other’s necks. I freed Claire of her clothes and she made of her body a cooperative object.

  She was too thin, with a low, sweet bulge in her tummy, the last little part of her to shed fat. Her legs were chalky, dry, as if she’d walked through salt to get here. Should there not have been more evidence of her days and nights, her feelings, the things Claire kept herself from feeling? What was her body for if not to record something so simple as that?

  I peeled down my jumpsuit and returned to bed, but Claire took no special notice.

  Claire and I had been naked together as a matter of contract for so many years at bedtime that an animal indifference had developed. Perhaps that’s a working definition of love. We were fellow creatures who grazed and fed nearby, who tended the same difficult offspring. We opened our faces in complaint to each other when some injustice showered down, frequently by our own hand, and together we linked arms to squeeze out vocal notes of disapproval whenever something struck us as wrong, which only meant we had not thought of it ourselves.

  Such a shared habitat allowed ritual nudity to occur at home, a nudity that often heralded nothing but private fits of sleep on top of the same, vast bed.

  When Esther switched from needing us to hating us—perhaps the two are not so different—Claire and I stopped being naked together. This is one of the thousands of coincidences that combine to assemble the skeleton of a marriage. After Esther switched off her feelings—after she instituted delay strategies when it came to demonstrations of love—Claire and I undressed and suited up in private instead, removing our nightwear, if the occasion called for it, only after we’d crawled under the blankets and turned out the light.

  Just when there was no reason for it, when our history and intimacy made such shyness preposterous, we’d each discovered shreds of modesty with which to build out our evening endgame.

  It had thus been longer than usual since we had been under the light and fully nude together. And as lovely as Claire looked, I felt sorry for her tonight, sorry for her and somewhat ashamed of myself for getting us undressed so quickly.

  I took Claire’s hand and rolled over her. Beneath me her body felt cold and long. I tried to fit myself over her in a way that would trigger something. It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

  Everywhere people must have been exploring the alternatives; otherwise they’d be sentenced to solitude. But that night Claire and I showed a mutual failure of the imagination. Without speech we were unskilled mim
es locked into alien vernaculars, missing every connection, growing slowly angry that the other person could not decode our thoughts.

  I would like to say that without language Claire and I exchanged something. But in fact we did not. We simply looked at each other, at most with forced curiosity. The channel that was meant to dilate between us to allow our feelings and thoughts to flow back and forth, well, it didn’t. One witnessed no such channel.

  Throughout our endeavors on my bed we remained dutifully mute. We wrestled in much the same way we had when we were erecting the play tent for Esther when she was four, sliding collapsible stilts through a long canvas sleeve, except this time there was no play tent between us, just deflated geometries of air, and we were two old acquaintances grimly determined to extract pleasure from each other. But when our pleasure centers met, they were cold and shielded by brittle walls of hair.

  Claire arranged herself on her knees at my side while I settled back and permitted the ministrations that would ready me for our sexual encounter, since that transaction would be the only way to rescue us from our awkward wrestling. Such she did, in rote style, pressing my penis between thumb and forefinger so the top part ballooned angrily and flipped from side to side as she moved her hand.

  Her activity was smart, rigorous textbook arousal technique, and she labored with her hand with such determination that her face grew misted in perspiration.

  But her manipulations turned my item not toward readiness but to putty. A cold putty that did not stand, but seemed that it would melt into clammy liquid against my leg instead.

  When it was clear that her work, tendered so sorrowfully, was not effective and that I would not be able to fulfill my part in the exchange of intimacy, Claire stopped touching me and stared away at the wall.