The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I was never very good at knowing Claire’s feelings, even, unfortunately, after she’d shared them with me. Somehow I still didn’t understand. Now, in silence, insights into my wife were out of reach entirely.

  For the rest of our time together, we lay on the bed listening to each other breathe. I would like to think that this was nice. A peaceful way to reconnect and feel our bond restoring itself. I would like to think that, but I’m afraid I cannot.

  When the technicians knocked I was relieved.

  At the door Claire and I exchanged a dry, glanceless kiss. The technicians hovered, faces hidden behind gauze.

  Before she left I reached into my workbag, pulled out the Hebrew letter, a cold pelt of hairiness, and pressed it into Claire’s hand. My actions I hid from the technicians. I felt like I was handing off a shrunken father. Someone to look after her. The Hebrew letter was the only possession I cared about, and it fit into her hand perfectly. She could hide it there. It would not be discovered.

  Perhaps it would read itself to her through her hand as she walked back to her quarters. If my work at the hole went well, we’d be back together soon. Oh, I had no idea how I would activate a wall of listeners I could not understand, especially when, according to LeBov, I had never even properly used my own. Already I was wondering how I could fool the man who seemed to be aware of my thoughts before I even had them.

  He’d be ready for any trickery I could devise. He’d have planned for it. He was probably hoping I’d try to deceive him.

  I watched Claire’s face when she took the Hebrew letter from me.

  Thank you for the gift, she didn’t say. I will look at it later.

  And it was only because Claire couldn’t speak that she didn’t say I love you. That was the only reason.

  For a moment in the doorway the simple things between us went without saying. You could feel it.

  She squeezed the Hebrew letter in her hand and I could almost hear it working. Almost.

  What kind of shoes does Rothschild have?

  Golden shoes!

  Yes, but what does he do when it rains?

  He does what we all do, I couldn’t say. Doesn’t he?

  Then Claire was gone.

  43

  One more thing happened that night, but before it did, I fucked Marta again.

  After Claire left my room, the Hebrew letter hot in her hand, speaking only to her the more she clutched it, I went back out and found Marta at the cart, spun her around to be sure it was her this time. I ignored the protocol of tapping and brought her back to my room, my bed still destroyed from the visit with Claire.

  Marta could not know that. What happened with Claire happened in a different world. And what was fine about Marta was that she concealed her apparatus for caring. She had an expertise at hiding what mattered most.

  In my room I experienced a surge of virility. My area was rigid, but it was also numb. Marta worked calmly at it, ferreting the difficulty, stared past my head and labored to ease the issue.

  The room fell quiet and for a moment a trickle of wind intruded our space, as if a whip had been cracked and a sharp rope of air snapped past. It was cold and I thought I could taste it. The flavor of berries trickled down the back of my throat. My vision browned and when the completion came down below, the sudden sweetening, a feeling I could very nearly claim as my own, it flashed through my limbs. Flashed, spoiled, faded.

  It was finally clear that I did not need a woman for this, or even a person. I needed a knife.

  After she surrendered her hold on me, Marta quietly arranged herself on her side, curled into a ball, because from there she could most easily gain satisfaction, provided I supplied the labor. We could face the same direction, prone in my sweaty bed, as if we were traveling to the countryside, waiting for the piece of perfect scenery to explode before our eyes.

  This felt fair, and for a while I spent energy on the project, I put time in. I owed something to Marta. Perhaps this was a way I could repay her.

  Marta was silent, and I responded with silence of my own, but still I burrowed away behind her, working through repeated waves of exhaustion to deliver my favor. I kept my hands well free of her neck.

  Finally Marta clenched, a wave of coldness overcoming her skin. Or perhaps she coughed and swallowed. In any case she scooted forward and made it known that our activity had ended.

  When we finally stood to dress, Marta got herself buttoned up, but before she opened the door she turned to me. This was not part of our routine. She never stopped for an encounter like this, and so I looked down.

  It was time for me to be shy. Eye contact with Marta felt like more of a betrayal to Claire than anything. I did not want to be seen seeing her.

  This is when Marta struck me in the face.

  Had I not been looking down, perhaps I could have protected myself from the blow. Or perhaps, had I seen Marta’s fist coming at me, I would have allowed it to travel, just as it did, on its course with my head. Even had I seen it coming, I may have let it through.

  I wanted to smile at Marta, and I believe I did, through salty warm blood, but I had fallen to the floor, and she left my room too quickly to notice.

  I felt like watching TV before bedtime. My face throbbed. When I touched it, it felt like another man’s face entirely. Perhaps in the TV room I’d fill a bowl with broth, maybe find one of the salted cookies for after. I could stretch out in a chair and watch the children follow orders. Maybe they’d try to walk on water, then drop quietly into the sea and the camera would stay fixed to the water until the last bubbles rose and dissolved into the air and the water fell calm again.

  A cold, hacking sound track, precisely applied, could leach the moment of all feeling.

  But I never arrived at the TV room, never again saw the blur-faced children taking a pet monkey to the grocery store, and only from very far away did I hear the sound track meant to wash this material of meaning, the noises a giant might make from his chest after he’s been dealt his deathblow.

  One must fairly consider that all music is the sound a body makes as it comes to its pretty end. Is there any sound that cannot be traced back to that?

  Usually in the public space of Forsythe I had to wade through mesmerized crowds of scientists, but tonight the entertainment corridor was oddly empty.

  Down below, in the hallway outside the assembly, a pack of scientists hovered over something, and from the north hallway sprinted a retinue of technicians, who pushed their way through to what turned out to be a lab-coated body sprawled out on the floor.

  There’d been an accident. Someone had fallen and was not moving.

  The scientists stepped back to let the technicians work. From a white box came a stethoscope, and this was pressed onto the chest of the downed scientist. The victim was a woman, from what I could tell. She had lovely hair.

  As the technicians worked to revive her, the scientists who had gathered started to drift away. They were lost in thought, or maybe just lost. Their minds were hollow and they walked away thinking nothing.

  I felt a kinship with their indifference. Someone else’s collapse was of no interest to me, either. When you remove the sound from a medical crisis, it feels far less worrisome.

  The technicians circled the fallen scientist, lifting her onto a stretcher. With heads down they moved as one and led the woman away. They took their time. The casual pace suggested that their patient hadn’t made it.

  A reaction seemed optional.

  Now I had the face-level monitor to myself, so I checked in with the outside world to see what the children were up to these days, out in their idyllic quarantine where they could hurl language at each other without consequence.

  The video revealed the same sunny street as before, a crowd of children circling something, their heads so close together that, with the distortion painted in by the editor, they seemed to belong to a single, blurred cloud. At their feet was the same imprinted shadow, like graph paper tattooed on the road, even while
the scenery behind them had been reduced to snow and noise.

  The shadow from the Montrier electrical tower again. My old neighborhood.

  None of this concerned me, though. None of this held any interest.

  I was about to move off and settle in for more entertaining TV when I saw something in the corner of the frame. A girl sat on the steps to a house. She was alone, her hands melted into the blur where her head was, which meant she was hiding her face in her hands. I saw just her body, and it was the bouncing of her legs that interested me. Her knees were together and both legs bounced as one, bounced and then tilted.

  This was curious. I’d seen this before.

  This way and that. That way and this. This way and that and that way and this.

  On the steps, this girl, doing something very particular with her legs.

  Do you know, Dad, that I can do a trick?

  Oh yeah?

  Yeah!

  I can make my legs go this way and that, that way and this!

  Still, this meant nothing. Still it could have been any kid doing that. Wishful thinking could be vicious. Why should I be impressed? I was not impressed.

  Then I saw the shoes: black Mary Janes scuffed to hell, and the sweet little head of hers, even through the blurring, most certainly more long than round, very much unmistakably tubelike in dimension, this poor girl, despite the scarf she wrapped around her neck, the square spectacles. Despite everything. The poor thing. She really did have such an unusual head.

  My little Esther sitting alone on the steps.

  I’m coming for you, Darling, I didn’t say. I’m coming to get you.

  44

  The next morning, after being medically ambushed and stuck with a syringe of the child serum, I descended the ramp with LeBov to the room with the Jewish hole in it, where I’d begin my first day of work.

  Behind LeBov trailed a retinue of technicians, faces hidden in foam, which made them look not unlike the children on television, sprung to real life and engraved on the air, reeking of illness. In two wagons the technicians pulled a piece of gear that produced a long, low moan. Through the thin metal bars of one of these things I thought I saw the bright glowing eyes of an animal. Well, perhaps it was a small person. Something looked at me from the cage.

  LeBov moved with the careful steps of an old man, but he did so under his own power. Whatever was wrong with him, he seemed proud. I found it to be an interesting strategy. When he stopped, his entourage stopped, hanging behind with their tall foam heads tilted down, as if they were shy.

  “We were all sorry to learn about your wife,” LeBov wheezed.

  “Sorry what?” I said. For some reason I pictured not Claire when he said this, but Esther, sitting on those steps, smoothing down her clothing, as if someone might soon approach and ask her to dance. Her legs swinging back and forth. I so wished Claire had seen this with me last night.

  LeBov looked at me. “About what happened. I figured you were there.”

  I must have been staring at him because he retreated facially, blanked out his features.

  “I promised you her safekeeping and I wanted to let you know I didn’t do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure what happened. Perhaps it was an allergic reaction to the serum, perhaps she was already sick. Or your daughter’s voice penetrated the immunity. This is still happening when the emotional connection is high. We don’t know. Or somehow someone broke protocol and rushed her with speech. Whoever it was who spoke to her, it hurt her.”

  Whoever it was.

  I asked, “Hurt her how?”

  I pictured Claire leaving my room, the Hebrew letter nearly boiling in her hand, then making it out to the assembly area where something went wrong, and she collapsed.

  Now what kind of shoes does he wear?

  Probably golden shoes.

  The scientists circled her, probably wished they could undress her and cut her open. No one noticed her fist clenched over the Hebrew letter that might have poisoned her. Then came the technicians and their paddle, their dun-colored tools of revival, and the scientists backed away. That was Claire they worked on. While I was upstairs looking at our old neighborhood on the video monitor, catching sight of our shared daughter on the steps.

  Was that the word for it? We shared a daughter? I’d not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to share Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.

  Only true in a glorious world of hypotheticals. The real truth was that neither of us had Esther and in the end we shared nothing.

  Outside the door to the Jewish hole, LeBov bent over a wagon, attended to the piece of gear. He rummaged in the wooden box, got his arm in there as far as his shoulder.

  Then he fed a length of clear piping into his mouth and spoke, his lips stretched bloodless.

  LeBov’s words came out watery, leaking around the pipe.

  “I’m not going to tell you that she’s going to be fine. That I won’t do.”

  I said, “And yet you’ll do almost anything else. You’ve suddenly drawn a line?”

  I pictured Claire alone on a hospital bed, ignored by a man who had a cushion for a face. If they confiscated the letter, the corpse of it, there was no question they could track it back to me. If they cared to.

  That letter, sucked free of meaning, its story discharged, probably looked exactly like me now. Decayed to resemble its miserable maker. We make the language in our own image and the language repulses us. A damning piece of evidence, as if I’d torn off my face, shrunken it in fire, then sent it out to harm the woman I was supposed to love.

  “You’re doing everything you can for her, right?” I said. “You’re going to tell me that there’s nothing you won’t do. All the expertise of this shithole is being brought to bear on it, and now you’re going to make her better, right?”

  A dark froth rose in the pipe that fed into LeBov’s mouth. Whether it came from his own nasty interior or the little medical wagon, I wasn’t sure, but it filled the pipe and seemed to churn in there.

  The chemical reaction did not suit him. LeBov’s eyes fluttered, rolled back in his head. He reached for me, to hold on to something, but I stepped back and he fell.

  I distanced myself further to allow the technicians access to the man. They’d want to perform their intervention now. Usually they were so quick to come to LeBov’s aid. But the technicians hovered and, if anything, pulled farther away, their pillowed faces revealing nothing.

  Perhaps they were under other instructions now.

  I yelled at them and they tilted, as if they could dodge what I said. Without faces it felt absurd to shout at them, like scolding a stuffed animal. It was clear that they would not be helping their leader.

  I crouched over LeBov, pulled the tube from his mouth. It was jammed in there pretty badly and he wheezed when it finally popped free.

  Some dark spit clung to his lips, seemed to harden as he breathed on it.

  “You should never have taken our listener,” I said. “It didn’t belong to you. And you shouldn’t have pierced it. That was a big mistake. A really big mistake. That’s why you’re sick. You’re not supposed to get that stuff on you. Perhaps you’re going to die again.”

  “That’s not it. It’s the Child’s Play, the side effects.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s what we call it.”

  “Who is we?”

  “The other LeBovs.”

  LeBov seemed sad to have admitted this to me. The other LeBovs. From the wagon came an animal growl, so throaty and plain it sounded like a person.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  I pictured a room full of redheads eating from the same animal carcass, licking each other’s bloody faces. The LeBovs.

  “One too many, maybe.”

  It worried me to see LeBov so scared, ill.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever se
e you feel sorry for yourself.”

  “There is no myself. I bargained out of it.”

  “In return for what?” I asked.

  “Not this,” he said. “I definitely didn’t think it would be this.”

  For a moment LeBov couldn’t breathe and his eyes bulged with panic. He grabbed his throat and seemed to choke himself, which somehow restored his air.

  “Why don’t you stop taking the serum if it’s making you so sick,” I said.

  “I don’t care for silence. It’s not my specialty to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Then you’ll never fit in. I think silence is headed your way.”

  LeBov endeavored a long blink that did not make things look good for him.

  “Don’t forget that you’ve made a commitment,” he whispered, eyes still closed.

  “That’s true.”

  I palmed his sick face, leaned into it, as if a man had popped through the earth and I was stuffing him back into his hole, where he belonged. If the floor had been soft, I might have pushed LeBov through. His head seemed to give a little as I pressed on it.

  LeBov tried to look at me, but his open eye would not obey. His eye followed, with apparent interest, some invisible object in the air. I’d seen such detachment before, when Claire collapsed in the field, a rapturous commitment to an invisible world, and I was starting to covet it.

  I said, “I always keep my promises,” wondering if I ever had.

  Just not to you, I didn’t say. Not to you, or your kind. And if you will hijack my body with a chemical in order for us to speak, then I will not be accountable for anything I say. Whatever words I said to you were borrowed. Brought to you by some child lying listless somewhere. One of the siphoned ones. You sponsored what I said. Those words are on you.

  I left him there. If LeBov was breathing, it was only mildly. He seemed unsure that breathing would help. On the fence about it. Ready to stop trying, maybe pursue other avenues. Weighing his options. I envied the attitude. At least he was at peace with the coming coldness.