The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  Dr. Moriphe, when we returned to her, did the blood work, metabolic panels, thyroid function tests, an ESR and a CRP. Claire got spun through a cylinder that whirred and clicked, a picture of deep blue space flickering on the screen, her body rasterized into a galaxy of points and dusky blotches.

  Nothing to worry about here, reported the doctor.

  Nothing your tiny mind can conceive of, I thought.

  I sucked on a swab, spat in a jar, peed in a cup. My bottom was probed and, like a little boy, I giggled. Nothing conclusive came back, just the mortal data, the numbers within range, the levels of little concern.

  In the waiting room neighbors stared at their pee-soaked laps, hacked into fistfuls of cloth. Some went shirtless from the pain. Out in the parking lot people shivered in their cars, sometimes didn’t get out. The occasional ambulance stopped on our block, stayed too long, drove away finally, too quiet, its lights revolving in funereal silence.

  Later Dr. Moriphe was sick herself, but doctors and their entourage employ a different vocabulary for their own physical failings. Each appointment I made was canceled by her office at the last minute. She, too, was not feeling so well. She was never really feeling up to coming to work, they said. Would you like to see someone else? they wanted to know.

  I’d seen someone else. Someone else was a moron.

  “Does she have children at home?” I asked.

  What a gorgeously long pause came back.

  They couldn’t give out that information. We can pass on a message to her if you like, they offered, in their best professional voice. And I said sure, sure, please do that. Pass on a message.

  5

  Then came November’s stay, a sweetly deluded phase of recovery that we fed with great doses of denial.

  But in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes. They were found with the slightly smaller faces we would routinely see on victims in only a few weeks.

  Drifts of salt blew in from the west, blew out to sea, leaving bleached streets, trees abraded to pulp. Perhaps just a coincidence. Sometimes the driving was blind, and on the highways blowers mounted to poles kept the roads clear.

  But at home Claire woke up one morning and declared us cured.

  Esther was away at horse camp, her school’s fall trip. They’d gone to Level Falls Farm, a four-figure getaway that promised intimate occasions with horses and the experts who baby them. Blood money paid out to stop the flow of Esther’s demands for a few seconds. Money paid to her school, who we already paid, so they could take her away for a while and we could fucking breathe.

  Esther was probably riding a horse right now, wearing the black Mary Janes she refused to shed for anyone, even if it was a shit-clotted field she needed to cross. Or she was lugging a saddle to the stable, or standing not-so-patiently as someone overexplained something Esther already knew. At home she fumed when you doled out information she took to be a given. Anything factual went without saying. Esther opposed repetition, opposed the obvious, showed resistance to anything that resembled an instructional phrase, a word of advice, a sentence that carried, however politely, a new piece of information. These were off-limits, or else we would be scorched by her temper. Out in the world I wonder how she concealed it. With strangers a level of control must have been available to Esther that we never got to see. One hoped.

  Perhaps while her mother and I were at home believing we might be getting better, Esther sat quietly in her farmhouse room at a mirror adjusting her collar so her head did not look, in her words, “like a tube,” which was a great concern of hers that she angrily shared with us and that would never, ever be solved, because it was our fault. We’d made that body of hers, shaped it. We’d done it on purpose, out of spite, to keep her freakish, ensure her difference. Hadn’t we? We were, she said, probably glad she came out that way. Oh, probably. At home we defeated this tube of Esther’s head, daily, with high collars, scarves, turtlenecks. Endless strategies of cloth, sculpted around her neck. Even though we failed to detect the disorder ourselves, we made Esther’s head seem rounder by fitting her with wide glasses, prescription-free. This would fool the eye, make her look like something that she was almost certainly not. And sometimes it even calmed her down, allowed her to move on to other troubles, our little girl’s great project of faultfinding—with us, with others, with the world—that would never be complete.

  With Esther upstate, our days without exposure numbered four by now.

  Our health seemed to be flowing back, but there were hidden factors in play. We were ignorant of the illness plateau, the comprehension ratio we’d soon surpass. There were only so many words you could stand before you were done. About the child radius we were naïve. Naïve is too mild a word for what we were. With this illness, signs of recovery were the trickiest symptoms of all. Feeling better was perhaps just a form of stunned disbelief, a shutting down. Maybe this was the quiet before the really fucking quiet.

  “I think I feel better,” Claire announced, sounding blurry. “I’m definitely kicking this thing.”

  Said the half-dead person, I thought.

  It was remotely possible she was right, which isn’t to say Claire wasn’t capable of objective diagnostics, but that sometimes she suffered from spells of positive thinking.

  To prove her vigor, Claire cornered me, sexually, made a physical trespass. Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on. But my body, pajama-clad and sweated out, with enough blood to power only part of me, failed to cooperate. Her lips dragged across my back like a rough little claw.

  “What do you think?” she said. There was something forced to the way she kept rubbing, as if she wanted to get down to the bone.

  Claire’s breath soaked into me and she pitched her voice against my neck, speaking so closely to my body that only gibberish came out. This should have felt nice, but something sour hovered.

  “Want to?”

  “You mean now?” I stalled.

  “We could,” she said, and her hand dropped, found my coldness, squished it inside her fist.

  There was no response. I rolled out of range.

  Claire never propositioned me, which on its own would be understandable. Language shouldn’t be required for a married couple to toil for their grain of pleasure. But she never actually took off pants, mine or hers, or got the enabling oils or the towel. I guess that was supposed to be a man’s work, or maybe only mine. She sent out clues and then waited for me to follow through, but often I did the reverse. Some days I was blind to the clues a little bit on purpose.

  In this case I was hoping to wait for Thursday, when we were at synagogue, the two of us in the woods after the broadcast had ended. In the hut, with the cold air pouring in, and the radio crackling in the background, it was easier to surrender to what sometimes, if we were exceptionally lucky, felt unterrible.

  Claire furrowed back into me, tugged too hard, and I swallowed some bile. Part of her on the wrong part of me was gritty and rough. There was a terrible smell in the air, most likely my own, and my groin was cold. It seemed as if what she gripped so fiercely might come loose in her hand.

  I tried to look at Claire, but her face was too close. “Should we later?” I said, hiding the apology in my voice.

  I sold the gambit with the most unbothered look I could manage. It was important that she not feel rejected. I noted, too, that sudden atypical sexual desire, with predatory indicators, was a clear symptom. But of what I still wasn’t sure.

  “I’m just so happy,” Claire said, and her hug turned cozy, safe.

  Wasn’t I happy, too? she w
anted to know. Wasn’t I?

  We hadn’t been outside in days. We hadn’t gotten dressed or done more than swish some cold water in our mouths, inhale a little bit of soup, maybe submit to the coarse body brush we treated each other to at bedtime. But bedtime seemed to be all day lately, and since today, with the contagion absent, we found ourselves moving faster and suddenly dressed for an outing, we got in the car and took off for a black-blanket picnic in our usual spot, up on Tower Ledge.

  The field was quiet when we arrived, thoroughly childless. Some older couples, wrapped in parkas and camp blankets, huddled around their bread and jam. They suffered from the facial smallness; I tried not to stare. But people with shrunken features seemed short on time. It was like they were on their deathbeds. A ventilator chugged along on a carpet, churning liquid in its tank. Beneath a shawl two women shared the mask, passing it back and forth without bothering to wipe it out between turns.

  As usual, some families had run extension cords up from their cars to power portable heaters, casting shimmering air over the field. You could walk through pockets of heat, as if they had burst through a hole in the earth.

  In the field no one sang, and if there was speech, it was whispered at levels too low to decode. People hummed in secretive tones, giving in to fits of coughing when their breath failed. When Claire and I walked through the grass looking for a dry patch where we might settle, picking our way through collapsed piles of people, we triggered ripples of silence in everyone we passed. No one wished to be overheard.

  But I didn’t want the secrets of these strangers. I did not think I could bear them.

  The picnic tables, usually loaded with serving boats of communal food, were empty except for traces of gauze rolls, some shredded medical supplies. Wrist straps and crumbled yellow tubing sat in the dirt. A fluid had dried and gone dark in streaks over the grass. It looked like the aftermath of an outdoor surgery.

  At the shaded end of the field, where the sand run was installed, no little dogs tore back and forth, kicking up blizzards of sand. No dogs to be seen in the whole field. No dogs and no children.

  Over on the scorched cement pads no one was shooting off rockets into the woods below. The public fire pit hadn’t been cleaned from last time, and last time seemed like long ago. A mound of coals spilled over the rim of the hole, and the spit rod was still filthy with skin, from what might have been the final cookout.

  The field was usually so crowded that family blankets met at their edges until the grass was covered in a great rug of black tufted wool. But today our rugs were scattered far apart, too few to ever connect, and we sat in distant rafts from each other, mostly out of earshot.

  “I guess it’s sort of cold,” I offered, by way of a theory.

  Claire didn’t second me. She must have also known that couldn’t be it. We’d come here in weather far worse and the field was packed with families. In the snow last year we rolled our blanket over frozen grass. Someone built a fire inside an old iron lung, which got so hot it glowed. When the sun set in late afternoon some elders launched from a slingshot hardened balls of birdseed, which ripped through the sky and occasionally got intercepted, in dusty explosions, by the bald sparrows that kept watch in the trees and shot out when they saw food.

  It was not such a nice day and there was illness in the field, but we decided to stay. We’d come all the way out here and both of us dreaded being home again, where the house smelled of our own spoiled traces. Esther was coming back tonight, so at least today, for a little while in the field, we could spend our recovery out of doors with some people who were almost our own.

  The picnics were not strictly for the Jews of our neighborhood and maybe Bayside or Fort Wine, but they’d winnowed down that way. We were a community bound by an agreement to graze in the same field and enjoy the sight of each other, but beyond that it needn’t escalate.

  We used to bring our kids to these picnics as surrogate social agents and the kids seemed to coagulate in some violent, anonymous way, even if the adults cuddled inside their own force fields and only said hello to one another.

  Hello was the perfect word. It began and ended all contact, delivering us into private chambers from which we could enjoy other people in textbook abstraction, without the burden of intimacy.

  The kids would devour their food, then run off down the foot trail that dead-ended in a wall of trees. Well, other people’s kids. We used to bring Esther to the picnics, but she clung to us and sulked, building out a gloom that she somehow bloodied our own hands with, as if we created her moods in a lab and force-fed them to her every day, giving her no choice but to display feelings of our own authorship. The other kids formed a roving pack, moving like one of those clusters of birds that seem to share a single, frantic brain.

  Claire and I would scout the kids for Esther, identifying girls her age, potential targets for friendship.

  “I like that girl’s shoes,” I’d say, and Esther wouldn’t even look, just tell me that I should go talk to her if I liked her shoes so much.

  “Is that how you captured Mom? Complimenting her footwear?”

  “I didn’t capture your mother,” I said.

  “Not yet,” smirked Claire.

  Kids approached Esther and asked her to play, but she politely declined, citing fatigue. Or she’d say, “No thank you, I never really get to spend time with my parents,” putting her head in her mother’s lap. Claire accepted the affection, ulterior or not, and petted Esther’s hair, careful not to push things too far.

  Last year a gaunt, tall girl trespassed our blanket and asked, in the workshopped tones of a second language, if Esther wanted to come see something. The girl smiled conspiratorially, as if to suggest that Esther’s idiotic parents could have no idea how brilliant this thing was that she was inviting Esther to see. Parents were creatures with ruined, insensate heads, and how could they ever be expected to appreciate the marvels of the Monastery valley woods? What was it they’d found, a bucket of fresh, oiled genitals? When Esther declined, failing even to look intrigued, the girl ran off and was soon sucked into a cloud of children who plunged down the hill, shrieking.

  “Sweetie, I thought she seemed nice,” Claire said.

  “Because she asked a question? That makes her nice? That’s a fairly low standard, Mom.”

  “Well, because she was inviting you to join in, and that’s a nice thing to do. She made an effort to include you.”

  “So if I try to coerce someone into doing something they don’t want to do, then I’ll be considered nice also?”

  This was Esther logic. It was formidable.

  “You guys wouldn’t go running off with a pack of strangers,” Esther said, “so why should I?”

  “It’s fun,” I ventured, bracing myself for her response.

  “Dad, can you name one time in your life when you suddenly ran off with a group of people you didn’t know, screaming and laughing, simply because they were your age?”

  I looked down, hoping Esther would lower her voice. But it was true, I could not think of a single time.

  “I guess it’s something you sort of stop doing when you get older,” I admitted.

  Esther looked at me so hard I couldn’t bear it.

  “So why can’t I follow your example and never get involved in such practices in the first place? I’m not an animal. I don’t follow people around simply because their asses smell good to me.”

  I probably sighed. Certainly I expressed disappointment without speaking. It always surprised me when I didn’t just stoop to Esther’s level but dug down below it, responding to her killing logic with sublingual ordnance. She watched my little performance, the facial codes I sent out to no avail. I saw her straining not to feel sorry for me.

  “This picnic would be more successful,” said Esther, as if she were honestly trying to troubleshoot what had gone wrong, “if you guys gave up your urge to control me.”

  “But where’s the fun in that?” I said under my breath.


  Sometimes Esther appreciated these retorts. Not today.

  We were surrounded by other parents on the black rug, some of whom were overdoing their attempts to show they were not listening. Mostly they’d stopped talking, staring into space as if some wind-borne peril had paralyzed them.

  “I think it’s a perfectly successful picnic,” Claire announced. “I’m having a terrific time. I really am.”

  The word really showed up now and then in family conversations like these. We all clung to it. A desperate little adjective.

  Claire struggled to trust what she’d said. Perhaps she thought a voice-over would convince our audience. She had the amazing ability to conceal all evidence that she detected our prevailing moods, and if she ignored them maybe those moods would vanish. It is true that Claire’s indifference to our despondency sometimes had a medical effect.

  Esther looked as if she had been studying our discussion for a class. Her face was blank. She’d fended off another friend and perhaps in her world—with its new-generation accounting—this was a point scored, another success.

  Down the ledge an awful blast of laughter rose up from the children, but on our carpet we were quiet.

  Without Esther today we tried not to trouble our few neighbors in the field by staring. No one wants to be seen asleep with a blood-cracked mouth. The ventilator chugged and the wind swept waves of dry warmth at us from the heaters. A hairless couple slept loudly on the carpet nearby, the wife’s face erased beneath a white hospital mask.

  We ate and rested and we talked a little. Claire insisted that she felt fine. I wanted to believe her, but I felt scared deep in my body. This might have meant nothing. I could feel that way at the wrong times, when things were fine, when I slept or even laughed. Surges of fear that I’d learned to ignore. Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them. I wanted to tell Claire I was frightened, but it seemed like one of those remarks that would lead to trouble.