The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I turned away as he finished and asked if he needed any help.

  The retching stopped.

  “Oh, goodness,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.” He coughed, swallowed, arranged his appearance.

  This was Murphy’s first lie.

  I frisked myself for a tissue I didn’t have.

  He brought out a handkerchief, touched it to his mouth, as if he were dabbing a drop of soup from his lips.

  “Sorry about that. I thought I was alone. Give me a second.”

  He opened a tiny bottle, swished a mouthful, then spit a black mess into the bushes. From a small tin he scooped a grease with his finger, then smeared it inside his mouth, running it around with his tongue. Some flavoring to mask the bile, maybe. I wasn’t sure.

  With a spoon he scraped some dirt over his pool of sickness and then stood to kick more mulch over the area.

  “It’s actually good for the plants,” he said, and he stuck out his hand.

  I managed a laugh.

  “Murphy,” he said, and we shook hands.

  He didn’t seem to recognize me from the hiking trail.

  I gave him a name for myself—share not your full story—and we stood there in the cold, looking everywhere but at each other. I needed to get at my gear for a measurement, or else this whole cycle was blown, but I couldn’t perform a half-mile reading in front of him and he failed to produce the body language that would allow us to go our separate ways.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” I finally asked.

  He laughed. “Not even close. But at least I’m out of the house.”

  He seemed pleased with this answer, but then he noticed the bulge under my coat.

  “You’re not all right, are you?”

  Murphy smiled at me with believable concern.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, how many miles out are you?” he asked.

  He tapped the machine beneath my coat, which he could not have known was there.

  “From what?”

  “Your kids.”

  “I have just one.” As I said that I pictured an oversize Esther, towering above Claire and me, bending down to crush us.

  “One will do it,” he said.

  I’d not discussed the toxicity with a stranger, but the information was too rampant now to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. Everything is a disclosure.

  Murphy did nothing to disguise his curiosity at my silence. Curiosity might be too kind a word.

  “Okay, how about this?” he asked.

  Murphy opened his coat and flashed some corroded metal, a vital signs kit not unlike my own, strapped to his chest like a bomb. There was something brown and wet on his, though, glistening as if smeared in paste, but I didn’t get a careful look at it before he closed up his coat.

  In return I did not similarly open my own coat. I hugged it closer instead.

  “I’ll do us a favor then and go first,” he said. “I have four kids. Try to multiply your bullshit into that. I am two miles out. That’s my minimum. Less than that and I’m sure we could bond over some symptoms. Want to?”

  I didn’t answer, but I gave him to understand, through a controlled smile, that he was not wrong to confide in me. Perhaps there was something to be learned here.

  Listen for a change, Claire’s old admonition, suddenly seemed useful. She would say it as a joke, mocking the folk wisdom, emphasizing the phrase’s secondary meaning—if you desire change then first you must listen—but I think Claire actually believed it. Wisdom would come from outside ourselves. We must keep an ear to the ground.

  If that was true, then it was the deep listeners among us, consuming so much more of the venom, who would die first. My indifference to others might end up buying me a little more time.

  Murphy and I walked together and I lost track of our direction. He boasted of the insulation he’d installed in his home. The soundproof barriers with R-values above twenty, the speech-blocking baffles, some sediment collectors that were yielding a not uninteresting powder, even if the use of this powder was still beyond him.

  For some reason it kept falsely testing as salt.

  His kids were younger than Esther, and, to hear him tell it, they were compliant to his wishes. Little eager subjects who sat for every experiment he could devise. This whole thing excited them, he said, even though it’s hell on us, and I didn’t ask who the rest of the us was.

  “If you think about it,” said Murphy, “our kids are the first generation. They are the first with this power. We’re seeing an incredible transition.”

  Transition to what, I didn’t ask.

  In his house quiet time was nearly all the time, but Murphy said it had stopped mattering and they were worried. He and—I forget his wife’s name, if there really ever was a wife—were beginning to question if there wasn’t something else going on, an undetermined allergy radiating from persons beyond his children, as if the toxin were replicating, and his testing had gone in what he called a very different direction.

  Why, for instance, would the sickness endure even if the children were silent?

  “Have you given any thought to that, that it isn’t just them?” he wanted to know.

  I had given thought to that, so much that I’d exhausted myself. To Murphy, in response, I offered the obvious idea that there was no way to reconcile why children’s language should be toxic while the language of adults was not. The acoustics were the same, child, adult, machine. If you taught a chimp to speak, that speech should sicken you, too. How could the source matter? It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes any sense.

  Murphy scoffed.

  “I’m fascinated by people who pout when they can’t find sense and logic, as if it’s not fair when something in nature doesn’t reveal an obvious pattern. It’s a fucking epidemic, and the logic is impenetrable. That’s how it succeeds, by being inconsistent and unknowable. Fairness is for toddlers in a goddamn sandbox. No one wants to admit that our machine of understanding is inferior.”

  “I’ll admit that, but it’s not malicious to try to understand what’s happening,” I said.

  “No, maybe not. But understanding takes its toll. It’s a fucking disease in its own right.”

  Murphy brought out the tin of grease, coating the inside of his mouth with another shining scoop of it. It smelled like jam.

  He held it out for me to try.

  “If we’re going to keep talking, you’re going to want some of this. For protection.”

  “What is it?”

  “This? It’s child’s play. Some basic shielding. It’s been around for a while. It’s pretty much lost its effectiveness for me, but I don’t want to take any chances. You could rub some on your throat first.”

  I thanked him but declined.

  “Still waiting for an official solution? Don’t you think it’s time we took matters into our own hands? The doctors are scared, right? Aren’t the doctors scared? That’s what I’m hearing.”

  I looked at him, determined to show no sign I’d heard those words before, not so long ago, from Thompson.

  “I don’t think we’ll get any insights from them, that’s all,” Murphy said.

  More of Thompson’s exact language.

  He smiled at me, waited. It was like he was watching me open a present, excited to see my reaction.

  Murphy wasn’t Jewish. There was no way he’d have access to a feed from a hole. Except this was certainty based on nothing I could name, a certainty I found I had come to specialize in. I caught myself feeling curiosity about another person’s faith and tried to shut it down. Whatever Murphy believed should not concern me. It would dilute my own ideas, even if presently I had none. I was not supposed to care. I knew that. I knew it.

  I just wish that I could have felt it, too.

  At the intersection where Nearing dead-ends into the synagogue prison wall, Murphy directed me out of the streetlight and we walked down the unlit causeway toward Blister Field and the electrical to
wer.

  “Are you reading LeBov?” Murphy asked.

  “Not so much,” I said. “Which books would be good?”

  Murphy looked confused. “LeBov doesn’t write books. Books expire. Books get hacked. No one wants to leave that kind of evidence.”

  It seemed important to reveal a kernel of the dilemma, in good faith, to discover Murphy’s strategy. I took my time and tried to fill him in on my fledgling perimeter work, the respite during Esther’s trip to camp. I drew a distinction between the genders, because it seemed obvious to worry about how resistance differed. Claire was always sicker than I was, always. And I floated the Jewish question, since the news had already spit out this idea of a chosen affliction, something related to genetics and faith and whether or not your distant relatives thousands of years ago were covered in shit-clotted fur and prone to kill everything in sight.

  I suggested, in counterargument to LeBov, that Murphy’s children were not Jewish, were they, and yet apparently they carried the toxic language as well.

  Murphy nodded, perhaps too slowly.

  “LeBov isn’t blaming Jewish children,” he said, carefully. “This isn’t about blame. He has profound respect for them. How can you not appreciate that kind of power? His diagnosis is medical, not political. How can we not be curious about where this thing started?”

  “I thought you were suggesting that curiosity was pointless.”

  “Well, maybe LeBov has a reason. Sometimes you say something unbelievable in order to promote a new idea. You build authority that way, and possibly it’s better to be doubted than believed. It is more productive to be doubted. What good is it when people believe you?”

  Reading LeBov would catch me up on things, explained Murphy, but I had to be careful not to be misled. There was too much conflicting information, too many doctored broadsides attributed to him, loaded with unverified ideas. The speech cautions making the rounds, for instance, against I statements, against certain rhetoric deemed to be more toxic, attack sentences, that sort of thing, were probably not LeBov’s cautions. Even if it was possible, said Murphy, that an ultra-restricted language, operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this.

  Which meant, what, that the vague worries and rules of someone who might not exist were now being called further into question?

  It didn’t help that no one knew much about who LeBov really was.

  Or maybe, Murphy speculated, it did help, and that was precisely the point. Maybe the best leaders are the ones we cannot really know. The misinformation coming out of Rochester wasn’t exactly an accident, he felt, but a fairly advanced strategy. They knew exactly what they were doing up there at Forsythe.

  “In some ways, misinformation can be more useful at a time like this.”

  I could not follow this reasoning.

  Word on LeBov, said Murphy, as a for instance, was that he was childless. He was a woman. He was a teenager. Anthony LeBov was two people, a father and son. LeBov had made himself forget the English language, he self-induced aphasia through high dosages of Semantiril, or he took scheduled breaks from listening, reading, all comprehension.

  Nothing was verified, but Rochester was certain, if you wanted to know where the good thinking was getting done. This was news coming out of Rochester. Forget Rochester. Rochester didn’t mean what you thought it did, said Murphy. It was said that LeBov participated in the Minnesota trials, the lab work in Denver, some study in Dunkirk of which he alone survived.

  LeBov, went the story, had a chamber upstate. LeBov did cryptography. Most of the work now was in the wilted alphabet, which wasn’t even its real name. I was sure I had misheard this, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Until the world’s vocabulary got pumped through a kit, and no one could even agree on which kit to use, we wouldn’t know anything.

  “The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?” he asked. It wasn’t a question for me. “Visual codes. Except not the ones we know. The ones we know are already causing problems. Reading is next. It’s not even next. It’s now.”

  We had to prepare for a time, said Murphy, when communication was impossible. This thing started with children, but you were a fool to think it would stop there. Some of us were fools anyway.

  “You’ve heard of the flame alphabet, of course,” said Murphy. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you.”

  Again this look of his, as if he’d reached into my head with a dowser, monitoring my reaction to see if he’d struck water.

  I nodded.

  I wouldn’t show him. Perhaps he was kidding, or, worse, testing me. But this was something straight from the hut, a seasonal topic of Burke’s, when he adopted tones of high caution, warnings so spectacular you could not entertain them as remotely true. If you expected to go on living, that is.

  Murphy held forth on the flame alphabet as though he’d been in the hut with us. The name as deceiving shade. Nothing called by its accurate title. We’ve trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used.

  Some of Murphy’s rant was unfamiliar, strayed into craziness. Nothing from the hut. But other phrases seemed lifted exactly from Burke, as if he’d recorded and memorized the sermons.

  The problem was that I had disregarded a lot of these sermons because—I should be honest here, and there is no one left whom I wish to deceive—these ideas bored me. Maybe I failed to understand them. Burke agonized over speechblood, an engine ripped from the language so the language would fail, and I took it for granted as the higher registers of a religion that did not always move me. The flame alphabet was the word of God, written in fire, obliterating to behold. The so-called Torah. This was public domain Jewish information, easy for Murphy to obtain. We could not say God’s true name, nor could we, if we were devoted, speak of God at all. This was basic stuff. But it was the midrashic spin on the flame alphabet that was more exclusive, spoken of only, as far as I knew, by Rabbi Burke in our hut. Since the entire alphabet comprises God’s name, Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not? That’s what words are. They are variations on his name. No matter the language. Whatever we say, we say God. This excited Burke to shouting. Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through. The logic was hard to deny. You could not do it.

  Of course somehow I had found a way. And Rabbi Burke must have found a way, too, because he went on using language and in the end seemed stronger for it. What was Burke but disembodied speech? He showed no signs of walling himself up in silence any time soon.

  If Murphy did have his own hut, it didn’t seem possible he was breaking protocol in the worst way. Speaking freely of the secrets, sharing them at length with a stranger. And if he had no hut of his own, then somehow he’d gained access to the transmissions, to our transmissions, and this he wanted me to know.

  Murphy said that someone under LeBov was a troubleshooter, apparently, did speech tests, was favorable to lists. Lists were all the talk at Forsythe. Blacklists, safe lists, green lists, healing lists. There were words to fill all of them. But the healing lists, these were short, and no one was saying for sure what words were on them, not until they were tested, tested very thoroughly.

  These were highly guarded lists. A small group of people would be entrusted with them, hone them in Rochester, test for toxicity only on themselves.

  “Words you’d recite for medicinal purposes? Some kind of healing acoustics?” I asked.

  Murphy tilted his head, grimaced, suggesting maybe, maybe not. Suggesting an idiocy he couldn’t meet halfway.

  I said something about Babel. It was the easiest myth to invoke, queued up for renewed scrutiny, and it was getting batted around by anyone who believed our oldest stories still
mattered. What I said was probably nothing. Maybe I only said the word Babel, let it hang out there as if that’s all that was required.

  Murphy wasn’t impressed. “That topic is exhausted. Mythology is the lowest temptation. You want to talk about first causes, I’d go back before the Jewish child and cite mythology, the most sickening specimens of speech. We subscribe to these supposedly important stories, religious stories, and we ignore their inanity, how moronic and impractical they are. Can we prove the stories don’t make us sick? Because they happened long before we were born, we somehow decide they are extraordinarily important and we shut our brains down, we turn into imbeciles, we let the past start thinking for us. That’s sickness. Talk about a fucking precursor.”

  “I don’t think those things actually happened,” I said. “As in really happened. If we’re still talking about Babel.”

  He’d gotten himself pretty worked up. A halo of spit ringed his mouth, his eyes flaring.

  “And you’re an authority on what has and hasn’t happened? Where’d you do your training?”

  “It’s a parable,” I said. “You believe that, right? You don’t think it’s a true story?”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  I had no interest in speaking about Babel, a heavy-handed narrative from a world that wasn’t mine. Those obvious myths from the Old Testament—decoy, decoy—bored me anyway. I’d brought it up because of how harmless it seemed, drowning in easy connotations. But part of me couldn’t resist the topic.

  “So you’re saying,” I began, as if I didn’t really understand what he was saying, “you’re saying that a biblical story in which God strikes down his people with aphasia is not relevant? A story about losing our power of speech?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Murphy, quietly. “Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating. The sharing of information hasn’t always been a good thing. Sometimes it is a very terrible thing. Perhaps always. God behaved appropriately in that situation.”

  “You don’t think people will write books about this very topic, linking this speech poison, or whatever it is, to something biblical?”