The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  The frosting I colored silver with a bead of food-grade aluminum.

  When she was younger, Esther preferred black frosting on Fez cakes, and she liked these cakes tethered by rope candy. Or, if not rope candy, then string, dipped in food coloring and pan-seared inside a thin jacket of sugar. When she was ten we’d cooked, cooled, and braided her own rope candy, but left it clear.

  “Color is vulgar,” she said, quoting somebody.

  Once we’d built trails with jelly beans, linking the baby cakes by candy cobblestone. Esther discovered that the jelly beans could be cut smaller and arranged so densely, it seemed the entire gathering of cakes rested on a pebbled surface.

  Instead of a candle Esther would have me soak the perimeter of the cake with a squirt of kerosene, which flamed a perfect halo. When she was nine we strung a wick between two pieces of wire that bordered the cake. The laundry line, we called it. We lit the wick from both ends while singing “Happy Birthday” and watched it fall into the frosting. The two little balls of flame found each other in the center of the cake, burned out, and left a dark, charred circle.

  “The burnt part is the best,” declared Esther. “I get the burnt part!”

  Today I had no candle, no sweets. I did have a placebo smoke purse, which I’d billowed with safe vapors early in my experiments with Claire. The purse had cured—the plastic must have been tainted—yielding a reddish smoke inside.

  I rolled an egg of wax, scooped it hollow, then linked it by drinking straw to the red smoke purse.

  The smoke drained from the purse through the straw, filled the ball of wax, clouding the inside of it, turning it dark.

  I removed the straw and quickly sealed the ball of wax. With a potato peeler I set about shaving the ball, thinning its surface to transparency. Then Esther could see the red smoke trapped inside. Perhaps she’d pierce the ball with her teeth, let the smoke release into her mouth.

  A birthday smoke should be red. It’s the prettiest color for smoke.

  When I was done I placed the wax ball on top of the cake. It sank slightly into the silver frosting, and that was that. It didn’t symbolize anything. This was the point. It was interesting to look at and I thought that Esther might have fun holding it up to the light, wondering how the dark red smoke got in there.

  I found Claire beneath her linen shield and helped her into the hiding place under the stairs. Her body was light in my hands these days, but if I pulled the comforter she was resting on, I could drag her as on a sled from room to room, interrupted only by the thresholds, which offered a small obstacle Claire didn’t seem to mind.

  I did not speak, did not tell her where we were going, but she’d want to see this, her daughter’s birthday. Together we could watch safely through the hole in the door our own little girl. It would be safe. Esther would come home and have some cake and we could watch her together.

  I left a trail of Post-its that would lead Esther to the cake, which I’d positioned on a pedestal table within view of the peephole. We’d bored a hole into the crawl space door and now this was our little shelter beneath the staircase.

  Next to the table I pulled up the children’s chair she used when she was younger. Surely she could still fit into it. And at this height she’d be right in our line of view, provided she didn’t move the chair and turn her back on us.

  Inside our heads Claire and I could sing “Happy Birthday.” No one would have to hear. Esther wouldn’t even know we were there. She could enjoy her cake and it would be nice to be together again.

  I pushed Claire into our cave beneath the stairway, tucked her all the way back, then crawled in myself. Claire did not rouse herself or show much interest. When the time came, when Esther returned, walked through the house, and then found the cake, I would wake Claire and help her see.

  We settled onto our cushions, pulled shut the door, and waited. Claire leaned against me, seemed to whisper something, but I think she was speaking to herself.

  From where I sat I could see perfectly through the peephole. That was a pretty cake on the pedestal, its little wax ball starting to sweat from the smoke. I was just fine to wait here.

  It was dark and late when I woke beneath Claire’s damp body. Someone was in the house. I pressed my face to the peephole.

  The footsteps shook the floor. Esther must have been wearing boots. She clomped through the house as if she were old and slow. I could hear every move as she walked near to us, then far. All I saw through the hole was the little silver cake on the table.

  The steps drew closer, and then a voice called hello. A man’s voice.

  Hello and hello and hello. He called out the name Steven? Steven as a question. He asked if Steven was there. Walked through, opened and closed doors. Was Steven home? Anybody?

  “Hello?”

  It was Murphy.

  I held my breath.

  He was bundled for the cold. He stood huge in our little house. The room was doll-size with him in it.

  He stopped next to the cake, let a finger drag through the frosting. He turned and looked at the door that sheltered Claire and me.

  I stared at him through the peephole and did not move.

  The wet rattle of Claire’s breath seemed suddenly loud. I could not shush her. Even placing my hand over her mouth would not work. The sound didn’t come from her mouth, but from her chest, her whole body. Our hiding place vibrated with Claire’s gasps.

  Murphy walked off, resumed calling out hello, but in a lifeless, obligatory way, as if he couldn’t turn off his voice.

  I waited for Murphy to leave, but he took his time. He went upstairs, came down, went back up. At one point it seemed that he pulled up a chair, sat for a while, before scooting out again.

  In our bedroom Murphy seemed to move some furniture.

  Finally the front door closed and his steps retreated.

  I kept on waiting, pictured Murphy walking to his car, opening it, getting in, and driving away. Then I pictured the same routine again, over and over, until I could be sure that he was far away.

  Except I could never be sure of that.

  Claire’s weight was stifling, a wet pressure. I pushed her off me and climbed out of the crawl space to survey the damage.

  All throughout the house everything seemed as it was, except upstairs I discovered that the hut repair box was missing from my drawer. The little tools meant to fix the listener at the Jewish hole, tools I’d never needed to use. This box was all that was missing. For all of Murphy’s raucous rummaging he hadn’t taken much.

  But the cake had been disturbed. Not eaten, but violated, the ball of wax collapsed, smokeless. Something had been dropped on the cake, then removed. I made a fist, held it above the ruined cake. This was too large.

  The size of the crater was just right for Esther’s hand, I reasoned. Balled up, punching down.

  I couldn’t believe she would destroy her own cake. Certainly the cake had collapsed because I had baked it poorly, failed to follow a recipe. It was stupid to think I could go in the kitchen and improvise like that.

  Perhaps Esther was not hungry. Perhaps she came in and saw the cake and decided she might have a slice later on. Only not now. After dinner, maybe.

  I’d put it in the refrigerator, is what I would do. The cake would be there for her when she was hungry. Perhaps when I was feeling better I would have a piece, too. Maybe Esther and I could sit quietly together over a piece of cake. I’d skin back my frosting for her, because she liked extra. There’d be no reason to speak. We could enjoy each other’s company in silence, in the kitchen, on her birthday. If I could find a candle, an old-fashioned one, we’d light it up. It’d be nice to sit together, listening to our forks click on the plates. We’d be sure to save a piece for her mother.

  17

  LeBov died that week. A feature ran on the news, a final piece of television. He was sixty-two. Or he was sixty-eight. An assistant found him at home, where he lived alone. Two of his many children apparently lived nearby. I mis
sed the picture they flashed of him, but then a photo of one of LeBov’s sons, cast up on the screen, showed a suntanned, elderly fellow with a white ponytail. LeBov’s son. There was no mention of a wife. LeBov had been taken to a private facility in Denver where he later expired. This was the language used by the newscaster. Expired.

  There would be no funeral.

  According to the news, LeBov was perhaps the first researcher, certainly the most outspoken, to identify the threat of language.

  All the good it’s done, I sat there thinking.

  The editorial assessment of the news program was that LeBov’s death was particularly distressing at this time, given our current situation.

  A toxicologist by training, they called LeBov. He had lived mostly in Canada, spent the early years of his career developing his theory of a primary allergen, allergy zero.

  Later in his career LeBov focused on the toxic properties of language. Most recently, until his passing, he had been the director of a private research lab in Rochester called Forsythe. He was working closely with health officials on the problem of the viral child.

  “Claire!” I called out into the cold house.

  LeBov was known for disseminating his views in underground publications. Designed, some said, deliberately to mislead. Filled with false information and historical inaccuracies invented to bolster his theories.

  A montage spun together clips of other scientists appraising LeBov’s contributions. He merited scorn, derision, from a pedigreed cohort, doctors, scientists, linguists. But these were old clips, exhumed from an archive somewhere, stitched together to form a portrait. All the footage was from well before his death, before his recent lunge into credibility. These men and women, pronouncing on the now dead LeBov, projected a vital cheer quite terrible in hindsight—sitting in offices or newsrooms while off-loading their expensive opinions about someone they could safely dislike in public.

  These scientists had yet to live in these times. Today, yesterday, the past few months. Their short-term futures were going to hurt, and they had no idea. Where were these fine people now? I wondered. Were they hiding yet?

  Have you found shelter? Is it finally quiet and safe where you are? I wanted to ask them.

  Not a person alive could be made to talk like that now, look so healthy, using language as if it did not break something in us.

  Even the newscaster, broadcasting live, wore a bloodless mask, staring, one supposed, at the words on the teleprompter. Eating the vile material for his very employment, each word producing the crushing. You could tell. He seemed to weaken by the second. They’d done him up in television paint. One could see that this man did not have long. For some reason I recall his name. Jim Adelle.

  Jim Adelle’s News Hour. A Special Report with Jim Adelle.

  I wonder how many more days he had to live.

  The feature continued. I settled in to listen as LeBov’s colleagues detailed his work, decried his methods, his results, his person.

  “Claire!” I called again. She couldn’t still be asleep. I knew she’d be interested in this.

  LeBov’s theory of allergy did not assist his career. One of the desert universities finally offered him a silo, but they kept him away from students. Later he distanced himself from the theory, then finally renounced the idea as dangerous.

  Not really a rebuttal, I noted, to call your own idea dangerous. More of a sensationalizing gesture to increase attention.

  This would turn out to be a signature method throughout LeBov’s career. He advanced an idea, often a problematic one, beat its drum until everyone was revolted, then turned on himself, often through pseudonym, and attacked his own work. He staged battles in the academic journals between two different versions of himself, argument and refutation coming from the same man.

  At conferences LeBov sent imposters to the podium in his place. No one knew what he looked like, apparently. Then he sat hectoring his stand-in from the audience, protesting every idea, sometimes storming out in disgust. He accused himself of fraudulence, plagiarism. In at least some cases it would seem that he was correct.

  LeBov’s signature work, in the end, addressed the trouble with language, the word trouble being, in his view, an understatement. He argued for most of his professional life that language should be best understood, aside from its marginal utility as a communication technology—can we honestly say it works?—as an impurity.

  Language happens to be a toxin we are very good at producing, but not so good at absorbing, LeBov said. We could, per LeBov, in our lifetimes, not expect to process very much of it.

  In answer to his detractors, LeBov asked what it was that ever suggested speech would not be toxic.

  “Let us reverse the terms and assume that language, like nearly everything else, is poisonous when consumed to excess. Why not assault the folly that led to such widespread use of something so intense, so strong, as language, in the first place?”

  Where was the regulatory body? LeBov wanted to know. Where was the marshaling instinct for speech, for language itself?

  It causes the most unbearable strain on our systems, LeBov would say. It is not very different from a long, slow venom.

  This idea was never granted legitimacy, evidenced by the battalion of naysayers. He simply had no proof. Witness after witness remarked on LeBov’s lack of evidence, and the word evidence came to indicate something significant that LeBov was missing, like an eye, a limb.

  They had some audio for this, a response of sorts. More than anyone else in the world, I wish that I was wrong, answered LeBov, in a voice I felt I had heard before. What a relief that would be, to me, and also to my family.

  “Claire,” I called out again, softer. I listened into the house to hear some sign of her. “Come sit with me.”

  LeBov had written something, a screed, on the Tower of Babel, apparently, but retracted it before it could go to press. The other version of the story is that LeBov wrote in and protested to his own publisher, demanded they pulp the book. The book was a dangerous speculation, an assault on reality.

  “Claire, Honey?” I called.

  The Babel document came up a few times in the news interviews, though no one, it seemed, had read it. LeBov had an obsession with this myth. More than that, a bone to pick. He felt that it was a misleading, dangerous myth. It had, he supposedly argued, been copied out incorrectly, transmitted from generation to generation with a serious degree of error. Now the myth as we knew it presented a terrible impediment. I saw where Murphy had gotten the idea.

  Claire appeared in the doorway, fully dressed, brushing the last of her hair.

  “Why do you keep yelling my name?” she asked.

  “I wanted you to see something,” I said. “This show I’m watching. On this guy who died.”

  “Well, you could have said that. I wish you wouldn’t yell my name. I really can’t stand it.”

  I apologized to her.

  “It’s fine,” she said, leaving the room. “But I can’t stand it. Please don’t do that anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling less sorry.

  “And I said it’s fine,” she yelled from another room. “Stop apologizing.”

  Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

  A linguist from Banff scorned LeBov’s idea of a toxic language.

  “This idea implies a physical component to language. Some material antigen,” she said. “What exactly is the substance, in chemical terms, that is causing this allergy he speaks of?” asked the linguist. “Language is the scapegoat here. If there is a problem—and I highly doubt there is, I cannot imagine such a thing—it is one for the immunologists.”

  Was the Banff linguist, I wondered, simply part of LeBov’s long plan, designed to contr
ol the flow of the argument?

  The linguist held forth, smugly dismissing an idea that had recently come into its own. It interested me that the linguist’s inability to imagine something constituted a sound rejection of its possibility.

  I cannot imagine such a thing.

  If only that kept it from coming true.

  You had simply to look out the window to see the missing evidence she was calling for, watch the neighbors drive off and not return.

  Actually you had only to look at Claire, if you could even bear to. I certainly tried to avoid sight of her, even dressed up, even with her hair, falling out as it was, brushed back over her small face. That sort of witness bearing did no one any favors.

  LeBov was dead, so enemies could alert the world to how unimportant the old man really was, before irony would come along to smother them alive.

  I thought of Murphy and wondered to what authority figure he would answer now. Was he trembling in his room at home now that his master had died?

  The final segment of the news focused on LeBov’s Jewish problem. LeBov exhibited, admitted one commenter in rather shy tones, an unreasonable interest in the private activities of members of a certain religious faith.

  LeBov often stoked, our expert remarked, the long-standing rumor of a segment of the Jewish population who worship privately, sharing wisdom through an underground signaling mechanism.

  Of course we have found no basis for these rumors, the expert assured us.

  Of course, I thought.

  These rumors show a profound disrespect for people of diverse faiths.

  Yes, yes. A profound disrespect.

  When a scientist, particularly a scientist, the expert warned, buys into superstition, into lore, and uses them as paradigms of insight, our entire method of knowing is threatened. LeBov shows no respect by fanning the flames of a dangerous rumor, a rumor that only seeks to further isolate those among us who do practice authentic religious observance. To people of genuine faith, LeBov’s antics are a disgrace.