The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I held still and watched through the rearview mirror as they picked through my gear, holding utensils up to the last light of day, smelling deeply into my duffel. My toolkit was discovered, spilled out into the road. Someone ran a finger into the neck of a beaker, gathered a residue, licked it. A smoke purse was tossed onto a vented snuffing mat and stamped out. It burst with a wet noise, its smoke spilling downward into the vent, as if someone was employed in a cave to inhale the fumes of our world. Nothing but the smell of burnt dough drifted to me up front in the car.

  The younger officials were clothed alike in the full-body suiting, but the older ones had not managed to assemble a uniform. Some still wore their household robes, medical gowns, pajamas under coats.

  The jumpsuits of the youth were blue and seemed to be fashioned of wool ticking. These inspectors lacked even the discipline necessary to tyrannize anyone, to cause paralysis and fear, and it seemed that soon they would drift away from their posts into the hills and sit down in the grass and collapse.

  The great effort of eager amateurs was everywhere. There were none of us who were not amateurs now. The experts had been demoted. The experts were wrong. The experts had perished. Or perhaps the experts had simply been misnamed all along.

  24

  It must have been Woodleigh where I was waved to the side after my car was searched.

  I pulled over near a standing coffin, but no one approached. I waited as other cars were waved through. Blue sedans swept past, passengers hidden behind viral masks.

  The man who finally approached had a small face that rode too high on his head. He beckoned down my window and reached in for me. With his thumb he probed under my arm, burrowing into a spot that was suddenly raw. He directed a penlight into my eyes, studied my face, positioned it in different angles. I returned calm expressions to him and did not spoil the encounter with speech. He, too, was silent, and if there was any noise it was only my own breathing.

  Before I was waved through, he handed me a sheet of paper embossed with a crazed freckling of Braille. He placed my hand over the sheet, running my fingers along the bumps, which felt like Claire’s skin. He passed my fingers back and forth over the Braille message and I could only smile at him and shrug. If this was reading, it was the kind that left me cold. Had I read it? I couldn’t be sure. I had no reaction, but that could be true of other things I read. Perhaps that was the intent of such a message and I had read it correctly. With a sneer he snatched the paper from me and walked off.

  I drove on, passing a stretch of small, wooden prisons dug into the hillside, marked by symbols too strange to read. I must have been near one of the Dunkirks, at the broken radial that once linked them in a breezeway leading down to the sea.

  Outside of Palmyra a tent hung from a tree. A crowd of people had formed, lined up to get inside. What did these people want outside of a tent? A field of fresh-dug holes spread out behind the tent, mounds of dirt in cemetery formation, ready to be shoveled back in when the holes were filled. Graves so soon, I thought.

  Humps of earth reared up in meadows, not just hills and natural elevations, but architecturally engineered redoubts. Mounds and swells and bunkers, as if air was bubbling up from underground, creating shelters under skins of soil. Every manner of door was cut into these dwellings. Wood, glass, fencing, cloth. Some were free of any visible means of entry, the sealed homes of people who did not mean to come out again.

  No exit left the freeway to reach these shelters. If people roamed out there, they were too perfectly camouflaged against the landscape. The sun was abstracted on the horizon, merely a placeholder. I kept the threat of it on my driver’s side periphery, figuring at this pace I’d land at my destination right after nightfall.

  When there were no houses and the road was free of cars, I stopped and climbed into the long grass of the embankment, stretched my body. Beneath a canopy of trees I gave in to what seemed to need to come out of me, pouring so much hard sound from my person I thought it would not stop and I would never get my breath back.

  I wept out all my air. I wept a little bit of something darker. I wept until my voice grew hoarse, then failed, and I kept weeping until I fell to the grass, finished.

  My chest felt like it would break. I clutched the grass so hard that my hands, each finger, felt broken. My face was too tight on me. I wanted to cut it off.

  If indeed I was only crying, it was like no crying I had ever done before.

  In a world where speech was lethal, I could not share with anyone what happened when Claire collapsed in the grass and I failed to help her.

  I would never be able to lie out loud about what happened the day I left my wife and daughter behind, driving north alone.

  At least I had that one, small thing all to myself. My shame would be safely contained inside what was left of me. Barring some miracle, I’d never be able to tell this story. It could die with me. Very soon, I hoped, it would.

  Back in the car, night seemed impossibly far off. I was ready for darkness. I knew that difficult thoughts and feelings awaited me, but still they had yet to arrive. I wanted to be more tired, to have some better reason to find a turnout and shelter my car until morning. But I couldn’t stop now.

  When the sun went down, slipping behind the hills, the road thinned into a single lane and started to climb.

  On a bird-strewn incline I came upon women pulling a cart up a footpath. The tarp thrown over their cart so clearly covered the bulges of people. They were fooling no one. I pressed the gas pedal to the floor, but the incline was so great I could hardly pull ahead of them, so we climbed in parallel up the southern ledge that ringed the city of Rochester.

  At the summit the trees grew rumpled and dense, as if they had been forced to mature under dark glass. Cars on the road below moved in orderly lanes into a single checkpoint, a wooden low-rise with well-dressed guards. In this traffic streamed a caravan of red busses, windows blacked out. The lights of Rochester were only mildly brighter than the darkness, small pale stains oiling the air. If you stared into the light, it retreated until the whole city seemed covered in dark grease.

  I pointed my car down the hill and headed into town.

  25

  In the Forsythe parking lot I fell from my car and crawled over hot asphalt, circling an endless fleet of red busses, looking for an entrance to the building.

  Forsythe was not a government structure with its typical transparent woods, or one of those low, glass laboratory compounds where clear smoke worked like a lens, sharpening the air over the roof. Forsythe was, instead, just a high school, a research lab embedded within the old educational structure that still had the mascot carved in its face. A game cat whose teeth jutted out from the facade. The name of the school was covered now in a swipe of rust.

  Some men were waiting at my open car when I realized I had crawled full circle, gone nowhere. They fell on me softly, lifted me into the air as if they’d throw me into the sky and discard me.

  Someone grabbed my keys and the taillights of my car squirreled through the nighttime air, then disappeared around a building.

  There went everything I owned.

  My helper spoke through a plastic mouth fitted over his face, but what he said was so foreign and airless that I cannot here transcribe it.

  The message traveled so fast into me that I felt torn open. The phrase, whatever it meant, was like an act of sudden surgery, the kind that cuts the rotted thing from your body, leaving you empty, healed, exquisitely released from pain. That’s all I remember.

  I woke inside a light-scorched hallway. A salted object filled my mouth. Someone shoved it deeper, his fist jammed into my face, as if he was trying to hide his whole arm in my body. I breathed through my nose and tried to keep up, but my mouth was too full with the gag of salt.

  My escorts held me close and I let their bodies guide me. We moved from hallways to small rooms, waited at doors, then passed through tight corridors until we mounted a steep, narrow staircase and came up on th
e floor where I would be staying.

  I tried to keep my sense of direction throughout this interior maneuvering, but the compass I conjured in my mind had only a single direction, the needle in a palsy over a symbol I didn’t recognize.

  A man in a lab coat removed the salt object from my mouth and something tore as he pulled it out.

  I felt hands on me, sharp pieces of bodies that stank. Someone with a practiced touch lifted my arms, removed my shirt. He’d done this to many people, I could tell. Disrobed them while they slumped over in a stupor, readied them for some miracle.

  I was held in place while something pinched under my arm, deep against the bone. It is hard to know if I made any show of my feelings. I looked down as a syringe pulled from a perforation under my arm, the skin hugging the needle as it retreated.

  This was no medicine I had tried before. It brought my eyes halfway shut and I could do nothing to open them again.

  The man spoke in that foreign, airless language, his breath oily in my mouth, and this time his phrasings made me cry. I cried in the most childish, open-faced way.

  I let myself fall into his arms.

  With a thumb jammed between my shoulder blades, he worked a finger from his other hand deep under the bone of my sternum. He had a hand on each side of me and he crouched, readied himself in preparation.

  I draped over him, unable to stand.

  When my lungs were empty, he squeezed, as if his thumb and finger might meet inside my body. I believe he succeeded.

  The sensation came too quickly for me to cry out. My face tightened, a blast of pressure leaking from my eye. He slipped out from under me and I fell.

  He left me in a heap on the floor.

  The medical procedures at Forsythe, at least those I received in the parking lot and outer hallways of the recovery wing, belonged to no speech fever treatment I knew. Hebraic phrases delivered through a prosthetic mouth, triggering ecstasy, promoting unconsciousness. Perhaps these were the healing phrases Murphy—LeBov, I should say—had mentioned. Then there was the profoundly painful bodywork, the deep-tissue manipulation and extreme compression. Crushing. These practices had not been discussed publicly.

  Against the cold wall of my room, in clothes that reeked of my travels, I spoke for a time with Claire. I spoke to her in private tones, words dismantled into grunts, because Claire did not need anything spelled or even sounded out for her, she never did.

  Sometimes I could summon my wife’s voice, no matter where she was. Sometimes she would talk back, even if it was only me willing it so.

  I found myself arguing for the family, trying to make a case that we needed to stick together, and as I did that, I could see Claire’s face, a stricken look of disbelief on it, a really appalled look that I would even begin to suggest she did not also want that, which of course I agreed to as fully as I could, but I could tell from her face that it was too late, I had cast myself as the one who wanted unity, I had excluded her from this desire, and how dare I do such a thing?

  Stick together? She didn’t need to ask. This from the man who drove off without us?

  What’s important now, I started to say to her. What’s important now … What’s important is that we …

  I pictured Claire waiting for me to say, waiting for me to actually know what was important now. She stood over me.

  Dig yourself out of this, she didn’t need to say. Go ahead. Get down on your knees and start digging your way out of this. I’d like to see how far you get. I’ll be right here, watching you disappear into the earth.

  26

  My days in this northern hole of Rochester were speechless and dark. I saw no sun, never felt the sky darken. No authentic sky prevailed in the Forsythe recovery wing, no windows through which the light might fail.

  Ruptured mattresses littered the floor, sleeping bags with the bottoms kicked through. A brittle pillow bore the facial welt of the last patient who slept here.

  A man’s work shirt had been chewed, swallowed, spit up in a glaze of bile.

  Mesh baggies of hair hung from the ceiling, repelling flies. Possibly the hair attracted them instead.

  Most rooms were furnished with wooden chairs, seats scarred by fire. Rope railings hung from the corridor walls. The blind could pull themselves to the bathroom without falling. The blind, the sick, the tired.

  These quarters so far I occupied alone, with the exception of a man left too long to spoil in what I came to think of as Room 4. His face was so white, it seemed painted.

  It was early December. Year of the sewn-up mouth. The last December of speech. If you were not a child, safely blanketed in quarantine, bleating poison from your little red mouth, you were one of us. But to be one of us was to be something so small and quiet, you may as well have been nothing. If we had last messages, we’d crafted them already, stuffed them in bottles, shoes, shot them out to sea. Words written for no one, never to be read. When pressed for something significant to say, most of us said so little we seemed shy, could not speak the language. We wrote down our names, our dates, the names of our mothers and fathers, the towns we lived in. On notebook paper we sketched pictures. Our last words weren’t even real words.

  Claire was wherever they took people like her, still blinking and breathing, camouflaged against a hillside of salt.

  Esther was thriving in the world she must have always craved, where the washed-out idiots of preceding generations had finally been banished, rags crammed down their throats. I worried for her without a world of older people to loathe. Now she lived with a population of her own kind, where self-hatred meant you gnashed at whomever you saw. And they you. How much time did Esther have before her own face was touched, before her tongue hardened and grew cold in her mouth?

  Oh, of course I did not know where Claire was. I did not know where Esther was. Even as to where I was, I was hardly sure. But my ignorance did not slow my mind from its suspicions, and these held a vivid persuasion all their own.

  At Forsythe my sleep was not patterned enough to signal the hour. With no smallwork to perform, the time of day failed to matter. What did matter was so far beyond me, I sometimes could not even see it. But still it hovered out there in dark shapes, however much I wished it gone.

  LeBov would find me. He’d hear of my arrival, come get me, bring me into some important fold, if there was a fold. LeBov needed me, if only to practice those black tasks no one else could carry out. I’d let him use me again. Better that than having no use at all.

  Rabbi Burke never used the word devil. The universal coinage was worthless, in his view. Words that mask what we don’t know. But he spoke about dangerous people who orbited the moral world, building speed around us, rendering themselves so blurred, they looked gorgeous. Burke spoke of refusing dizziness, latching on to these satellite monsters, of which one must count LeBov, so we could travel at their velocity, see them for what they were.

  For now I slept in my sweaty room, ate the briny lobes stuck to my hallway food stand, rested wide awake, venturing into the carpeted hallway only when I needed to pee.

  Outside my door stood a wire magazine rack filled with a stash of refreshments, unlabeled glass cylinders of water, cloudy pouches of juice. Whatever I drank was so heavily salted, my mouth became scoured. At the urinal I peed a heavy, white pudding. But I lacked the strength to discharge all of it. Sometimes it sat low in me, an anchoring sediment, as if I were meant to carry this slow water forever.

  The bathroom was dank and its lone faucet, protruding from the wall, blew debris-laden air from its nozzle. If liquid rode in this stream, it clung to the sand that blasted out. I held my hands under the nozzle, beneath a wind that scarcely moistened my fingers. I bent to it and swallowed jets of wind so fierce, they knocked me against the back wall of the bathroom.

  The air sped through me with such turbine force, I sensed a bird’s violation when its beak opens, wind penetrating every last space inside its body.

  When I pictured Claire, she crouched in the woods, c
aked in mud so the dogs couldn’t smell her. In my wishful thinking, which amounted to all my thinking, Claire had fled the truck, scattered to the tree line, then vanished into the woods. From there she watched our house. In her gown she strained to get a safe look at Esther. She strained and failed. When I pictured this, Esther remained hidden from Claire, would not show herself, and her mother did not relent, crawling through the woods for every advantage of perspective.

  No matter how much I wanted to, I could not get Claire to see Esther, even though I should have been in charge of my own imagination. It should have been child’s play to picture these events, but somehow this imagery was blacked out in me. When I moved Esther and Claire together in my mind, a darkness fell and they turned into distant, weak shapes. Even if I could collide these shapes, at that point they were not even people, just blocks of cold darkness that looked nothing like my wife and daughter.

  Early in my stay, I discovered a way to access Rabbi Burke, but the method had difficulties.

  At some point I woke up to an engine shrieking overhead. It was day, it was night, it was early, it was late. The time was best judged, if it needed to be judged, by how thirsty I was, and now my tongue was as dry as a sock in my mouth.

  Above me, jets of smoke poured from a ceiling fixture. I reasoned it to be intentional smoke, a smoke meant for me, the patient, as opposed to exhaust fumes from an accident elsewhere at Forsythe.

  Finally they were medicating me so I could get out of there. A nozzle in the ceiling pumping vapors into the recovery wing.

  The flow was loud and cold. No matter where I huddled in my room it reached me, pouring cloudy fumes over my face. In the hallway it pumped. In the other rooms, even Room 4, covering in fog the man on the floor.

  Sometimes the machinery behind the spout whined and the smoke spewed faster from its hole. When I tried to stop it, thinking perhaps the spigot could be dialed down, I discovered that the cork ceiling panel it protruded from was unusually soft. Soft and easy to remove.