The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I stood on my chair, ducking the putrid smoke, rotten and icy at its source, and pushed aside the panel. The drop ceiling disguised a tangle of plumbing ducts and power lines, but something else snaked through that space as well: a bright orange cable such as the one that pulsed up from our Jew hole. A shining orange piece of conduit. I’d recognize it anywhere.

  I wanted to think that this cable could have been anything. It probably was a coincidence. Plastic orange insulation could not be exclusive to the forest Jews who deployed a Jewish radio. But when I gripped the cable it warmed in my hands, pulsing as if fated with a heartbeat. It gave off the same heat, the same nauseating smell, as the cable of our hut.

  To be sure, I checked the other rooms, the hallway. I dragged my chair throughout the recovery wing, pushed aside ceiling panels, and found the orange cable wherever I looked. In Room 4 I stood over the fallen man and found the orange cable buried in his ceiling as well.

  When I traced the cable out of the recovery wing, I struck a concrete wall and could follow it no farther. The cable flowed up from somewhere and retreated, never revealing itself from the recovery wing ceiling. It was tucked away. It was traveling elsewhere. To some other Jew’s hut, perhaps. Why it detoured through Forsythe, a building that was once a high school, and not even a Jewish one, was beyond me. Clearly it wasn’t meant to be found.

  But I had found it, and now I wanted to listen in. If LeBov could intercept the feed without a listener, then so could I. I’d worked my own orange cable for years, learned a thing or two about the secret Jewish radio.

  The wire magazine rack was easy to dismantle. I straightened the curved frame, rotating a small length of wire like the hand of a clock until it snapped off. With this short wire I climbed back on the chair, grabbed the warm meat of the cable, and pierced the shielding until the wire penetrated the cable’s core. A sudden antenna.

  On the chair I braced myself, thinking I was bringing together two powerful forces that might knock me to the ground.

  But nothing happened. No transmission, no sound.

  I’m not sure why I thought there would be. I’d bridged no signal, simply pierced the cable and possibly deferred one channel of the transmission into the air of my room, where it died out inaudibly.

  It’s true that the medical smoke briefly faltered in my room when I pierced the orange cable, sputtering from the nozzle, but that might have been a coincidence.

  What I needed to do was extend the wire from the orange cable to a grounded point of metal conduction, then parlay the transmission into something that could pass for an audio speaker. Then I’d be able to hear the feed. If there was a feed. If this was a Jewish transmission at all.

  From the straightened coils of the magazine rack I snapped off a clutch of longer wires, crimping them onto the short piece that pierced the cable, and in this way I wove a necklace of wire from the ceiling cable to the electrical outlet in the baseboard.

  From here I used the final length of wire to bridge the signal into the best point of conductivity I could think of, the most natural audio speaker there is, at least when you have no other radio equipment on hand: the flesh inside of one’s own mouth.

  I coiled a tight nest of wire using the last scraps of the magazine rack and stashed it under my tongue. This was elementary antenna work. When I was ready I would feed the wire from the electrical outlet to the nest in my mouth, consummating the transmission. Perhaps then Burke would speak. Burke would make himself known through my mouth. My rabbi could be heard again.

  My face was cold, as rough as an animal’s back. LeBov’s ointment last week had bought me some time, softened my palate enough for me to speak in ways I didn’t understand. But that had worn off by now and my face had the buzzing, numb feeling of a sleeping limb. It therefore did not concern me that I was delivering the Jewish voltage to my mouth. My mouth was probably the safest place to test this bit of smallwork.

  I sat down on the floor with the conducting wire, gripping the chair leg for support. At this point I should have taken stock, given some last thought to my Esther in the quarantine, Claire barely alive. I should have paid my respects to what little was left of the world I knew. But instead I touched the wire to the metal nest inside my mouth and fell at once into a tremble.

  My vision blistered, blackened, and a seizure surged through my body. A darkness came over me, and in a great rush of sound, the Jewish transmission gushing from my face at a shattering volume, I blacked out.

  27

  Blessed are they who keep his testimonies quiet, who share them not even with themselves.

  They make no crime in the air; they walk in the ways.

  How does a person cleanse his way?

  By saying nothing of your word.

  Let me never announce the thought. Let me not corrupt it with sound.

  Your word I have buried in my heart.

  My heart I have buried in the woods.

  These woods you have hidden from me in darkness.

  You have commanded us not to know you and we have obeyed. When we have known you we have looked away, put blacklings in our eyes.

  If my ways are directed to keep your promise, then I will not be ashamed. If my ways are directed to keep your promise and I am rendered alone, then I will not be ashamed.

  This is the prayer that flowed through my mouth in the Forsythe recovery wing. It repeated day and night, even if I slept through it, even if I shut my mouth. It streamed at such a volume that it shook the room. When I sealed my lips the sound of the prayer beat against the backs of my teeth, fought its way out, the wire so alive with the transmission, you could still hear it resonating inside me.

  I was scared to move, afraid to disrupt the transmission as it shook through my person, the nest of wire so hot in my mouth, it burned.

  But for however many days I hosted the transmission, this prayer was all I could get from the cable, all that played, and the person behind it did not sound like Burke.

  I adjusted the wire, shifted the nest in my mouth. To no avail.

  I came to know the prayer with the greatest intimacy.

  Your word I have buried in my heart.

  I grew so alert to its obvious meanings that they sickened me, leading me to secondary, ironic intentions, disguises of rhetoric I would not normally notice. But soon these, too, felt fraudulent and then I returned to the literal meanings, which had gained more force now that I’d spurned them. That, however, did not last, and by the end the words had shucked their meaning entirely and evolved into a language of groaning, beyond interpretation. Or susceptible to the most obvious interpretation of all.

  I wish I could report that the prayer flowed from my mouth in the broken, transfixing voice of Rabbi Burke, a voice I longed to hear again. But it did not. A prayer repeated by Burke would be one I could endure, could grow to love, even blasting through my face so hard I couldn’t see.

  But this prayer came from my lips in a horrible voice other than Burke’s. The tones of it were weak and scared. It was a thin voice: my own. The voice I used back in the days of speech. The voice that had never worked very well or much and that sometimes repulsed me, even before it sickened anyone else.

  Around the burning wire I spoke this prayer in my own voice, and even though it came from me, sounded like me, seemed in fact to be my very own prayer, I could do nothing to make it stop.

  I removed the wire. I spit out the nest. I climbed back on the chair and severed the transmission from the wire to the orange cable, replacing the cork panel in the ceiling so the cable could no longer be seen.

  But it didn’t matter. The prayer came harder out of my face, even when I hid in the bathroom, even when I nuzzled up to the fallen old man of Room 4. I’d triggered it myself and now this prayer wouldn’t stop for anything.

  28

  On a warm day in what turned out to be April, I departed the recovery wing of Forsythe Labs. I was woken gently that morning and from a steel door at the bottom step of my lodgings, gogg
led men helped me inside a light-soaked tunnel.

  My guides did not seek to communicate. They maneuvered me with their hands, herding me to the other side.

  Above me holes pierced the arched roof, where harsh portions of sky shone through.

  When we cleared the tunnel we entered a tube-framed dome, its roof covered by plastic clear enough to give a view of the area. Outside the dome, the broad trees of Rochester hung over us. From the branches grew leaves so fat, they dripped a green fluid onto the roof.

  Leaves already in full bloom, grotesque with life. Temperate air and the sun stalking a route impossibly high for the winter months.

  I performed some calculations. The season was spring. Spring was well along now. When I arrived here it was December. I had served over four months in recovery, by myself. It was difficult to factor how the time had passed.

  The prayer had finally died out in my mouth, I think. But in some ways I never stopped hearing it. Perhaps I’d simply learned to relegate it to the background.

  The morning of my release into the research wing was reserved for procedural matters, decontamination. A truck drove through and sprayed me with an air hose so forceful, I clutched into a ball on the dirt until it passed.

  A clump of black fur was pressed to my neck with a forceps, and when I buckled with dizziness I seemed to have passed the test.

  A man used a tweezers to extract a piece of paper from a medical waste bag. I squirmed away from it, some deep instinct repelling me from reading. From behind me someone gripped my face and again the paper was dangled, twisting in the breeze.

  My handlers averted their eyes.

  The paper tilted, caught the perfect plane, and for a moment I saw it clearly. It had words on it, the sort I knew and would never forget, and I was forced to look at them. Yet more papers were tweezed from the bag and held before me, one after another. I was out of practice, but I knew I could estrange myself from language, should I encounter it. I could squint away the particulars, fuzz them into nothing.

  But part of me was curious. Perhaps this was their only way of telling me something. Perhaps these notes held a message for me.

  My interest appeared too late. The last page was retracted, the bag sealed, and then a handler stepped forward, gripping a short needle in his work glove, and jabbed me with it. I looked away as he drew from my thigh the blood they apparently required.

  The other tests were routine and I submitted to them patiently. The goggles worn by my handlers were curious: the light was not bright enough to call for them. I realized then that they did not wear goggles to shield their eyes from the sun, but rather to keep themselves from being seen, to hide their eyes. I had seen no other unadorned faces, made no eye contact, heard no speech. The silence of everyone and everything felt pressurized, achieved at some cost I couldn’t calculate.

  When my examination was done, someone nudged me from the filthy yurt into a clearing, the Forsythe courtyard.

  On top of a perfect circle of grass, a table stood loaded with bread, toasted seeds, a bowl of jam. The rolls were still warm. When I tore one open the steam bathed my face, and in my mouth it was soft and salty, so lovely to taste I nearly wept. On my second roll I spread some of the pale yellow jam and scattered the blackened seeds over it, stuffed the hot mass into my mouth, then looked for something to drink.

  Nothing else had been laid out. When a handler passed me I grabbed his arm and made a drinking gesture, but he ducked away. The nimble way he evaded me, not hostile, just effortless and fast, as if he were executing a precisely timed dance move, suggested he had practiced this kind of avoidance before.

  I waited while my work order was finalized, shifting along the courtyard every so often to keep the shade, which was terribly cold, from overcoming me. There were others, apparently dragged from a recovery tank somewhere also, likewise encased in oversize pajamas, huddled against themselves inside the great open courtyard. We looked like prisoners staggered in precise intervals so someone, stationed in a high tower, could practice his rifle skills.

  In buildings as formidable and cold as this, one expects to look up from a courtyard at cruelly small windows, and see desperate faces pressed to the glass, the urgent signals of people held against their will. Instead the facility wall that gave onto the courtyard below featured broad sheets of transom glass, allowing more sunshine than a building as featureless and leaden as Forsythe would seem to be able to tolerate.

  No ashen prisoners crowded behind the glass, only lab-coated observers, standing in full view. The glass shielded an indoor deck of some kind, allowing people to stand and study the doings below.

  Before I was taken to my new room, I glimpsed what must have been capturing the interest of those people up in the observation booth: a man under a clear dome in the courtyard, his head encased by bright yellow earphones. A crowd of lab-coated observers stood outside the dome with clipboards, while above them their supervisors surveyed the spectacle.

  The man tugged at the earphones, righted himself, and shook his head, trying to tear them free, but they were fastened tight. The observers, near enough to enter the dome and help him, showed no reaction.

  With those lemon yellow headphones and his black suiting, the subject looked like a bee trapped in a jar. From his gestures one might conclude that the headgear was burning his ears.

  He was the first of many I would see. I would never learn what they called them, since naming of this sort had no application anymore, and anyway could not be shared.

  Volunteer, test subject, language martyr: tasked out for experiments to test the toxicity of the languages being devised by people like me.

  By the time I was ushered inside, he whimpered silently under the glass, having given up on removing his headphones, which one supposed were transmitting language his body could not bear.

  Oh, one supposed this all right. A froth of bubbles clouded from his mouth.

  I did not look at his face very carefully, but I would see him again. And again. And again. Within weeks, once I took up my new role, this man’s agony would be my responsibility alone. The voice pumping poison into his body may as well have been my own.

  29

  On my first day of work in the research wing, in a private office with a view that gave out onto the rock face I would think of as Blank Mountain, I checked the lockers for medical equipment.

  I had no access to my car, and no one would retrieve my gear, my samples. My mimed requests were ignored. Or a blanket was tossed over my hands and someone bowed before me, head averted, and squeezed my wrists so tightly I fell.

  I got the message. Sign language was restricted unless new forms of it were being tested under controlled circumstances. If you forgot this and brought your hands into gestural action you were subdued. They came out of nowhere and they did not look at you but if you tried out a language, even a silent one, they put a stop to it fast.

  In my new office I believed I could resume my work with chemicals, with vapors and mists and smokes, with augmented medicines. Even if LeBov had been Thompson, it didn’t mean that the medical work was a dead end. I’d given some thought to this. LeBov trafficked in long displays of falsity, perfecting his untruths, and I’d been listening to Rabbi Thompson speak from the Jew hole for years. If there was identity subterfuge at work, it did not automatically negate the recommendations of Thompson, whoever he really was.

  Other mysteries remained. I had yet to determine what went into LeBov’s speech-enabling grease. I was also unclear about the white collar at the Oliver’s.

  But in the low cupboards and drawers, in the cabinets mounted above a faded slate counter, I found no beakers, tubes, or burners. The raw materials for a chemical kit were absent. There were no raw materials for anything, no bulk drugs, no running water or salt bag. The medicine cabinet was empty of medicine, the refrigerator was tilted open, rimed with mold, gutted. Its power line curved around the back, with no sign of an outlet.

  A drafting desk stood at the wind
ow, and in its drawers I found paper and the makings of a lettering kit. Rubber stamps, ink pads in different colors, and a set of baby sawtooth knives. Alongside these were a clutch of chrome pens, bottles of ink, an engraver’s kit, a set of reference books labeled with a poison symbol, and, most interestingly, a scroll of self-disguising paper—paper with small windows factored in that could be enlarged with a dial—that allowed you to see only the script character you were presently reading, and nothing else, not even the word it belonged to. It broke the act of reading into its littlest parts, keeping understanding at bay.

  Smallwork.

  Unless you dialed open the window at your peril, this device revealed only part of a letter at a time, and even of that part it revealed so little that you might never guess that this mark on a page was participating in the larger design of an entire letter, which itself joined others in a set of interlocking designs called words, that would coalesce on the page to mean something, and thus bring a reader to his knees. This paper let you forget all that.

  I sat down and fiddled with the apparatus, trying it out on whatever text I could find. Such redactions would keep my own work from poisoning me. If I desired, with the self-disguising paper, I could write with the perfect impassive remove that would keep me detached from the very thing I was writing. I’d have full deniability.

  Elsewhere in the desk were some retired alphabetical designs, produced perhaps by my predecessor.

  I pictured a man with blackened limbs, sitting on the high stool with his stylus. Of course he died of his own work. One day he lets down his guard, forgets his language shield, starts looking through his alphabets, and they poison him.

  The work he left behind came stuffed in a binder. Had any of it mattered to anyone at Forsythe, had it somehow transcended the limitations of our current repulsive alphabet, I figure I would have known—it would not be here, we would not be here—so this was failed work. But since it was failed work, I wanted at least not to repeat it, which meant I needed to study it, to understand what went wrong. And that struck me as problematic. Such work would take me days with the self-disguising paper, as if I needed to go thread by thread through a pair of trousers in order to determine that they were wearable.