The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  33

  At Forsythe there was little news of the outside world, because the outside world had slowed to a freeze. Most of what happened elsewhere happened silently, underground, far enough out of sight that unless you saw it for yourself, it probably happened in your imagination.

  What there was to know could be seen on surveillance monitors throughout the suite of leisure byways on the Forsythe laboratory mezzanine.

  Footage came in of some settlements overseas. A cinema of the perished. From Denver also came film. Grown men locked under glass in a bleached field. On some rocky coast a houseboat of old people tied off to a dock, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed, shouted into the cold water. The film out of Florida was so finally blackened, no shapes bled through.

  On the monitors you could see children on horseback in the Catskills, dragging audio sleds. Faces brilliant and large, the happy people we once were. By now I’d gotten used to the button mouths on grown men, eyes crowded in close as if for warmth. It was too much to see a face so large, a child with feelings that could not be concealed. I preferred the new smallness that better hid the insides of people. Insignificant faces that bore no message. Another house with the lights out.

  The strategies of the speechless were obvious. There was the strategy out to sea. The strategy in the mountains. Overseas the strategy was similar, but fire seemed more frequently involved. Films from there were burnt or films were blank or the films only showed water in looping reels that never seemed to end. If this was a catastrophe, many parts of the world stubbornly showed no sign of it.

  A project was under way in Montana, copied in the Dakotas, in a sandy stretch of what looked like Utah. Corridors of speech ignited by children would block the passage of the older weaklings. Telephone poles and electrical towers were pressed into service to keep the vocal weapon in play. Speech was routed out loud from every kind of vertical structure, pinged across wilderness coordinates so no space was left silent.

  Beneath these channels of speech were the most vicious accumulations of salt.

  Too often the footage revealed some badly swaddled survivor caught out in the language. If you watched all night you could see him starve.

  Sometimes after working hours a small-faced scientist stood staring up at one of these news monitors, so riveted in his vigil that you had to step around him on your way to the coffee cart.

  Finally among the speechless there was the strategy of the tents. In every location tents in circus colors had been erected over the ground, strung up from trees. In line at the cloth doorways of these tents stood the speechless, and one at a time they entered. Five minutes, ten minutes inside, sometimes longer. You didn’t get to see their throes, their fits of expiration. They departed on stretchers, covered in a sheet. Sometimes uncovered. A team of volunteers took the stretchers to a field and rolled them over a hole until the stretchers were light again.

  These were the mercy tents. Inside people heard some last song, whatever they chose to dial up, and then down they went to those sounds. A strategy of acoustical expiration. Suicide by language. Mercy was right. The tents were clearly a kindness to those who remained. No one was forced in. On the contrary, people fought to get inside first. And when a funeral field had filled, the mercy tents were struck and dragged away. Audio equipment pulled alongside by wagon. A jukebox of words to die to.

  I had to believe that LeBov, if he was even here, wanted us to see what had become of our peers in the world outside.

  If I were in line at a mercy tent, it would be Rabbi Burke I’d most want to hear. Burke or something closer to home. A final message from Claire or Esther, if I had any recordings. I would have liked to have heard their voices again.

  Of the footage shared with us in the corridor, one only rarely saw evidence of the child quarantines where our children lived. The quarantines had evolved into defended settlements, but it didn’t take much to keep us out. Loudspeakers on poles, broadcasting the famous old speeches, the fairy tales, radio serenades. It was a hissing wash of poison to traverse, and unless you’d rendered yourself deaf, you didn’t get far inside such sound. You stumbled, fell, and probably could not even crawl away. Speech at that volume flashes out deep into the woods, a murmur line. The new maps would be blackened with them.

  Some lonesome fathers and mothers tried to penetrate the quarantines, shielding their soaked faces, burrowing in. Individual missions, no doubt. Projects of intimacy. Every so often a dark shape streaked across a field, pierced the sound barrier that blasted an impermeable language to prevent intrusions by the speechless, and disappeared into the darkness of a quarantined neighborhood. What these people did when they got through was not available. How they survived was not available.

  Even a camera had not lasted in one of these places for long. Recording devices were discovered and smashed, but that was only a matter of time. Cameras were too obvious. They needed to send not a device inside, but a person, one of their own, and that person would be very young, well trained, and entirely hostile to the locals.

  Somewhere at Forsythe, if they knew what they were doing, if this place was being run by someone who was thinking clearly, working to outsmart the dilemma, they were raising their own children. It sounds like a fictional conceit, the idle imaginings of a culture unimpressed by its own reality, but it would have been one of the first ideas to try. And once, as they say, the asset had matured, the asset would be released into the world loaded with enough misinformation to be dangerous. First stop, the quarantines. Project, fucking overthrow. Project coup. This work was a given. Perhaps that seems far-fetched. It actually is far-fetched. Which, in my mind, made it all the more likely. As of last December, the far-fetched had pretty much come nigh.

  Children, after all, were the ultimate asset.

  This would turn out to be true in ways I could never have predicted.

  On the last monitor of the corridor, a lone black-and-white unit that hung at face level, one could sometimes find footage taken from inside the quarantines. When it flickered on it attracted the interest of most of the loitering scientists, who would crowd the set and try to see.

  One’s first assumption of a child-run community, supervision-free, calls up wolflike youngsters crawling through dirty hallways, eating each other’s torsos with lazy relish. But the evidence I reviewed presented a subdued crowd. The children, in the footage we had, their faces turned bland by the editor, had set a long table with plates. They raced across a room, bringing supplies to this table, then sat down to eat. But with their features smoothed over they seemed to be spooning food into the blurry holes of their necks.

  In an outdoor scene, captured from what seemed to be an upstairs window of a house, a formation of children moved on the street in the regimented patterns of an old-fashioned dance.

  At times the children clustered so closely together, it was as if they’d become one body, swaying over the floor. Why they kept huddling so close together was unclear to me. To the unspoken dismay of my colleagues, I would get right up to the monitor so the heat of it bathed my face, and I’d wish I could clear away the fog from the children to see what it was they were feeling as they clustered against each other like that.

  Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

  The background of this imagery had been scrubbed, censored. Instead of the hills and trees that loomed behind them, or even the other houses, the scenery had been pixilated. Someone didn’t want us to know where this was, and the children were meant to be shown playing or dancing in the street as though that street was suspended in space. But something gave away their location, and I stopped often when this scene was playing to confirm my suspicion.

  On the asphalt, in a pattern at the feet of the children, were the cold mesh bars of shadow that could only have come from a signature electrical tower anchored to a slope not so far away from our old Jewish hole.

  I think I knew exactly where those children were, and it was just blocks from my old house.
r />   Even so, what did this mean? It meant nothing. I could not share it, I could not go there, and after watching this loop too many times it began to bore me, even as I sometimes thought the loop kept changing. I knew there was a quarantine in Montrier, because it was forming when I left, and our little town, with its valley on one side and the great hill behind it, offered natural protection. But this footage, from the looks of it, might have been taken years ago.

  I wanted to pass it by, duck the dull high monitors, ignore the face-level screen, even if the crowd of scientists suggested there might be new footage streaming through. I wanted to ignore these diversions and move directly to the coffee cart, where the relief and comfort and, if necessary, savagery, were far easier to regulate.

  If I got to the coffee cart early enough, I could tap Marta, retreat to one of our rooms for a transaction, then be back at the cart before the last person had been tapped, and there I could tap again and retreat to my room for a second round of intimacy, to wipe up any needs I’d not soothed the first time out.

  But on harder days in my office, after watching from the observation deck as my work was placed before some crowd of subjects, who at once fell to fits on the floor, who did not recover even when the offensive material was removed, and who continued in mute throes of agony as I returned to my desk and picked up on yet another dead-end script that was sure to fail, I had needs that sex with Marta only antagonized when the working shift finished. On those evenings, when I passed this corridor through the spotlights shed by the high monitors, and then that white cone of face-level light at the end, I did feel compelled to study this imagery for a familiar landmark, some sign of home, or, and this I hoped for most stupidly, and most desperately, evidence that Esther, older now, meaner, stronger, nicer, I did not know, might have lodged herself among these strange, faceless children and might have decided to place herself in front of the camera, so her father, wherever he was now, might see her and might, if he was any kind of human person, do whatever he possibly could to get her out of there.

  34

  Weeks passed like this. If LeBov was here, I did not see him.

  I did my work and fed the material to the technicians, who came to my office with a bucket to collect what I’d done. That’s what the work I gave them amounted to: slops. In the courtyard men and women fell unconscious, turned into gazeless creatures. Some of them were sick because of alphabets I made. I raised a sparse beard on my face and I learned to stare between the people I saw.

  At work I bent yet harder to the task, determined to rule out anything, however archaic or difficult or obscure, that had once let people connect.

  Rebus writing, rune writing, pictograms, they all failed.

  Administrative script, scripts of love, the scripts used to conceal secrets and deflect attention. All of the specialty languages I tried. I tried the languages of complaint, of apology and denial. I wrote out simple sentences, hiding my own words with the self-disguising paper. By design I wrote sentences filled with errors, sentences afflicted with inconsistencies of tense and tone. Sentences of poor taste, good taste, no conspicuous taste at all. Grammatical rules, rules of usage, rules governing rhythm and silence, these I broke hard. I used a conventional Roman alphabet but spelled everything wrong. Would it matter? I tweezed letters from words, obliterated vowels, used only vowels, repurposed a single vowel, O, to stand in for all of them, to give air to the words, a universal breathiness from a single source. Let them all drink from the fat O. And when O didn’t work I tried the others, to be thorough, but just as O failed, of course the others failed, too. Of course is the operative term here. Not once did I believe that through lettering alone we’d reach people without harm.

  Through lettering alone. Good fucking luck.

  I tried everything but the Hebrew alphabet. I knew it was poison, too, but I didn’t want this script to cause pain. Lift not the language into the service of bloodshed, Burke had said. Or, these words will open up holes in men. I would not be the person to pass scripts of these symbols into the courtyard, where seizures would occur. But though I never sent down work that explored the Hebrew possibility, I did make latex letters in the Hebrew script that inflated, once I’d sewn up the sutures, into fat, black clouds. Little floating tumors that were language-free, hovering over my desk until I pierced them. And when I did that, they fell into shredded piles and I swept them into a drawer.

  Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I re-created what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.

  To readers not versed in the code, this presented like pulp. No sense could be had unless the subjects sat down with a Caesar wheel to decipher what I’d done, and we allowed our martyrs no equipment, let alone enough time to drag meaning out of the ultra-cloaked messages before them.

  But it didn’t matter. Sense wasn’t what was getting them, the immediate impact of comprehension in the brain. It may have been meaningless, but they were sick regardless, even sicker than before.

  The progression of our shared disability defied the going modes of understanding.

  So I tried different colored papers, clear papers, walls, cloth, skin. I ran troubleshooting on backgrounds, which interested me, the visual phenomena that stood behind the text in question, to determine how the backgrounds to our written language either support or defeat the toxicity. What kind of air masks a language, and does that air matter?

  We lacked the equipment for a smoke machine that might be fitted with a text filter, through which legible typefaces could float out and dissipate in time. A self-eroding writing, a writing that dissolved when it was seen. But I didn’t need to make skywriting to know how we would react to it. With cotton balls I tufted up letters, glued them to cork. I acquired an LED board, rigged it to scroll words, to blink the scripts that I commanded.

  These light boards not only failed, they brought on new symptoms, triggering a palsy in our subjects, sometimes rendering them moribund, twitching on the testing-room floor until we unplugged the board.

  A writing might be made of air alone, I reasoned, colored air, the brittle air in zero-humidity climates, fur or animal hair that’s been pulverized by mortar or woven into strands, any kind of cloth, any kind of object, or ink alone, ink on paper, ink delivered by means of stylus. It was worrisome how bottomless my project was. For a stylus I defaulted to reed. But I also used pens, pencils, knives, my own finger dipped in pigment, and a lead nail for scratching over glass. The ancient tools were there for me, dragged from some useless museum, no doubt—everything at your disposal, sir, the technicians never said—and I used them, but to use them convinced me further that this direction was doomed.

  After every failure I returned to my desk more certain that scripts were finished. No matter how I ornamented them, in the courtyard the result was the same. Months of this confirmation took place, played out against a range of test subjects. The work that I produced, the letters and codes and then the aggregates and compilations of these, sometimes brought to further order and logic by the Forsythe technicians, was nothing but a weapon.

  When I looked from the window at the crowd outside Forsythe, clamoring without a sound to be let in, I felt wildly blank, unresponsive. They were desperate for admission but too cautious to riot, too scared, because it’d be so easy to douse them all with speech, to drive them away with a steady broadcast of the simplest words. In days, maybe weeks, they’d be processed through the system, and they’d sit before something I had written, and all I would have to say to them, after all of the effort they went through, was The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

  What was compelling them to come here in droves like that, to lay themselves open t
o such rank poison? What on earth, I wondered, was misleading all of these language martyrs into thinking there was something inside of Forsythe that would deliver them?

  35

  In his early writings, Thoreau called the alphabet the saddest song. Later in life he would renounce this position and say it produced only dissonant music.

  Letters, Montaigne said, are a necessary evil.

  But are they? asked Blake, years later. I shall write of the world without them.

  I would grow mold on the language, said Pasteur. Except nothing can grow on that cold, dead surface.

  Of words Teresa of Avila said, I did not live to erase them all.

  They make me sick, said Luther. Yours and yours and yours. Even sometimes my own.

  If it can be said, then I am not interested, wrote Schopenhauer.

  When told to explain himself, a criminal in Arthur’s court simply pointed at the large embroidered alphabet that hung above the king.

  Poets need a new instrument, said Shelley.

  If I could take something from the world, said Nietzsche, and take with it even the memory of that thing, so that the world might carry on ever forward with not even the possibility that thing could exist again, it would be the language that sits rotting inside my mouth.

  I am a writer, said Picasso. I make my own letters.

  Shall I destroy this now, or shall I wait for you to leave the room, said his patron to Kadmos, the reputed inventor of the alphabet.

  Kadmos is a fraud, said Wheaton. Said Nestor. Said William James.

  Do not read this, warned Plutarch.

  Do not read this, warned Cicero.