The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus

  I knew the fairy tale that I would select for my last obliterating language. I knew it inside and out.

  Then we could finally bring an end to this thing, a lovely end, death by reading. How many sentences in would we get? Could we get to the part where the wolf is waiting in the grandmother’s bed, or would we have collapsed in agony already? Would we miss the best part?

  It was a matter of choosing which form of failure to ride out to the spectacular, bloody end.

  If I produced the decoy scripts fast enough, and had them available for the technicians when they came, I had enough time to think about my real work, and this, inevitably, had to involve a complete rethinking of the Jewish script.

  From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.

  With this material I fussed throughout the day, doing mock-ups in ink, laying down string for patterning, making textile samples of this lettering and wrapping the material around different lengths of iron rod.

  The script, when I erected it on pins and experimented with small jets of air, looked like the folds of a brain.

  I staged it in arrangements that might constitute sensible order, the logic of words, but not the sort of words we’d ever use.

  It was foolish, maybe, but I wouldn’t be sharing it with just anyone, and if it wasn’t harmful, then this was the work I wanted to do, these were the letters I preferred to be near. The Hebrew letter is like a form of nature. In it is the blueprint for some flower whose name I forget, and if this flower doesn’t exist yet, it will. It is said that the twenty-two Hebrew letters, if laid flat and joined properly, then submitted to the correct curves on a table stabbed with pins, would describe the cardiovascular plan of the human body. And not only that. That was child’s play.

  The absolute key was that this letter would, by necessity, need to be orphaned from the flame alphabet, toxic to it and in no way capable of joining its system. No matter what else you could communicate with it, it was imperative that this letter could never indicate the Name, or be part of a word or words that did, however indirectly. It would be the flame alphabet’s bastard letter, and I knew who would be the first to receive it.

  When the technicians came for my materials, I swept this work aside, passed them Dravidian syntax instead. When I thought they needed something new, I gave them some Foster, one of the more recent, specialized languages, invented solely to promote doubt and uncertainty.

  If I deployed the Hebrew script in the predictable ways, using it in words we already knew, it was still too sickening to use. I had tested enough of it on myself to know. But this only suggested to me that standard forms of communication were off-limits.

  I hung my secret Hebrew letter on sticks, enlarging the aperture on the pinhole over sample words. These were words that were not even clearly defined and, to my mind, could not possibly exist. Something of their design, the precise way the details of the letters converged when placed together, fused so quickly into the shape of a toxic emblem that I felt an instant chill of comprehension.

  But with this comprehension did not come the crushing. My gag reflex was not triggered. I felt a mild revulsion and that is all.

  This is what I wanted. It is what our old poisonous alphabet must look like to an animal. Unpromising, of no interest. If it could not be eaten or fucked, what other use could it possibly have? Ambivalence was a starting point. When I studied the letter, looked at it from every angle, I was indifferent, unmoved. I just did not care. This was, if you’ll accept the phrase, a breakthrough.

  I enlarged the pinhole, allowing more language to fill my field of vision. And every day I—I’ve never used or even thought this word before—but I fucking rejoiced, because when I looked at what might be possible with this alphabet, when I spelled with it by severing it to pieces and using its parts, omitting vowels with it and some crucial consonants, and wrote the safer words with it and then deployed those words into word strings that fell just shy of forming sentences, I was not so fully blinded by sickness that I collapsed unconscious in my chair.

  I may have retched, I may have felt the room spin off its moorings as if I’d suddenly been launched from my window over the countryside of Rochester, but foul as these symptoms were, they did not of themselves seem killing, which meant the Hebrew letter had more promise than anything I’d ever seen. I may have been repulsed by the script I made with it, but because it did not finally destroy me, I felt that I had the beginnings of a solution.

  With this new Hebrew lettering paradigm I began work on a non-alphabet, a system revolving around one symbol that could never be used in a word, a letter that did not even exist yet, a letter whose existence was merely inferred by the other letters. This letter could fluidly receive or reject ornament, be layered or cloaked, snap open and release, and ultimately be totally disguised, but I had yet to complete the instructions, I had not actually loaned this symbol into a vocabulary, and to one of the test subjects it would look and sound too much like the alphabet that already sickened us. I imagined a single-letter alphabet, one you could hold in your hands. Not that I planned to show this thing to just anyone. This I would be keeping to myself. Myself and maybe one other person.

  It would require redundancy and nonsense built in, ligatures that expressed merely noise, to soften the harshness of meaning, extend it, disguise it. I saw it as a foam I needed to add to my system, a cloaking agent. I wondered if it could be built into a person’s body, to be activated by touch, by the absence of touch. This, too, must have been tried. We did not precisely understand how to control which symbols were perceived as nonsense, and which ones suddenly came to mean something. In fact, we understood nothing.

  When I finished the first prototype, an inflatable letter vacuumed of air so that it looked like a miniature collapsed building, my idea of what had been missing from the Hebrew alphabet all along, I realized that I had inadvertently constructed an artifact that was, in appearance if not in function, very nearly identical to something from our Jewish hut, an item now confiscated. A listener, a Moses Mouth. But smaller. A baby one. New to this life. I’d finally found my smallwork. I could keep something from the motherfuckers who would abuse it.

  I put it in my pocket and went out.

  39

  A few days after my encounter with LeBov, and my first dose of the child chemical that triggered brief fits of speech and illness-free comprehension, I left my office, rounded a corner, and was abruptly ambushed by one of his people. Someone with a covered face hugged me and below my buttock I felt the cold potion flow.

  LeBov was waiting for me in the cellar, outside the door to their Jew hole. He was attended by technicians hidden behind goggles, their heads wrapped in flesh-colored rags. Enough strips of foam insulate to cover a large man.

  On LeBov’s neck a stained, brown bandage peeled up over a wound, threatening to fall off.

  LeBov wanted to know if I had changed my mind, if I’d consider helping them.

  The fluid from the injection activated, shooting through me like a rope of electricity. Immediately I felt that this dose of child fluid was different, laced with something harsh, a ballast of amphetamine, a numbing agent. They’d been tampering with it, pushing it through betas.

  My speech resources were back. In my face a buzzing commenced, to be relieved only by talking. This medicine didn’t seem to just allow for language, it demanded it.

  I looked through the window to the cold, vaulted space where the hole was.

  Something pink was tied off to a pole, floating out of sight. It looked like a person hovering in the air.

  LeBov asked, “Are you in?”

  “You must have others,” I s
aid.

  LeBov said, “We do. Nine of them. Foresters. You’ll meet them. They’re a lovely crowd, and your participation, as they say, would round things out nicely.”

  Nine of them. And I would make ten. Someone had been doing his reading, a little elementary Jewish procedure, put abroad into the world by our clever elders only to mislead the curious. It astonished me that people expected us to share our holy text, our rules and rituals, with just anyone, or even with each other. Sharing. What a tragic mistake. While the other religions begged for joiners, humping against the resisters until they yielded and swore themselves forever to their principles, we set about repelling them, erecting barriers to belief. It was how I preferred it. And LeBov had taken the bait. The so-called quorum of ten Jews required to ignite proper worship. This rule was one of our better decoys. I marveled at how off track he was. Whoever was running Forsythe thought a Jewish tradition, invented in the first place, was going to assist their decipherment of the transmission, a rigorously difficult act not tied to mystical belief whatsoever.

  “You think a minyan is going to help you here?”

  LeBov coughed with wretched force, while the technicians kept him from falling. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.

  “Well, you tell me,” he said, heaving. “Enlighten me, please. Tell me what will help. I’m at your mercy.”

  I looked away from him and said, “I wish you were.”

  LeBov waved aside his technicians, but they didn’t leave, only took a step back while continuing to hold him up.

  “How about this?” he said to me. “Let’s go take a look at something.”

  I paused. LeBov’s show-and-tell had its downside. The last time he’d offered to show me something, it was a room full of children having their essence sucked free into a cup, to be boiled down somewhere into a speech-releasing agent. An essence now forced into my body twice. I didn’t get to see what happened to those children after the fluid was withdrawn, and I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see anything new that this man might have to share, but, despite myself, I was already following him.

  We went up one level to a low, ankle-height window. You had to crouch to see out, pressing your face sideways against the cold floor, but this required too much strain for LeBov, so he reclined on the floor with his face at the window and invited me to join him. It was like we were testing a bed together in a department store and the headboard was a window we could see through.

  Together we looked into a wet, stone room that held a crowd of people who seemed to be test subjects, potential ones. An endless supply of test subjects seemed to appear at Forsythe, and here was yet another holding tank. This group was no different from those I’d seen, and I was relieved; at least I’d not be shown some gruesome sight today. I knew I should feel pity for these people, but their endless numbers, their compliance, made sympathy difficult. These people today who we saw from the low window apparently had made it through most of the admissions process and were here waiting for their final decontaminating showers.

  A jet of water shuddered through the room every so often, and someone stepped up to take his turn, twisting in the spume.

  Among this group, huddled against the back wall waiting her turn, was my wife, Claire.

  She looked calm, even pleased, as if she was waiting on a bench for the doors to open on a movie she wanted to see.

  I tried to animate the months she’d spent since I’d left town, but could not will a picture of the extraordinary narrative that must have unfolded. I could only see her gasping on her back in the woods, trampled by a feral child, or scratching at the door of our house while Esther and her friends barked debilitating language sounds inside. I could not will her image into any functional mode, modes of escape, flight, competence—she had been so ill—such as what might have been required for her to first survive, and then to get all the way to Forsythe.

  “So,” said LeBov. “The plot thickens.”

  “The plot sucks.”

  “Well,” he replied, as if there were some debate.

  “Go on,” I said. “This is the part where you spell out the blackmail.”

  LeBov took that in, said, “That seems tiring, though. Must we really get into that?”

  In the stone room Claire had found a friend to huddle against. He seemed nice, a man with no hair. Not fat now, but probably once fat, because he had too much skin everywhere, skin hanging off him. I guess that meant he’d had trouble finding food. He wore large, women’s glasses and I wondered if he walked around expecting to be killed. He had accepted Claire into his arms as if she were a pet, stroking her hair. Maybe he was protecting her.

  “What’d you tell her?” I asked LeBov.

  “Well, it didn’t take much. Actually it took no telling. No wonder she married you. She thinks we have Esther in here. I waved a photo at her. Those family photos again. I’m not even sure it was actually a photo of your daughter. Maybe it’s a soft spot for children in general that your wife has?”

  I asked, quietly, “And do you have Esther here?”

  LeBov smiled. “It’s amazing what people will believe.”

  “Would you have us believe nothing?” I said, so softly I hardly heard it myself. I knew I was taking the bait. I couldn’t help it.

  He paused, gave it some thought. “Well, I do have that also. I have that right now, with some of my workforce, and I quite enjoy it. I have them believe nothing. And then with people like your wife, I have them believe what I require, which is slightly more than nothing. It’s not even that impressive. Is there anything more basic than having people believe things? It’s an elementary strategy of control, to get people to believe things. There’s not even that much artistry required. You should try it.”

  If someone was operating the faucet in the holding tank where Claire waited, I couldn’t see him. One by one the potential test subjects rendered themselves nude before the cold jet of water, brought their speechless bodies into collision with the liquid blast. But it wasn’t strictly water, because what collected in the drain had a soapy, black foam in it, a dark brew of bubbles bearding up on the floor.

  Soon it was Claire’s turn. She shed her coat, stepped from her nightgown, and with self-conscious charm flipped her hair back before submitting to the fierce spray.

  She was really quite lovely, my wife.

  LeBov seemed transfixed by the shower spectacle. His mouth had gone slack on the window, mist flaring over his face.

  So he’d indicated to Claire that they had Esther in here, and now Claire thought she might just come in and get her? It was hard to think that Claire’s stubbornness had persisted over these last few months, had not yielded even slightly to the crush of reality. Esther would be too old for their purposes by now. At Forsythe teenagers were on the brink of illness themselves, but there was no way Claire could know that.

  Or there was every way Claire could have known that, and more. I should have reminded myself not to think I had some advantage of perspective here. What you are most certain of is what will undo you, had said Rabbi Burke, once long ago. I had scoffed. It sounded like the mantra of a high school teacher who trafficked in homilies that no one believed.

  The naked Claire stepped behind a curtain.

  “And your plans for her now?”

  “She’ll serve as an associate tester for us,” said LeBov, bored. He motioned his technicians over and they helped him up.

  I pretended to know what that meant, and LeBov caught me trying to decipher what he’d said.

  “You think we don’t rank them?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “Good point,” he admitted.

  He went on to explain that her class of test subjects would not die immediately. Claire would be exposed to materials that had not formally been ruled out, scripts, historical speeches delivered in a spectrum of accents, languages laced into ambient room sounds at subvocal thresholds, even though prospects were …

  LeBov di
d not finish saying what Claire’s prospects were.

  “It’s possible she’ll even get to read one of your funny little alphabets. What a nice reunion that will be. Maybe you should encode a message to her? ‘Dear Claire, how are you today? I am fine. This script, by the way, I made it myself! And … it will kill you. Love, Sam.’

  “Turns out it’s not too late to apologize after all. What’s the hieroglyph for ‘I’m sorry’? In fact, let’s arrange that,” LeBov said.

  He laughed. “Don’t you love closure?”

  LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really say what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel the words of an invader. This kind of concealment was supposed to create tension, build mystery. We spoke in code, but no one was listening in, and we no longer knew the original language to which our niceties would be translated back. We were trapped in the code now for good. A language twice removed, stepped on, boiled into a paste, and rubbed into an animal’s corpse.

  We returned to the door outside the Forsythe Jew hole.

  I thought of Claire covering herself with the robe they dispense to the subjects, moving into the final processing line, waiting with the others. I thought of her standing there missing her daughter, looking strong and indifferent on the outside, but missing her daughter so hugely that she worried it would show, it would show and then she’d do something wrong, something that would only hurt her chances of seeing Esther again, so she braced herself further, hardened her look, erasing all signs of desire, of interest, of anything. Such erasure of one’s appearances, how can it not seep into the interior, even a little bit? What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?