The Flame Alphabet
Page 27
How could a girl so striking tolerate the wretched people her parents had become?
Oh, of course. She couldn’t.
While waiting in the blind for Esther’s release, what I failed to picture was a gray-faced Esther, as if prepped for entombment, an Esther who was recumbent and dry-lipped with iced-over eyes. I had not planned for such a helpless body, erased of the Esther I knew, much like her own mother when the quarantine was announced. The illness had rendered Esther anonymous, and I found it better not to look too closely.
Still I tended to her. I boiled a broth, filtered it through a cone of flannel. With the residue I made little pills for her to suck. From the larder I flayed a choker of cured meat, and when her fevers surged I worked with cloth to keep her face cool and clean.
Esther did not thrive with me huddled over her, staring, dabbing. If she seemed to see me, it was with a scowl, but scowl does not describe a face that shows disappointment and irritation mixed with something that a father might read as his child’s relief. Or maybe he only wants to see relief, and the desire, projected strongly enough, nearly changes the face of the young woman in the bed. I registered the small winces of distaste at my attentions, and, when I was certain Esther was disgusted by my hovering, repelled and annoyed and altogether bothered, I quietly celebrated. When I saw these grimaces I felt more sure that, yes, this was my Esther. Get away from me, I could almost hear her say. This was displeasure that I knew. A comfort to see something that I remembered. This was my girl. Finally I grew sure I had brought her home.
After that I draped a woolen wall over the cot, a blanket hanging from a wire, so Esther would not suffer any added distress. No need to punish her with my presence. Esther prefers privacy. I do understand. She deserves what personal space I can provide.
She deserves a little house of her own, too, and maybe when she recovers, and when her mother returns to us, Esther can choose the site herself, so long as it’s not too far from this hut. So long as I can get there easily, even in darkness.
47
Not so far off in the sky, the odd bird tours the valley. Birds seem to prefer the speechless world. If you lived here you’d have to be buried alive not to notice the superior joy they demonstrate overhead. Victory laps inscribed in the air. Rubbing it in. Admiring the way their shadows crawl over the salt below. Perhaps you require no convincing. Perhaps such sights are available where you live as well, and you, too, look from your shelter at this airborne gloating.
When I picture you examining this account, dangling each decaying page aloft with a tweezers, I wonder if you are alone, barricaded from someone with whom you once spoke freely. Are you reading this with assistance, an inhibitor cutting into the folds of your mouth? Does some cold, salted tonic sluice through your blood to give you shield, if briefly? Or is your protection something more, shall we say, bitter and problematic, achieved at a greater cost?
Perhaps a little one fell down in a great black swoon after you sucked free his assets, and the transaction has left you, what is the word, troubled.
Is there salt where you are, too? Just so much of it everywhere? Can you reckon that it is really the residue of everything we ever said, piled now in soft white mounds? It seems far too pretty to only be our spoils.
I would like to question you on your symptoms, the path you navigated to language, the choices you’ve faced. But we will never speak, as I will be dead by the time you read this. We do not get to survey the people of the future, who laugh at how little we knew, how poorly we felt things, how softly we knocked at the door that protected all the best remedies. You are monstrous and unreal to me now, it is important that you know that. You are my reader but I cannot reach into your face and pull out your secrets. Perhaps you live in a time when someone else’s harm is not bound up with your pursuit of words and you traffic easily with the acoustical weapon, the clustered scripts. Congratulations, if so. I remember those days, too. It is my true wish that you enjoy yourself.
But enjoyment is not one of the choices we have here today.
Darkness soaks these woods by afternoon, browning in so low. One must be careful in this season not to be caught past noon on too remote an errand in the woods, because after sunset a return home is difficult, even for me, who knows these trails by heart. This darkness is different. It interferes more finally with one’s passage through the woods, and one must halt all activity until the sun boils it off, if only partially, in the early morning.
I will admit that I supply some of this darkness myself, through failed eyesight, draining health. My pursuit of language immunity has come with its own dear little cost. A certain serum I use has not agreed with me. Some mornings I discover my yellowed bandages, smitten in dirt and dew, and for a minute I think there is another one like me. I see these bandages strewn around my hut like tufts of rancid snow and think I am not alone until I realize that, oh, yes, these bandages are my own, aren’t they, and I tore them off last night because they burned. I could not bear the hot wadding on my skin.
As such, I cannot accurately make a statement about some objective loss of light. I have no device to record the expiration of daylight I suspect. I’d not be able to supply evidence for such a decline, my faculties of detection are compromised, and in any case I am not a specialist on the atmosphere.
What errands I have are few. Such freedom to come and go might have been useful back when people spoke, but now it is only a bitter advantage. What an archive of hindsight I’ve grown fat on, spoiled ideas and second thoughts ripening in my body now for no one, the putrid material. I’d like a more physical way to extract all of it, memories, too, a surgery I could perform to finally release it, burn it down.
It is not clear why the ideas are put in us if we only wish they could be removed again.
Instead of errands to kill the day, I can sit in my hut and wait for my wife’s arrival, listening at the old Jew hole for the sounds of her crawling this way.
Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.
But this waiting has its challenges. It is too easy to imagine that one hears a person struggling on her stomach through a narrow tunnel, from Forsythe to here, and the suspense is difficult. When I cannot endure it, I hike up to the vacant town that has stored enough untouched goods to sustain me for years. Some of the food was looted, but only some, as if when people first stormed through, arming their new life of solitude, they found they were not especially hungry.
So for errands there is the gathering of food and tools even as the surplus spoils in my cold locker, plunder spilling down the hillside. Mostly I grab what I already have. I hoard. I stockpile. I do what solitary men in the speechless world must do.
How important that sounds. I mean only to say that the published etiquette for life in these times is slim. A code of conduct for people like me is unavailable, and if it were, it would damage one’s body to read it.
What is it called when a dark, hard magnet has been run over one’s moral compass so many times that the needle of the compass quivers so badly that it cannot be read?
Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.
I forget who said it and I no longer care.
I suppose with my time I could farm and hunt and subsist through harvest, but all of those food products on shelves in empty stores off the quiet freeway make such labors unnecessary.
As to hunting, when I consider it now, there is a certain version I have practiced. I had not really named that form of smallwork.
Hunting. But if hunting means the careful tracking and subsequent acquisition of a living resource, for whatever reasons, then, yes, I have hunted.
Just the few times.
48
When I monitor the quarantine across the river, what I see is not so much anymore. The child quarantines here at this final New York—and staggered in settlements up and down the coast, even as the salt rises—have developed an orderly form of dispatch when they need to eject their own, young citizens of eroded immunity, tongues hard in their mouths, newly pained by language.
All of them will age, and all of them will have to leave, and then my town, my house, will be free of their kind, the easy-speaking ones. I cannot fathom another outcome.
Now the little gate opens and out they come, dazed and already ill. No doubt they will not live long, unless they can quickly adapt to the laws of the speechless world.
Hide yourself away, is one of these laws.
And, If you see someone, goes another one, exercise the necessary evasions.
The laws apply because I am not the only person hidden in these hills watching the exits. I am not the only one with an interest in these young people.
There are others like me, but they are not really like me. Escorts, predators, parents. So many different words might apply to them.
I’ve seen them rush to meet the exiles, using a mixed weaponry of kindness and cruelty. A gracious welcome, the offer of a blanket, a comfortable ride in a cart. Or instead a quick capture, a stifling, the enclosure of rope, an abduction. From my distance these transactions play out slowly, without feeling. They suffer from problems of believability.
The rescuers move alone or in groups, faces covered, and most often their lure is food, which our little speakers have had trouble securing. The exiles hardly ever resist. They get so hungry! They are still children, really, and they are sick, but now they are alone. So when the welcome wagon comes, they climb in.
Off they go with their new families to a life without words somewhere west of here. That is how they compass, usually, west, then south. Probably they go to Wheeling, Marion, Danville. I’ve been too bored to follow them beyond Albert Farm. They almost never drag back this way, into the salt, where nothing is good for anything and nobody would ever think to set up a life.
Perhaps the mute, gazeless family life in underground berms, where even eye contact must be kept in check for its lurches into nuance and meaning, is more pleasant in the sunshine of our warmer towns. Perhaps the salt is finer there, easier to sweep away.
Now that Esther has come to me, or I to her, as the case was, fighting off some rescuer waving sugary hunks of bread at her, then dragging her by spoiled light through the marsh, over the river, and up to the hut, I have little reason to keep watch of the town gate. I’ve gotten what I came for. My daughter is back in my custody. But sometimes I sit under cover in any case, hills away, watching these exits through binoculars. It’s a habit of years.
Over time people either gave up on the children harbored within, or the children came out of their own accord, contrite and quiet. If the parents were lucky, they got to them before anyone else did. But what they did next, where they went and what happened after they arrived, what those people actually did with their days when silence was enforced by the speech fever, that information is not available to me. I refuse to make up stories about such people. To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
Too many nights, hiding in the brush, I’ve lost track of time during my observational work and found it too dark to return to the hut. I’ve spent sunless hours dug in against some low hillside, forcing from myself an artificial laughter to keep warm. You’ve heard of laughter in the hills. This is all it is. It’s no mystery and nothing is funny. Just a person like me, pulsing sound and breath through his body, trying to stay warm.
I’ve lived these winters before, speechless, waiting. They bring one too close to the doings of one’s own mind, some of which—I finally believe this—must remain unheard, must have their meaning amputated until they’re reduced to babble. A careful listener to such interior speech is not rewarded. These winters fail to blot the mind, and what now could the mind even be for, since its fears and lies cannot be shared? Often I have wished that the toxicity, when it came, had reached deeper, into the unspoken speech we stalk and hound ourselves with.
Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.
Oh, I fucking hope so.
49
So yesterday I left Esther asleep on her cot and went out to get wood. I have a chain saw for clearing, but a tool like this is a luxury for someone who wants mostly to sit in his hut and listen carefully at the hole for news that never comes, for a person who is really getting late. I’d settle for a hiss from the wire, just the crackling of static, even, suggesting the orange cable has been plugged in again to Buffalo, to Albany, to I don’t care where. Then I might listen to a story from the old days.
They really are the old days. They have aged. They are not pretty to consider.
Why the Jewish feed is so long silent is a question I cannot resolve. Or maybe I should say that I don’t know why there’s no more bait on the line. Perhaps Rabbi Burke, in the tomb of Forsythe, is mouthing silences on the other end and that’s all that is left. Do the birds still bathe in his glass tank, I wonder?
For some years now, since leaving Forsythe by tunnel, I have been alone, and I have worked to leave no evidence of myself in this place. My solitude was corrected by Esther’s arrival, an arrival I arranged through years of patience, waiting under cover for her exile to end, hoping that through binoculars I’d see her emerge by horse and cart, by sled, on foot, out of the town gates.
She is my first visitor. Well, that’s not accurate. One or two times I brought another person into this hut, three times, a person unknown to me. Maybe we could say this happened five times altogether, persons other than Esther. Is person the right word? In truth I do not care for a tabulation of the activity.
Children, they were. I did not harm them. I fed them soup topped with cut squares of one of my long breads, which I crisped over the cold burner. You’ll wonder what these children offered in payment after they’d been fed. This is a natural curiosity. One feeds a stranger and in return, well. Soon I will share the details, before my language usage expires here for good.
So yesterday I cut and gathered my wood, then left it piled in its fine pyramid, and stealthed downhill to lie in wait for assets.
Sometimes you see them on the grass ramp that once featured children playing before school. Sometimes they wander right up to you and raise their arms, actually wanting to be picked up. At such times, one obliges. One reaches down and picks them up.
I stayed too long. The light failed. No assets came, just a horse. It was untroubled and calm as it stood eating grass in a field, not even startling when a loud crack shook the sky somewhere to the east.
Ammunition does go off every now and then. It sounded like a house breaking in half.
When I woke it was dark, and I broke my own rule. Esther would be alone all night in the hut if I didn’t return. I had to get back, even if that meant hours of blind groping.
Behind the hut I’ve dug a fire pit, where I cook the occasional brittle lobe, sear a cake of jam, and bring heat by venting into my hut so I can withstand the cold nights. The pit I fill with wood in the mornings, and then again late at night. Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I ache to pee, I wrap up in one of the buntings and stuff more branches in the hole.
It’s Aesop’s fables they have playing from them now, but the speakers have fallen into terrible repair, warping the speech so badly that it no longer spreads the poison. If anything it sounds pretty, some low-toned singing as if from deep underwater.
Living here is not ideal, no matter how Claire and I used to dream of it. When I was alone I could endure the conditions. With Esther commanding the lone cot now, even my seat at the hole, where years ago I sat with Claire and clutched the orange cable, digging my fingers deep into the flesh of the listener, is too crowded.
Oh, I’m not forgetting that LeBov went down this same hole once. Or maybe sometimes I am.
On windless days I can hear Esther’s breath, wheezing from her lungs as if she were straining to inflate a balloon. Sometimes the wheezing stops and it’s too quiet in here. I look at the cloth wall that divides us and wonder if this is it. If only one of us gets to breathe, it had better not be me. Suspense left my life a long time ago, but now it has returned. I do not care for it.
It was so dark last night, I could not see my hand in front of my face as I tried to make my way back to Esther. Navigation by starlight was impossible because there were no stars. They were just too far away. Everything was. Had there been stars I could see, it would have meant nothing anyway. Above me would stand the rebuke of an information system I have failed to learn, a map written in one of those languages unsuited to describing anything but itself. Maybe all languages are like this.
I knew I had an incline to gain, but I did not know when to break from it to find the lateral path. Throughout the night I descended and climbed, then traversed along what was not the path. It was never the path. Too often I fetched up in a tangle of trees, probing a clammy flesh beneath the bark. Once my hand worried into what felt like soup, but this was waist-high, and I yanked it free when it started to burn.