Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

We endured lurid speculation on what we might be doing in the woods. We were called forest Jews and in newspapers cartoons depicted what awful work we’d undertaken. The Jew, in these images, sits on a jet of steam that charges him with special knowledge. God’s air, heated to a vapor, is blown over the mystic. The Jew fits his sticky red mouth over the nozzle and sucks. Into a vein in the Jew’s leg comes the cold, clear liquid.

And then the speculation on the dark electronics of such messaging, how a system like this could even work. A radio console with a flesh underside is postulated. Modules sheathed in gauze, lubricants siphoned from children, injected to flow through custom gears.

In our defense spoke only those who said we did not exist. We’d been invented by our enemies to give them something to tear apart with their teeth. How convenient, a Jew with important secrets. How self-serving to you, they said. These were our defenders, but to them we were a fiction. It was not clear that we owed them gratitude.

The Jewish person who has not received an assignment at a hole, and the Gentile who has only heard rumors about the gear that governs the hole’s ritual, have missed the elemental purpose of these transmission sites: the Jewish transaction is a necessarily private one . I am thinking of people like Murphy who would plunge his fists into it, believing he could extract some perfect remedy for the speech fever.

The topic was a common one in the broadcasts. Burke returned to it often. What others, with no information, might make of us.

Let such errors stand, he always said. Their mistakes put good miles between us. There is no better blessing for us than to be unknown.

If a knowledge is to be made public, went the saying, it should erect a shell around our secret. Such is true of the Torah, the Talmud, the Halakha we appear to follow. When we communicate, we do so to throw them off our scent.

Claire and I had done our part. Said nothing. Never indicated for a moment that we were members of this faith.

“To be a Jew is to let them be wrong about you,” said Burke today. “If we cannot allow this, then nothing is possible.”

He always lowered his voice when he was nearly finished, an emphatic whisper he used to hammer home his final point.

“There is nothing like being profoundly misunderstood. Let others expose their secrets, advertise their identities, neutralize their mysteries with imprecise language. A Jew must project behavior distant from his aim, must cast up a puppet world for those who are watching. Puppets made of real flesh. Puppets who weep, bleed, die.”

We had, it seemed to me, succeeded perfectly at being misunderstood. Again and again our huts were surveilled, seized, burned, for fear that the Jew was drinking something too important out of these holes, drinking directly from God’s mind, eating a pure alphabet that he alone could stomach. These were the fearful rumors. Such an apparatus, if true, was too good for Jews alone. It must be breached, overturned, made to work for the others. The holes must be explored, chased to their source, fucked dry for their secrets.

And they were.

When a hut above a loaded hole is found, a hole that is hot with language, the hut is overturned. If the listener is buried elsewhere, as it must be , then no reception is possible. Even when the exposed cables are jammed into every kind of translating console by engineers, without a listener nothing but burnt tones are ever heard, and even these are confused for last year’s wind, swept underground now and dying.

Without the listener draped over the radio module hugging that fucker until it releases its broadcast, these are the spoils the intruder will hear, these at most, and he will soon cease to care. Not least because such washes of sound render the inexperienced vandal docile, listless, apathetic.

After all their violating labors, what is extracted from these holes by intruders is never anything coherent enough to be called a language, and the public curiosity whispers down into nothing again.

Foolish Jews worshipping in the mud, goes the claim. Let them have their holes, their ancient language of clicks and whistles and yells.

And have them we damn well do.

The radio fell silent when Burke finished. Before he signed off he promised that a brief message from Rabbi Thompson would follow. Until then there’d be a low rumble from the module, remote voices chopped into pieces too small to understand.

Claire curled up on the hut floor and I pulled a blanket from the bin.

“If you get up I can put this under us,” I said.

With a show of labor, her body in pain, Claire pulled herself up and stepped from the hut. I rolled out the blanket and brought Claire back in, lowering her down again. Without removing her shoes she shucked her leggings to her knees, then turned on her stomach.

“Okay” was all she said, not even looking up at me. She was ready.

I did not yet know if I was aroused.

Claire was quiet today, but sometimes our best intimacy occurred after the most difficult sermons. We could not speak of them and I don’t think either of us was even tempted. Our minds worked away in private at what we heard, but our bodies sometimes wanted the busywork of a cold joining of parts.

Burke’s sermons reminded me of what I did not know, could hardly ever honestly feel. “You come here because of what is missing,” he always said. To listen to Burke was to believe I could be curious about something. In theory I felt a great awe for what could not be explained, but in practice I felt too alone. Always I worried that I lacked the great appetite for uncertainty that Burke demanded. What if uncertainty held no appeal for me?

A distant hissing reported from the radio, the searching work of the listener, divining the wire for a signal. Before I dropped down over Claire for our intimacy, I put my coat over the radio. Sometimes vestigial sound poured out, accidents in the broadcast, and we preferred these stifled so we could concentrate.

Claire stretched long and I covered her. Beneath me, even clothed, she felt bony. I worried my weight was too much for her, so I held myself up with my arms, letting my face settle in her hair.

We worked the messy connection by shifting clothing, Claire’s leggings in a ruffle around her knees. The moment of insertion was abrasive, but soon a moist warmth engulfed us, and we settled into a dutiful pursuit of pleasure, sharing the labor as equally as we could. Fairness always, even in these grisly animal matters. When Claire took the lead from underneath, I held my breath so I could feel her against me. When it was my turn to provide the motion, I shut my eyes and put all my weight, it would seem, on my face, which pressed into the filth of the blanket.

It was here, one guesses, that our toxic Esther was conceived. Certainly it was here.

We coupled under the hiss of the module until Thompson’s broadcast kicked on, and we missed the first part of it, heard only the coat-muffled drone of Burke’s second rabbi, a rabbi with more technical, practical concerns.

My completion, when it came, did so without my full knowledge. I noticed it drooling across my leg when I looked down, felt myself shrink and go cold.

“I’ll be outside,” Claire said, before I’d even gotten off her.

We kissed and I helped her up. She never seemed interested in Thompson’s information, so she’d wait in the yard, stretch her legs, get some sun, if she could find a spot not too shielded by trees. I don’t really know what she did out there while I stayed inside and cleaned up. But Thompson often provided more concrete information and I always wanted to hear him out.

Thompson spoke in warnings today. Warnings and guidance. Usually he followed Burke and simply reaffirmed the need for secrecy, urging us to a deeper privacy, reminding us of the levels of disclosure we succumb to every day without even knowing. Disclosures in the face and eyes. Disclosures in our bearing, our dress. Disclosures through omission, everything we fail to say and do. The Name is the only one who does not disclose. When we find no evidence of the Name, that is when we can be most sure of him. But we, we wake up and reveal ourselves until everything special vanishes. Our privacy drains from us no matter what, said Thompson.