Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

And now that weakness merited ever more vigilance. We would be queried on our affiliation, he said. That is not new. We might be followed. A threat I never took seriously. It seemed so grandiose to believe anyone cared how Claire and I spent our Thursday lunch hour. But Thompson said our hut visits should only be conducted with special watchfulness.

Then it was doctors who received his scorn, doctors and experts of any kind. We were to take matters into our own hands. The doctors are scared. Of course they are. From doctors we would receive no insight. If we could gather our own statistics, we would be better prepared. Thompson fell into a list of technical details and materials, read quickly in a desperate voice, the transmission flickering in and out.

There was, it seemed, smallwork to be done now, and this was how to do it.

Sometimes when Thompson spoke I had to touch the wet belly of the listener to ground the signal. Otherwise it shorted, fell mute. This rarely happened with Burke’s sermons. I used the back of my hand against the listener’s cool, slick exterior, pushed up into the softness until I felt resistance, as if deep inside the listener, if you gouged enough jelly from it, was a long, flat bone.

Thompson provided the details that would inform my first round of smallwork, the tests and procedures I might perform, taking matters into my own hands , to keep Esther close to us.

When the service finished I unseated the listener and wrapped it in plastic before burying it behind the hut. Back inside I stuffed the cables into the hole and covered up the hole with a floorboard.

Claire and I made no sign to each other outside, only stared at the yardless plot of dirt that circled our hut. It was our right to ignore what we heard. Burke always said there was no true reaction to the service, no single response. “Bafflement is the most productive reaction,” he said. “This is when the mind is at its best. This is all we are in the face of the Name’s mystery.”

We walked the perimeter of the hut and finally groped our way into a conversation about the brush, beating it back, knowing that we’d never do it so long as the rules were in place. But we indulged these conversations about gardening anyway, let them fill the air so we could use our voices again, which always sounded so loud and wrong in the air outside the hut, after so much of our own silence. We thought it’d be nice to plant some grass here one day, and we’d better do it soon, hadn’t we, before the grotesque wall of trees crowded in too close. Before the trees grew into the hut itself.

This would almost make a kind of home for us, wouldn’t it? Just in case? We could do some work on the land, build an addition onto the hut. It would not be terrible. Couldn’t we live here someday if we needed to, if it came to that?

You weren’t supposed to, but who would know? How could that be bad, to make this place prettier and livable? There is no possible way that could be bad. Making a place nicer was a good thing to do. No one could argue with that. No one would have to know.

LeBov, by radio—broadcasting from a secluded location for his own protection —brought his diagnosis public, called out the toxic Jewish child. A disease seeping beyond its circumference, radiating from the head, the face, the mind.

There are particulars I do not wish to share , said LeBov. A secrecy that made his claim seem more true.

It was hard to disagree, but everyone did. They protested out of conviction or denial or fear or real scientific understanding. The diagnostic debate played out with proponents and detractors firing evidence back and forth across the massive pit of confusion we all swam in.

The culprits, the carriers, the agents of infection, were Jewish children, all children, not just children, some adults, all of us.

The culprits were infirm only, or maybe just the healthy, or maybe only those who’d eaten dirt, or not eaten enough of it. An autopsy was called on the whole living planet. The expertise in each case was minor and romantic and you could hitch your fate to any of it, so long as you didn’t mind being wrong.

To challenge matters, a child-free settlement in Arizona produced victims with identical symptoms: facial smallness, lethargy, a hardening under the tongue that defeated attempts at speech. No exposure to a child, let alone a Jewish one.

LeBov wasn’t bothered. “I’m speaking of the cause,” he said, “and this cause spread fast a long time ago. Our forest Jews know what I mean. Just ask them .”

When the affliction crystallized on a map, colors coding the victim radius, the image was pretty, a golden yellow core radiating out of inner Wisconsin. Whatever was happening seemed to happen there first. But there were flares of activity everywhere, and every day they changed, the whole map strobing over time into one blinding sphere.

Activity was the word for people finally hardening in their beds for good, sewn up in frozen limbs from speech and its offshoots. Activity was the diplomatic word for its reverse.

Whatever anyone knew, they knew it with desperate force and you were crazy not to believe them. But when you melded the various insights to forge a collective wisdom, you had total venom pouring from every speaking creature. The common thread among the theories was that whoever was to blame, children alone were resistant.

It was a piece of evidence not lost on the children.

At home, in the weeks after Esther’s return from camp, I traversed the dirty five-mile wedge of boulevard that insulated our house from the woods, chasing the question of the Esther perimeter. Basic smallwork prompted by Thompson’s sermon. How far away from our daughter did we need to remove ourselves to experience an abatement of symptoms or even, one hoped, the ability to breathe enough air to stay functional and conscious?

On my evening walks, initially to Culpin Boulevard on the north end, or to Blister Field and its adjacent parks just south of the synagogue prison, where the narrow, tree-clotted streets give way to plantless swaths of gravel, I tracked the distance that would be required from Esther for the sickness to retreat.

Men my own age wandered by, smothered in winter wear, their eyes locked to the footpath. From their mouths curled thin ribbons of steam. Women with the same gray face as Claire’s wheezed under the cover of trees. One of them offered a shy wave I chose not to return. Or perhaps her raised arm was meant to ward me off.

Nothing much lived in the air. The occasional sickly bird chugged past overhead, its body translucent. These birds were so undefended, so slow and stupid at flight, I felt I could grab them from the air.

When it was children I saw, particularly the older ones who roved together and glowed with obscene health, I changed my direction. Slowly, though. Careful to disguise my caution.

In our neighborhood, anyway, these children were not just Jewish. This was a mixed, feral pack, drawing from vast bloodlines. And together, when they spoke in unison on their nighttime tours, their weapon was worse.

Sometimes it was hard work, the air too rough with sleet, my body unfit for hiking so far afield. My equipment was awkward and heavy, like carrying a squirming person against my chest, and I would forget to turn it on. Or the battery pack overheated, burned through the shielding, raising welts on my skin beneath the warm metal plate.

I stopped to rest on benches, in the grass, against the knee wall at Boltwood Park, and then hours later I struggled to my feet and hoped I recognized my surroundings well enough to return home. Not that home was where I wanted to be. Sometimes I suffered shallow sleep on a bench until it was dark and then woke to wet, frozen pants at my crotch and a shard of drool solidifying into ice at the corner of my mouth.