Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

With a spoon he scraped some dirt over his pool of sickness and then stood to kick more mulch over the area.

“It’s actually good for the plants,” he said, and he stuck out his hand.

I managed a laugh.

“Murphy,” he said, and we shook hands.

He didn’t seem to recognize me from the hiking trail.

I gave him a name for myself— share not your full story —and we stood there in the cold, looking everywhere but at each other. I needed to get at my gear for a measurement, or else this whole cycle was blown, but I couldn’t perform a half-mile reading in front of him and he failed to produce the body language that would allow us to go our separate ways.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” I finally asked.

He laughed. “Not even close. But at least I’m out of the house.”

He seemed pleased with this answer, but then he noticed the bulge under my coat.

“You’re not all right, are you?”

Murphy smiled at me with believable concern.

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh. Well, how many miles out are you?” he asked.

He tapped the machine beneath my coat, which he could not have known was there.

“From what?”

“Your kids.”

“I have just one.” As I said that I pictured an oversize Esther, towering above Claire and me, bending down to crush us.

“One will do it,” he said.

I’d not discussed the toxicity with a stranger, but the information was too rampant now to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. Everything is a disclosure .

Murphy did nothing to disguise his curiosity at my silence. Curiosity might be too kind a word.

“Okay, how about this?” he asked.

Murphy opened his coat and flashed some corroded metal, a vital signs kit not unlike my own, strapped to his chest like a bomb. There was something brown and wet on his, though, glistening as if smeared in paste, but I didn’t get a careful look at it before he closed up his coat.

In return I did not similarly open my own coat. I hugged it closer instead.

“I’ll do us a favor then and go first,” he said. “I have four kids. Try to multiply your bullshit into that. I am two miles out. That’s my minimum. Less than that and I’m sure we could bond over some symptoms. Want to?”

I didn’t answer, but I gave him to understand, through a controlled smile, that he was not wrong to confide in me. Perhaps there was something to be learned here.

Listen for a change , Claire’s old admonition, suddenly seemed useful. She would say it as a joke, mocking the folk wisdom, emphasizing the phrase’s secondary meaning— if you desire change then first you must listen —but I think Claire actually believed it. Wisdom would come from outside ourselves. We must keep an ear to the ground.

If that was true, then it was the deep listeners among us, consuming so much more of the venom, who would die first. My indifference to others might end up buying me a little more time.

Murphy and I walked together and I lost track of our direction. He boasted of the insulation he’d installed in his home. The soundproof barriers with R-values above twenty, the speech-blocking baffles, some sediment collectors that were yielding a not uninteresting powder , even if the use of this powder was still beyond him.

For some reason it kept falsely testing as salt.

His kids were younger than Esther, and, to hear him tell it, they were compliant to his wishes. Little eager subjects who sat for every experiment he could devise. This whole thing excited them, he said, even though it’s hell on us, and I didn’t ask who the rest of the us was.

“If you think about it,” said Murphy, “our kids are the first generation. They are the first with this power. We’re seeing an incredible transition.”

Transition to what, I didn’t ask.

In his house quiet time was nearly all the time, but Murphy said it had stopped mattering and they were worried. He and—I forget his wife’s name, if there really ever was a wife—were beginning to question if there wasn’t something else going on, an undetermined allergy radiating from persons beyond his children, as if the toxin were replicating, and his testing had gone in what he called a very different direction.

Why, for instance, would the sickness endure even if the children were silent?

“Have you given any thought to that, that it isn’t just them?” he wanted to know.

I had given thought to that, so much that I’d exhausted myself. To Murphy, in response, I offered the obvious idea that there was no way to reconcile why children’s language should be toxic while the language of adults was not. The acoustics were the same, child, adult, machine. If you taught a chimp to speak, that speech should sicken you, too. How could the source matter? It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes any sense .

Murphy scoffed.

“I’m fascinated by people who pout when they can’t find sense and logic, as if it’s not fair when something in nature doesn’t reveal an obvious pattern. It’s a fucking epidemic, and the logic is impenetrable. That’s how it succeeds , by being inconsistent and unknowable. Fairness is for toddlers in a goddamn sandbox. No one wants to admit that our machine of understanding is inferior.”

“I’ll admit that, but it’s not malicious to try to understand what’s happening,” I said.

“No, maybe not. But understanding takes its toll. It’s a fucking disease in its own right.”

Murphy brought out the tin of grease, coating the inside of his mouth with another shining scoop of it. It smelled like jam.

He held it out for me to try.

“If we’re going to keep talking, you’re going to want some of this. For protection.”

“What is it?”

“This? It’s child’s play. Some basic shielding. It’s been around for a while. It’s pretty much lost its effectiveness for me, but I don’t want to take any chances. You could rub some on your throat first.”

I thanked him but declined.

“Still waiting for an official solution? Don’t you think it’s time we took matters into our own hands? The doctors are scared, right? Aren’t the doctors scared? That’s what I’m hearing.”

I looked at him, determined to show no sign I’d heard those words before, not so long ago, from Thompson.

“I don’t think we’ll get any insights from them, that’s all,” Murphy said.

More of Thompson’s exact language.

He smiled at me, waited. It was like he was watching me open a present, excited to see my reaction.

Murphy wasn’t Jewish. There was no way he’d have access to a feed from a hole. Except this was certainty based on nothing I could name, a certainty I found I had come to specialize in. I caught myself feeling curiosity about another person’s faith and tried to shut it down. Whatever Murphy believed should not concern me. It would dilute my own ideas, even if presently I had none. I was not supposed to care. I knew that. I knew it.

I just wish that I could have felt it, too.

At the intersection where Nearing dead-ends into the synagogue prison wall, Murphy directed me out of the streetlight and we walked down the unlit causeway toward Blister Field and the electrical tower.

“Are you reading LeBov?” Murphy asked.

“Not so much,” I said. “Which books would be good?”

Murphy looked confused. “LeBov doesn’t write books. Books expire. Books get hacked. No one wants to leave that kind of evidence.”

It seemed important to reveal a kernel of the dilemma, in good faith, to discover Murphy’s strategy. I took my time and tried to fill him in on my fledgling perimeter work, the respite during Esther’s trip to camp. I drew a distinction between the genders, because it seemed obvious to worry about how resistance differed. Claire was always sicker than I was, always . And I floated the Jewish question, since the news had already spit out this idea of a chosen affliction, something related to genetics and faith and whether or not your distant relatives thousands of years ago were covered in shit-clotted fur and prone to kill everything in sight.