Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

One of the kids stopped on the sidewalk across the street from us. He’d caught someone and now he was going to attack. He crouched, his hands cupped over his mouth, and he started shouting. A series of single word cries, projected through his hands, as if he were launching ammunition from his face.

But this was no abstract show of force, this was an attack on someone who hadn’t found cover in time.

Sprawled on the street beneath the boy was someone who wasn’t moving, and the boy made sure of that with repeated volleys launched right over the body, a relentless flow as the body twitched on the asphalt each time the kid spoke, as if a cattle prod shot electricity from his mouth.

Then the body stopped twitching and the boy relented.

When the boy stood up we saw his face in the streetlight, so long and solemn and awful to behold.

Except the kid wasn’t a boy. It was my Esther. Her hair was wild and she wore an outfit I didn’t recognize, some long coat that was too big on her.

From our hiding place in the grass we watched her.

“Be careful of that one,” whispered Murphy into my neck.

I tightened at the warning. That one . That one was my one and only.

Esther looked down at the person at her feet, seemed to whisper something. Then she ran to catch up with her friends, dwarfed by her coat. On the street that body still didn’t move.

Murphy climbed off me, sat back in the grass.

“That one is trouble,” Murphy said. “I’d like to see a sample of her blood, wouldn’t you?”

In my mouth I felt that I had eaten a piece of terrible meat.

“What did you give me?” I asked.

“A gift.” Murphy handed me a tissue.

I didn’t thank him. I wanted to be sick.

Murphy crawled up to me, held my face tight.

I felt that I should go after Esther, if slowly, carefully, but I was afraid to move.

“Now say thank you,” Murphy said. “Or have you forgotten your manners?”

His hand gripped my face so hard, I could barely form the words, but I did it, I thanked him, and he released me.

Murphy relaxed, sat back.

“Well, you’re welcome,” he said. “It was really my pleasure. But now I’m curious about something.”

The man on the street groaned, rolled over. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to disappoint Murphy that the man was not dead.

“I’m curious,” he said. “I’ve done something for you. Now how do you propose paying me back?”

The next day I struck out for the hut alone, Claire too ill to join me. I offered to drive right up to the trailhead for her, perhaps all the way down past Boltwood, if we could get the gate open and sneak our car through. For Claire I would even drive down to the northern foot of the stream where it ponds and there’s a small turnout. From there I could strap her to a sled and drag her up the embankment. It’d be bumpy but we could line the sled with pillows. She would hardly have to walk. I’d carry her that last leg, if she wanted. We could bring extra blankets, a thermos of soup. It would be good to go to the hut today. Good for us. It might help.

I wasn’t sure I believed this, but I needed to sound hopeful for Claire.

It didn’t matter, because she declined the invitation. She didn’t even decline, just failed to answer, staring with dread focus at her own little finger, as if she could will me from the room by exercising that top knuckle back and forth, back and forth.

Without Claire I took the cautious route, down Sedgling to 38 for one exit’s worth of highway, only to return to town from the north, dropping into the valley from the old Balden Road, which is so steep that no matter how slow you take it, riding your brake the whole way, you fairly skid along the sand to the bottom, where the Montrier electrical tower sits planted inside a guarded park.

Even here I doubled back along the dark wall of the Monastery, in case I was being followed, because Murphy seemed too easily to find me. Even though I’d driven this time, driven not just the long way but the entirely incorrect way, a route that made no navigational sense, I could not risk running into him today. I would follow Thompson’s rules to the letter.

Behind the hut I extracted the listener from its shit-caked bag. At the rusted orifice in the hut floor I squeezed the hole until I could pull on the fitting, but the hole was stiff. Today I could hardly force it open. After a finger-mincing effort, it ripped wider with what sounded like an animal cry and heat spread into the hut as the listener shriveled in my hands. Soon the bag stoppering the hole swelled with air, inflating gently as if a sick person lay beneath it, breathing his last. Now, at least, a transmission might be possible.

I found the labor dispiriting. It was too much effort to get to Rabbi Burke. You should have been able to plug in our radio and turn it on. But Burke had indicated once, while praising us for our adherence to protocol, that sentences pertaining to the Jewish project must come in certain lengths, precise strings of language, stripped of acoustical excess. Otherwise they were invalid, not technically a part of the authentic language, which required endless honing, pruning. The listener enabled this, in ways I would never understand. The requirements we upheld at our hut would fill a whole other report until it burst into rags. As with any religion, one supposes.

Perhaps other options might present themselves here, I hoped. Burke, or even Thompson, would have to consider more concrete guidance now, particularly since LeBov was saying we knew something . Everything had changed. One’s faith was meant to yield actionable material at times like this, I always thought, when one’s own imagination had failed, when nothing seemed possible. Wasn’t this why we accommodated an otherwise highly irrational set of beliefs?

I had not done this hut work alone before. Solitude was not authorized. And this was no Thursday, which doubled my violation. I half thought I’d see some other Jew in the woods toting his own blood-slick listener.

Tuesdays are mine, he’d snarl, heaving his hot listener over the console.

I would guess that my visit took place on a Tuesday, but days were not easy to track. It was hard to believe that it should matter, that access to our faith would be blocked on some days, regulated according to some inscrutable limitation in, of all things, forest electronics, radio science.

Lately there were days I wished I could walk into a real synagogue, a real one , sit down, and listen to a live person, a person I could then follow home with questions.

When the listener was sealed to the bag and my tests for leaks yielded only a mild stream of wind from the hole, I ran the orange cable into the console and sat down to listen. I waited there in the cold hut and I squeezed out all other noise, freezing on the wood floor.

Nothing happened. Hours later I’d only gathered hisses and blips, a language ripped apart, turned into flesh and then shredded. At one point I discovered that with my face pressed against the listener, more voices flowed through the radio, a tumble of speech from a man whose voice was far lower than Rabbi Burke’s. A different man entirely, speaking in what sounded like Old English. The harder I pressed my face against the listener, smashing it into the wet flesh, the clearer this man’s voice became, but it seemed I’d have to hurt myself to make his words audible. I’d need to break my skin, fracture my jaw, taking the listener inside my own face, and I could not bring myself to do it.

Instead I retreated, went back to the standard procedures. But the module could build nothing else from whatever weak signal trickled through. Yesterday’s signal, the vestiges of a message that might have once mattered, but by now had been hacked into nonsense by exposure in the hole. A sermon built only from wind, a wind that had been buried for years, only to spill from the earth now with no force or meaning.