Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

Presumably if you wanted nothing, you’d have no occasion to speak.

In a section of historical anecdotes I read that in 1825, Jacob Gallerus, a chemist, was sickened by his family. A letter to the medical dean of some Dublin college, written by him, asking for outside verification, which was not granted. He recorded symptoms of nausea and dizziness while in their company, determined the sickness occurred only when they spoke to him. Troubleshooting not listed, diagnostics similarly absent. A form of inbreeding, he called it, to listen to his family. There is congress in speech, he wrote. It is illicit from them. It is obscene. A sentence from The Proofs I will always recall: I am not similarly ill with strangers . In his cellar Gallerus built a soundproof room to recuperate and to purge himself—these were his words—from the exposure to his wife and children. To what end it isn’t said. Of what he finally died neither.

Alongside the historical anecdotes were medical recommendations, refutations, preventative treatments.

If a child was deemed viral, he was salted. This by the Jews, I read. What kind of Jews, it was not clear. Circa sometime that was not mentioned. Salted in the deepest sense. A cake of it rubbed over the limbs, salt poured down their mouths, into their cavities.

It is possible, I thought, that these were stories. Fancies. But if so, they were not good ones or even whole ones, but facts made wrong, broken open and remolded into lies. Someone reaching back into history and rearranging the parts, but with a filthy hand. Which would be to what end? The urge to falsify such details was without any purpose I could name. There was too much, additionally, that I knew to be true.

In a section related to materials I read of pariahs and salt, lepers and salt, the use of salt when it comes to lunatics. Salt as a detoxifier. From Jews comes the idea of salt as the residue of an ancient language, which I’d heard at the hut. Such salts were dissolved in water and dispensed to mutes, to the deaf, to infants on the threshold of speech. Acoustical decomposition, the powder left over from sounds. What this proved went unsaid.

In The Proofs a pattern of cryptic evasions became clear, of failing to deduce.

From recorded language, broadcast in a controlled environment and subjected to freezing temperatures, is collected trace amounts of salt. Whorf and Sapir perform this work with some graduate students. A salt deficiency lowers language comprehension in children.

The practice of language smoking originates in Bolivia but quickly travels north. In Mexico City it is perfected. Words and sentences tested by a delegate in a smoke-filled tube, at the end of which is stationed a sacrificial listener called, for unknown reasons, the bell .

The bell’s brain, when he dies, is pulled and separated into loaves. The loaves are tagged and named. Only drawings survive.

More instances of rot in the brain from those who have exceeded the threshold of listening.

In 1834 a family of five in Rotterdam are discovered expired in their home, parents and children blanketed in hives. That same year, farther north, a series of rashes observed in children, rashes with what is inexplicably called “a tonal element.” Rashes, hives, welts: of inordinate concern in The Proofs . And the connection is , I wondered.

In the island of Port Barre the citizens employed expired animals for soundproofing. Walls of pelts on stilts over fault lines. The typical strategy of shielding with organic matter. Usage of animals for such purposes not being the point, apparently, but rather the unanswered question, from what were they soundproofing? What was so loud that needed quieting? Autopsies show a nonmedical diagnosis. Blackened cortex, they call it.

Perkins refers to the “person allergy,” a toxicity to others. Uses the phrase as if it’s an accepted disorder. He fails at developing any effective shielding. Scoffs at the use of animals for such work. Meat is in fact an amplifier, he will say.

The young Albert Kugler has a superstition against the utterance of certain words. Proper names are volatile, likewise imperatives.

A section, mostly inscrutable, written perhaps in code, or in an eroded language, on which words are volatile. A volatility index?

None of them not, the conclusion?

A tribe from Bolivia rations their use of spoken language by appointing a delegate. Again this term, delegate , who uses language so others don’t have to. A language martyr. These tribe members speak and write on behalf of the entire community. They die young, their hands bloated, hearts enlarged, goes the claim. No asterisk, no footnote. How the others die goes unmentioned.

Hiram of Monterby calls language the great curse. Esther of the Fire, in her almanac, decries the pollutions of the mouth. It will burn in your mind, says Pliny, of a speech he hears an unknown traveler deliver at the roadside at Thebes.

If I could only speak such words at my enemy, would say Pliny. What weaponry I would have.

I knew my Pliny pretty well and I was fairly sure this was wrong, hadn’t happened to Pliny. Or anyone. Yet the tone was assured, hardened in the rhetoric of fact.

The brain of Albert Dewonce, whose job it was to listen to troubles. Of whom nothing is given, but one can guess at the kind of job. Heard more words than anyone alive, was the claim, this Dewonce. His brain, they said, when he died, was decayed at the core, a lather of cells that could not possibly have received any information. Says the coroner. The cortex, blackened. Says his wife, he was sick each night from what he heard.

A brain that had been rendered to slush from speech, then.

Stories of this sort all throughout. Did any of it stand to reason? The profound cost on the brain itself. Its limited resilience in the face of, what, language ?

A person’s language age can be measured through a test of his Broca’s area, such test to be performed with a tool whose name is defaced, unreadable. Unattributed drawings near the text are perhaps this tool. Language age, a phrase used throughout The Proofs . Language death, when the body is saturated. At the cusp of adulthood. A drowning of cells, is the phrase. The time of quota, when the threshold is tripped, at or near the age of eighteen.

Giving Esther four more years, I noted.

Another section, a test, called How Do You Feel When You Read This? Then some words slung together without logic.

The reading did not harm me. I scanned through what was written but felt nothing. Sometimes numbness took me, working like a vacuum to siphon off what I knew, but it did not feel connected to reading . It felt like a headache that had grown cold, pulled long, a headache on the move through parts of me I never knew felt pain.

In future issues of The Proofs , a final theory of rashes was pledged. We’d see working drawings of the Perkins Mouth Guard. The thirty-word language would be revealed, the least toxic words in our lexicon, but these words would primarily be place-names.

The Proofs was conspicuous for its absence of conclusions. One was not sure it was not simply the stitchery of Murphy, whose motives were somehow other. Deeply other. Unguessable. If The Proofs was advocating something, it did not say. It was not for sale. How many copies there were, I didn’t know.

Before folding up my evening reading and stuffing it back in its envelope, I saw in smaller print, bound by a box, a paragraph of text with the title Take Heart!

What a thing to do, and how very much I wished I could.

The red busses of Rochester pulled in that week, parked outside the school to collect their cargo. They came from Forsythe, a universal F scratched into their hoods. These were not busses so much as engorged medical waste canisters, motorized and fitted with tires, dipped in brilliant red paint. The medical waste being our children.