Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

“It’s not your decision,” I said to her, softer. “You can’t break faith because it also breaks mine. I can’t go out there without you. You know that . It doesn’t work. I already tried it. We have to go together, to believe in it together.”

She laughed. “But we don’t have to, Sam. We actually don’t. Find someone else to believe in nothing with. I’m done.”

“It’s not your choice,” I whispered.

“Oh, I think it is. And, anyway, it’s for the best. I have it on good faith that if I stop going, Esther will be safe. Someone’s made a promise to me, and, unlike you, I think he can keep it.”

“Someone?”

“Yes, Sam. Someone. You don’t know him.”

“Claire, please,” I said. “This person.”

“Forget it.”

“He came to the house?”

“I said forget it.”

“One question.”

“No. No questions. No questions and no answers.”

“Claire. Did this man call himself Murphy ? Does he have red hair?”

My wife did not respond, but she gave me such a queer, searching look, and then it was a long time before she looked at me again.

Together we sat staring out at the street, the final exhausts of Claire’s sobs gasping out. She slid to the far end of the steps, kept to herself for the rest of the night. She was perhaps too weak to bring herself inside.

Salt blasts had streaked into the neighborhood. You couldn’t see them at night, or even so well in the day. Mostly it was the pellucid salt already washed clear by the wind. But you felt it crunching under your feet, some living thing recently crushed into grain.

I looked east toward the man-shaped silhouette between two houses where the sun would appear in a few hours, but there was nothing there to suggest a sun could ever heave itself into the sky again. I would never get used to that.

I could not ignore how that space looked forever immune from any illumination. Places give no warning that they might soon be erased by light. There is never a single thing to suggest that some grotesque change is coming that will reveal all, and soon.

A language solely of place-names. What would we possibly say to each other?

Sitting with my wife, whose disgust pulsed over me, I laughed to myself over these assessments, thoughts of a final or irresolvable darkness. There was textbook wisdom surfacing a little too easily. Sentimentality was no doubt a side effect of the speech fever, compounded by the side effects of all our failed medicine. The side effects of fighting, the side effects of knowing nothing, the side effects of being done with it and somehow, for no reason I could detect, still alive. One uses one’s deathbed energy to project meaning where none can be found. How does the species possibly benefit from such an action?

Your feelings will matter to you and to you alone, would say LeBov. You will surge with emotion over situations that have no bearing on the crisis. It’s a tactic. A trick. Believe in it at your peril. Better to bury yourself alive than give these ideas any due.

LeBov’s wisdom, like anyone’s, most fitting for those who wished to live, who had tasks in mind they still hoped to complete. For the others, like us two on the steps that night, wisdom is a high-handed scold, a reminder of what you’re not capable of thinking, some bit of behavior you can’t even reach for. Whether or not LeBov would prove to be right would remain to be seen. That night I wanted to expire on those steps, breathing in the perfect, cold air.

In many ways, that would have been a preferred outcome.

It still seems important, given all that’s happened, to report that across the street from my house, there was a hidden piece of the deadest air. No glow whatsoever, even from the streetlamps. I felt I could shine a lamp into it and the light would be extinguished. Just a swollen patch of darkness that seemed to throb the more I stared.

By early December we huddled at home, speechless. If we spoke it was through faces gripped in early rigor mortis. Our neighborhood had gone blank, killed down by winter. It was too cold even for the remaining children to do much hunting.

I don’t know how else to refer to their work, but sometimes they swarmed the block, flooding houses with speech until the adults were repulsed to the woods.

You’d see a neighbor with a rifle and you’d hear that rifle go off.

The trees stood bloodless, barely holding on in the wind. We sat against the window and waited, spying out at the children when they roved through. The children—they should have been called something else—barking toxic vocals through megaphones as they held hands in the street.

I hoped they wouldn’t turn and see us in the window, come to the door. I hoped they wouldn’t walk up the lawn and push their megaphones against the glass. And always I hoped not to see our Esther in these crowds, but too often there she was in the pack, one of the tallest, bouncing in the winter nighttime fog, breathing into her hands to keep warm. She’d finally found a group of kids to run off with.

If there was an escape to engineer we failed to do so, even while some neighbors loaded cars, smuggling from town when they’d had enough. The quarantine hadn’t been declared, but in our area they weren’t letting children through checkpoints, except by bus. Basic containment. If you wanted to leave, you left alone.

Even so, bulky rugs were thrust into trunks. Items that required two people to carry. Usually wrapped in cloth, sometimes squirming of their own accord, a child’s foot poking out. A clumsy game of hide-and-seek, children sprawled out in cargo carriers, children disguised as something else, so parents could spend a few more minutes with what ailed them.

Claire retired as my test subject. She stopped appearing in the kitchen for night treatments, declined the new smoke. When I served infused milk she fastened her mouth shut. If she accepted medicine from me she did so unwittingly, asleep, whimpering when the needle went in.

I couldn’t blame her, falling away like that, embracing the shroud of illness. But I did. I conducted nightly campaigns of blame and accusation, silently, in the monstrous internal speech that is only half sounded out, a kind of cave speech one reserves for private airing. In these broadsides Claire spun on a low podium and absorbed every accusation.

If I prepared a bowl of steamed grain and left it on the table for her, salted as she liked it, pooling in the black syrup, she passed her spoon through it, held up a specimen for study, and could not, just never could, finally slide it in her mouth. For Claire I cut cubes of meat loaf, and at best she tucked one or two in her mouth, where she could suck on them until they shriveled to husks.

Claire no longer slept in her bed and she seemed too listless even to maneuver to the crafts room, to the guest room, to anywhere she might be able to fall unconscious in private.

I was always trying to offer her shield, a modesty curtain, so she could come undone alone and unseen. She shouldn’t have to collapse in hallways. If necessary I helped her along, at least to a corner, where I could erect a temporary blind.

Once I found her asleep in the bathroom, one eye stuck open, leaking a speckled fluid. I crouched down and closed the eye, blotted it with my shirt. It opened again and she whispered at me.

“Hi there.”

I looked down at her and she blinked, perfectly alert.

Claire must have thought she was smiling, but that was so far from a smile. With my fingers I tried to change the feeling, to reshape her mouth. I couldn’t have her looking at me like that.

Her lips were cold and they would not stay where I arranged them. Her face had the weight of clay.