Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

“So you change your name, fake your death.”

“Look, that’s nothing. That’s cosmetic. Not even cosmetic. I moved around some grains of sand. Or not even that. I can’t invent a small enough metaphor for what I’ve done. It’s that insignificant. It adds some maneuverability, that’s all. Some spaces open up. Everyone’s presumed dead now anyway, as of tonight, after the radio darkness. Today was the last chance to die and have it reported. I hit the last news cycle. My death was the last story before the blackout. The world’s last obituary. You should be congratulating me.”

I looked at this redhead squeezing through the floor of my synagogue.

“Congratulations. And if in the process of this important work you hurt someone?”

“Then, uh, they feel pain? Is that a trick question? Is that really what’s at issue right now, your hurt feelings? Could your perspective be any smaller?”

“You spoke to my wife.”

“Someone had to. At least she actually listened. So much for your unified front.”

LeBov reached into his coat and removed a long darning needle.

“Here,” he said, rolling it over. “If you don’t jam it in too hard, you won’t do any permanent damage.”

“To myself?”

“To anyone . Jesus, you are so self-centered. Thousands of years of Judaism, topped off by exclusive, secret access at your hole, for ultra-rare religious guidance, and this is all your people have come to?”

He gestured at our surroundings as if I, too, was meant to examine them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but this place is sad. I examined your, what do you call it, your Moses Mouth? Your enabler? You all have different silly words for it.”

He was referring to the slashed-up listener in his bag.

“Listener,” I whispered to him. I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud.

“You examined it?” I asked.

“And you didn’t even bleed the withers, or whatever that fucking extra skin is called. It’s completely engorged. You only used it to tap into Burke. That’s insane. I’ve never seen such a rudimentary listener, and I have a good collection of them now. Anyone can listen to Burke, because there is no Burke . You don’t even need a fucking listener. I can drop a copper wire into any conductive soil and pick up that signal. Probably with my landline telephone I could dial it up. It’s completely unsecured. Public domain. Probably ham radio. I bet people get it in their houses. I bet you could pick it up off a filling in your molar. You spent all this time out here with this amazing device and you never wondered if you were hearing the right broadcast? The deepest feed? Instead you fucked on the floor like animals. Honestly, sometimes I had to look away. You didn’t care and you fucked in a pile of musty sweaters. I’m kind of astounded. The Burke sermons were recorded years ago and play on a loop.”

“Right. And you’d know that how?”

“Uh, because I’ve memorized them? Because they repeat? Burke’s sermons are decoys for people like me who hack into the transmission, to appease us, to make us stop looking. They’re not real . They’re bait, you fucking kike. You’re supposed to activate your listener to pick up the real transmissions. Even the morons down in Fort Wine figured that out. What do you think that box is for that I got from your house? You didn’t even slide in the glass . Those tools were untouched.”

“It was never broken,” I whispered.

“But it fucking hell was! It was dead. How could you not have noticed?”

LeBov was ready to go, his tools packed, his bag strapped to his chest.

“You still have time on the clock,” he said. “Any more questions?”

I stared at this man filling the hole in my hut.

“No?” he said. “I have a question, then. I’ll use your remaining seconds. We’ll say that I owe you. My question is, for whose benefit is it?”

“Is what?”

“Your complete inability to understand what’s going on.”

“I don’t see that it benefits anyone,” I admitted.

“Oh. I was just curious. That strategy is really unfamiliar to me. It kept me fairly interested in you. I figured you had a deeper play. I thought that perhaps I was missing out on the angle and I wanted to see what you’d do, but then you didn’t do anything . I guess that’s your play?”

LeBov gave some genuine reflection to this idea.

“You have a novel way with confusion. In another world inertia might have helped you, might have seemed genius. But even this thing with Thompson. I mean, you really believed that, that he was a rabbi ? You didn’t recognize my voice?”

“You want me to believe that you were Thompson, too?”

“No, not particularly. It’s more interesting when you don’t believe deeply obvious facts. That’s far more fascinating to me. I like to surround myself with mistaken people. I draw strength from it. It increases my own chances for success.”

“Agreement is a poison, right?”

“That’s part of it.”

“So the medical approach Thompson prescribed,” I started.

“I needed it done and there you were, needing to do it. It occupied you, didn’t it? It took your eye off the ball. I didn’t think you’d take it all so seriously, but thank you for obliging.”

“And your promise to my wife?”

“I’m proud of that. You don’t often find someone so ripe for turning. She’s a wonderful lady. I enjoyed her company tremendously. Reverse conversion, talking people down from their beliefs. Pretty standard. Anyone can feed a doubt. I gave her hope, which is more than you were doing for her. You treated her like a lab rat and now if you even speak to her she’s going to die.”

“She’s not going to die.”

LeBov laughed.

“At least your denial is consistent.”

Then LeBov dropped down into the hole and disappeared.

I crept over, ducked down to see, but there was nothing, just the smell that seemed to follow me around, the sour fume of sleeplessness and decay.

From the depths of the hole I heard LeBov’s voice.

“Listen,” he called up. “I’d invite you to Forsythe, but there’s that wife of yours. You realize that you’re hurting her, right? Every time you talk to her? You probably think you have her best interests in mind, but believe me you don’t know what they are. Her best interests don’t involve you. Her best interests require your absence. Until death do us part, though? I hope that works out. But if you change your mind, we could use your help.”

It turns out that I did have a last question for him, one that I was still trying to form. I whispered it down the hole, afraid, for some reason, to raise my voice too loudly.

I asked—certain that LeBov was still down there, plotting his course beneath us—about the Jewish children. Early in the epidemic, those reports that the Jewish children were the only toxic ones? I needed to know if that was true, if the epidemic really emerged that way. Was Esther among the first? Or had he, had LeBov, influenced that information? I whispered this down the hole.

“Did you make that up, too? Did you spread misinformation?”

I waited for his response, jets of cold air from the Jewish hole rushing over my face. But LeBov didn’t answer.

He was already gone.

At home that night Claire fell asleep in Esther’s bed. Not the sleep that people can easily be roused from, but the leaden hibernation that resists all signaling, raising a carapace on the shell of the sleeper that cannot be pierced by mere shouting. The heart rate slows, the hands grow cold, and life inside the body begins to spoil. Once the vigilant waking person has succumbed, the body consumes itself. A fume rises from the torso as it molders.