Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

A man in a lab coat removed the salt object from my mouth and something tore as he pulled it out.

I felt hands on me, sharp pieces of bodies that stank. Someone with a practiced touch lifted my arms, removed my shirt. He’d done this to many people, I could tell. Disrobed them while they slumped over in a stupor, readied them for some miracle.

I was held in place while something pinched under my arm, deep against the bone. It is hard to know if I made any show of my feelings. I looked down as a syringe pulled from a perforation under my arm, the skin hugging the needle as it retreated.

This was no medicine I had tried before. It brought my eyes halfway shut and I could do nothing to open them again.

The man spoke in that foreign, airless language, his breath oily in my mouth, and this time his phrasings made me cry. I cried in the most childish, open-faced way.

I let myself fall into his arms.

With a thumb jammed between my shoulder blades, he worked a finger from his other hand deep under the bone of my sternum. He had a hand on each side of me and he crouched, readied himself in preparation.

I draped over him, unable to stand.

When my lungs were empty, he squeezed, as if his thumb and finger might meet inside my body. I believe he succeeded.

The sensation came too quickly for me to cry out. My face tightened, a blast of pressure leaking from my eye. He slipped out from under me and I fell.

He left me in a heap on the floor.

The medical procedures at Forsythe, at least those I received in the parking lot and outer hallways of the recovery wing, belonged to no speech fever treatment I knew. Hebraic phrases delivered through a prosthetic mouth, triggering ecstasy, promoting unconsciousness. Perhaps these were the healing phrases Murphy—LeBov, I should say—had mentioned. Then there was the profoundly painful bodywork, the deep-tissue manipulation and extreme compression. Crushing. These practices had not been discussed publicly.

Against the cold wall of my room, in clothes that reeked of my travels, I spoke for a time with Claire. I spoke to her in private tones, words dismantled into grunts, because Claire did not need anything spelled or even sounded out for her, she never did.

Sometimes I could summon my wife’s voice, no matter where she was. Sometimes she would talk back, even if it was only me willing it so.

I found myself arguing for the family, trying to make a case that we needed to stick together, and as I did that, I could see Claire’s face, a stricken look of disbelief on it, a really appalled look that I would even begin to suggest she did not also want that, which of course I agreed to as fully as I could, but I could tell from her face that it was too late, I had cast myself as the one who wanted unity, I had excluded her from this desire, and how dare I do such a thing?

Stick together? She didn’t need to ask. This from the man who drove off without us?

What’s important now, I started to say to her. What’s important now… What’s important is that we …

I pictured Claire waiting for me to say, waiting for me to actually know what was important now. She stood over me.

Dig yourself out of this , she didn’t need to say. Go ahead. Get down on your knees and start digging your way out of this. I’d like to see how far you get. I’ll be right here, watching you disappear into the earth .

My days in this northern hole of Rochester were speechless and dark. I saw no sun, never felt the sky darken. No authentic sky prevailed in the Forsythe recovery wing, no windows through which the light might fail.

Ruptured mattresses littered the floor, sleeping bags with the bottoms kicked through. A brittle pillow bore the facial welt of the last patient who slept here.

A man’s work shirt had been chewed, swallowed, spit up in a glaze of bile.

Mesh baggies of hair hung from the ceiling, repelling flies. Possibly the hair attracted them instead.

Most rooms were furnished with wooden chairs, seats scarred by fire. Rope railings hung from the corridor walls. The blind could pull themselves to the bathroom without falling. The blind, the sick, the tired.

These quarters so far I occupied alone, with the exception of a man left too long to spoil in what I came to think of as Room 4. His face was so white, it seemed painted.

It was early December. Year of the sewn-up mouth. The last December of speech. If you were not a child, safely blanketed in quarantine, bleating poison from your little red mouth, you were one of us. But to be one of us was to be something so small and quiet, you may as well have been nothing. If we had last messages, we’d crafted them already, stuffed them in bottles, shoes, shot them out to sea. Words written for no one, never to be read. When pressed for something significant to say, most of us said so little we seemed shy, could not speak the language. We wrote down our names, our dates, the names of our mothers and fathers, the towns we lived in. On notebook paper we sketched pictures. Our last words weren’t even real words.

Claire was wherever they took people like her, still blinking and breathing, camouflaged against a hillside of salt.

Esther was thriving in the world she must have always craved, where the washed-out idiots of preceding generations had finally been banished, rags crammed down their throats. I worried for her without a world of older people to loathe. Now she lived with a population of her own kind, where self-hatred meant you gnashed at whomever you saw. And they you. How much time did Esther have before her own face was touched , before her tongue hardened and grew cold in her mouth?

Oh, of course I did not know where Claire was. I did not know where Esther was. Even as to where I was, I was hardly sure. But my ignorance did not slow my mind from its suspicions, and these held a vivid persuasion all their own.

At Forsythe my sleep was not patterned enough to signal the hour. With no smallwork to perform, the time of day failed to matter. What did matter was so far beyond me, I sometimes could not even see it. But still it hovered out there in dark shapes, however much I wished it gone.

LeBov would find me. He’d hear of my arrival, come get me, bring me into some important fold, if there was a fold. LeBov needed me, if only to practice those black tasks no one else could carry out. I’d let him use me again. Better that than having no use at all.

Rabbi Burke never used the word devil . The universal coinage was worthless, in his view. Words that mask what we don’t know. But he spoke about dangerous people who orbited the moral world, building speed around us, rendering themselves so blurred, they looked gorgeous. Burke spoke of refusing dizziness, latching on to these satellite monsters, of which one must count LeBov, so we could travel at their velocity, see them for what they were.

For now I slept in my sweaty room, ate the briny lobes stuck to my hallway food stand, rested wide awake, venturing into the carpeted hallway only when I needed to pee.

Outside my door stood a wire magazine rack filled with a stash of refreshments, unlabeled glass cylinders of water, cloudy pouches of juice. Whatever I drank was so heavily salted, my mouth became scoured. At the urinal I peed a heavy, white pudding. But I lacked the strength to discharge all of it. Sometimes it sat low in me, an anchoring sediment, as if I were meant to carry this slow water forever.

The bathroom was dank and its lone faucet, protruding from the wall, blew debris-laden air from its nozzle. If liquid rode in this stream, it clung to the sand that blasted out. I held my hands under the nozzle, beneath a wind that scarcely moistened my fingers. I bent to it and swallowed jets of wind so fierce, they knocked me against the back wall of the bathroom.