Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

The air sped through me with such turbine force, I sensed a bird’s violation when its beak opens, wind penetrating every last space inside its body.

When I pictured Claire, she crouched in the woods, caked in mud so the dogs couldn’t smell her. In my wishful thinking, which amounted to all my thinking, Claire had fled the truck, scattered to the tree line, then vanished into the woods. From there she watched our house. In her gown she strained to get a safe look at Esther. She strained and failed. When I pictured this, Esther remained hidden from Claire, would not show herself, and her mother did not relent, crawling through the woods for every advantage of perspective.

No matter how much I wanted to, I could not get Claire to see Esther, even though I should have been in charge of my own imagination. It should have been child’s play to picture these events, but somehow this imagery was blacked out in me. When I moved Esther and Claire together in my mind, a darkness fell and they turned into distant, weak shapes. Even if I could collide these shapes, at that point they were not even people, just blocks of cold darkness that looked nothing like my wife and daughter.

Early in my stay, I discovered a way to access Rabbi Burke, but the method had difficulties.

At some point I woke up to an engine shrieking overhead. It was day, it was night, it was early, it was late. The time was best judged, if it needed to be judged, by how thirsty I was, and now my tongue was as dry as a sock in my mouth.

Above me, jets of smoke poured from a ceiling fixture. I reasoned it to be intentional smoke , a smoke meant for me, the patient , as opposed to exhaust fumes from an accident elsewhere at Forsythe.

Finally they were medicating me so I could get out of there. A nozzle in the ceiling pumping vapors into the recovery wing.

The flow was loud and cold. No matter where I huddled in my room it reached me, pouring cloudy fumes over my face. In the hallway it pumped. In the other rooms, even Room 4, covering in fog the man on the floor.

Sometimes the machinery behind the spout whined and the smoke spewed faster from its hole. When I tried to stop it, thinking perhaps the spigot could be dialed down, I discovered that the cork ceiling panel it protruded from was unusually soft. Soft and easy to remove.

I stood on my chair, ducking the putrid smoke, rotten and icy at its source, and pushed aside the panel. The drop ceiling disguised a tangle of plumbing ducts and power lines, but something else snaked through that space as well: a bright orange cable such as the one that pulsed up from our Jew hole. A shining orange piece of conduit . I’d recognize it anywhere.

I wanted to think that this cable could have been anything. It probably was a coincidence. Plastic orange insulation could not be exclusive to the forest Jews who deployed a Jewish radio. But when I gripped the cable it warmed in my hands, pulsing as if fated with a heartbeat. It gave off the same heat, the same nauseating smell, as the cable of our hut.

To be sure, I checked the other rooms, the hallway. I dragged my chair throughout the recovery wing, pushed aside ceiling panels, and found the orange cable wherever I looked. In Room 4 I stood over the fallen man and found the orange cable buried in his ceiling as well.

When I traced the cable out of the recovery wing, I struck a concrete wall and could follow it no farther. The cable flowed up from somewhere and retreated, never revealing itself from the recovery wing ceiling. It was tucked away. It was traveling elsewhere. To some other Jew’s hut, perhaps. Why it detoured through Forsythe, a building that was once a high school, and not even a Jewish one, was beyond me. Clearly it wasn’t meant to be found.

But I had found it, and now I wanted to listen in. If LeBov could intercept the feed without a listener, then so could I. I’d worked my own orange cable for years, learned a thing or two about the secret Jewish radio.

The wire magazine rack was easy to dismantle. I straightened the curved frame, rotating a small length of wire like the hand of a clock until it snapped off. With this short wire I climbed back on the chair, grabbed the warm meat of the cable, and pierced the shielding until the wire penetrated the cable’s core. A sudden antenna.

On the chair I braced myself, thinking I was bringing together two powerful forces that might knock me to the ground.

But nothing happened. No transmission, no sound.

I’m not sure why I thought there would be. I’d bridged no signal, simply pierced the cable and possibly deferred one channel of the transmission into the air of my room, where it died out inaudibly.

It’s true that the medical smoke briefly faltered in my room when I pierced the orange cable, sputtering from the nozzle, but that might have been a coincidence.

What I needed to do was extend the wire from the orange cable to a grounded point of metal conduction, then parlay the transmission into something that could pass for an audio speaker. Then I’d be able to hear the feed. If there was a feed. If this was a Jewish transmission at all.

From the straightened coils of the magazine rack I snapped off a clutch of longer wires, crimping them onto the short piece that pierced the cable, and in this way I wove a necklace of wire from the ceiling cable to the electrical outlet in the baseboard.

From here I used the final length of wire to bridge the signal into the best point of conductivity I could think of, the most natural audio speaker there is, at least when you have no other radio equipment on hand: the flesh inside of one’s own mouth.

I coiled a tight nest of wire using the last scraps of the magazine rack and stashed it under my tongue. This was elementary antenna work. When I was ready I would feed the wire from the electrical outlet to the nest in my mouth, consummating the transmission. Perhaps then Burke would speak. Burke would make himself known through my mouth. My rabbi could be heard again.

My face was cold, as rough as an animal’s back. LeBov’s ointment last week had bought me some time, softened my palate enough for me to speak in ways I didn’t understand. But that had worn off by now and my face had the buzzing, numb feeling of a sleeping limb. It therefore did not concern me that I was delivering the Jewish voltage to my mouth. My mouth was probably the safest place to test this bit of smallwork.

I sat down on the floor with the conducting wire, gripping the chair leg for support. At this point I should have taken stock, given some last thought to my Esther in the quarantine, Claire barely alive. I should have paid my respects to what little was left of the world I knew. But instead I touched the wire to the metal nest inside my mouth and fell at once into a tremble.

My vision blistered, blackened, and a seizure surged through my body. A darkness came over me, and in a great rush of sound, the Jewish transmission gushing from my face at a shattering volume, I blacked out.

Blessed are they who keep his testimonies quiet, who share them not even with themselves.

They make no crime in the air; they walk in the ways.

How does a person cleanse his way?

By saying nothing of your word.

Let me never announce the thought. Let me not corrupt it with sound.

Your word I have buried in my heart.

My heart I have buried in the woods.

These woods you have hidden from me in darkness.

You have commanded us not to know you and we have obeyed. When we have known you we have looked away, put blacklings in our eyes.

If my ways are directed to keep your promise, then I will not be ashamed. If my ways are directed to keep your promise and I am rendered alone, then I will not be ashamed.