Ben Marcus: The Flame Alphabet

Who even said anymore that fresh air was supposed to help anything?

Drs. Meriwit and Borger did. Dr. Levinson did. Dr. Harris did. Nurses did, and interns at the clinic did, and the evening advisories did, as long as your doctor did.

This was hobby diagnostics. This was troubleshooting by the blind. The hindsight on this isn’t just twenty-twenty. It sees straight through walls.

As Murphy would later say: We are in a high season of error .

The early diagnostics were sad and random, experts holding forth confidently on the unknown, using their final months as language users to be spectacularly wrong. We have unverified complaints, moaned the news.

In Wisconsin the trouble was pinned to dogs. Animals took the blame up and down the coast. From Banff, from almost everywhere, came the question of pollutants, which wasn’t so wrong. Something in the air, something in the ground, a menacing particulate in the water. Something from the child’s mouth , it took them too long to realize. Drink less water, drink more. Use this filter. Put this filter in your fucking throat. Stop breathing and cease listening for a little while. Victims were dried out and saltless. Salt played a role. Of course it did. Streaking dunes of salt collecting first in the Midwest, sweeping to the south. Drifts and ridges and swells. Attractive in the landscape, if you didn’t know what it meant. Children themselves, their noxious oral product, were not yet being blamed, unless you counted the outskirt finger-wagging of LeBov, which too few of us did. But people were noticing that among the ill numbered no children. No one cared to connect the line from Lamentations that declares, And not one child fell to the plague . A university silo in Arizona published the theory that the impact of speech can be measured, with high dosages producing symptoms of the little death, the evening coma, a rictus in the legs. That would have been someone from LeBov’s staff, operating under a fake name, floating the notion.

Before all names were fake. Before all notions had floated so far off, you could no longer see them.

No one important was really looking into history yet, uncovering precedent, so much of it that the foreshadowing was embarrassing. It was not yet discussed that from Pliny comes the idea of the child who speaks the poisonous word, who uses certain mouth shapes to spread pestilence. In our reading of Galen we had not yet connected several mentions of disease originating in the child’s mouth. Herschel’s cone, termed by Vesalius, describes the spray radius of speech, a contact perimeter for exposure, and this we did not know. Nor did we know that an acoustical rupture is observed in Herschel’s cone by Paracelsus. Or that 1854 sees a medical exhibit in Philadelphia featuring the child-free detoxification hut, a prototype only, never adopted. Or that in the end Pliny had shielding nailed to his walls and sought immortality by banning children from his presence, dying only days later.

Our symptoms at first were too vague to name, too easily linked to how we always felt: a bit of sludge in our systems so that we dragged around the house and slept long and looked away from our food. Pushed our plates to the side. Caught ourselves staring into space, drool flooding from our mouths. Friends smirked. The childless ones, underexposed so far. The old loners. The selfish mates who perfected hobbies and tended their own interests instead of turning over their lives to what Claire called a stewardship of the small and crazy. For a while they were fine. Just for a while.

In retaliation we limited our evening drinking, took aggressive walks, performed the recommended stretches and bodywork. But our joints were hardening and our muscles were tight, and when I bent over I could no longer easily breathe. At night we filled ourselves with water and slept more deliberately, with silencing and darkening gear, when we weren’t waking up to dry heave. But we were every day stiffening, growing sicker, paler, more exhausted with what Esther could not stop doing.

A decline in our appearance came next. Claire’s own hair had come to look like a wig, as if her body might reject it all at once. Her hands had the dimpled plastic cast of a mannequin, a body painted with something fake, then cooked. She had never worn much makeup before, but now she was pasting her face with it and she shuffled through the house with the clownish features an undertaker smears on his bodies.

I smiled her way, a little too wide, because the display concerned me. I produced superlatives and praise, in chivalrous phrases that sounded like a foreign language, but I couldn’t get the tone right. I couldn’t scrub my voice of worry. If she returned my look she did so defiantly, daring me to say what I was really thinking. But I had already stopped doing that.

A death mask aesthetics arose, and it occurred to me that Claire was making herself look worse on purpose. Which the sick will do. One can never be sick enough. Even the stricken can milk it.

Some nights Claire and I pushed through the air as if it were solid, our bodies cleaving into fuzz, and then we came to a halt in it, locked up as if in a thick paste.

“What’s wrong with you guys?” Esther snapped one night, looking up from the book she was reading as we drifted through dinner. Those words alone tightened my face and I tried to cloud what I heard so I could breathe again.

Clouding . A good word for the strategic inattention one needed to practice around children.

This was October, before my medical smallwork began, the interventions I conducted to protect myself and Claire. Smallwork, the techniques to keep you alive, at large, prompted from instructions received at our synagogue hut, when it was time to take matters into our own hands.

On our bookshelves we had yet to install the speakers that would pump fine washes of hiss into the room, an acoustical barrier that would mostly fail to cloak Esther’s language.

In our town, in the sweet spot of our county, we were like dark lumps of flesh moving through plasma. In a thousand years, perhaps, our descendants might evolve into creatures with a morsel of understanding at their core, some insight to untangle their gnarled dilemma, but for now, at this moment in our unevolved history, we were blessed with no skill for diagnosing our withered, exhausted state.

We groped about, and if there was a harm’s way, we plunged into it so deeply that we were smeared up to the neck with the very stuff, the greasy paste, that was slowly killing us.

We were tired, is what we said, which was like saying we were alive. Of course we were tired, who wasn’t? Asleep is the new awake, Claire conceded, tossing her hair back to reveal the muddled watercolor lady she’d made of herself. We weren’t worried yet. Don’t let your children see you worry: a rule we pursued, because in our hands a public show of feelings was not sporting. Claire and I had a way of smiling gamely at each other, which meant an admission of illness would be seized upon and punished. We would summon great blame. Our marriage, among its other features, had blacklisted claims of weakness.

“I’m sorry, Sweetie,” I said to Esther. “We’re fine. We should go to bed early tonight, that’s all.”

Issued as a gentle command from one ashen father to his family.

Esther had turned back to her book by then, reading with the glaring superiority that suggested that this adventure story, or whatever she happened to be reading, was so far beneath her, she could hardly see it, idiot language engraved into paper by morons. And then when our food was already wilted and cold, after the conversation had expired, we heard the barest muttering from her. “If we go to bed any earlier, we might as well not get up.”