Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

At Forsythe there was little news of the outside world, because the outside world had slowed to a freeze. Most of what happened elsewhere happened silently, underground, far enough out of sight that unless you saw it for yourself, it probably happened in your imagination.

What there was to know could be seen on surveillance monitors throughout the suite of leisure byways on the Forsythe laboratory mezzanine.

Footage came in of some settlements overseas. A cinema of the perished. From Denver also came film. Grown men locked under glass in a bleached field. On some rocky coast a houseboat of old people tied off to a dock, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed, shouted into the cold water. The film out of Florida was so finally blackened, no shapes bled through.

On the monitors you could see children on horseback in the Catskills, dragging audio sleds. Faces brilliant and large, the happy people we once were. By now I’d gotten used to the button mouths on grown men, eyes crowded in close as if for warmth. It was too much to see a face so large, a child with feelings that could not be concealed. I preferred the new smallness that better hid the insides of people. Insignificant faces that bore no message. Another house with the lights out.

The strategies of the speechless were obvious. There was the strategy out to sea. The strategy in the mountains. Overseas the strategy was similar, but fire seemed more frequently involved. Films from there were burnt or films were blank or the films only showed water in looping reels that never seemed to end. If this was a catastrophe, many parts of the world stubbornly showed no sign of it.

A project was under way in Montana, copied in the Dakotas, in a sandy stretch of what looked like Utah. Corridors of speech ignited by children would block the passage of the older weaklings. Telephone poles and electrical towers were pressed into service to keep the vocal weapon in play. Speech was routed out loud from every kind of vertical structure, pinged across wilderness coordinates so no space was left silent.

Beneath these channels of speech were the most vicious accumulations of salt.

Too often the footage revealed some badly swaddled survivor caught out in the language. If you watched all night you could see him starve.

Sometimes after working hours a small-faced scientist stood staring up at one of these news monitors, so riveted in his vigil that you had to step around him on your way to the coffee cart.

Finally among the speechless there was the strategy of the tents. In every location tents in circus colors had been erected over the ground, strung up from trees. In line at the cloth doorways of these tents stood the speechless, and one at a time they entered. Five minutes, ten minutes inside, sometimes longer. You didn’t get to see their throes, their fits of expiration. They departed on stretchers, covered in a sheet. Sometimes uncovered. A team of volunteers took the stretchers to a field and rolled them over a hole until the stretchers were light again.

These were the mercy tents. Inside people heard some last song, whatever they chose to dial up, and then down they went to those sounds. A strategy of acoustical expiration. Suicide by language. Mercy was right. The tents were clearly a kindness to those who remained. No one was forced in. On the contrary, people fought to get inside first. And when a funeral field had filled, the mercy tents were struck and dragged away. Audio equipment pulled alongside by wagon. A jukebox of words to die to.

I had to believe that LeBov, if he was even here, wanted us to see what had become of our peers in the world outside.

If I were in line at a mercy tent, it would be Rabbi Burke I’d most want to hear. Burke or something closer to home. A final message from Claire or Esther, if I had any recordings. I would have liked to have heard their voices again.

Of the footage shared with us in the corridor, one only rarely saw evidence of the child quarantines where our children lived. The quarantines had evolved into defended settlements, but it didn’t take much to keep us out. Loudspeakers on poles, broadcasting the famous old speeches, the fairy tales, radio serenades. It was a hissing wash of poison to traverse, and unless you’d rendered yourself deaf, you didn’t get far inside such sound. You stumbled, fell, and probably could not even crawl away. Speech at that volume flashes out deep into the woods, a murmur line. The new maps would be blackened with them.

Some lonesome fathers and mothers tried to penetrate the quarantines, shielding their soaked faces, burrowing in. Individual missions, no doubt. Projects of intimacy. Every so often a dark shape streaked across a field, pierced the sound barrier that blasted an impermeable language to prevent intrusions by the speechless, and disappeared into the darkness of a quarantined neighborhood. What these people did when they got through was not available. How they survived was not available.

Even a camera had not lasted in one of these places for long. Recording devices were discovered and smashed, but that was only a matter of time. Cameras were too obvious. They needed to send not a device inside, but a person , one of their own, and that person would be very young, well trained, and entirely hostile to the locals.

Somewhere at Forsythe, if they knew what they were doing , if this place was being run by someone who was thinking clearly, working to outsmart the dilemma, they were raising their own children. It sounds like a fictional conceit, the idle imaginings of a culture unimpressed by its own reality, but it would have been one of the first ideas to try. And once, as they say, the asset had matured , the asset would be released into the world loaded with enough misinformation to be dangerous. First stop, the quarantines. Project, fucking overthrow. Project coup . This work was a given. Perhaps that seems far-fetched. It actually is far-fetched. Which, in my mind, made it all the more likely. As of last December, the far-fetched had pretty much come nigh.

Children, after all, were the ultimate asset.

This would turn out to be true in ways I could never have predicted.

On the last monitor of the corridor, a lone black-and-white unit that hung at face level, one could sometimes find footage taken from inside the quarantines. When it flickered on it attracted the interest of most of the loitering scientists, who would crowd the set and try to see.

One’s first assumption of a child-run community, supervision-free, calls up wolflike youngsters crawling through dirty hallways, eating each other’s torsos with lazy relish. But the evidence I reviewed presented a subdued crowd. The children, in the footage we had, their faces turned bland by the editor, had set a long table with plates. They raced across a room, bringing supplies to this table, then sat down to eat. But with their features smoothed over they seemed to be spooning food into the blurry holes of their necks.

In an outdoor scene, captured from what seemed to be an upstairs window of a house, a formation of children moved on the street in the regimented patterns of an old-fashioned dance.

At times the children clustered so closely together, it was as if they’d become one body, swaying over the floor. Why they kept huddling so close together was unclear to me. To the unspoken dismay of my colleagues, I would get right up to the monitor so the heat of it bathed my face, and I’d wish I could clear away the fog from the children to see what it was they were feeling as they clustered against each other like that.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

The background of this imagery had been scrubbed, censored. Instead of the hills and trees that loomed behind them, or even the other houses, the scenery had been pixilated. Someone didn’t want us to know where this was, and the children were meant to be shown playing or dancing in the street as though that street was suspended in space. But something gave away their location, and I stopped often when this scene was playing to confirm my suspicion.