Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

On the asphalt, in a pattern at the feet of the children, were the cold mesh bars of shadow that could only have come from a signature electrical tower anchored to a slope not so far away from our old Jewish hole.

I think I knew exactly where those children were, and it was just blocks from my old house.

Even so, what did this mean? It meant nothing. I could not share it, I could not go there, and after watching this loop too many times it began to bore me, even as I sometimes thought the loop kept changing. I knew there was a quarantine in Montrier, because it was forming when I left, and our little town, with its valley on one side and the great hill behind it, offered natural protection. But this footage, from the looks of it, might have been taken years ago.

I wanted to pass it by, duck the dull high monitors, ignore the face-level screen, even if the crowd of scientists suggested there might be new footage streaming through. I wanted to ignore these diversions and move directly to the coffee cart, where the relief and comfort and, if necessary, savagery, were far easier to regulate.

If I got to the coffee cart early enough, I could tap Marta, retreat to one of our rooms for a transaction, then be back at the cart before the last person had been tapped, and there I could tap again and retreat to my room for a second round of intimacy, to wipe up any needs I’d not soothed the first time out.

But on harder days in my office, after watching from the observation deck as my work was placed before some crowd of subjects, who at once fell to fits on the floor, who did not recover even when the offensive material was removed, and who continued in mute throes of agony as I returned to my desk and picked up on yet another dead-end script that was sure to fail, I had needs that sex with Marta only antagonized when the working shift finished. On those evenings, when I passed this corridor through the spotlights shed by the high monitors, and then that white cone of face-level light at the end, I did feel compelled to study this imagery for a familiar landmark, some sign of home, or, and this I hoped for most stupidly, and most desperately, evidence that Esther, older now, meaner, stronger, nicer, I did not know , might have lodged herself among these strange, faceless children and might have decided to place herself in front of the camera, so her father, wherever he was now, might see her and might, if he was any kind of human person, do whatever he possibly could to get her out of there.

Weeks passed like this. If LeBov was here, I did not see him.

I did my work and fed the material to the technicians, who came to my office with a bucket to collect what I’d done. That’s what the work I gave them amounted to: slops. In the courtyard men and women fell unconscious, turned into gazeless creatures. Some of them were sick because of alphabets I made. I raised a sparse beard on my face and I learned to stare between the people I saw.

At work I bent yet harder to the task, determined to rule out anything, however archaic or difficult or obscure, that had once let people connect.

Rebus writing, rune writing, pictograms, they all failed.

Administrative script, scripts of love, the scripts used to conceal secrets and deflect attention. All of the specialty languages I tried. I tried the languages of complaint, of apology and denial. I wrote out simple sentences, hiding my own words with the self-disguising paper. By design I wrote sentences filled with errors, sentences afflicted with inconsistencies of tense and tone. Sentences of poor taste, good taste, no conspicuous taste at all. Grammatical rules, rules of usage, rules governing rhythm and silence, these I broke hard. I used a conventional Roman alphabet but spelled everything wrong. Would it matter? I tweezed letters from words, obliterated vowels, used only vowels, repurposed a single vowel, O , to stand in for all of them, to give air to the words, a universal breathiness from a single source. Let them all drink from the fat O . And when O didn’t work I tried the others, to be thorough, but just as O failed, of course the others failed, too. Of course is the operative term here. Not once did I believe that through lettering alone we’d reach people without harm.

Through lettering alone . Good fucking luck.

I tried everything but the Hebrew alphabet. I knew it was poison, too, but I didn’t want this script to cause pain. Lift not the language into the service of bloodshed , Burke had said. Or, these words will open up holes in men . I would not be the person to pass scripts of these symbols into the courtyard, where seizures would occur. But though I never sent down work that explored the Hebrew possibility, I did make latex letters in the Hebrew script that inflated, once I’d sewn up the sutures, into fat, black clouds. Little floating tumors that were language-free, hovering over my desk until I pierced them. And when I did that, they fell into shredded piles and I swept them into a drawer.

Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I re-created what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.

To readers not versed in the code, this presented like pulp. No sense could be had unless the subjects sat down with a Caesar wheel to decipher what I’d done, and we allowed our martyrs no equipment, let alone enough time to drag meaning out of the ultra-cloaked messages before them.

But it didn’t matter. Sense wasn’t what was getting them, the immediate impact of comprehension in the brain. It may have been meaningless, but they were sick regardless, even sicker than before.

The progression of our shared disability defied the going modes of understanding.

So I tried different colored papers, clear papers, walls, cloth, skin. I ran troubleshooting on backgrounds, which interested me, the visual phenomena that stood behind the text in question, to determine how the backgrounds to our written language either support or defeat the toxicity. What kind of air masks a language, and does that air matter?

We lacked the equipment for a smoke machine that might be fitted with a text filter, through which legible typefaces could float out and dissipate in time. A self-eroding writing, a writing that dissolved when it was seen. But I didn’t need to make skywriting to know how we would react to it. With cotton balls I tufted up letters, glued them to cork. I acquired an LED board, rigged it to scroll words, to blink the scripts that I commanded.

These light boards not only failed, they brought on new symptoms, triggering a palsy in our subjects, sometimes rendering them moribund, twitching on the testing-room floor until we unplugged the board.

A writing might be made of air alone, I reasoned, colored air, the brittle air in zero-humidity climates, fur or animal hair that’s been pulverized by mortar or woven into strands, any kind of cloth, any kind of object, or ink alone, ink on paper, ink delivered by means of stylus. It was worrisome how bottomless my project was. For a stylus I defaulted to reed. But I also used pens, pencils, knives, my own finger dipped in pigment, and a lead nail for scratching over glass. The ancient tools were there for me, dragged from some useless museum, no doubt— everything at your disposal, sir , the technicians never said—and I used them, but to use them convinced me further that this direction was doomed.