Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

I tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it opened and we stepped back into the hallway.

LeBov was casual, as if he was asking me to join his softball team. “So will you help us?” he asked. “It could be an interesting project.”

“I thought you had what you needed. You said that yourself. What you took from me when you left.”

I remembered the punctured listener leaking down his wrists as he tried to wriggle through the hole. Along with his burns, it could have been a cause of the nosebleeds.

“Well, I thought so, too. But I didn’t. Your listener has proven stubborn to us. That’s why we need your help. The original owner of the thing, certain administrative rights, the ability to modify the property in ways we require. Something about you people is a catalyst.”

“Us people. How frustrating for you to have something you don’t control. But I’m not sure I understand. Why don’t you force me?”

LeBov broke into a fit of coughing.

“That’s a really good question,” he said, when he’d recovered. “It’s a pet topic of mine. Our studies show that coercion has a fairly poor track record. Otherwise, of course, we would.”

“Then no, thank you. I do appreciate the offer, though.”

“That’s not the whole story,” said LeBov, and I thought, Too bad. It never is .

“We saw what you did with that wire when you first got here, that little act of ventriloquism. That was of enormous interest to us and that’s why we pulled you out of isolation. You channeled a prayer none of us had heard before.”

“You were watching me?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And we’ve tried to duplicate your work, connecting wires to the mouths of Jews, to mannequins, to anyone, but no one else is conductive like you appear to be. Something about your mouth we’d like to study. And that prayer you were transmitting, that prayer doesn’t even… exist. We can find no record of it. It’s not a real prayer, which confirms to us that there’s something out there that we need to hear more of. There’s a territory of wisdom we don’t own, and that’s troubling. We need to get you connected in here.”

“You want to nail me to your wall and use me as a listener?”

“Well, not if you don’t want to.”

“Good, because I don’t want to.”

LeBov checked his watch.

“Whoops. We’d better get you back.”

This wasn’t the last word on the hole, obviously. LeBov’s mildness on the subject was unnerving. But he didn’t bring it up again and he seemed in a hurry to get rid of me.

On our way back to the spiral staircase, LeBov stopped at a door and looked in the high window.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Take a look,” he said, standing aside.

Inside were children, seated in rows, like in a classroom, except this wasn’t a classroom, it was some kind of hospital ward. The children were drawing, reading. Others stared at a television.

When I saw the medical carts, the tubing, a masked technician bending over one of his subjects, who smiled up at him as the needle was raised, I turned away and walked off. I wanted to get out of there, and I wasn’t waiting for LeBov.

LeBov started laughing. A feminine laugh like a cat getting killed.

He fell into step with me, and we made our way back to the staircase.

“Shall I congratulate you?” I asked.

“You shall not, I fear.”

LeBov did want to be congratulated. He seemed so proud, cheerfully indifferent to my outrage, almost pleased by it.

However they were harvesting their serum should not have mattered to me. But I had questions.

“And the test subjects. Why don’t you give them this serum from the children?”

He laughed. “Test subjects? Are you fucking kidding me? Is that what you actually call them? We wouldn’t waste it on them. It’s too precious, too difficult to, uh, make .”

LeBov narrowed his eyes.

“Well, why are they here?” I asked. “How do you get them to submit to these tests?”

I thought of the endless crowds, clamoring to be let into Forsythe.

“Your mind has been wasted on small questions. They want to be here. It’s called choice. They come from all over and beg to be let in. We have a security issue, really. There are too many of them. If they weren’t so collectively uninspired, so unspeakably”—he paused, searching for the right word—“ stupid , they could launch a pretty effective attack on us.”

“Right.”

“Of course the pictures we’ve gathered of their children don’t hurt. A photo of a child is such a strangely powerful tool. Family pictures are funny. Sometimes they are the most boring material on the planet. Literally. There is nothing that causes more agony than someone else’s family photo. I weep with boredom at the sight of these things. They could almost be used as a medicine to cause indifference. And yet, if you show one of those very same photos to a parent who has, for the moment, lost track of that child, or even voluntarily surrendered that child for medical safekeeping on one of our busses, and you suggest, through mime, because language would fucking kill those miserable, anxious parents, that you might know where that child is, uh, presently residing , well then suddenly that photo has turned into what we call here an outstanding piece of leverage. Currency for the mute time. The new money. It’s a pretty straightforward economy.”

On our way up the staircase LeBov’s nose started to bleed again, and as we hurried up the narrow passageway his breath grew wet and ugly. We stopped to rest and he coughed a slurry into his hands, mumbling something. Again I hugged the railing, shutting my eyes against the spinning walls, and followed.

I was released upstairs later that night, disoriented and hungry, as the last protection from the serum fizzed away. I found myself back in the land of the mutes and I was relieved.

Down on the mezzanine I raced to the coffee cart, hoping to find Marta, or anyone. There was no way I would be alone tonight. I would have tapped the old man from the tests if he’d have me. I would have led him to my room, peeled down his robe, and tried whatever I could get away with against his body until he dragged himself from me in exhaustion.

There was no one at the coffee cart. The scientists had paired off already. Tripled off. Gone back to their rooms to nurse their sense of specialness and to marshal every kind of argument for themselves that what they think, what they feel, has any value at all.

I returned to my room, closed the door, and suffered the long, violent seizure of alertness that had come to pass for another night of sleep. Waiting. Thinking. Not sleeping. Never really sleeping.

I avoided the observation booth after that. I did not like to join the other scientists for the afternoon stroll, the old thoughtful walk we took with our great brains towering over us, down our serious corridor that ended in glass, where we could watch the good people of Rochester bleed from the mouth, trembling with sobs, while they tried to endure exposure to our work.

Once I knew my scripts were pre-classified as doomed, never even shared in the courtyard, or, if they were, used on the test subjects merely to confirm a previously held certainty , a certainty that written language, no matter how inventively conceived or destroyed and then remade, could not safely be read again for very long by people over a certain age, I began to keep some experiments to myself, substituting credible symbol systems and scripts for the technicians to take away, while concealing anything promising—the project that might deliver me from this facility—beneath a pile in my desk drawer.