Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

The symptoms worsened. Someone from Forsythe, one of the medical research labs, called it a virus, menacing to the old, the weak. Menacing to the living, he might as well have said. Claire and I looked dipped in ash. Claire smelled sour, and given the distance she kept from me, I must not have smelled so fine myself.

Something streamed down my legs when I coughed, when I breathed too hard. Something as warm and slow as blood.

Soon we had to work at the basic behavior. It was work to walk. It was work to get dressed. To get undressed was work. To pee, to drink, to groom, forget it.

With no official diagnosis forthcoming, we troubleshot at home, white-boarding the safer explanations first. Maybe this wasn’t a sickness so much as us getting older. Who knew what we were supposed to be feeling, anyway? We assessed our self-care and charted our intake. On principle we ate the better foods. Was one meant to be perfect at nutrition, otherwise be sickened? At first for dinners we had nuts and greens and the healthy oils. Plates of firm white fish crusted up in a glowing pan, shards of salt littered on top. A handful of salad on the side. For dessert a flavored ice or some crisp, cool fruit.

Not anymore. The food burst into rotten morsels in my mouth when I ate. I thought I was chewing on skin, maybe my own. Frequently I spat sad things back onto my plate, and if I ate at all, I waited until Claire and Esther were asleep, snuck into the kitchen, and sucked on a rag soaked in apple juice, which offered cold relief.

Our weekly trips to synagogue, trekking to the woods each Thursday, were robotic, if we even went. Until October we heard only the usual services, Rabbi Burke’s sermons lightened by occasional broadcasts of Aesop’s tales. At synagogue we sat in stunned exhaustion, taking in nothing, and we barely got ourselves through the woods back home again before collapsing.

Claire and I started making way for each other, the small courtesies one shows a sick person. Wide berths in the hallway and boundaries observed in bed. We slept in lanes, did not visit each other in the night, even for the sexless embrace, to extinguish each other’s insecurities, to see what comfort there wasn’t in someone else’s cold frame. Skills arise to suit this sort of work. I could turn over without breaching Claire’s side of the bed. A person wants his space when he feels like that. Even our functional kisses—good night and, less happily, good morning—were drily offered at a distance, faces braving the infected space, bodies angled away as if leaning into a terrible wind. Separately we showered and bathed and soaked in salts, we rinsed with astringents, dutifully pursuing what hygiene we could manage, but something wasn’t washing out, and I was versed enough in rotting, spoiling, putrefaction—we all have our specialties—to know that these odors of ours were not the oils of the skin or the tolerable foulness of sweat.

If Esther banged on the bathroom door and so much as shouted “Hurry!” that word alone tightened my throat. I’d go to my knees, the wind knocked out of me.

The evidence was mounting, but I seemed to have a pact against insight, a refusal to name my poison. Esther had no such inhibition. Esther knew, in the precocious way of nearly everyone but us. She might have thought it was what she said that hurt us: the actual words in their scathing specifics, as if meaning itself ever had that kind of power. But she could have been singing us love songs, cooing little melodies of affection, and the effect would have been the same. By now, or maybe always, the meaning failed to matter.

I required Esther’s total silence. When I looked at her—a young girl dipped in a shell of unkillable health—it was with pure, scientific ambition. I had a technical, professional need, and it wasn’t personal, or of course it fucking was. I needed my daughter to disappear from my sight. If I could have had a wish, I would have wished her away.

Dr. Moriphe, when we returned to her, did the blood work, metabolic panels, thyroid function tests, an ESR and a CRP. Claire got spun through a cylinder that whirred and clicked, a picture of deep blue space flickering on the screen, her body rasterized into a galaxy of points and dusky blotches.

Nothing to worry about here, reported the doctor.

Nothing your tiny mind can conceive of, I thought.

I sucked on a swab, spat in a jar, peed in a cup. My bottom was probed and, like a little boy, I giggled. Nothing conclusive came back, just the mortal data, the numbers within range, the levels of little concern.

In the waiting room neighbors stared at their pee-soaked laps, hacked into fistfuls of cloth. Some went shirtless from the pain. Out in the parking lot people shivered in their cars, sometimes didn’t get out. The occasional ambulance stopped on our block, stayed too long, drove away finally, too quiet, its lights revolving in funereal silence.

Later Dr. Moriphe was sick herself, but doctors and their entourage employ a different vocabulary for their own physical failings. Each appointment I made was canceled by her office at the last minute. She, too, was not feeling so well. She was never really feeling up to coming to work, they said. Would you like to see someone else? they wanted to know.

I’d seen someone else. Someone else was a moron.

“Does she have children at home?” I asked.

What a gorgeously long pause came back.

They couldn’t give out that information. We can pass on a message to her if you like, they offered, in their best professional voice. And I said sure, sure, please do that. Pass on a message.

Then came November’s stay, a sweetly deluded phase of recovery that we fed with great doses of denial.

But in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes. They were found with the slightly smaller faces we would routinely see on victims in only a few weeks.

Drifts of salt blew in from the west, blew out to sea, leaving bleached streets, trees abraded to pulp. Perhaps just a coincidence. Sometimes the driving was blind, and on the highways blowers mounted to poles kept the roads clear.

But at home Claire woke up one morning and declared us cured.

Esther was away at horse camp, her school’s fall trip. They’d gone to Level Falls Farm, a four-figure getaway that promised intimate occasions with horses and the experts who baby them. Blood money paid out to stop the flow of Esther’s demands for a few seconds. Money paid to her school, who we already paid, so they could take her away for a while and we could fucking breathe.

Esther was probably riding a horse right now, wearing the black Mary Janes she refused to shed for anyone, even if it was a shit-clotted field she needed to cross. Or she was lugging a saddle to the stable, or standing not-so-patiently as someone overexplained something Esther already knew. At home she fumed when you doled out information she took to be a given. Anything factual went without saying. Esther opposed repetition, opposed the obvious, showed resistance to anything that resembled an instructional phrase, a word of advice, a sentence that carried, however politely, a new piece of information. These were off-limits, or else we would be scorched by her temper. Out in the world I wonder how she concealed it. With strangers a level of control must have been available to Esther that we never got to see. One hoped.