Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

I had all the power of a child.

As she got dressed and made her way out of my room, Marta looked at me plainly, as if she was curious, in the detached, scientific sense, why I would have any interest in hurting her. I’d seen that face before, and I hadn’t realized it was a face that could be shared, used by more than one person, but it had appeared on Claire, and I had always thought that it was hers alone, to use only on those special occasions when I had disappointed her. But apparently this was a face that Marta had access to as well.

Marta’s unspoken question—why I had caused her harm—was one I would not have been able to answer. There was a small, decisive advantage to the language toxicity here. One did not have to stand there explaining oneself, inventing motives that might make sense to someone. Explanations of any kind, in fact, were simply extinct.

Among the many rhetorical modes that had perished, it was this one I was not sorry to see go.

In the days after that, the serum fully discharged from my system, my immunity depleted, I braced myself for assault. I waited to be ambushed, then hauled off and injected with vile stuff. I didn’t just wait for it. I wished for it.

It happened again a few days later.

When my hood came off, a technician was putting drops on LeBov. From a baster he squeezed a pearled fluid over LeBov’s face. It smelled of flowers. LeBov clenched in his chair as if the substance burned. The technicians leaned over him, tilting on their toes to press all their weight into holding him down.

The puncture wound on my arm, where the needle had gone in this time, was rimmed already by a shiny black scab.

To LeBov I said, “Was that really necessary? I’d have come to you willingly. I honor my agreements.”

He stood up, coughing into a towel, and waved me after him. It was my first night of work at the Jewish hole.

But two things happened the night before that need to be related first. Two things, and then I’ll report on my first engagement with the hole.

The night before, I went to the coffee cart and, from behind, tapped Marta, maybe a bit too hard. We’d not been together since I had repelled her from bed with language.

Maybe I struck her on the shoulder. Not a blow to knock Marta down, although it happened to do so, and not a blow to injure her, because that was not a desire I knew about having, even though I had recently caused her pain in pursuit of a broader curiosity, but a firm tap of the sort one delivers to an object to keep it from moving. An anchoring gesture, one might call it. And when I did it Marta buckled to the floor, a surprisingly soft fall, executed with a dancer’s grace.

The scientists at the coffee cart looked down at their fallen colleague. We’d all of us developed, in our time at Forsythe, the remotest style of curiosity. We looked at fallen people with the clinical gaze of someone assessing an old painting. What do have we here? If my colleagues had any reaction, I was grateful that I would not learn what it was.

Marta was not long for a posture of collapse.

When she stood up to join me, showing no distress at having been knocked down, I saw that it wasn’t Marta I had tapped.

It was Claire.

Here was my very own wife in a scientist’s disguise on the grounds of Forsythe. LeBov had kept his promise. He’d brought my sweetheart to me and she was safe.

Poor Claire’s face was small, her hair too thin. I wanted so much to hold her, to take her to the video feed where I thought I’d seen our old neighborhood. But I had an agreement to honor.

I clutched my wife and together we hurried through the Forsythe hallways. At the door to my room the technicians rushed her with the serum and she did not cry out. She was so brave.

I gripped Claire’s hands, forced her to the wall. She couldn’t know what we were doing. I would explain later. LeBov had urged this upon me— when the time comes you must control your wife —and I had agreed.

The injection would need to penetrate Claire’s back. Protocol. I kept her hands from thrashing while the technicians readied the needle. I jammed a knee against her bottom, forcing her to submit.

Poor Claire did not really struggle. She gave me such a trusting look as I restrained her, a shy smile to suggest she would have done anything, anything. And so would I, I tried to silently say back. This was me doing anything right now. I swear I am doing this for you .

When the needle went in, Claire sputtered from the throat, tried to summon a voice that had fallen so slack it could not even moan. Only a drowning sound came out of her.

I know , I wanted to say. I know, Honey. I do. I know .

Inside my room the technicians plugged in a tape recorder and settled the yellow headphones on the desk. Then from a foil bag I knew too well, they retrieved the toxic tapes, the whole sonic archive I’d stashed in the car. The last record of my daughter. Our own Esther’s voice, recorded when I thought that one day I’d need to study her words to figure out why we could not bear them. Oh, one day.

Claire curled up under the sting of the injection, twitched softly on the floor. A technician caught some of the froth that poured out. I stroked her hair, waited for her to open her eyes. It’s all right , I didn’t say.

You could see the child serum start to activate in her, a mineral deficiency erased with one honey-colored syringe, the person brightening again to a world that had been closed to her.

The technicians flashed miniature tools, the instruments of a dentist, a botanist. Fingernail-size mirrors on gleaming, chrome sticks, measuring the moisture in her breath, clamps made of something the color of skin. With a dropper they squirted the same pearled fluid I saw them use on LeBov, but this they squeezed into Claire’s mouth. She sucked the dropper like it was a pacifier.

Claire sat up, rubbing her face, and before I could hold her—she seemed confused and scared now—the technicians pulled me into the hallway. They shut me out of my own room and guarded my door. I’d have to sit out here and wait for Claire to be done. I could picture her inside listening to Esther’s voice and this would have to be enough.

This was because I’d be getting no dose of my own. Only Claire would get to listen to the Esther tapes. That was the deal. Claire could hear her daughter’s voice. Even if her daughter was only reciting lists, Claire could finally listen to her with no ill effects. None. This was all I knew to give her. It was all I had.

The agreement with LeBov was worked out in stages. If things went well with the Jew hole, then my turn was next.

If things went well . What that meant, apparently, was whether or not I could summon LeBov’s wall of slick listeners in tandem, because each listener faltered in the presence of another, and the problem was not just electrical. Get the motherfuckers to work together. Braid the orange cables into some kind of sisterhood, then prize them into the dark brown apertures of the listeners. Sneak the conduit into its appropriate cavity, escalating the detection frequency to x , to n ? Put a maximum latch on that cable so Rabbi Zero could be heard, whispering from his Buffalo fortress.

But more important, let them thread any gauge of wire into my mouth. My mouth would no longer be mine. From now on my mouth belonged to them.

We’d hear beyond the rudimentary transmissions of the fraud Rabbi Burke . What a joke . Beyond the hierarchies of middling low-level so-called rabbis on the closer reaches of the radio, into the darker, more exclusive terrain of… whom, whom ?

LeBov wouldn’t say.