Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

A cold, hacking sound track, precisely applied, could leach the moment of all feeling.

But I never arrived at the TV room, never again saw the blur-faced children taking a pet monkey to the grocery store, and only from very far away did I hear the sound track meant to wash this material of meaning, the noises a giant might make from his chest after he’s been dealt his deathblow.

One must fairly consider that all music is the sound a body makes as it comes to its pretty end. Is there any sound that cannot be traced back to that?

Usually in the public space of Forsythe I had to wade through mesmerized crowds of scientists, but tonight the entertainment corridor was oddly empty.

Down below, in the hallway outside the assembly, a pack of scientists hovered over something, and from the north hallway sprinted a retinue of technicians, who pushed their way through to what turned out to be a lab-coated body sprawled out on the floor.

There’d been an accident. Someone had fallen and was not moving.

The scientists stepped back to let the technicians work. From a white box came a stethoscope, and this was pressed onto the chest of the downed scientist. The victim was a woman, from what I could tell. She had lovely hair.

As the technicians worked to revive her, the scientists who had gathered started to drift away. They were lost in thought, or maybe just lost. Their minds were hollow and they walked away thinking nothing.

I felt a kinship with their indifference. Someone else’s collapse was of no interest to me, either. When you remove the sound from a medical crisis, it feels far less worrisome.

The technicians circled the fallen scientist, lifting her onto a stretcher. With heads down they moved as one and led the woman away. They took their time. The casual pace suggested that their patient hadn’t made it.

A reaction seemed optional.

Now I had the face-level monitor to myself, so I checked in with the outside world to see what the children were up to these days, out in their idyllic quarantine where they could hurl language at each other without consequence.

The video revealed the same sunny street as before, a crowd of children circling something, their heads so close together that, with the distortion painted in by the editor, they seemed to belong to a single, blurred cloud. At their feet was the same imprinted shadow, like graph paper tattooed on the road, even while the scenery behind them had been reduced to snow and noise.

The shadow from the Montrier electrical tower again. My old neighborhood.

None of this concerned me, though. None of this held any interest.

I was about to move off and settle in for more entertaining TV when I saw something in the corner of the frame. A girl sat on the steps to a house. She was alone, her hands melted into the blur where her head was, which meant she was hiding her face in her hands. I saw just her body, and it was the bouncing of her legs that interested me. Her knees were together and both legs bounced as one, bounced and then tilted.

This was curious. I’d seen this before.

This way and that. That way and this. This way and that and that way and this.

On the steps, this girl, doing something very particular with her legs.

Do you know, Dad, that I can do a trick?

Oh yeah?

Yeah!

I can make my legs go this way and that, that way and this!

Still, this meant nothing. Still it could have been any kid doing that. Wishful thinking could be vicious. Why should I be impressed? I was not impressed.

Then I saw the shoes: black Mary Janes scuffed to hell, and the sweet little head of hers, even through the blurring, most certainly more long than round, very much unmistakably tubelike in dimension, this poor girl, despite the scarf she wrapped around her neck, the square spectacles. Despite everything. The poor thing. She really did have such an unusual head.

My little Esther sitting alone on the steps.

I’m coming for you, Darling, I didn’t say. I’m coming to get you.

The next morning, after being medically ambushed and stuck with a syringe of the child serum, I descended the ramp with LeBov to the room with the Jewish hole in it, where I’d begin my first day of work.

Behind LeBov trailed a retinue of technicians, faces hidden in foam, which made them look not unlike the children on television, sprung to real life and engraved on the air, reeking of illness. In two wagons the technicians pulled a piece of gear that produced a long, low moan. Through the thin metal bars of one of these things I thought I saw the bright glowing eyes of an animal. Well, perhaps it was a small person. Something looked at me from the cage.

LeBov moved with the careful steps of an old man, but he did so under his own power. Whatever was wrong with him, he seemed proud. I found it to be an interesting strategy. When he stopped, his entourage stopped, hanging behind with their tall foam heads tilted down, as if they were shy.

“We were all sorry to learn about your wife,” LeBov wheezed.

“Sorry what?” I said. For some reason I pictured not Claire when he said this, but Esther, sitting on those steps, smoothing down her clothing, as if someone might soon approach and ask her to dance. Her legs swinging back and forth. I so wished Claire had seen this with me last night.

LeBov looked at me. “About what happened. I figured you were there.”

I must have been staring at him because he retreated facially, blanked out his features.

“I promised you her safekeeping and I wanted to let you know I didn’t do it.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“We’re not sure what happened. Perhaps it was an allergic reaction to the serum, perhaps she was already sick. Or your daughter’s voice penetrated the immunity. This is still happening when the emotional connection is high. We don’t know. Or somehow someone broke protocol and rushed her with speech. Whoever it was who spoke to her, it hurt her.”

Whoever it was .

I asked, “Hurt her how?”

I pictured Claire leaving my room, the Hebrew letter nearly boiling in her hand, then making it out to the assembly area where something went wrong, and she collapsed.

Now what kind of shoes does he wear?

Probably golden shoes.

The scientists circled her, probably wished they could undress her and cut her open. No one noticed her fist clenched over the Hebrew letter that might have poisoned her. Then came the technicians and their paddle, their dun-colored tools of revival, and the scientists backed away. That was Claire they worked on. While I was upstairs looking at our old neighborhood on the video monitor, catching sight of our shared daughter on the steps.

Was that the word for it? We shared a daughter? I’d not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to share Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.

Only true in a glorious world of hypotheticals. The real truth was that neither of us had Esther and in the end we shared nothing.

Outside the door to the Jewish hole, LeBov bent over a wagon, attended to the piece of gear. He rummaged in the wooden box, got his arm in there as far as his shoulder.

Then he fed a length of clear piping into his mouth and spoke, his lips stretched bloodless.

LeBov’s words came out watery, leaking around the pipe.

“I’m not going to tell you that she’s going to be fine. That I won’t do.”

I said, “And yet you’ll do almost anything else. You’ve suddenly drawn a line?”

I pictured Claire alone on a hospital bed, ignored by a man who had a cushion for a face. If they confiscated the letter, the corpse of it, there was no question they could track it back to me. If they cared to.