Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

That letter, sucked free of meaning, its story discharged, probably looked exactly like me now. Decayed to resemble its miserable maker. We make the language in our own image and the language repulses us. A damning piece of evidence, as if I’d torn off my face, shrunken it in fire, then sent it out to harm the woman I was supposed to love.

“You’re doing everything you can for her, right?” I said. “You’re going to tell me that there’s nothing you won’t do. All the expertise of this shithole is being brought to bear on it, and now you’re going to make her better, right?”

A dark froth rose in the pipe that fed into LeBov’s mouth. Whether it came from his own nasty interior or the little medical wagon, I wasn’t sure, but it filled the pipe and seemed to churn in there.

The chemical reaction did not suit him. LeBov’s eyes fluttered, rolled back in his head. He reached for me, to hold on to something, but I stepped back and he fell.

I distanced myself further to allow the technicians access to the man. They’d want to perform their intervention now. Usually they were so quick to come to LeBov’s aid. But the technicians hovered and, if anything, pulled farther away, their pillowed faces revealing nothing.

Perhaps they were under other instructions now.

I yelled at them and they tilted, as if they could dodge what I said. Without faces it felt absurd to shout at them, like scolding a stuffed animal. It was clear that they would not be helping their leader.

I crouched over LeBov, pulled the tube from his mouth. It was jammed in there pretty badly and he wheezed when it finally popped free.

Some dark spit clung to his lips, seemed to harden as he breathed on it.

“You should never have taken our listener,” I said. “It didn’t belong to you. And you shouldn’t have pierced it. That was a big mistake. A really big mistake. That’s why you’re sick. You’re not supposed to get that stuff on you. Perhaps you’re going to die again.”

“That’s not it. It’s the Child’s Play, the side effects.”

“Right.”

“That’s what we call it.”

“Who is we?”

“The other LeBovs.”

LeBov seemed sad to have admitted this to me. The other LeBovs . From the wagon came an animal growl, so throaty and plain it sounded like a person.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

I pictured a room full of redheads eating from the same animal carcass, licking each other’s bloody faces. The LeBovs.

“One too many, maybe.”

It worried me to see LeBov so scared, ill.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you feel sorry for yourself.”

“There is no myself . I bargained out of it.”

“In return for what?” I asked.

“Not this,” he said. “I definitely didn’t think it would be this.”

For a moment LeBov couldn’t breathe and his eyes bulged with panic. He grabbed his throat and seemed to choke himself, which somehow restored his air.

“Why don’t you stop taking the serum if it’s making you so sick,” I said.

“I don’t care for silence. It’s not my specialty to keep my mouth shut.”

“Then you’ll never fit in. I think silence is headed your way.”

LeBov endeavored a long blink that did not make things look good for him.

“Don’t forget that you’ve made a commitment,” he whispered, eyes still closed.

“That’s true.”

I palmed his sick face, leaned into it, as if a man had popped through the earth and I was stuffing him back into his hole, where he belonged. If the floor had been soft, I might have pushed LeBov through. His head seemed to give a little as I pressed on it.

LeBov tried to look at me, but his open eye would not obey. His eye followed, with apparent interest, some invisible object in the air. I’d seen such detachment before, when Claire collapsed in the field, a rapturous commitment to an invisible world, and I was starting to covet it.

I said, “I always keep my promises,” wondering if I ever had.

Just not to you, I didn’t say. Not to you, or your kind. And if you will hijack my body with a chemical in order for us to speak, then I will not be accountable for anything I say. Whatever words I said to you were borrowed. Brought to you by some child lying listless somewhere. One of the siphoned ones. You sponsored what I said. Those words are on you.

I left him there. If LeBov was breathing, it was only mildly. He seemed unsure that breathing would help. On the fence about it. Ready to stop trying, maybe pursue other avenues. Weighing his options. I envied the attitude. At least he was at peace with the coming coldness.

From one of the wagons came a low, soft growl, the unmistakable click of teeth. The technicians bobbed in place like rifle targets.

From a hallway beneath Forsythe I entered the room with the broken Jew hole. LeBov sprawled in a black puddle on the floor behind me while his retinue refused to interfere with his collapse. Maybe the other LeBovs needed this one to die. It was hard to blame them. The redhead was too sick to be of further use. Sick from Child’s Play. Of course he was. I didn’t say good-bye.

Inside the vaulted space the Jewish radio testing was in full swing. This was the large-scale listening task force I was meant to join, siphoning deep rabbi sounds from cabling that I wasn’t sure even carried them.

I guess it was my mouth they wanted.

Radio gear glittered along the far dirt wall. An arsenal of antenna wire drooped over a table, in gauges so fine they shone like hair. Some of it, when I touched it, was hair. But it was far too long to have come from a person.

On a testing platform Jews spooled wire into the jacked-open faces of mannequins.

The mannequins were pink save for bands of wire necklacing their groin. Boots anchored them to the platform, but a few inflatable mannequins floated overhead, tethered like kites to lightning rods. They looked like little balloon people, in seated postures, hovering upside down in the air. From their mouths spilled an overgrowth of wire as if they were coughing up their insides.

The largest mannequin, on its back with a wire jammed into its torso, wore a copper yarmulke. Around its left arm metal tefillin were strapped.

It was quite a lot to take in. I’d come far from my scripts desk, far from the language-testing courtyard. Here in the dirt vault of the Forsythe Jew hole they weren’t creating a new language but listening fiercely for one that might have always been there, however deeply encoded in copper.

The living were conscripted as listeners, too, martyrs seated in docile postures nearby. Citizens of Rochester, Buffalo, Albany. Shirtless men who looked surprised. One of them slowly combed his hair. Antenna wire grew like creepers up their faces. Test subjects with cages for mouths, human antennas. From their faces came nothing but white noise.

Next to the Jew hole itself, under the glare of the klieg lights, some Jewish scientists gathered at a console. Hairless men of my generation shivering inside their gowns.

Disappointment was in the air.

The console they fussed over was one of those moist slab radios fastened by beige elastic to a medical cart, squirting liquid runoff into a scuffed bucket on its underside.

Even I knew this was a questionable device when it came to repairing a transmission from a Jewish feed. It may as well have been a tiny fire in the woods. Perhaps the console radiated heat, and that’s why the scientists were drawn so closely to it. They had private reasons for misleading the LeBovs. Surely they knew this piece of tech was a dead end. They knew but were not saying.

Such a phrase might serve as a new motto for our times.