Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

Perhaps while her mother and I were at home believing we might be getting better, Esther sat quietly in her farmhouse room at a mirror adjusting her collar so her head did not look, in her words, “like a tube,” which was a great concern of hers that she angrily shared with us and that would never, ever be solved, because it was our fault. We’d made that body of hers, shaped it. We’d done it on purpose, out of spite, to keep her freakish, ensure her difference. Hadn’t we? We were, she said, probably glad she came out that way. Oh, probably. At home we defeated this tube of Esther’s head, daily, with high collars, scarves, turtlenecks. Endless strategies of cloth, sculpted around her neck. Even though we failed to detect the disorder ourselves, we made Esther’s head seem rounder by fitting her with wide glasses, prescription-free. This would fool the eye, make her look like something that she was almost certainly not. And sometimes it even calmed her down, allowed her to move on to other troubles, our little girl’s great project of faultfinding—with us, with others, with the world—that would never be complete.

With Esther upstate, our days without exposure numbered four by now.

Our health seemed to be flowing back, but there were hidden factors in play. We were ignorant of the illness plateau, the comprehension ratio we’d soon surpass. There were only so many words you could stand before you were done. About the child radius we were naïve. Naïve is too mild a word for what we were. With this illness, signs of recovery were the trickiest symptoms of all. Feeling better was perhaps just a form of stunned disbelief, a shutting down. Maybe this was the quiet before the really fucking quiet.

“I think I feel better,” Claire announced, sounding blurry. “I’m definitely kicking this thing.”

Said the half-dead person, I thought.

It was remotely possible she was right, which isn’t to say Claire wasn’t capable of objective diagnostics, but that sometimes she suffered from spells of positive thinking.

To prove her vigor, Claire cornered me, sexually, made a physical trespass. Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on. But my body, pajama-clad and sweated out, with enough blood to power only part of me, failed to cooperate. Her lips dragged across my back like a rough little claw.

“What do you think?” she said. There was something forced to the way she kept rubbing, as if she wanted to get down to the bone.

Claire’s breath soaked into me and she pitched her voice against my neck, speaking so closely to my body that only gibberish came out. This should have felt nice, but something sour hovered.

“Want to?”

“You mean now?” I stalled.

“We could,” she said, and her hand dropped, found my coldness, squished it inside her fist.

There was no response. I rolled out of range.

Claire never propositioned me, which on its own would be understandable. Language shouldn’t be required for a married couple to toil for their grain of pleasure. But she never actually took off pants, mine or hers, or got the enabling oils or the towel. I guess that was supposed to be a man’s work, or maybe only mine. She sent out clues and then waited for me to follow through, but often I did the reverse. Some days I was blind to the clues a little bit on purpose.

In this case I was hoping to wait for Thursday, when we were at synagogue, the two of us in the woods after the broadcast had ended. In the hut, with the cold air pouring in, and the radio crackling in the background, it was easier to surrender to what sometimes, if we were exceptionally lucky, felt unterrible.

Claire furrowed back into me, tugged too hard, and I swallowed some bile. Part of her on the wrong part of me was gritty and rough. There was a terrible smell in the air, most likely my own, and my groin was cold. It seemed as if what she gripped so fiercely might come loose in her hand.

I tried to look at Claire, but her face was too close. “Should we later?” I said, hiding the apology in my voice.

I sold the gambit with the most unbothered look I could manage. It was important that she not feel rejected. I noted, too, that sudden atypical sexual desire, with predatory indicators, was a clear symptom. But of what I still wasn’t sure.

“I’m just so happy,” Claire said, and her hug turned cozy, safe.

Wasn’t I happy, too? she wanted to know. Wasn’t I?

We hadn’t been outside in days. We hadn’t gotten dressed or done more than swish some cold water in our mouths, inhale a little bit of soup, maybe submit to the coarse body brush we treated each other to at bedtime. But bedtime seemed to be all day lately, and since today, with the contagion absent , we found ourselves moving faster and suddenly dressed for an outing, we got in the car and took off for a black-blanket picnic in our usual spot, up on Tower Ledge.

The field was quiet when we arrived, thoroughly childless. Some older couples, wrapped in parkas and camp blankets, huddled around their bread and jam. They suffered from the facial smallness; I tried not to stare. But people with shrunken features seemed short on time. It was like they were on their deathbeds. A ventilator chugged along on a carpet, churning liquid in its tank. Beneath a shawl two women shared the mask, passing it back and forth without bothering to wipe it out between turns.

As usual, some families had run extension cords up from their cars to power portable heaters, casting shimmering air over the field. You could walk through pockets of heat, as if they had burst through a hole in the earth.

In the field no one sang, and if there was speech, it was whispered at levels too low to decode. People hummed in secretive tones, giving in to fits of coughing when their breath failed. When Claire and I walked through the grass looking for a dry patch where we might settle, picking our way through collapsed piles of people, we triggered ripples of silence in everyone we passed. No one wished to be overheard.

But I didn’t want the secrets of these strangers. I did not think I could bear them.

The picnic tables, usually loaded with serving boats of communal food, were empty except for traces of gauze rolls, some shredded medical supplies. Wrist straps and crumbled yellow tubing sat in the dirt. A fluid had dried and gone dark in streaks over the grass. It looked like the aftermath of an outdoor surgery.

At the shaded end of the field, where the sand run was installed, no little dogs tore back and forth, kicking up blizzards of sand. No dogs to be seen in the whole field. No dogs and no children.

Over on the scorched cement pads no one was shooting off rockets into the woods below. The public fire pit hadn’t been cleaned from last time, and last time seemed like long ago. A mound of coals spilled over the rim of the hole, and the spit rod was still filthy with skin, from what might have been the final cookout.

The field was usually so crowded that family blankets met at their edges until the grass was covered in a great rug of black tufted wool. But today our rugs were scattered far apart, too few to ever connect, and we sat in distant rafts from each other, mostly out of earshot.

“I guess it’s sort of cold,” I offered, by way of a theory.

Claire didn’t second me. She must have also known that couldn’t be it. We’d come here in weather far worse and the field was packed with families. In the snow last year we rolled our blanket over frozen grass. Someone built a fire inside an old iron lung, which got so hot it glowed. When the sun set in late afternoon some elders launched from a slingshot hardened balls of birdseed, which ripped through the sky and occasionally got intercepted, in dusty explosions, by the bald sparrows that kept watch in the trees and shot out when they saw food.