Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

More and more often, when I climbed through the earth to take a reading, it was night.

I am no reader of the nighttime sky, as I have said. I find its layout obscene. If it was nighttime aboveground, if I was in some kind of featureless lowland and could not safely find shelter, I dropped into the tunnel again, made camp, and waited in the safety of the tunnel for daylight.

Camp was a woolen wall I raised from blankets. With my knife I slashed a vent, then laced a stitching of twine in the seam, so that my window was a scar in the cloth. In daylight I crept out and disguised my hole, performing the obligatory landmark checks that would allow me to find my way back without a problem.

I did surface walks in towns that may have been Dushore or Laporte, the part of New York that seems to absorb so much sunlight it’s forever shadowless wherever you look. When I walked through the grass, I’d sometimes step on something hard, panes of glass dusted with dirt, windows to shelters below, installed flush to the soil, easily hidden.

I stopped once to sweep away the grass and dirt of one such window, only to see a small, dark room, where an old man’s face looked up at me. This man did not seem afraid. He beckoned. Aren’t you lonely, too , he didn’t need to ask. But I walked on.

In Wilbert, or maybe it was North Sea, smashed radios littered the road. From their severed antennas someone had built a figure of a person, gleaming in chrome, rendered in a posture of contemplation. It sat in a puddle now, starting to rust.

Weeks away from Forsythe, where the tunnel widened into a room-size cavern, I found a stash of jam jars, a cloudy red gelatin tiding inside. The lids pried off with a suck, and into the cavern drifted the bitter smell of skin. I used a pencil to spoon free some of the tinted jelly, which I rolled into logs. When these hardened overnight I subjected them to a long, slow heat.

Such little treats kept me nourished for weeks, and when I lodged one in my mouth, it released such a slow sweetness that for days, it seemed, I needed nothing else, not even water. I eat them still. Whatever’s in them is almost all that I need.

There is little else to report of this journey. I surged south, then took exploratory routes away from my path, emerged from underground, calculated coordinates, dipped back into the tunnels, and corrected.

When I saw the Level Falls horse farm stripped of animals, stripped of its barn, just a few troughs remaining that had been turned over and which I did not want to disturb, I knew I was close to home, but judging by the quiet open roads, the unprotected route south into town, I did not want to risk overland passage. I had come this far in the tunnels. Now I would finish my trip underground, where I was unfollowed, unknown, and I could get to my destination in secret.

I lurched east after that. It was trial and error, but mostly it was error, until one morning I shoveled into a crawl space that had no stable bottom, just slimy, flesh-like objects upon which I could not get my footing. These were the pink rubber balls Claire and I had dropped down the hole so long ago, coated now with something cool and slick.

I was below the old hut.

The orange cable elevated. I pictured Claire sitting at the mouth of the hole, waiting for me. She’d have a sandwich ready, a thermos of soup. She’d be laughing, that laugh of anger she delivered whenever someone else’s stupidity had been what she was waiting for, the perfect confirmation of all her suspicions. I’d yell up to her that I found the balls, all of them.

They’re at the bottom and they’re so weird all together, like one of those kid tents with balls in it, except the balls are all bloody. I’ll be right there!

I climbed into the corridor. At the top, the mouth of the hole was stuffed with shredded pink insulation.

Perhaps this was what had obstructed LeBov when he made his way out of the hut to Forsythe several Decembers ago.

I picked at the insulation until a sheet of it released past me and slid down the hole. Then I climbed up into the hut.

Everything was mostly as I remembered it. In the corner, undisturbed, was the wooden crate painted with the word Us , a tuft of bluish wool hanging out of it.

It was Claire’s winter hat, kept on hand for a just-in-case. I crawled over to the crate and put it on, smelling, I told myself, the very last remnant of her.

But the whiff I took returned nothing. It smelled only of smoke.

I walked outside, easily found the old path that dropped down to the creek, and beyond that, growing out of the embankment, was the still-recognizable profile of growth that Claire and I called the Seine.

This was it. I’d arrived. I was home.

Now I just needed to rescue my daughter.

Most of the rest you already know. The hut’s mechanics were fucked. The orange cable was not just cold but worm-gutted as well. I ignored it for too long, too fearful of town, at first, to trek in and get supplies, letting the wiring blister.

Meanwhile, one of those pink vermin got to it, started eating into the copper, rubbed his bald body against its length until the cable shredded, like bright splinters of candy.

Once, early on, I inserted a copper feeler into the frizzed wiring of the cable, and I wove, from memory, a conductive nest of wire that I slipped under my tongue to complete the facial antenna. When I kissed the wire against the nest, clutching a grounding rod for safety, the old prayer surged on and pushed its way out of my mouth.

You have commanded us not to know you and we have obeyed. When we have known you we have looked away …

Whatever this was, it was no real prayer. It sounded like an apology for something that had never happened. I could not bear the sound, particularly in my own voice, and so I put away my wires and did not eavesdrop on this cable again.

I did not give up on my religion. I found only that I no longer required reminders, assertions, repetitions, harangues. Nothing outside myself. Whatever I believed played on inside me with no help from a radio. I’d heard enough for a lifetime. I found I could do without more things to misunderstand.

I spent my first months home determining the safety levels of my new settlement, circling the hut in wider surveys, moving low and quiet, stopping always to listen for pursuers, building my inner map of the place.

Deer froze when I approached, their muzzles frosted and white. I registered no threats of people. In the end I realized that I was well bounded by the murmur line, protected from others, but also captive as well. Unless you were a child, you could only get to where I was by Jew hole. I set up a few alarm lines anyway, some rudimentary triggers that might give me good minutes to vanish if necessary.

I suppose I was really only concerned about LeBov. A new one, maybe, whom I wouldn’t recognize. That he was coming after me in the tunnel, would soon punch through the floor of the hut.

I should have filled the hole with dirt, with salt, so no one could come through again. Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow until the thing was sealed. But I wanted to keep the hole open for Claire. I could not close it down yet. I had to think she would solve the problem the same way I did. I had to.

I’d only been back for a few days when I crept closer to the old neighborhood, heard the tin-voiced stories bleating from the loudspeakers. The broadcast created an effective repellent of sound, the worst choking in the air. If I got too close, I felt the suffocation—an airless panic triggered by an area ripe with language—so I determined early on where the murmur line was, that point on the periphery where I could hear the voice but not understand it. Beyond this I wouldn’t go.