The Flame Alphabet (8 page)

Nothing was verified, but Rochester was certain, if you wanted to know where the good thinking was getting done. This was news coming out of Rochester. Forget Rochester. Rochester didn’t mean what you thought it did, said Murphy. It was said that LeBov participated in the Minnesota trials, the lab work in Denver, some study in Dunkirk of which he alone survived.

LeBov, went the story, had a chamber upstate. LeBov did cryptography. Most of the work now was in the wilted alphabet, which wasn’t even its real name. I was sure I had misheard this, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Until the world’s vocabulary got pumped through a kit, and no one could even agree on which kit to use, we wouldn’t know anything.

“The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?” he asked. It wasn’t a question for me. “Visual codes. Except not the ones we know. The ones we know are already causing problems. Reading is next. It’s not even next. It’s now.”

We had to prepare for a time, said Murphy, when communication was impossible. This thing started with children, but you were a fool to think it would stop there. Some of us were fools anyway.

“You’ve heard of the flame alphabet, of course,” said Murphy. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell
you
.”

Again this look of his, as if he’d reached into my head with a dowser, monitoring my reaction to see if he’d struck water.

I nodded.

I wouldn’t show him. Perhaps he was kidding, or, worse, testing me. But this was something straight from the hut, a seasonal topic of Burke’s, when he adopted tones of high caution, warnings so spectacular you could not entertain them as remotely true. If you expected to go on living, that is.

Murphy held forth on the flame alphabet as though he’d been in the hut with us. The name as deceiving shade. Nothing called by its accurate title. We’ve trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used.

Some of Murphy’s rant was unfamiliar, strayed into craziness. Nothing from the hut. But other phrases seemed lifted exactly from Burke, as if he’d recorded and memorized the sermons.

The problem was that I had disregarded a lot of these sermons because—I should be honest here, and there is no one left whom I wish to deceive—these ideas bored me. Maybe I failed to understand them. Burke agonized over speechblood, an engine ripped from the language so the language would fail, and I took it for granted as the higher registers of a religion that did not always move me. The flame alphabet was the word of God, written in fire, obliterating to behold. The so-called Torah. This was public domain Jewish information, easy for Murphy to obtain. We could not say God’s true name, nor could we, if we were devoted, speak of God at all. This was basic stuff. But it was the midrashic spin on the flame alphabet that was more exclusive, spoken of only, as far as I knew, by Rabbi Burke in our hut. Since the entire alphabet comprises God’s name, Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not?
That’s what words are
. They are variations on his name. No matter the language. Whatever we say, we say God. This excited Burke to shouting. Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through. The logic was hard to deny. You could not do it.

Of course somehow I had found a way. And Rabbi Burke must have found a way, too, because he went on using language and in the end seemed stronger for it. What was Burke but disembodied speech? He showed no signs of walling himself up in silence any time soon.

If Murphy did have his own hut, it didn’t seem possible he was breaking protocol in the worst way. Speaking freely of the secrets, sharing them at length with a stranger. And if he had no hut of his own, then somehow he’d gained access to the transmissions, to
our
transmissions, and this he wanted me to know.

Murphy said that someone under LeBov was a troubleshooter, apparently, did speech tests, was favorable to lists. Lists were all the talk at Forsythe. Blacklists, safe lists, green lists, healing lists. There were words to fill all of them. But the healing lists, these were short, and no one was saying for sure what words were on them, not until they were tested, tested
very thoroughly
.

These were highly guarded lists. A small group of people would be entrusted with them, hone them in Rochester, test for toxicity only on themselves.

“Words you’d recite for medicinal purposes? Some kind of healing acoustics?” I asked.

Murphy tilted his head, grimaced, suggesting maybe, maybe not. Suggesting an idiocy he couldn’t meet halfway.

I said something about Babel. It was the easiest myth to invoke, queued up for renewed scrutiny, and it was getting batted around by anyone who believed our oldest stories still mattered. What I said was probably nothing. Maybe I only said the word
Babel
, let it hang out there as if that’s all that was required.

Murphy wasn’t impressed. “That topic is exhausted. Mythology is the lowest temptation. You want to talk about first causes, I’d go back before the Jewish child and cite mythology, the most sickening specimens of speech. We subscribe to these supposedly important stories, religious stories, and we ignore their inanity, how moronic and impractical they are. Can we prove the stories don’t make us sick? Because they happened long before we were born, we somehow decide they are extraordinarily important and we shut our brains down, we turn into imbeciles, we let the past start thinking for us.
That’s sickness
. Talk about a fucking precursor.”

“I don’t think those things actually happened,” I said. “As in really happened. If we’re still talking about Babel.”

He’d gotten himself pretty worked up. A halo of spit ringed his mouth, his eyes flaring.

“And you’re an authority on what has and hasn’t happened? Where’d you do your training?”

“It’s a parable,” I said. “You believe that, right? You don’t think it’s a true story?”

“Forget it,” he said.

I had no interest in speaking about Babel, a heavy-handed narrative from a world that wasn’t mine. Those obvious myths from the Old Testament—
decoy, decoy
—bored me anyway. I’d brought it up because of how harmless it seemed, drowning in easy connotations. But part of me couldn’t resist the topic.

“So you’re saying,” I began, as if I didn’t really understand what he was saying, “you’re saying that a biblical story in which God strikes down his people with aphasia is not relevant? A story about losing our power of speech?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Murphy, quietly. “Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating. The sharing of information hasn’t always been a good thing. Sometimes it is a very terrible thing. Perhaps always. God behaved appropriately in that situation.”

“You don’t think people will write books about this very topic, linking this speech poison, or whatever it is, to something biblical?”

“On the contrary,” said Murphy, “that’s exactly what I think. As always, people will court the gravest misunderstandings. People are driven to be wrong in the most spectacular ways. There’s fame in it. We are in a high season of error. But don’t fool yourself. There aren’t going to be too many more books. We’re not going to see a lot of documented analysis or any kind of analysis. This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us. Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language. This is a plague among cavemen, and soon we’ll only be grunting to each other about it. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is. And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause.”

Murphy fell silent and we walked through the cold streets back into my neighborhood. It would be morning soon and I wanted to get to sleep before Esther woke up. My gear was heavy and hot on my body and I was tired.

“I guess this is me,” I said, stopping short at a buckled brick path.

It wasn’t my house we stood in front of, but I didn’t want Murphy to know where I lived. I pictured him the other day in the woods, harassing the Jewish couple, and I hadn’t seen them or their violent boys again. I figured I could say good night, walk around and hit the alley, then cut back over to my house.

“Here we are, huh?” Murphy looked at the house and then back at me with a grin.

I had picked a difficult house to lie about. There was a windowless store with a side entrance dormered onto the residence. The sign said it sold ribbons, cartridges, adhesives. A portion of the roof was exposed, with blue Tyvek badly nailed over a hole. It would be too cold to live there. Whatever construction that was under way must have been abandoned for the winter.

“All right, uh,
Bill
, or whoever you are,” said Murphy.

The name I’d given him was Steven. He was testing me. I let it go.

Manage your disclosures
. The problem was that, by lying, I’d made him more curious. I needed him to feel he had picked me clean.

“You should come to the Oliver’s. That’s where we’ve been meeting. But you’d better get right with meds, and soon, no matter what you believe. You need to start dosing. Have you been to the Oliver’s?”

I stalled. “Sure.” I pictured myself in a long, beige room trying to climb over a wall.

“Obviously you haven’t, but that’s all right.”

Murphy seemed less amused, rubbed his face so hard it hurt to watch. From his pocket he took out the grease again, pushed a tuft of it into the roof of his mouth, smacked his lips.

“Bill, I’m not the devil. I’m not evil,” he said. “You’re not alone is all. It’s perfectly all right to work together on this thing. But I think I understand. Privacy and all that. You have your little hut, I presume? Your forest worship? Maybe you’re one of those? People are wondering if there’s some,
you know
, in those locations.”

Some, you know,
what
?

Murphy paused, waited for me to roll over on my back with my legs in the air, begging him to take me.

“It would seem that secret channels of insight are obliged right now to open up, reveal their wares. This is definitely not the time for secrecy.”

Oh, but yes it is
, I thought. I gave him nothing.

“I hope it works out for you,” he added.

This was bait I would not take. I smiled, lacking all the required skills for this conversation. My lies were glaring, but Murphy remained polite.

“Here,” said Murphy. “Here’s the address, and my number.”

I looked at the script on the card and my eyes watered, lost focus.

Murphy nodded up at the house that wasn’t mine.

“You’d be lucky if you really lived here,” he said.

I stared at the house without really seeing it.

“Check your vitals,” said Murphy. “No children in there that I can tell. I bet your heart is thriving right now. I wish to fuck that I lived here.”

He was wrong. My heart wasn’t thriving. It felt tight and cold, strangling inside my rib cage. I needed to get out of there.

We stared at this house as if we were tourists looking up at a great cathedral.

“Anyway,” Murphy finally said, “don’t court too much blame out there. You know,
blame is interesting
, but be careful. It’s a dangerous strategy.”

Blame. I’d said nothing to him about it.

“I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Not if I can help it, I didn’t say, whoever you fucking are.

It was early November. The Forsythe drug trials sped through testing, and the basic anti-speech agents were released for free to the public, dumped into empty newspaper bins on corners.

The drugs were a medical slush short on real medicine, soggy little tonics desperate for vast strengthening. It was the wrong time for placebos, for liquid vials of nothing. When we injected them, they only stupefied us until we sputtered awake in a different room. Instead of healing us, this medicine seemed only to bring on spells of afternoon death. A rehearsal, maybe. A warm-up.

In the days after my run-in with Murphy I rigged a lab in the kitchen, following Thompson’s orders. On my conscious nights I milled speculative medicines designed to keep us healthy enough to hold our ground at home. Such nights were coming less often, but when I was able to crawl from the rug in my home office, where I had erected a person-size humidor in which to test the inhalers, and when the evening was cleansed of potential encounters with Esther, I started boiling down drugs.

From the kitchen’s single crusted naval port window, as I waited for my solutions to cool, I watched the emergency vans cruise down Wilderleigh at night, sampling the air with roof-mounted saucers and testing wands that spoiled from their bumpers like fins.

No such vans roamed the streets in daylight. A medical truck might have parked on the corner, but I suspect this was for the personal use of a neighbor, the private removal of a loved one who’d just fallen to the toll. A yellow hearse roamed the neighborhood, opening its doors to sheet-covered gurneys. And the occasional diesel helicopter pitched north of us through the upper Montrier Valley, taking aerial surveys, but it was a skeletal effort that could not have yielded much useful information. If officials wanted data on the predicament, they gathered it at night from the vans, and this I knew because nighttime was best for lab work. If there was medical forensics being practiced in our neighborhood, I’d see it through the window.

Esther was no threat at night. At night she slept, or she left the house, teaming up with the other underage weapons in the neighborhood.

The lab was piecemeal, outfitted with equipment I swapped for at the Science Exchange. On the kitchen counter I looped tubes between a trio of beakers, and I flipped the circuit to the furnace so I could plug in the micro finer, which pulverized whatever organic matter I required as ballast, without causing a brownout. Working with no furnace made for cold nights so I repurposed our silverware drawer to hold a stash of sweaters and socks. Hats and whatever else I kept in a wire basket in the pantry. I had a separate handmade Valona machine for fats.

With an induction burner I reduced solutions of saline, blended anti-inflammatory tablets, atomized powder from non-drowsy time-release allergy vials, and milled an arsenal of water-charged vitamins, particularly from the B group, along with binding agents and hardened shavings of an herb dust I’d crushed in the mortar. The salted protein sheets, rolled out from bulk supplies of medical gelatin, I stretched on the dish rack until they resolved as clear as glass, and once they’d hardened I cut them into batons and hollowed out their middles so they could be injected with medicine.

With a cold-reduction process I isolated lead—quivering, gangly worms of it—which served as a jacket around the pills I fed poor Claire. These weren’t time release so much as time capsule. Health bombs to go off only when the exposure was intense. Or so they were designed. I planted secret weapons in my wife and she swallowed them down without a fuss. My logging was steady now. All these trials and procedures are documented.

We told ourselves, when we spoke at all, that it was helping.

I mentioned this work to Murphy the next time I saw him. I didn’t want there to be a next time, I never did, but there always was. He admitted there was a small chance, statistically insignificant, that it could help. Medical shielding, a chemical serum. It wasn’t
technically impossible
.

We’d run into each other by accident a few nights after our first meeting—I had little reason to think otherwise—in the bitter early morning hours down near Esther’s school. I wasn’t even checking my vitals. There really was no need anymore.

He found me resting on a bench, as if he happened to be walking by, and I filled him in on my kitchen lab work. He seemed sympathetic at first. Sat down with me and really listened.

“Failures have their place in our work,” he admitted, after hearing me out. “I’ve had my flirtations with failure. There is a small allure there. I commend you for seeking out failure so aggressively. But this idea people have of failing on purpose,
failing better
? Look at who says that. Just look at them. Look at them very carefully.”

I tried to picture the people who said that, but saw only my own head, mounted on a stick.

“They talk about failure all the time,” said Murphy. “They’re obsessed with it. Really what they’re doing is consoling themselves for being ordinary, boasting about it, even. They’ve turned their incompetence into a strange kind of glory. They have entered the business of consoling themselves.”

And you think that’s what I’m doing? I didn’t ask.

It was a cold, awful night, and my only consolation, solitude, was gone for the moment.

“You’re testing on two people, and you’ll probably be dead before your work will help anyone. You need a much, much broader test population for your studies to lead anywhere. You know that, right? It’s not as if you want
only
you and your wife to survive, right? You’re doing this work because you want to stop the epidemic, right?”

Right, I thought. Right. I think.

Murphy repeated his invitation to the Oliver’s. Or Forsythe. I wasn’t really clear about the naming. I didn’t care.

What
wasn’t
failure? I wanted to know. Was there something that was working?

Murphy spoke of a vaccine derived from
children
. When he said that word he grew quiet, looked around as if we were being observed. He didn’t like to believe this, he didn’t
want
to believe this, but if
the children
harbored the poison, then they no doubt contained the antidote to it as well.
No doubt
. It stood to reason. He mumbled on about blood, marrow, building tolerance, immunity, controlling the circumstances. This was a favorite word of his.
Circumstances
. It sounded so odd when he said it, one of those words designed to make me forget other words, the whole language.

Murphy felt that we should be drawing blood from our own kids, informally, gently, of course. Everyone will soon come over to this approach. It needn’t cause any trouble. In the spirit of science.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about drawing some of, what’s your daughter’s name again? Her blood?”

I had not told him Esther’s name, had not even told him I had a daughter. Just called her my kid. If I had thought of drawing her blood, a nighttime withdrawal while the girl slept, I would not reveal that to Murphy.

“You have the source of the disease living in your house and you’re not even curious what her blood might reveal under a microscope?”

Profoundly incurious, I thought. Deeply, hugely indifferent. I looked down and smiled as if he were being hypothetical.

Murphy waved the question away, letting me off the hook, repeating that if I’d only come down to the Oliver’s, I could see what was being done.

I pictured children linked by medical tubing to one of those vast, overhead syringes. I pictured a wolf climbing a slippery wall, on top of which sat some glistening piece of meat.

I thanked him and said good night. Had to be getting back. Work to do. Pretty tired now. But Murphy didn’t respond, didn’t move.

Among other things, Murphy excelled at a refusal to release me from our encounters. It was a strange power of his, to pretend a conversation had not ended.

“Wait,” he said, his head cocked, listening.

I wanted to go home, get away from him, but I stopped, quieting my breath. You could hear the engines running the neighborhood homes. Furnaces and water heaters droning on. Above us came a hum from the telephone lines.

Murphy gripped my shoulder, raised his other hand in concentration, his eyes closed. And then I heard it, too.

A din rose out of the north field beyond the school, and as the sound bloomed it grew piercing, wretchedly clear, borne so quickly on the wind, we shuddered when it hit. Voice-like, childlike, a cluster of speech blaring out of the field. The sound crushed out my air. Behind the noise ran a pack of kids, so shadowed and small at that distance, they looked like animals sprinting across the field. Coming right toward us.

In front of them came a wall of speech so foul I felt myself burning.

Murphy scrambled, grabbed me, and we ran for cover. In the bushes I felt his cold hand in my mouth, a greasy paste spreading against my gums, his fingers reaching so far into me, they touched the back of my throat.

I gagged over his hand, fought to breathe. Murphy wanted to reach all the way into my lungs. I tried to relax my mouth, my throat, but I could feel my lips stretching, starting to tear. Murphy’s weight was on me, his own scared breath against my neck.

I gave in, exhaled, letting the man cover me, spread his medicine deep in my mouth. Then finally Murphy pulled out his hand, wiped it on the grass next to my face. The release from this agony felt sweet, and I could breathe again.

The kids cleared the field, ran past us, their voices sounding—I wasn’t sure how—harmless to me now, as if I’d only imagined the effect before. The awful wave had passed through and now I felt no acid in their speech. Just kids’ voices squeezed against the higher registers. Sharp and annoying, maybe, but safe. I had a fruity taste in my mouth and I had to keep swallowing. The paste triggered a gush of saliva that I did not want to give up. I drank what released in my mouth and watched. Everything out on the street under the lamp seemed gorgeous and clear.

One of the kids stopped on the sidewalk across the street from us. He’d caught someone and now he was going to attack. He crouched, his hands cupped over his mouth, and he started shouting. A series of single word cries, projected through his hands, as if he were launching ammunition from his face.

But this was no abstract show of force, this was an attack on someone who hadn’t found cover in time.

Sprawled on the street beneath the boy was someone who wasn’t moving, and the boy made sure of that with repeated volleys launched right over the body, a relentless flow as the body twitched on the asphalt each time the kid spoke, as if a cattle prod shot electricity from his mouth.

Then the body stopped twitching and the boy relented.

When the boy stood up we saw his face in the streetlight, so long and solemn and awful to behold.

Except the kid wasn’t a boy. It was my Esther. Her hair was wild and she wore an outfit I didn’t recognize, some long coat that was too big on her.

From our hiding place in the grass we watched her.

“Be careful of that one,” whispered Murphy into my neck.

I tightened at the warning.
That one
. That one was my one and only.

Esther looked down at the person at her feet, seemed to whisper something. Then she ran to catch up with her friends, dwarfed by her coat. On the street that body still didn’t move.

Murphy climbed off me, sat back in the grass.

“That one is trouble,” Murphy said. “I’d like to see a sample of
her
blood, wouldn’t you?”

In my mouth I felt that I had eaten a piece of terrible meat.

“What did you give me?” I asked.

“A gift.” Murphy handed me a tissue.

I didn’t thank him. I wanted to be sick.

Murphy crawled up to me, held my face tight.

I felt that I should go after Esther, if slowly, carefully, but I was afraid to move.

“Now say thank you,” Murphy said. “Or have you forgotten your manners?”

His hand gripped my face so hard, I could barely form the words, but I did it, I thanked him, and he released me.

Murphy relaxed, sat back.

“Well, you’re welcome,” he said. “It was really my pleasure. But now I’m curious about something.”

The man on the street groaned, rolled over. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to disappoint Murphy that the man was not dead.

“I’m curious,” he said. “I’ve done something for you. Now how do you propose paying me back?”