The Flame Alphabet (9 page)

The next day I struck out for the hut alone, Claire too ill to join me. I offered to drive right up to the trailhead for her, perhaps all the way down past Boltwood, if we could get the gate open and sneak our car through. For Claire I would even drive down to the northern foot of the stream where it ponds and there’s a small turnout. From there I could strap her to a sled and drag her up the embankment. It’d be bumpy but we could line the sled with pillows. She would hardly have to walk. I’d carry her that last leg, if she wanted. We could bring extra blankets, a thermos of soup. It would be good to go to the hut today. Good for us. It might help.

I wasn’t sure I believed this, but I needed to sound hopeful for Claire.

It didn’t matter, because she declined the invitation. She didn’t even decline, just failed to answer, staring with dread focus at her own little finger, as if she could will me from the room by exercising that top knuckle back and forth, back and forth.

Without Claire I took the cautious route, down Sedgling to 38 for one exit’s worth of highway, only to return to town from the north, dropping into the valley from the old Balden Road, which is so steep that no matter how slow you take it, riding your brake the whole way, you fairly skid along the sand to the bottom, where the Montrier electrical tower sits planted inside a guarded park.

Even here I doubled back along the dark wall of the Monastery, in case I was being followed, because Murphy seemed too easily to find me. Even though I’d driven this time, driven not just the long way but the entirely incorrect way, a route that made no navigational sense, I could not risk running into him today. I would follow Thompson’s rules to the letter.

Behind the hut I extracted the listener from its shit-caked bag. At the rusted orifice in the hut floor I squeezed the hole until I could pull on the fitting, but the hole was stiff. Today I could hardly force it open. After a finger-mincing effort, it ripped wider with what sounded like an animal cry and heat spread into the hut as the listener shriveled in my hands. Soon the bag stoppering the hole swelled with air, inflating gently as if a sick person lay beneath it, breathing his last. Now, at least, a transmission might be possible.

I found the labor dispiriting. It was too much effort to get to Rabbi Burke. You should have been able to plug in our radio and turn it on. But Burke had indicated once, while praising us for our adherence to protocol, that sentences pertaining to the Jewish project must come in certain lengths, precise strings of language, stripped of acoustical excess. Otherwise they were invalid, not technically a part of the authentic language, which required endless honing, pruning. The listener enabled this, in ways I would never understand. The requirements we upheld at our hut would fill a whole other report until it burst into rags. As with any religion, one supposes.

Perhaps other options might present themselves here, I hoped. Burke, or even Thompson, would have to consider more concrete guidance now, particularly since LeBov was saying we
knew something
. Everything had changed. One’s faith was meant to yield actionable material at times like this, I always thought, when one’s own imagination had failed, when nothing seemed possible. Wasn’t this why we accommodated an otherwise highly irrational set of beliefs?

I had not done this hut work alone before. Solitude was not authorized. And this was no Thursday, which doubled my violation. I half thought I’d see some other Jew in the woods toting his own blood-slick listener.

Tuesdays are mine, he’d snarl, heaving his hot listener over the console.

I would guess that my visit took place on a Tuesday, but days were not easy to track. It was hard to believe that it should matter, that access to our faith would be blocked on some days, regulated according to some inscrutable limitation in, of all things, forest electronics, radio science.

Lately there were days I wished I could walk into a real synagogue,
a real one
, sit down, and listen to a live person, a person I could then follow home with questions.

When the listener was sealed to the bag and my tests for leaks yielded only a mild stream of wind from the hole, I ran the orange cable into the console and sat down to listen. I waited there in the cold hut and I squeezed out all other noise, freezing on the wood floor.

Nothing happened. Hours later I’d only gathered hisses and blips, a language ripped apart, turned into flesh and then shredded. At one point I discovered that with my face pressed against the listener, more voices flowed through the radio, a tumble of speech from a man whose voice was far lower than Rabbi Burke’s. A different man entirely, speaking in what sounded like Old English. The harder I pressed my face against the listener, smashing it into the wet flesh, the clearer this man’s voice became, but it seemed I’d have to hurt myself to make his words audible. I’d need to break my skin, fracture my jaw, taking the listener inside my own face, and I could not bring myself to do it.

Instead I retreated, went back to the standard procedures. But the module could build nothing else from whatever weak signal trickled through. Yesterday’s signal, the vestiges of a message that might have once mattered, but by now had been hacked into nonsense by exposure in the hole. A sermon built only from wind, a wind that had been buried for years, only to spill from the earth now with no force or meaning.

The listener could not even pull a fairy tale from the cable for me, which it sometimes did, after Burke’s sermon had been discharged, sometimes instead of Burke’s sermon, instead of Thompson’s typical aftermath.

Claire and I always got excited that we might hear a story instead of a sermon. The line would crackle, seem to die, and then, with no preamble, a broadcast surged on that played the old stories, one after another. Scratchy-voiced recitations of Aesop’s, or the story of the dry well, which we very much loved, no matter how many times it played. Even “Rothschild’s Shoes” was not terrible. We did not find it a terrible story at all. We never complained if we got to hear it from the radio in our hut.

And these stories, unaffiliated as we guessed they were, unrelated to our religious practice, these we could talk about together. These we could share out loud, which made us like them even more.

Our favorite line was,
Then what does he do when it rains?
, asked about Rothschild of the golden shoes. We used to ask this of each other on the way home from the hut, and we asked it solemnly, sometimes holding each other’s faces, trying not to laugh. We came to say it of nearly anyone we saw who seemed too good to be true, happy and attractive and successful. Yes, Claire would say later, when we were home in bed and debriefing on this person, trying not to show how threatened we were,
But what does he do when it rains?

Now in the hut when I looked at this sad apparatus, the crumbled rubber, the flannel insulation from some other time, the felted “skin” lining the orange cable that I could not touch without gagging, I felt queasy about how it all worked, how these parts, useless and absurd on their own, were meant to accomplish anything, least of all connect me to rabbinical guidance pumped in from an elsewhere I couldn’t name.

Burke was gone today, Thompson was off. Nothing flowed from the radio. I was alone out there, and any channel of insight would have to be one I manufactured myself. This I did not know how to do.

Cold as it was, I stripped off my clothes, then wrapped my body over the listener, hugging it so tightly that a broadcast finally surged into the hut. If I held still and squeezed the listener for dear life, I could now hear Rabbi Thompson, even though he sounded old and tired, as if he were transmitting from late in his life. In his sermon were medical instructions, more of the technical work we might pursue, and I took in as much as I could before my body failed and I fell from the listener, freezing.

Without Claire the hut felt small and false, the childish architecture of some hack inventor, someone who
didn’t believe enough
that this location would actually be inhabited by real people one day.

Claire and I were proud—I’m speaking for her because she couldn’t hide how she felt—that we had something private like this that was our own, and that it gave us something to listen to, to think about, to rail against, to love. But there were times when I wondered why it had to be so difficult, so dependent on questionable equipment.

Sitting there as the day grew dark, the listener perspired on me, and one part of it, a fin canting from its rear that seemed encased by a soft wood, was so hot that I felt sick when I touched it.

It was time to go. Given the extra distance I had to travel to get home, I was in a hurry. I rushed to the woods and took the northern trail down into the valley again and up the other side to where the car was, jogging the whole way so I would not have to walk those woods in the dark.

In my haste I believe I left the listener there on the floor of the hut, or perhaps I dropped it on the porch, the shining limb.

I cannot understate the error of such an action.

I failed to bury the listener when I was done.

With Claire this never would have happened. She was fastidious, held us to protocol each time, and together we checked and balanced our tasks, dispersing whatever ritual worry we might have until the worry turned small.

No, I left the listener there, exposed for anyone to find, to try to use, because I’d broken code and gone alone to the hut. Because I thought I could do something like this by myself.

In late November documents crowded my mailbox. Printouts sealed in manila lacking address or postage. This was my first view of
The Proofs
, a medical broadside of LeBov’s that Murphy called required reading. It resembled a university newspaper, except blown strange, its histories slurred, its facts effaced.

The text was pale blue, like a writing erupted under skin. The illustrations—illness maps, perimeter lines for the epidemic, and module schematics—were drawn by a palsied hand. In these drawings germs were people or beasts, and viruses looked like the world seen from miles away. Speech from the faces of children was rendered in ugly rushes of color, with each color coded on a wheel to some kind of distress.

On the back page Murphy had written:
I’ve entrusted you with something, now it’s your turn
.

He’d found my house, then. Which meant he had followed me. I pictured him striding in the shadows down Wilderleigh on a cold wellness walk, his children barking at home while his wife moaned in the corner. If there
was
a wife. He was waiting for his moment, watching my house from down the street.

I concealed
The Proofs
and looked at the issues alone in bed. But with each delivery I put everything back in my mailbox as I’d found it, creeping out in the dark of morning so Murphy could not know for certain I had received what he sent.

Inside
The Proofs
I found historical precedent for the language toxicity. A kind of medical foreshadowing from earliest history. Signs from the past that this would happen, or that it had happened before and been snuffed out, forgotten. Hippocrates, Avicenna, a long list of experts who knew without really knowing that our strongest pollution was verbal.

The master dissector Gabriele Falloppio, forerunner of the modern autopsy, found what he termed curious
erosions
in the brain from multilingual patients. Or more notably Boerhaave, who registered speech aversions in the infirm and began to use small doses of speech as homeopathic treatments. Boerhaave saw only one way this could go, hoped to trigger immunity through controlled exposure. Hoped to, but didn’t.

Throughout
The Proofs
were phrases lifted from as far back as the medical spookeries of Laennec and Auenbrugger, sometimes misattributed, sometimes attributed to medical scientists I’d never heard of, because, I suspected, they had not actually lived.

Theories of exposure, but more than that. A grammar detected in breath, in wheezing. A new rationale for listlessness. Epidemics like cholera reimagined as speech-driven, miasmatic cyclones, an airborne disturbance, to be sure, but one that fed on the denser pockets of speech, grew stronger in such places, dying out in regions of controlled silence.

The finer print offered no attribution. No masthead, no bylines. Just the name
LeBov
raised in a sickly script. You almost needed night vision to see his name. With a computer one might have mocked this up alone and run off copies at the supermarket.

A list of speech rules filled the inside cover. A caution to ration one’s
I
statements, suppress reference to oneself, closing off a small arsenal of the language. The various speech quotas scientists were proposing now, even if they didn’t believe it would matter. Grammatical amputations. A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one’s interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire.

Presumably if you wanted nothing, you’d have no occasion to speak.

In a section of historical anecdotes I read that in 1825, Jacob Gallerus, a chemist, was sickened by his family. A letter to the medical dean of some Dublin college, written by him, asking for outside verification, which was not granted. He recorded symptoms of nausea and dizziness while in their company, determined the sickness occurred only when they spoke to him. Troubleshooting not listed, diagnostics similarly absent. A form of inbreeding, he called it, to listen to his family. There is congress in speech, he wrote. It is illicit from them. It is obscene. A sentence from
The Proofs
I will always recall:
I am not similarly ill with strangers
. In his cellar Gallerus built a soundproof room to recuperate and to purge himself—these were his words—from the exposure to his wife and children. To what end it isn’t said. Of what he finally died neither.

Alongside the historical anecdotes were medical recommendations, refutations, preventative treatments.

If a child was deemed viral, he was salted. This by the Jews, I read. What kind of Jews, it was not clear. Circa sometime that was not mentioned. Salted in the deepest sense. A cake of it rubbed over the limbs, salt poured down their mouths, into their cavities.

It is possible, I thought, that these were stories. Fancies. But if so, they were not good ones or even whole ones, but facts made wrong, broken open and remolded into lies. Someone reaching back into history and rearranging the parts, but with a filthy hand. Which would be to what end? The urge to falsify such details was without any purpose I could name. There was too much, additionally, that I knew to be true.

In a section related to
materials
I read of pariahs and salt, lepers and salt, the use of salt when it comes to lunatics. Salt as a detoxifier. From Jews comes the idea of salt as the residue of an ancient language, which I’d heard at the hut. Such salts were dissolved in water and dispensed to mutes, to the deaf, to infants on the threshold of speech. Acoustical decomposition, the powder left over from sounds. What this proved went unsaid.

In
The Proofs
a pattern of cryptic evasions became clear, of failing to deduce.

From recorded language, broadcast in a controlled environment and subjected to freezing temperatures, is collected trace amounts of salt. Whorf and Sapir perform this work with some graduate students. A salt deficiency lowers language comprehension in children.

The practice of language smoking originates in Bolivia but quickly travels north. In Mexico City it is perfected. Words and sentences tested by a
delegate
in a smoke-filled tube, at the end of which is stationed a sacrificial listener called, for unknown reasons,
the bell
.

The bell’s brain, when he dies, is pulled and separated into loaves. The loaves are tagged and named. Only drawings survive.

More instances of rot in the brain from those who have exceeded the threshold of listening.

In 1834 a family of five in Rotterdam are discovered expired in their home, parents and children blanketed in hives. That same year, farther north, a series of rashes observed in children, rashes with what is inexplicably called “a tonal element.” Rashes, hives, welts: of inordinate concern in
The Proofs
.
And the connection is
, I wondered.

In the island of Port Barre the citizens employed expired animals for soundproofing. Walls of pelts on stilts over fault lines. The typical strategy of shielding with organic matter. Usage of animals for such purposes not being the point, apparently, but rather the unanswered question, from what were they soundproofing? What was so loud that needed quieting? Autopsies show a nonmedical diagnosis. Blackened cortex, they call it.

Perkins refers to the “person allergy,” a toxicity to others. Uses the phrase as if it’s an accepted disorder. He fails at developing any effective shielding. Scoffs at the use of animals for such work. Meat is in fact an amplifier, he will say.

The young Albert Kugler has a superstition against the utterance of certain words. Proper names are volatile, likewise imperatives.

A section, mostly inscrutable, written perhaps in code, or in an eroded language, on which words are volatile. A volatility index?

None of them not, the conclusion?

A tribe from Bolivia rations their use of spoken language by appointing a delegate. Again this term,
delegate
, who uses language so others don’t have to. A language martyr. These tribe members speak and write on behalf of the entire community. They die young, their hands bloated, hearts enlarged, goes the claim. No asterisk, no footnote. How the others die goes unmentioned.

Hiram of Monterby calls language the great curse. Esther of the Fire, in her almanac, decries the pollutions of the mouth. It will burn in your mind, says Pliny, of a speech he hears an unknown traveler deliver at the roadside at Thebes.

If I could only speak such words at my enemy, would say Pliny. What weaponry I would have.

I knew my Pliny pretty well and I was fairly sure this was wrong, hadn’t happened to Pliny. Or anyone. Yet the tone was assured, hardened in the rhetoric of fact.

The brain of Albert Dewonce, whose job it was to listen to troubles. Of whom nothing is given, but one can guess at the kind of job. Heard more words than anyone alive, was the claim, this Dewonce. His brain, they said, when he died, was decayed at the core, a lather of cells that could not possibly have received any information. Says the coroner. The cortex, blackened. Says his wife, he was sick each night from what he heard.

A brain that had been rendered to slush from speech, then.

Stories of this sort all throughout. Did any of it stand to reason? The profound cost on the brain itself. Its limited resilience in the face of, what,
language
?

A person’s language age can be measured through a test of his Broca’s area, such test to be performed with a tool whose name is defaced, unreadable. Unattributed drawings near the text are perhaps this tool. Language age, a phrase used throughout
The Proofs
. Language death, when the body is saturated. At the cusp of adulthood. A drowning of cells, is the phrase. The time of quota, when the threshold is tripped, at or near the age of eighteen.

Giving Esther four more years, I noted.

Another section, a test, called
How Do You Feel When You Read This?
Then some words slung together without logic.

The reading did not harm me. I scanned through what was written but felt nothing. Sometimes numbness took me, working like a vacuum to siphon off what I knew, but it did not feel connected to
reading
. It felt like a headache that had grown cold, pulled long, a headache on the move through parts of me I never knew felt pain.

In future issues of
The Proofs
, a final theory of rashes was pledged. We’d see working drawings of the Perkins Mouth Guard. The thirty-word language would be revealed, the least toxic words in our lexicon, but these words would primarily be place-names.

The Proofs
was conspicuous for its absence of conclusions. One was not sure it was not simply the stitchery of Murphy, whose motives were somehow other. Deeply other. Unguessable. If
The Proofs
was advocating something, it did not say. It was not for sale. How many copies there were, I didn’t know.

Before folding up my evening reading and stuffing it back in its envelope, I saw in smaller print, bound by a box, a paragraph of text with the title
Take Heart!

What a thing to do, and how very much I wished I could.