The Flame Alphabet (12 page)

I kept on waiting, pictured Murphy walking to his car, opening it, getting in, and driving away. Then I pictured the same routine again, over and over, until I could be sure that he was far away.

Except I could never be sure of that.

Claire’s weight was stifling, a wet pressure. I pushed her off me and climbed out of the crawl space to survey the damage.

All throughout the house everything seemed as it was, except upstairs I discovered that the hut repair box was missing from my drawer. The little tools meant to fix the listener at the Jewish hole, tools I’d never needed to use. This box was all that was missing. For all of Murphy’s raucous rummaging he hadn’t taken much.

But the cake had been disturbed. Not eaten, but violated, the ball of wax collapsed, smokeless. Something had been dropped on the cake, then removed. I made a fist, held it above the ruined cake. This was too large.

The size of the crater was just right for Esther’s hand, I reasoned. Balled up, punching down.

I couldn’t believe she would destroy her own cake. Certainly the cake had collapsed because I had baked it poorly, failed to follow a recipe. It was stupid to think I could go in the kitchen and improvise like that.

Perhaps Esther was not hungry. Perhaps she came in and saw the cake and decided she might have a slice later on. Only not now. After dinner, maybe.

I’d put it in the refrigerator, is what I would do. The cake would be there for her when she was hungry. Perhaps when I was feeling better I would have a piece, too. Maybe Esther and I could sit quietly together over a piece of cake. I’d skin back my frosting for her, because she liked extra. There’d be no reason to speak. We could enjoy each other’s company in silence, in the kitchen, on her birthday. If I could find a candle, an old-fashioned one, we’d light it up. It’d be nice to sit together, listening to our forks click on the plates. We’d be sure to save a piece for her mother.

LeBov died that week. A feature ran on the news, a final piece of television. He was sixty-two. Or he was sixty-eight. An assistant found him at home, where he lived alone. Two of his many children apparently lived nearby. I missed the picture they flashed of him, but then a photo of one of LeBov’s sons, cast up on the screen, showed a suntanned, elderly fellow with a white ponytail.
LeBov’s son
. There was no mention of a wife. LeBov had been taken to a private facility in Denver where he later expired. This was the language used by the newscaster.
Expired
.

There would be no funeral.

According to the news, LeBov was perhaps the first researcher, certainly the most outspoken, to identify the threat of language.

All the good it’s done
, I sat there thinking.

The editorial assessment of the news program was that LeBov’s death was particularly distressing at this time, given our current situation.

A toxicologist by training, they called LeBov. He had lived mostly in Canada, spent the early years of his career developing his theory of a primary allergen, allergy zero.

Later in his career LeBov focused on the toxic properties of language. Most recently,
until his passing
, he had been the director of a private research lab in Rochester called Forsythe. He was working closely with health officials on the problem of the viral child.

“Claire!” I called out into the cold house.

LeBov was known for disseminating his views in underground publications. Designed, some said, deliberately to mislead. Filled with false information and historical inaccuracies invented to bolster his theories.

A montage spun together clips of other scientists appraising LeBov’s contributions. He merited scorn, derision, from a pedigreed cohort, doctors, scientists, linguists. But these were old clips, exhumed from an archive somewhere, stitched together to form a portrait. All the footage was from well before his death, before his recent lunge into credibility. These men and women, pronouncing on the now dead LeBov, projected a vital cheer quite terrible in hindsight—sitting in offices or newsrooms while off-loading their expensive opinions about someone they could safely dislike in public.

These scientists had yet to live in these times. Today, yesterday, the past few months. Their short-term futures were going to hurt, and they had no idea. Where were these fine people now? I wondered. Were they hiding yet?

Have you found shelter? Is it finally quiet and safe where you are?
I wanted to ask them.

Not a person alive could be made to talk like that now, look so healthy, using language as if it did not break something in us.

Even the newscaster, broadcasting live, wore a bloodless mask, staring, one supposed, at the words on the teleprompter. Eating the vile material for his very employment, each word producing the crushing. You could tell. He seemed to weaken by the second. They’d done him up in television paint. One could see that this man did not have long. For some reason I recall his name. Jim Adelle.

Jim Adelle’s
News Hour
.
A Special Report
with Jim Adelle.

I wonder how many more days he had to live.

The feature continued. I settled in to listen as LeBov’s colleagues detailed his work, decried his methods, his results, his person.

“Claire!” I called again. She couldn’t still be asleep. I knew she’d be interested in this.

LeBov’s theory of allergy did not assist his career. One of the desert universities finally offered him a silo, but they kept him away from students. Later he distanced himself from the theory, then finally renounced the idea as dangerous.

Not really a rebuttal, I noted, to call your own idea dangerous. More of a sensationalizing gesture to increase attention.

This would turn out to be a signature method throughout LeBov’s career. He advanced an idea, often a problematic one, beat its drum until everyone was revolted, then turned on himself, often through pseudonym, and attacked his own work. He staged battles in the academic journals between two different versions of himself, argument and refutation coming from the same man.

At conferences LeBov sent imposters to the podium in his place. No one knew what he looked like, apparently. Then he sat hectoring his stand-in from the audience, protesting every idea, sometimes storming out in disgust. He accused himself of fraudulence, plagiarism. In at least some cases it would seem that he was correct.

LeBov’s signature work, in the end, addressed the trouble with language, the word
trouble
being, in his view, an understatement. He argued for most of his professional life that language should be best understood, aside from its
marginal utility
as a communication technology—
can we honestly say it works?
—as an impurity.

Language happens to be a toxin we are very good at producing, but not so good at absorbing, LeBov said. We could, per LeBov, in our lifetimes, not expect to process very much of it.

In answer to his detractors, LeBov asked what it was that
ever
suggested speech would not be toxic.

“Let us reverse the terms and assume that language, like nearly everything else, is poisonous when consumed to excess. Why not assault the folly that led to such widespread use of something so intense, so strong, as language, in the first place?”

Where was the regulatory body? LeBov wanted to know. Where was the marshaling instinct for speech, for language itself?

It causes the most unbearable strain on our systems, LeBov would say. It is not very different from a long, slow venom.

This idea was never granted legitimacy, evidenced by the battalion of naysayers. He simply had no proof. Witness after witness remarked on LeBov’s lack of evidence, and the word
evidence
came to indicate something significant that LeBov was missing, like an eye, a limb.

They had some audio for this, a response of sorts.
More than anyone else in the world, I wish that I was wrong
, answered LeBov, in a voice I felt I had heard before.
What a relief that would be, to me, and also to my family
.

“Claire,” I called out again, softer. I listened into the house to hear some sign of her. “Come sit with me.”

LeBov had written something, a screed, on the Tower of Babel, apparently, but retracted it before it could go to press. The other version of the story is that LeBov wrote in and protested to his own publisher, demanded they pulp the book. The book was a dangerous speculation, an assault on reality.

“Claire, Honey?” I called.

The Babel document came up a few times in the news interviews, though no one, it seemed, had read it. LeBov had an obsession with this myth. More than that, a bone to pick. He felt that it was a misleading, dangerous myth. It had, he supposedly argued, been copied out incorrectly, transmitted from generation to generation with a serious degree of error. Now the myth as we knew it presented a terrible impediment. I saw where Murphy had gotten the idea.

Claire appeared in the doorway, fully dressed, brushing the last of her hair.

“Why do you keep yelling my name?” she asked.

“I wanted you to see something,” I said. “This show I’m watching. On this guy who died.”

“Well, you could have said that. I wish you wouldn’t yell my name. I really can’t stand it.”

I apologized to her.

“It’s fine,” she said, leaving the room. “But I can’t stand it. Please don’t do that anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling less sorry.

“And I said
it’s fine
,” she yelled from another room. “Stop apologizing.”

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word
Sorry
.

A linguist from Banff scorned LeBov’s idea of a toxic language.

“This idea implies a physical component to language. Some material antigen,” she said. “What exactly is the substance, in chemical terms, that is causing this allergy he speaks of?” asked the linguist. “Language is the scapegoat here. If there is a problem—and I highly doubt there is, I cannot imagine such a thing—it is one for the immunologists.”

Was the Banff linguist, I wondered, simply part of LeBov’s long plan, designed to control the flow of the argument?

The linguist held forth, smugly dismissing an idea that had recently come into its own. It interested me that the linguist’s inability to imagine something constituted a sound rejection of its possibility.

I cannot imagine such a thing
.

If only that kept it from coming true.

You had simply to look out the window to see the missing evidence she was calling for, watch the neighbors drive off and not return.

Actually you had only to look at Claire, if you could even bear to. I certainly tried to avoid sight of her, even dressed up, even with her hair, falling out as it was, brushed back over her small face. That sort of witness bearing did no one any favors.

LeBov was dead, so enemies could alert the world to how unimportant the old man really was, before irony would come along to smother them alive.

I thought of Murphy and wondered to what authority figure he would answer now. Was he trembling in his room at home now that his master had died?

The final segment of the news focused on LeBov’s Jewish problem. LeBov exhibited, admitted one commenter in rather shy tones, an unreasonable interest in the private activities of members of
a certain religious faith
.

LeBov often stoked, our expert remarked, the long-standing rumor of a segment of the Jewish population who worship privately, sharing wisdom through an underground signaling mechanism.

Of course we have found no basis for these rumors, the expert assured us.

Of course
, I thought.

These rumors show a profound disrespect for people of diverse faiths.

Yes, yes. A profound disrespect
.

When a scientist,
particularly
a scientist, the expert warned, buys into superstition, into lore, and uses them as
paradigms of insight
, our entire method of knowing is threatened. LeBov shows no respect by fanning the flames of a dangerous rumor, a rumor that only seeks to further isolate those among us who
do
practice authentic religious observance. To people of genuine faith, LeBov’s antics are a disgrace.

LeBov had apparently called for the forest Jews to come forward, to quit hoarding their fucking treasure.

From what I could tell, LeBov knew little of our practice. He bathed in the standard misinformation, took wild swings, threw out a stinking bait that, I was sure, none of us would take.

Wisdom, he argued, was meant to be shared. Particularly wisdom that offers
precise guidance on our crisis
. A crisis like this, he said, requires assets. We must develop assets that will assist us in our change, and we can never ignore the source of a poison,
the source of it
, when we look to soothe its symptoms.

The source of it
. He was talking about children.

Which had what to do with our religion? I wondered.

A closing thought on LeBov from our expert. I do not recall the man’s name or title, just that he wore a collar and a dark robe, and that his thoughts seemed to come so slowly that they caused him pain.

“LeBov’s idea that science cannot help us, but faith can—this is an idea that resonates deeply for me. Deeply.”

He attempted an important pause.

“But when the faith to which he is referring
does not exist
, I can only be profoundly troubled. It desecrates the real, authentic Jew to imagine a false and private one, and to accord that imaginary Jew with secret powers channeled against the interests of the world at large. It’s a desecration.”

The feature on LeBov ended and Jim Adelle seemed caught by surprise, swaying in his chair behind the big news table. He put his finger to his ear, listened to his producer, winced. Perhaps, instead of a verbal message, they’d sent a knifelike frequency into his head. In the end, I bet Jim Adelle would have preferred that to words.

He looked up but his focus couldn’t quite meet the camera. He seemed to be staring at something inside his own eyes. With a mechanical face he repeated the news. LeBov was dead.

I got up to continue my apology to Claire, if I could find her. It was going to take a little bit more work.

Then they showed LeBov’s picture again.

Except on the screen where there should have been a picture of a man I’ve never seen, whose voice I’d hardly heard on the radio, they showed a picture of Murphy. It was unmistakable. The same red hair, the same immortal skin. A recent photo of Murphy.

I crouched into the blue funnel of the television to get a good look.

So. This was LeBov.

Do not let him confuse or mislead you
, Murphy had said. Or was it LeBov who said this to me?

Are you reading LeBov? That will catch you up on things
.

If he was still alive, and I had a terrible feeling that he was, I was pretty sure I knew where I could find him.