The Flame Alphabet (15 page)

When the departure horn tore open the New York air, and the cars started their slow crawl from town, Claire opened the passenger door and stumbled into the grass. At first I thought she forgot something in the house, so I let her stagger away.

My wife in her nightgown on a strangely warm December day, running not so well from the car.

Go ahead
, I thought. If we couldn’t have Esther, we could have more of her stuff. Grab the baby teeth stashed in the foot of an old onesie, the self-portrait Esther took with her long face overlit in the lens, the blanket stitched from Esther’s stuffed animals that might make this easier. We have
no
more time, Sweetheart, we really don’t, but go ahead. They’re motioning us to leave now, so please hurry.

It was true. The officials of the quarantine had initiated a semaphore that left no room for doubt. People so disfigured in padding they looked like technicians from a bomb squad, waving bright yellow traffic rods, firing a jolt at those few of us who were seeking to stay put. Men and women doubling over in the road from lightning shot into their torsos. It was time to go.

But Claire didn’t go to the house. She crossed into the field, entered the high growth, and before she even reached the meadow she faltered.

I raced after her but by the time I reached her she was fallen, her eyes already cold. She couldn’t even make it to the tree line. By the time I reached Claire the men of the quarantine dropped down on me, dragging me back to the car.

I left Claire on her back in the grass, staring through me, at something no one else could see. She looked finally gone.

From the woods trotted a pack of dogs, like old men in animal suits, barking with human voices. Behind them trudged a human chain of jumpsuited rescuers, arms linked so they’d miss no one. They were flushing stragglers from the woods, kicking the bushes for shapes.

And there were some stragglers. They thought they could wait out the evacuation, then return to their homes until this blew over. But nothing was blowing over. We kept believing it couldn’t get any worse, as if our imaginations held sway in the natural world. We should have known that whatever we couldn’t imagine was exactly what was coming next.

The technicians of the quarantine carried me over their heads in grips so fierce I couldn’t move.

I caught one last sight of Claire. She seemed confused. No one told her she’d come up short in the field and collapsed. No one told her she had not escaped.

They stuffed me in my car, shut the door, then banged a hand on the roof to tell me it was okay to go now. Join the procession out of here. Get going.
Without her
.

But it was very much not okay. I scrambled across the seats out the other side of the car, made a break for the field to get my wife—even dead, she should be coming with me, even if I had to drive up to Fort Wine to bury her—but they grabbed me again, pushed me back in, this time guarding the doors with their cushioned bodies.

When I kicked on the doors they were blocked from the outside. It was like my car was underwater and I could not get out. Underwater, with padded men hovering over me like … like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

From inside the car I watched them take Claire to their truck and then the truck’s cargo door slid down and the truck’s lights flashed once, before the truck pulled out and took, not the street, because the street was clogged with cars, but the field that stretched out beyond our houses. And if the truck stopped as it cruised through the grass, it was only to collect another straggler, some local citizen who had lost the strength to leave and would now join my wife and the stunned others inside that dark vehicle, headed slowly out of sight like the rest of us.

I drove from home through a gridwork of shadow, the car cold and dark. When I cleared the town line I hugged the access road along the wooden boulevard until it converted into open asphalt at Meriwether. A shudder of speed bumps shook the car, launching me onto the highway.

A siren from town erupted in deep, low tones. It blew nearly too low to hear, but I felt the rumble of it deep in my hips, and it took miles of driving before the vibration released.

The quarantine with its poisonous children was behind me.

In my rearview mirror no cars followed, nobody traveling north. Everyone else fleeing town had peeled off west, south, and I had the road to myself. The view was mostly washed out by the winter air, but outside of Van Buren a trail of smoke ripped through the sky. Somebody’s flare from some road somewhere, maybe.

I drove until I slumped exhausted against the steering wheel and the car crunched to a stop in a gravel swell. I awoke with salty, warm blood in my mouth and drove on, sometimes following roads that were so broad, so ill defined, it seemed I was traveling through a vast parking lot.

This was far from home already, along the northern vein toward Albany. In my life I had not driven this far north. This must be what birds feel when they look down on the world and find the entire landscape new. Suddenly they’ve flown into a strange place where even the wind is foreign on their bodies, a wind so thick it’s like a person. He’s mauling you and you can’t move. Everything is different. The buildings, the earth below, the wires bisecting streets into broken pieces of stone.

My maps were old, drawn for a louder world, and it sickened me to even consider them.

The road grew over the curb, threatened the grass. As I gained distance north, the road leaked into the woods, spreading over hills, a blanketing of asphalt. I could not leave the highway. The rumors about this region were true. Even the hills were made of road. I pulled over, but found only more road to clear, and no matter how far I pulled over I only entered new parts of highway, which spilled in every direction. It was not safe to slow down. More cars joined me now, humming past in reckless vectors, a traffic without lanes, drivers staring at the hardened space ahead.

I held fast to what seemed a straight line and did my best to focus.

By noon the road eased into a slushy grass, and I drove faster, the wet soil like a wake of water beneath me. I crossed Allamuchy, where trees enclosed the roadway in a dark tunnel, violated by shards of light so blinding they seemed to throw white rocks in my path on the highway.

A fine green grass covered the countryside here, blown flush to the soil by the volley of speeding cars. Whole meadows leaned over at once as if some great airplane roared overhead. Outside of Corning a thin geyser of mud shot from the earth, whining into the air before stalling at its peak of flight, then falling in streaks to the ground. I do not know for how long I pushed forward. With my windows sealed the world passed by in silence, and such conditions made it almost impossible to mark the passing of time.

At intersections the stop signs had been effaced, caked in metallic red paint. Road signs and city distances had likewise been distorted. Most public writing, issuing basic commands to drivers, had been camouflaged. The bright, hammered slabs of road signs still hung from their posts, but they were wordless blocks of color that commanded no action.

Wherever the epidemic stood north of town, no one was taking any chances. If there had been any language in the countryside, it had now been systematically erased.

I saw no real writing for hours. Such conditions suited me fine.

At a county border marked by a heap of rope, a man on a ladder disguised a road sign, adding marks to the letters until they flowered out of meaning. The word looked to have once been
Rochester
.

That such a word once meant something seemed now only to be an accident.

I drove on. Before checkpoints I slowed. With one of Claire’s hospital masks I wiped the warm leakage from my eyes. No one questioned me.

Somebody wept inside a clouded booth, where a line had formed. I saw the colorful body bags of Albany. A woman outside a medical tent sprayed a mist on what looked to be an antenna, the dark rod quivering in her hands. Possibly it was only a braided metal cable, feeding into a mound of dust at her feet, but I did not stop. Her ears were packed with mud.

I could stick a wire into any piece of soil and listen to Burke
, LeBov had said.

At most during these checkpoint stops a man peered into the car, smelled the air. My trunk was opened and probed. For children, no doubt, they searched. For something I did not have.

I held still and watched through the rearview mirror as they picked through my gear, holding utensils up to the last light of day, smelling deeply into my duffel. My toolkit was discovered, spilled out into the road. Someone ran a finger into the neck of a beaker, gathered a residue, licked it. A smoke purse was tossed onto a vented snuffing mat and stamped out. It burst with a wet noise, its smoke spilling downward into the vent, as if someone was employed in a cave to inhale the fumes of our world. Nothing but the smell of burnt dough drifted to me up front in the car.

The younger officials were clothed alike in the full-body suiting, but the older ones had not managed to assemble a uniform. Some still wore their household robes, medical gowns, pajamas under coats.

The jumpsuits of the youth were blue and seemed to be fashioned of wool ticking. These inspectors lacked even the discipline necessary to tyrannize anyone, to cause paralysis and fear, and it seemed that soon they would drift away from their posts into the hills and sit down in the grass and collapse.

The great effort of eager amateurs was everywhere. There were none of us who were not amateurs now. The experts had been demoted. The experts were wrong. The experts had perished. Or perhaps the experts had simply been misnamed all along.

It must have been Woodleigh where I was waved to the side after my car was searched.

I pulled over near a standing coffin, but no one approached. I waited as other cars were waved through. Blue sedans swept past, passengers hidden behind viral masks.

The man who finally approached had a small face that rode too high on his head. He beckoned down my window and reached in for me. With his thumb he probed under my arm, burrowing into a spot that was suddenly raw. He directed a penlight into my eyes, studied my face, positioned it in different angles. I returned calm expressions to him and did not spoil the encounter with speech. He, too, was silent, and if there was any noise it was only my own breathing.

Before I was waved through, he handed me a sheet of paper embossed with a crazed freckling of Braille. He placed my hand over the sheet, running my fingers along the bumps, which felt like Claire’s skin. He passed my fingers back and forth over the Braille message and I could only smile at him and shrug. If this was reading, it was the kind that left me cold. Had I
read
it? I couldn’t be sure. I had no reaction, but that could be true of other things I read. Perhaps that was the intent of such a message and I had read it correctly. With a sneer he snatched the paper from me and walked off.

I drove on, passing a stretch of small, wooden prisons dug into the hillside, marked by symbols too strange to read. I must have been near one of the Dunkirks, at the broken radial that once linked them in a breezeway leading down to the sea.

Outside of Palmyra a tent hung from a tree. A crowd of people had formed, lined up to get inside. What did these people want outside of a tent? A field of fresh-dug holes spread out behind the tent, mounds of dirt in cemetery formation, ready to be shoveled back in when the holes were filled. Graves so soon, I thought.

Humps of earth reared up in meadows, not just hills and natural elevations, but architecturally engineered redoubts. Mounds and swells and bunkers, as if air was bubbling up from underground, creating shelters under skins of soil. Every manner of door was cut into these dwellings. Wood, glass, fencing, cloth. Some were free of any visible means of entry, the sealed homes of people who did not mean to come out again.

No exit left the freeway to reach these shelters. If people roamed out there, they were too perfectly camouflaged against the landscape. The sun was abstracted on the horizon, merely a placeholder. I kept the threat of it on my driver’s side periphery, figuring at this pace I’d land at my destination right after nightfall.

When there were no houses and the road was free of cars, I stopped and climbed into the long grass of the embankment, stretched my body. Beneath a canopy of trees I gave in to what seemed to need to come out of me, pouring so much hard sound from my person I thought it would not stop and I would never get my breath back.

I wept out all my air. I wept a little bit of something darker. I wept until my voice grew hoarse, then failed, and I kept weeping until I fell to the grass, finished.

My chest felt like it would break. I clutched the grass so hard that my hands, each finger, felt broken. My face was too tight on me. I wanted to cut it off.

If indeed I was only crying, it was like no crying I had ever done before.

In a world where speech was lethal, I could not share with anyone what happened when Claire collapsed in the grass and I failed to help her.

I would never be able to lie out loud about what happened the day I left my wife and daughter behind, driving north alone.

At least I had that one, small thing all to myself. My shame would be safely contained inside what was left of me. Barring some miracle, I’d never be able to tell this story. It could die with me. Very soon, I hoped, it would.

Back in the car, night seemed impossibly far off. I was ready for darkness. I knew that difficult thoughts and feelings awaited me, but still they had yet to arrive. I wanted to be more tired, to have some better reason to find a turnout and shelter my car until morning. But I couldn’t stop now.

When the sun went down, slipping behind the hills, the road thinned into a single lane and started to climb.

On a bird-strewn incline I came upon women pulling a cart up a footpath. The tarp thrown over their cart so clearly covered the bulges of people. They were fooling no one. I pressed the gas pedal to the floor, but the incline was so great I could hardly pull ahead of them, so we climbed in parallel up the southern ledge that ringed the city of Rochester.

At the summit the trees grew rumpled and dense, as if they had been forced to mature under dark glass. Cars on the road below moved in orderly lanes into a single checkpoint, a wooden low-rise with well-dressed guards. In this traffic streamed a caravan of red busses, windows blacked out. The lights of Rochester were only mildly brighter than the darkness, small pale stains oiling the air. If you stared into the light, it retreated until the whole city seemed covered in dark grease.

I pointed my car down the hill and headed into town.