The Flame Alphabet (18 page)

At my desk each day I chased the notion that the alphabet as we knew it was too complex, soaked in meaning, stimulating the brain to produce a chemical that was obviously fatal. In its parts, in combination, our lettering system triggered a nasty reaction. If the alphabet could be thinned out, shaved down, to trick the brain somehow, perhaps we could still deploy this new set of symbols, or even a single symbol, the kind you hold in your hand and reshape for different meanings, for modest, emergency-only communications.

I decided to go all the way back to the first scripts. I had to rule out cuneiform, hieroglyphs, wedge writing. From the Egyptian I had to exclude the hieratic and demotic writings. It was impossible to be thorough, so I took shortcuts. Of the cuneiform I surveyed and dismissed were the Hurrian, Urartian, the Sumerian.

Each of these I re-created with meticulous examples and each of these was retrieved from my office by a technician, who came to my research floor in the afternoons with his medical bag to collect whatever specimens I had, all of which I created under cover from myself, in working conditions I thought of as
controlled ignorance
.

From my office the specimens were brought downstairs and readied for testing against people, people already shattered and near death, overexposed to the very thing I made more of every day.

And so my work began, ruling out approaches, touring through the history of letters and alphabets, borrowing liberally from incompatible scripts, inventing new ones, correcting mistakes burned into the old ones.

What the Pollard script could not do, neither could the script of Fraser. When I blended them it was worse, and when I crammed in the lettering from elsewhere—as with the Bamum script and the script from Alaska, whose characters I sought to flatten, because a central bone could be amputated from these scripts and they would collapse into rumpled shapes—the mixture was likewise noxious.

Did the language itself matter? Was ours exhausted and did an ancient one need to be revived, or were we bound to invent a new one, avoiding the perils of every language that has heretofore existed, I wondered.

Or was it the way that language was rendered, drawn, projected,
seen
. Had we tried everything possible in this realm? Was the delivery system the problem?

To test this I created white text on white paper, gray on gray, froze water into text-like shapes and allowed it to melt on select surfaces—slate, wood, felt—which it scarred so gently, you’d need a magnifying glass to spot the writing.

I tried pointillizing type, whitening or darkening it, making a scattered dust of it on the page, then blowing that dust free with a bellows until it could only be read under blue light. I tried copying it on the machine until the duplication rendered it ghosted and pale. The usual distortions, obvious, of course, and all failures.

If we hid the text too much, it could not be seen. If we revealed it so it could be seen, it burned out the mind. No matter what. To see writing was to suffer.

Strictly to rule out surface as a factor, I wrote on clay, I squeezed water onto wood using a dropper. Onto foam I poured channels of fluid, then hardened that foam with hot air. The paper I used was baked, bleached, soaked in lye. I ordered paper made not just from cotton and linen, but wool, the wool shorn from whatever was still out there, the world I was now protected from inside Forsythe.

From my window I saw no animals. I had a pair of binoculars, and when I was tired of the detached work of language creation I zoomed in on the hills of Rochester, hoping to see something.

Oh, I saw nature during this surveillance, obscene degrees of it. The binoculars magnified the catastrophe. I saw indecent splurges of beauty as summer tore open huge holes in the earth, from which came forth a sickening march of every kind of plant, as if the suddenly stifled world of people left more room for nature to fill, which it fucking well was going to do.

A paper of silver was produced for me, upon which letters were raised only through application of a light wand. A birch paper dipped in copper appeared in my materials box. Across its face I rubbed some salt. I scripted with salt on black felt, sprinkled salt over a twisting wooden model of block text, mounted on a wire like a nursery mobile, upon which the salt pooled in hills, creating the ephemeral shape of letters.

With stones I rubbed text away from paper, with sticks and clay bark and pastel markers I tested how much I could cover text without fully hiding it, and whether the covering mattered, being sure our test subjects would be shown plain blocks of color alongside shades that hid writing beneath.

I shaped letters with yarn, hieroglyphs with yarn, arranged yarn in the minimal spatter of contemporary shorthand. With a tweezers I laid down a vertical script of yarn, hung yarn from wire so it draped just so, and with jets of air blew the yarn into letter shapes as it swayed. Or so I surmised, for I did not look at the device myself. With yarn I wrote full sentences in the Coptic alphabet, the Indus script, Linear A and B, all proven toxic already, all capable, in blocks and paragraphs, to generate sickness—micro coma, paralysis—in the reader, but then I tugged each end of the yarn on these sentences until the words pulled long. I tugged on the yarn and documented each stage until the yarn was pulled so taut, it stood out in a straight line and could never be mistaken for language.

The results you already know. We took this work to our subjects, then stood to watch from the observation deck. If it was indoor work, the work of reading, we assembled the material in sealed-off rooms, into which a subject was brought, shown a chair, left alone.

The materials were bound, sealed in foil.

To be thorough, we tested on men and women alike, young and old, sick and well. There was a healthy supply of subjects on hand. People lined up for this work. They volunteered, fought to be first, scratched at each other without mercy, as if they’d been profoundly misled about what waited for them inside Forsythe.

Which of course, well, they had.

From my window I saw them, and from the observation booth I saw them, and sometimes I didn’t need to see them at all. I could stay at my desk and picture the sad readers being led into the testing area, strapped to the medical monitors. I could picture exactly how they would react. The work was foregone. To see it, to confirm it, was only a waste of time. I would know if something actually worked. The news would come fast. Or perhaps, if I ever did develop a script that could be read without sickness, restoring language to our fine species, I wouldn’t be so quick to share it with the good people of Forsythe.

Perhaps such an invention, kept private, was just what I needed to find my leverage.

At Forsythe one worked, one ate, one rested, and on occasion one consensually fucked a stranger, an arrangement that produced merely a pinhole of joy. Beyond that entertainment was limited, at least for my class of researchers, since our appetites were highly regulated. We were under shield. Our health was a priority.

Health
. Perhaps that wasn’t what people with stiff, shadowed faces really had, whose tongues had atrophied. People unable to look at each other. Out of shame or fear or maybe finally a true loss of interest. If we looked away from each other in the halls, it was mostly because we’d seen enough. Other faces were just uglier parts of the landscape inside of Forsythe. And people might have hurried past you, but soon they seemed transparent.

When I wanted to see children I watched old television shows, the comedies.

A recreation room near the observation deck was furnished with a low couch, and if the room was empty I sat down when the workday ended and enjoyed the shows. They were edited now, the contamination sucked out of them. I could watch without fear. Oh, mercy. The cleanser at Forsythe had swept through these shows and smeared over the faces of the actors with his blurring tool. I pictured a man waving a wet, foaming broom, spewing a clear lather over people’s heads, since feature recognition was generating too much toxicity in our volunteers. But even with their smoothed-over faces you could still see the young people tear around the artificial interiors of the TV studios, and in place of the dialogue these children hurled at each other, and the voice-overs that must have once straitjacketed the action, the technicians had looped in a sonorous, low-toned music, which sometimes made it seem that the little blond-headed children spoke a language not of words but of some intricate beeping songbook, a sonar for animals.

I relaxed with a bowl of clear soup, settled deep into the cushions, and for those hours I could almost feel like I was home with my family enjoying a night of television. Each evening over soup the television children—their faces swept into drain-like puckers of flesh—performed the archetypal behaviors. They danced, drove cars, dug a terrific, wet hole in a yard, accompanied an artificial wolf on a perilous adventure, or stood in place and probably said funny things to each other. They gathered in their smart outfits, the crisp white shirts and ties, holding stubby, flesh-colored canes, sometimes raising them as weapons, cocking their heads at each other. This kind of thing sometimes amounted to an entire episode of a comedy, a milling crowd of young people doing things with their faces and heads.

I soon tired of this style of entertainment. It began to stand in for the memories I had of home, and I did not want those disturbed. Instead of Esther at the state fair holding a barbecued turkey leg that she could neither eat nor surrender to me, since she was so proud to be in possession of such a gigantic animal part, I now pictured a television actor licking an ice-cream cone so roughly that the ice cream plopped on the ground, whereupon a legless elf riding in a low cart zoomed in, scooped up the half-melted ball of ice cream, and raced away. Even the elf’s face was muddied at the features, spackled smooth. Instead of the laugh track one presumed would accompany such an accident, droning notes would pour out, a blizzard of dissonance. I lacked the discipline to refuse these images as they appeared to me alone in my bed, hours later. I allowed them to hijack my mental space and hardly fought them off. It was easier to let them play on, endlessly, and such was the material that frequently sent me into spells of anxious, restless sleep.

But in bed at night, rarely, these television images expired and a mental vacancy settled. Suddenly there was nothing to think of, nothing to see, nothing to feel, as if the reception had failed. There was room for me to will my own thought, my own memory, and I would hurriedly try to call up something unique about Esther.

A vacuumed space would appear at first, a howling little hole, but if I strained and brought all of my resources to bear on the matter, I could piece together a fractured puzzle, a child’s drawing she had made of herself, a photo collage scissored apart and glued back with the prismatics of a ransom note. It was always shards. If I managed to conjure what mattered to me, what she genuinely looked like, I could only ever picture Esther with that awful blurred face of the television children, the sharp green speckling of her eyes wiped in streaks, the flushed color of her lips leaking upward from her mouth through her cheeks and forehead, a swirl of colors clouding her face. If I was lucky enough to picture her face, it smudged in my mind, as if, even in the past,
even when I knew her
, she wore a stocking over her head and I never once saw my daughter’s face for what it really was.

After television I cast around for a sexual partner and these were usually available at the coffee station.

I had a favorite, although I don’t care to admit it. In my mind I called her Marta. Sometimes, when I thought about her during working hours, I spelled her name phonetically, in Chinese, using the Soothill Syllabary. Some of the dummy texts I wrote in the Phags-pa script were addressed to Marta or documented some pleasing feature of hers.

Marta was wiry, severe. Beneath her skin was the faintest grid work of blue-colored veins that fell short of forming a picture of something I could never quite name.

In bed Marta and I were each impassive and facially bland in the extreme, as if we were competing with each other in the washing of windows. It took effort to control one’s face so totally while fucking, to disable one’s gestures and reactions, and it was not long before I was put in mind of the dead, just dead people, people who had died but who somehow had managed to start fucking each other, not because they still lived, but because this is what the dead did. This is what it was like with Marta. She had died, and then I had died, and then the two of us, in our dead world, had found a way to join parts, a grim and dutiful task, a collaboration of the dead on becoming slightly more dead with each other, this to be achieved only by deadly fucking until we turned blue and gasped with exhaustion, careful not ever to look at each other’s dead faces.

Marta and I collaborated on rapid-fire release, a sprinting frenzy of goal-oriented sex. We chose not to kiss, but sometimes we held hands. Not for tenderness, I don’t think, but for balance. That’s why we sometimes needed to connect our nonsexual parts.

Sometimes it wasn’t Marta whose shoulder I tapped at the coffee station, and I had to make do. I’d walk off with whoever it was and then see Marta not noticing or not caring as she did the same. I could always rely on her to project no response about an encounter. Sometimes it was Emily, or Andrea, or Linda I tapped, and off I went with them, and once it was Tim. I didn’t care. It wasn’t making love, it was making do. And I made do as a matter of course, often toward the end of the week, after a fit of the faceless television in the lounge. It didn’t matter. In private quarters we dropped our robes and transacted with legal precision, as if we were performing light surgery on each other’s genitals, the most delicate cuts, masturbating against the sweaty obstacle of another person, hoping to raise the difficulty of self-release.

We may as well have withdrawn my emission by syringe. The glow of orgasm was so vague, I experienced it as a theoretical warmth in the adjacent wall, as something atmospheric nearby that I could appreciate, but that I myself barely noticed. When I reached climax with Marta, I felt the material vacate my body, which counted for something, but the accompanying gush had departed, relocating off-site. It might as well have been happening to someone else. Perhaps it was.

But as detached as the Marta sessions were, I did prefer them to the solo work. Alone I raised no boner, even when I wanted release before sleep, when a cold, leaky emission was what I craved in order to break my seal with the day and let me think that something different was waiting for me tomorrow. I thought too much of home, and home was not a thought that carried with it the slightest erotic possibility. In fact, it only served to repel it. Home provided a sound defeat of the erotic, a complete and final stifling of it. In bed, alone, I may have approached myself with seductive touch, but it seemed only to trigger a rush of vivid imagery, imagery I myself had lived through, which may as well be called memory, the vilest stuff. The result was that I fell asleep holding my cold penis, missing my wife and daughter.