The Flame Alphabet (26 page)

From a hallway beneath Forsythe I entered the room with the broken Jew hole. LeBov sprawled in a black puddle on the floor behind me while his retinue refused to interfere with his collapse. Maybe the other LeBovs needed this one to die. It was hard to blame them. The redhead was too sick to be of further use. Sick from Child’s Play. Of course he was. I didn’t say good-bye.

Inside the vaulted space the Jewish radio testing was in full swing. This was the large-scale listening task force I was meant to join, siphoning deep rabbi sounds from cabling that I wasn’t sure even carried them.

I guess it was my mouth they wanted.

Radio gear glittered along the far dirt wall. An arsenal of antenna wire drooped over a table, in gauges so fine they shone like hair. Some of it, when I touched it,
was
hair. But it was far too long to have come from a person.

On a testing platform Jews spooled wire into the jacked-open faces of mannequins.

The mannequins were pink save for bands of wire necklacing their groin. Boots anchored them to the platform, but a few inflatable mannequins floated overhead, tethered like kites to lightning rods. They looked like little balloon people, in seated postures, hovering upside down in the air. From their mouths spilled an overgrowth of wire as if they were coughing up their insides.

The largest mannequin, on its back with a wire jammed into its torso, wore a copper yarmulke. Around its left arm metal tefillin were strapped.

It was quite a lot to take in. I’d come far from my scripts desk, far from the language-testing courtyard. Here in the dirt vault of the Forsythe Jew hole they weren’t creating a new language but listening fiercely for one that might have always been there, however deeply encoded in copper.

The living were conscripted as listeners, too, martyrs seated in docile postures nearby. Citizens of Rochester, Buffalo, Albany. Shirtless men who looked surprised. One of them slowly combed his hair. Antenna wire grew like creepers up their faces. Test subjects with cages for mouths, human antennas. From their faces came nothing but white noise.

Next to the Jew hole itself, under the glare of the klieg lights, some Jewish scientists gathered at a console. Hairless men of my generation shivering inside their gowns.

Disappointment was in the air.

The console they fussed over was one of those moist slab radios fastened by beige elastic to a medical cart, squirting liquid runoff into a scuffed bucket on its underside.

Even I knew this was a questionable device when it came to repairing a transmission from a Jewish feed. It may as well have been a tiny fire in the woods. Perhaps the console radiated heat, and that’s why the scientists were drawn so closely to it. They had private reasons for misleading the LeBovs. Surely they knew this piece of tech was a dead end. They knew but were not saying.

Such a phrase might serve as a new motto for our times.

At the feet of the Jewish scientists coiled the bright orange cable, snaking out of sight down the hole. They’d coated it in one of those reception-enhancing jellies. A liquid antenna ointment, rubbed onto the cable, rendering it so sensitive that it quivered in the dirt.

If you listened so intently into nothing, using gear like this, you might hear anything you desired. It made you think we were still being sickened from some language we didn’t even know was out there. Inaudible, sub-whispered, mouthed by an enemy from so far away, it could not even be measured. Still it pulsed some toxin on us that made us all crawl on our bellies and choke.

I did not count the scientists, but I could guess there were nine summoned here by LeBov. Nine Jews divining at the quiet hole, to which I’d be the tenth, which would suddenly create the quorum that would ignite the wall of listeners.

Speaking of which, the occasional bird landed on a listener and pecked at it desperately, drilling into the sweet, brown core. No one seemed to mind the vandalism of these birds. Perhaps their work was intentional. Perhaps this was a necessary priming of the listeners. Before they could work in tandem they needed to be mercilessly gouged by a bird’s beak.

Beneath the pegboard, there were skins shed by the larger listeners, collecting like shriveled faces in a trough. Next to the trough was a rumpled sack that looked to be filled with cream.

When I looked at the wall of listeners, for the first time I understood why a listener was once referred to as a
Moses Mouth
. Some names are so accurate they are unbearable.

A technician, stationed to monitor the doings of the Jews, gnawed at a sandwich through the tiny opening in his foam mask.

Nobody minded me as I circled the work site collecting what I could carry.

I received blank looks from the Jews. I’m sure I stared back at them the same way. My bruised face may have troubled them. Maybe they’d not even been alerted to my arrival. It looked like they’d not been alerted about anything for a long time.

Here we finally were in the community of Jews none of us had ever wanted. We were machines of indifference with a faintly human appearance. Stonewallers and deadpanners. Unimpressed, even when you pressed on us. Failures in one way or another.

Perhaps that’s why we’d all embraced our private style of worship out in secluded huts in the suburban forest. When we came together we felt too much like nothing.

I would not learn what blackmail had driven my forest colleagues into this room. Did LeBov vomit in the bushes for each of these men, months ago in different neighborhoods, laying his trap, or was that a piece of mirroring customized for me alone?

How do you even know that I’m the real LeBov?

As forest Jews, were we supposed to love one another because we drank from the same orange cable, shared the same shade of doubt about the same unknowable deity? I most certainly could not think of the reason. Because love one another we couldn’t. It was just a more territorial form of self-loathing to revile people too much like ourselves.

These were men too much like me. If they had a complaint, a disturbance, some kind of undoused anger scorching their interior, one would need a long knife to release it. What’s the name of the surgical technique required to draw forth a man’s hidden material? Who is it that forges and sells those tools?

We should have all lined up for a leeching procedure, and they could have bottled our private liquid after sucking it free of our concealing shells.

Far above the work site, birds rode thermals inside the Jew hole space of Forsythe. The most gorgeous birds I’ve ever seen.

When the air grew too crowded with them, a lone bird would plummet, returning to a glass tank in an unlit sector of the Jew hole space. A nude old man sat here, quietly addressing a microphone. When I came closer, to assess his work, I heard a singing voice I knew too well. One I’d never forget.

The old man sang with Rabbi Burke’s voice. A perfect imitation. Songs not so beautiful, a warm-up to the sermon to come. No one else could sing in a key that old, on the melodic side of awkward. This was a voice that came from only one man’s body in this world. Birds entered his glass tank and careened inside his sounds, as if they could replenish themselves on music. Then they squirmed out through the glass aperture and shot back into the sky.

There was a broadcast bulb above the man’s glass tank—the kind you once saw at radio stations—and it glowed white. He was singing
live
, over the airwaves, to whatever world remained.

I stroked the man’s hair and he looked up at me with a face I’d always wanted to see. I did not care if his words were from decades ago or today. I did not care if he spoke a decoy service to deceive people like LeBov, whether his sermons were real or fake, because what was the distinction again? It didn’t matter to me. He was still mine. And now they’d gotten to him, too, reduced him to a crooning role in this underground work site. Or else he’d always been here, had never left, and it took me this long to find him.

He rested his head against me and I held him close.

So it’s you
, I didn’t need to say.

To which the rabbi offered no answer but a smile so peaceful it was unbearable.

He resumed singing, and the birds circled, waiting their turn in his tank of sounds.

If I were anyone at all, I would have taken the rabbi with me. But I wasn’t. It turned out that I was no one, out only for myself, what little of it that remained for saving.

You might protest when I call this man a rabbi. But you didn’t see him, did you? You weren’t there. You didn’t know his voice your whole life the way I did, and if you did, I ask you now to stand down and believe me.

In those final minutes I prowled the work site, hiding my mouth from the scrutiny of those Jews. Were they going to rush me, hold me down, feed me the final wire?

I’d forgotten how to act as if I had an inner life, but it was coming back to me now. The face could be a powerful instrument. I’d make myself look like a creature sent to perform maintenance. Oh, it was the
n
th fucking Jew hole I’ve had to fix, I tried to suggest, but before I could get to work, before I could let them use my
apparently special mouth
as a reception ground for some unprecedented message to flow through, I needed to gather some equipment.

All the while I inched closer to the hole.

That’s not what it’s for
, I’d once said.
You can’t go in there
.

Until I died I’d keep thinking of the things I’d gotten wrong. Like this. Worshipping for years and years over a hole that I’d not once thought of entering.

No one seemed inclined to try to stop me, which suggested that no one sane would ever jump into this hole and climb down into nowhere with any hope of surviving.

Exactly my fucking point
.

I crept up to it and from the hole a blast of air hit me, foul and cold, like the rank breath of people who’ve been buried alive. For all I knew, people
had
been, and they were down there waiting for me.

I’m coming
, I didn’t say.
I’ll be with you soon
.

I grabbed more tools and some cellophane-wrapped lobes of food until my canvas satchel was stuffed.

On a hook beneath the klieg lights hung the quilted coats for a meat locker.

I took one, tested the fit, then layered a larger coat on top of it.

I required a hard shell over my skin. I couldn’t be sure what I would encounter down below in the tunnels.

Because that’s where I was going. Down the hole and out of there forever.

Above me somewhere, in a bed, plugged into support machines,
or perhaps plugged in no longer
, was Claire.

For the second time now, instead of staying to help my wife, I went the other way.

I looked at no one, then stepped into nothing.

I plunged down the Jewish hole of Forsythe in free fall, the underground wind rushing over me so sweetly it seemed that, perhaps, as I fell, I might have been in bed, too, and if I only rolled over, just rolled over a little bit farther into the darkness, breaching her side of the bed, I could maybe hold my Claire again for a little while, hold her so tight that perhaps it would not hurt so much when together we landed in the world below.

Yesterday morning I left Esther resting on my cot and walked out into the swale to collect wood. She would not miss me, perhaps not even know I was gone. I chose a southerly trail and jumped through the brush and shittings until I found a nest of felled branches, then took my time striking them into pit-size pieces for burning.

It is late autumn, I think, three years since I dropped down the Jewish hole at Forsythe and made my escape back to the old hut, where the feed has long since snuffed out. The hut makes a small home for me now. The orange cable has gone cold.

I have not kept faith with the calendar. My timekeeping is promiscuous at best. Perhaps it’s already winter and the climate is only slow to frost.

I am not so troubled by the season; it’s the shrinking of light that gives concern. The darkness of this New York has grown more severe lately, blotting up from the soil before the sun has even withered off for the day. It’s a soaking darkness, cold on my body when it comes.

The pretext for my outing yesterday was wood, more fuel to warm our forest hut, but in truth I was looking for something else. Something that will help Esther. What I was seeking is small and it has a face and it breathes so prettily, in little wet gusts of air. Often it comes along willingly. It harbors a medicine inside its delicate chest.

One day, when Esther has healed, when she can sit up and see, when she can tolerate my presence as her caretaker and endure me, if silently, I would like to take her on a tour of this valley in the woods behind her old house.

I can show Esther where I kept watch of the quarantine for so many months, years, the bench I built into the mud, the blind of trees I thickened, branch by braided branch, so I would not be discovered. I can point to where I sat, mime how I looked out across the river until my face ached, hoping to see her behind the town gates.

A more difficult story to reveal to Esther will be how, when I first arrived home—if such a word can apply to our Jewish hut—I contemplated going into the old neighborhood after her. I weighed the risks, keeping her safety in mind, then finally decided against such an incursion. I knew Esther was inside the child barracks and close to a failed immunity—her age was simply no good anymore, and we all grow up to speechlessness now, don’t we?—and I knew she’d soon be released without any perilous invasion by me.

What’s the mime for such a rationalization?
I would have saved you but I knew I didn’t really need to, since you were probably going to be released soon
. My body lacks the finesse for that kind of message. Those contortions are beyond me. Instead I might stare into space and let Esther see—she’s a smart young woman—that the issue is pretty fucking complicated.

One might argue that, absent of speech, deprived of all communication, a father dissolves. The title finally expires, and the man probably follows. You don’t strip away a father’s title and expect the man to live. A former father is just a man who once had a duty to answer. Perhaps he can barely recall what that duty ever was. It nags at him as something he forgot to do, something he did only poorly. Fatherhood is perhaps another name for something done badly.

Perhaps it is better now to liken a father to an animal parent. Certain caretaking is observed, but when the offspring matures, alienation and estrangement set in. Rivalry. The youngster grows preternaturally angry at the father, for some reason angrier at the father than at any other creature, and the father opens a small hole in his chest to accommodate this anger, which flows in rapidly. An emotional ecology is observed, with the energy composted and renewed in the chest of the man. A deep, circular structure is satisfied with the anger returning to its creator, who probably is not equipped to hold it anymore. He must release it through new activities in the world.

It is problematic to father alone. By this I do not mean without a wife. That can actually be simpler, finer. A single authority, a clear chain of command. None of the agonies of partnered power, although I’m confident that Claire will soon join me here at the hut. Instead I mean it is difficult to father without an actual child. How exactly does one father when no child is to be found, and yet the father has not finished his work, has fatherish urges he wishes still to discharge, since he did not do so enough when he had the child on hand? It is a central question.

Now that Esther has returned to me, my fatherhood will be evident to her in even the small touches, and not a word will have to escape my mouth. Esther will come to enjoy the woods behind her old house, find the resources she needs, perhaps one day consider this hut her home. She’d never been allowed at our hut before, couldn’t even know about it. Now it is hers. She will appreciate the steps I have taken to ensure her comfort.

We need to get her well first, that’s all. This is what I do not, cannot tell her. I know what words do, and I won’t subject her to our fatal language. We need to fix her up and get her back on her feet.

Newcomers to muteness are not always pleased. I know this firsthand.

On the cot I have forced open Esther’s eyes, stared into them. Her forehead is not just cold to the touch.
Cold
is not the word. The skin of her arms is slack. Her lips vanish into her face. They are paler than her cheeks.

I will admit that there were days when I first had Esther back in the hut, only a few weeks ago, leaving mugs of soup on the stone post for her, putting bread, dusted with salt, near her sleeping face, when I could look at her for the wrong number of minutes, an extended scrutiny that wore down my joy and left me unsure of who it was I had brought home.

It was marginally possible I’d rescued, instead of Esther, a stranger with a different name.

The hair was not really the hair of Esther. It was flat, brown, indoor hair, the kind more often found hidden beneath a person’s clothing. Under this girl’s tongue I felt the tough, dead skin. LeBov’s Mark. We all had it. A tongue fallen too long into stillness, hardening now in the mouth like a bone.

And Esther’s body? I did not have pictures to compare this girl to, but I shouldn’t have needed them. A picture in the wallet is for others, for boasting, not for the goddamn father himself, who has a picture of his children burned eternally into his mind, correct? Was she shorter than I remembered? Something was wrong. When I recalled Esther, it was now with a smeared face. Where was the smell I could not even describe to you? Life among the worded children had rubbed my daughter in the scent of too many strangers. It gave offense. It did not reach deep enough inside me to trigger my good side. I wanted a sharper dose of recognition. I worried that my paternal instincts would not ignite as long as I suffered this doubt.

While waiting in the blind beneath the ledge for Esther to be released, I recalled the four-year-old perfectionist who flew into rages, the eight-year-old who’d taken modesty to such extremes that she wore a robe over her clothes, the Esther new to her teens who was so disturbingly pretty that her mother and I fell silent when we saw her.

How could a girl so striking tolerate the wretched people her parents had become?

Oh, of course. She couldn’t.

While waiting in the blind for Esther’s release, what I failed to picture was a gray-faced Esther, as if prepped for entombment, an Esther who was recumbent and dry-lipped with iced-over eyes. I had not planned for such a helpless body, erased of the Esther I knew, much like her own mother when the quarantine was announced. The illness had rendered Esther anonymous, and I found it better not to look too closely.

Still I tended to her. I boiled a broth, filtered it through a cone of flannel. With the residue I made little pills for her to suck. From the larder I flayed a choker of cured meat, and when her fevers surged I worked with cloth to keep her face cool and clean.

Esther did not thrive with me huddled over her, staring, dabbing. If she seemed to see me, it was with a scowl, but scowl does not describe a face that shows disappointment and irritation mixed with something that a father might read as his child’s relief. Or maybe he only wants to see relief, and the desire, projected strongly enough, nearly changes the face of the young woman in the bed. I registered the small winces of distaste at my attentions, and, when I was certain Esther was disgusted by my hovering, repelled and annoyed and altogether bothered, I quietly celebrated. When I saw these grimaces I felt more sure that, yes, this was my Esther.
Get away from me
, I could almost hear her say. This was displeasure that I knew. A comfort to see something that I remembered. This was my girl. Finally I grew sure I had brought her home.

After that I draped a woolen wall over the cot, a blanket hanging from a wire, so Esther would not suffer any added distress. No need to punish her with my presence. Esther prefers privacy. I do understand. She deserves what personal space I can provide.

She deserves a little house of her own, too, and maybe when she recovers, and when her mother returns to us, Esther can choose the site herself, so long as it’s not too far from this hut. So long as I can get there easily, even in darkness.