The Flame Alphabet (7 page)

On the night I met Murphy, dinner was abandoned. Perhaps it had never been attempted. Esther slipped into her room, where gelatinous bird sounds flowed out, half-words and astringent syllables that produced a low-grade menace.

I’d braved a conversation with her, counting on her angry silence, which she delivered with force. I asked her, nervously, to limit her speech, with every expectation of getting shouted down, of getting mocked by our skilled and vicious little mistress. She smirked off, sparing me any response, and in the following days she launched a campaign of sonorous gibberish whenever she thought we were in earshot, and that earshot was something harder and harder to escape.

Earshot
. Such a very true word.

My plan was to track my symptoms without appearing too conspicuous. Beneath my coat I buckled my DRE Axis 4 portable vital signs monitor. The tubing had gone yellow, and cabling was exposed through the insulation, but the device held a steady charge for my outings and collected reliable data.

At the corner of Hospring and Woods, where the evergreens hung skeletal and brown, with sick branches that looked burnt by wind, I stopped for a one-mile readout.

A row of privets concealed the single-level houses that ran south along Hospring, and there in the unweeded mulch bed at the roots I saw, for the second time, the strange man from the picnic trail, the redhead who’d threatened the Jews. He was retching into the weeds, giving it his all.

He had seemed daunting when I first saw him off the trail, hulking over the Jewish couple as if he might carve into their backs and eat them. Now he was ill, on his knees.

I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke’s sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was
weakness
, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller’s need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning.

I stood closer to the hedge, tried to see the redhead’s face, thinking that at least he’d hear scuffling and turn to acknowledge me.

When I approached him, a pale cylinder of liquid birthed from his mouth, his lips stretched to allow its passage. A faint hiss followed, almost pretty, like crickets in the trees at night, but then a sour smell filled the air.

He was decorous in his expulsion and it appeared to come at no visible cost to his body. I reasoned that he must vomit with some regularity. He made it look natural, as if his face occasionally needed to void itself.

I turned away as he finished and asked if he needed any help.

The retching stopped.

“Oh, goodness,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.” He coughed, swallowed, arranged his appearance.

This was Murphy’s first lie.

I frisked myself for a tissue I didn’t have.

He brought out a handkerchief, touched it to his mouth, as if he were dabbing a drop of soup from his lips.

“Sorry about that. I thought I was alone. Give me a second.”

He opened a tiny bottle, swished a mouthful, then spit a black mess into the bushes. From a small tin he scooped a grease with his finger, then smeared it inside his mouth, running it around with his tongue. Some flavoring to mask the bile, maybe. I wasn’t sure.

With a spoon he scraped some dirt over his pool of sickness and then stood to kick more mulch over the area.

“It’s actually good for the plants,” he said, and he stuck out his hand.

I managed a laugh.

“Murphy,” he said, and we shook hands.

He didn’t seem to recognize me from the hiking trail.

I gave him a name for myself—
share not your full story
—and we stood there in the cold, looking everywhere but at each other. I needed to get at my gear for a measurement, or else this whole cycle was blown, but I couldn’t perform a half-mile reading in front of him and he failed to produce the body language that would allow us to go our separate ways.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” I finally asked.

He laughed. “Not even close. But at least I’m out of the house.”

He seemed pleased with this answer, but then he noticed the bulge under my coat.

“You’re not all right, are you?”

Murphy smiled at me with believable concern.

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh. Well, how many miles out are you?” he asked.

He tapped the machine beneath my coat, which he could not have known was there.

“From what?”

“Your kids.”

“I have just one.” As I said that I pictured an oversize Esther, towering above Claire and me, bending down to crush us.

“One will do it,” he said.

I’d not discussed the toxicity with a stranger, but the information was too rampant now to pretend I didn’t know what he meant.
Everything is a disclosure
.

Murphy did nothing to disguise his curiosity at my silence.
Curiosity
might be too kind a word.

“Okay, how about this?” he asked.

Murphy opened his coat and flashed some corroded metal, a vital signs kit not unlike my own, strapped to his chest like a bomb. There was something brown and wet on his, though, glistening as if smeared in paste, but I didn’t get a careful look at it before he closed up his coat.

In return I did not similarly open my own coat. I hugged it closer instead.

“I’ll do us a favor then and go first,” he said. “I have four kids. Try to multiply your bullshit into that. I am two miles out. That’s my minimum. Less than that and I’m sure we could bond over some symptoms. Want to?”

I didn’t answer, but I gave him to understand, through a controlled smile, that he was not wrong to confide in me. Perhaps there was something to be learned here.

Listen for a change
, Claire’s old admonition, suddenly seemed useful. She would say it as a joke, mocking the folk wisdom, emphasizing the phrase’s secondary meaning—
if you desire change then first you must listen
—but I think Claire actually believed it. Wisdom would come from outside ourselves. We must keep an ear to the ground.

If that was true, then it was the deep listeners among us, consuming so much more of the venom, who would die first. My indifference to others might end up buying me a little more time.

Murphy and I walked together and I lost track of our direction. He boasted of the insulation he’d installed in his home. The soundproof barriers with R-values above twenty, the speech-blocking baffles, some sediment collectors that were yielding a
not uninteresting powder
, even if the use of this powder was still beyond him.

For some reason it kept falsely testing as salt.

His kids were younger than Esther, and, to hear him tell it, they were compliant to his wishes. Little eager subjects who sat for every experiment he could devise. This whole thing
excited
them, he said, even though it’s hell on us, and I didn’t ask who the rest of the us was.

“If you think about it,” said Murphy, “our kids are the first generation. They are the first with this power. We’re seeing an incredible transition.”

Transition to what, I didn’t ask.

In his house quiet time was nearly all the time, but Murphy said it had stopped mattering and they were worried. He and—I forget his wife’s name, if there really ever was a wife—were beginning to question if there wasn’t something else going on, an undetermined allergy radiating from persons beyond his children, as if the toxin were replicating, and his testing had gone in what he called a very different direction.

Why, for instance, would the sickness endure even if the children were silent?

“Have you given any thought to that, that it isn’t just them?” he wanted to know.

I
had
given thought to that, so much that I’d exhausted myself. To Murphy, in response, I offered the obvious idea that there was no way to reconcile why children’s language should be toxic while the language of adults was not. The acoustics were the same, child, adult, machine. If you taught a chimp to speak, that speech should sicken you, too. How could the source matter? It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes any
sense
.

Murphy scoffed.

“I’m fascinated by people who pout when they can’t find sense and logic, as if it’s not fair when something in nature doesn’t reveal an obvious pattern. It’s a fucking epidemic, and the logic is impenetrable. That’s how it
succeeds
, by being inconsistent and unknowable. Fairness is for toddlers in a goddamn sandbox. No one wants to admit that our machine of understanding is inferior.”

“I’ll admit that, but it’s not malicious to try to understand what’s happening,” I said.

“No, maybe not. But understanding takes its toll. It’s a fucking disease in its own right.”

Murphy brought out the tin of grease, coating the inside of his mouth with another shining scoop of it. It smelled like jam.

He held it out for me to try.

“If we’re going to keep talking, you’re going to want some of this. For protection.”

“What is it?”

“This? It’s child’s play. Some basic shielding. It’s been around for a while. It’s pretty much lost its effectiveness for me, but I don’t want to take any chances. You could rub some on your throat first.”

I thanked him but declined.

“Still waiting for an official solution? Don’t you think it’s time we took matters into our own hands? The doctors are scared, right? Aren’t the doctors scared? That’s what I’m hearing.”

I looked at him, determined to show no sign I’d heard those words before, not so long ago, from Thompson.

“I don’t think we’ll get any insights from them, that’s all,” Murphy said.

More of Thompson’s exact language.

He smiled at me, waited. It was like he was watching me open a present, excited to see my reaction.

Murphy wasn’t Jewish. There was no way he’d have access to a feed from a hole. Except this was certainty based on nothing I could name, a certainty I found I had come to specialize in. I caught myself feeling curiosity about another person’s faith and tried to shut it down. Whatever Murphy believed should not concern me. It would dilute my own ideas, even if presently I had none. I was not supposed to care. I knew that. I knew it.

I just wish that I could have felt it, too.

At the intersection where Nearing dead-ends into the synagogue prison wall, Murphy directed me out of the streetlight and we walked down the unlit causeway toward Blister Field and the electrical tower.

“Are you reading LeBov?” Murphy asked.

“Not so much,” I said. “Which books would be good?”

Murphy looked confused. “LeBov doesn’t write books. Books expire. Books get hacked. No one wants to leave that kind of evidence.”

It seemed important to reveal a kernel of the dilemma, in good faith, to discover Murphy’s strategy. I took my time and tried to fill him in on my fledgling perimeter work, the respite during Esther’s trip to camp. I drew a distinction between the genders, because it seemed obvious to worry about how resistance differed. Claire was always sicker than I was,
always
. And I floated the Jewish question, since the news had already spit out this idea of a chosen affliction, something related to genetics and faith and whether or not your distant relatives thousands of years ago were covered in shit-clotted fur and prone to kill everything in sight.

I suggested, in counterargument to LeBov, that Murphy’s children were not Jewish, were they, and yet apparently they carried the toxic language as well.

Murphy nodded, perhaps too slowly.

“LeBov isn’t
blaming
Jewish children,” he said, carefully. “This isn’t about
blame
. He has profound respect for them. How can you not appreciate that kind of power? His diagnosis is medical, not political. How can we not be curious about where this thing started?”

“I thought you were suggesting that curiosity was pointless.”

“Well, maybe LeBov has a reason. Sometimes you say something unbelievable in order to promote a new idea. You build authority that way, and possibly it’s better to be doubted than believed. It is more productive to be doubted. What good is it when people believe you?”

Reading LeBov would catch me up on things, explained Murphy, but I had to be careful not to be misled. There was too much conflicting information, too many doctored broadsides attributed to him, loaded with unverified ideas. The speech cautions making the rounds, for instance, against
I
statements, against certain rhetoric deemed to be more toxic,
attack sentences
, that sort of thing, were probably
not
LeBov’s cautions. Even if it was possible, said Murphy, that an ultra-restricted language, operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this.

Which meant, what, that the vague worries and rules of someone who might not exist were now being called further into question?

It didn’t help that no one knew much about who LeBov really was.

Or maybe, Murphy speculated, it did help, and that was precisely the point. Maybe the best leaders are the ones we cannot really know. The misinformation coming out of Rochester wasn’t exactly an accident, he felt, but a fairly advanced strategy. They knew exactly what they were doing up there at Forsythe.

“In some ways, misinformation can be more useful at a time like this.”

I could not follow this reasoning.

Word on LeBov, said Murphy, as a for instance, was that he was childless. He was a woman. He was a teenager. Anthony LeBov was two people, a father and son. LeBov had made himself forget the English language, he self-induced aphasia through high dosages of Semantiril, or he took scheduled breaks from listening, reading, all comprehension.