The Flame Alphabet

22

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.

23

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.

24

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.

25

In the Forsythe parking lot I fell from my car and crawled over hot asphalt, circling an endless fleet of red busses, looking for an entrance to the building.

Forsythe was not a government structure with its typical transparent woods, or one of those low, glass laboratory compounds where clear smoke worked like a lens, sharpening the air over the roof. Forsythe was, instead, just a high school, a research lab embedded within the old educational structure that still had the mascot carved in its face. A game cat whose teeth jutted out from the facade. The name of the school was covered now in a swipe of rust.

Some men were waiting at my open car when I realized I had crawled full circle, gone nowhere. They fell on me softly, lifted me into the air as if they’d throw me into the sky and discard me.

Someone grabbed my keys and the taillights of my car squirreled through the nighttime air, then disappeared around a building.

There went everything I owned.

My helper spoke through a plastic mouth fitted over his face, but what he said was so foreign and airless that I cannot here transcribe it.

The message traveled so fast into me that I felt torn open. The phrase, whatever it meant, was like an act of sudden surgery, the kind that cuts the rotted thing from your body, leaving you empty, healed, exquisitely released from pain. That’s all I remember.

I woke inside a light-scorched hallway. A salted object filled my mouth. Someone shoved it deeper, his fist jammed into my face, as if he was trying to hide his whole arm in my body. I breathed through my nose and tried to keep up, but my mouth was too full with the gag of salt.

My escorts held me close and I let their bodies guide me. We moved from hallways to small rooms, waited at doors, then passed through tight corridors until we mounted a steep, narrow staircase and came up on the floor where I would be staying.

I tried to keep my sense of direction throughout this interior maneuvering, but the compass I conjured in my mind had only a single direction, the needle in a palsy over a symbol I didn’t recognize.

A man in a lab coat removed the salt object from my mouth and something tore as he pulled it out.

I felt hands on me, sharp pieces of bodies that stank. Someone with a practiced touch lifted my arms, removed my shirt. He’d done this to many people, I could tell. Disrobed them while they slumped over in a stupor, readied them for some miracle.

I was held in place while something pinched under my arm, deep against the bone. It is hard to know if I made any show of my feelings. I looked down as a syringe pulled from a perforation under my arm, the skin hugging the needle as it retreated.

This was no medicine I had tried before. It brought my eyes halfway shut and I could do nothing to open them again.

The man spoke in that foreign, airless language, his breath oily in my mouth, and this time his phrasings made me cry. I cried in the most childish, open-faced way.

I let myself fall into his arms.

With a thumb jammed between my shoulder blades, he worked a finger from his other hand deep under the bone of my sternum. He had a hand on each side of me and he crouched, readied himself in preparation.

I draped over him, unable to stand.

When my lungs were empty, he squeezed, as if his thumb and finger might meet inside my body. I believe he succeeded.

The sensation came too quickly for me to cry out. My face tightened, a blast of pressure leaking from my eye. He slipped out from under me and I fell.

He left me in a heap on the floor.

The medical procedures at Forsythe, at least those I received in the parking lot and outer hallways of the recovery wing, belonged to no speech fever treatment I knew. Hebraic phrases delivered through a prosthetic mouth, triggering ecstasy, promoting unconsciousness. Perhaps these were the healing phrases Murphy—LeBov, I should say—had mentioned. Then there was the profoundly painful bodywork, the deep-tissue manipulation and extreme compression. Crushing. These practices had not been discussed publicly.

Against the cold wall of my room, in clothes that reeked of my travels, I spoke for a time with Claire. I spoke to her in private tones, words dismantled into grunts, because Claire did not need anything spelled or even sounded out for her, she never did.

Sometimes I could summon my wife’s voice, no matter where she was. Sometimes she would talk back, even if it was only me willing it so.

I found myself arguing for the family, trying to make a case that we needed to stick together, and as I did that, I could see Claire’s face, a stricken look of disbelief on it, a really appalled look that I would even begin to suggest she did not also want that, which of course I agreed to as fully as I could, but I could tell from her face that it was too late, I had cast myself as the one who wanted unity, I had excluded her from this desire, and how dare I do such a thing?

Stick together? She didn’t need to ask. This from the man who drove off without us?

What’s important now, I started to say to her. What’s important now… What’s important is that we …

I pictured Claire waiting for me to say, waiting for me to actually know what was important now. She stood over me.

Dig yourself out of this, she didn’t need to say. Go ahead. Get down on your knees and start digging your way out of this. I’d like to see how far you get. I’ll be right here, watching you disappear into the earth.

26

My days in this northern hole of Rochester were speechless and dark. I saw no sun, never felt the sky darken. No authentic sky prevailed in the Forsythe recovery wing, no windows through which the light might fail.

Ruptured mattresses littered the floor, sleeping bags with the bottoms kicked through. A brittle pillow bore the facial welt of the last patient who slept here.

A man’s work shirt had been chewed, swallowed, spit up in a glaze of bile.

Mesh baggies of hair hung from the ceiling, repelling flies. Possibly the hair attracted them instead.

Most rooms were furnished with wooden chairs, seats scarred by fire. Rope railings hung from the corridor walls. The blind could pull themselves to the bathroom without falling. The blind, the sick, the tired.

These quarters so far I occupied alone, with the exception of a man left too long to spoil in what I came to think of as Room 4. His face was so white, it seemed painted.

It was early December. Year of the sewn-up mouth. The last December of speech. If you were not a child, safely blanketed in quarantine, bleating poison from your little red mouth, you were one of us. But to be one of us was to be something so small and quiet, you may as well have been nothing. If we had last messages, we’d crafted them already, stuffed them in bottles, shoes, shot them out to sea. Words written for no one, never to be read. When pressed for something significant to say, most of us said so little we seemed shy, could not speak the language. We wrote down our names, our dates, the names of our mothers and fathers, the towns we lived in. On notebook paper we sketched pictures. Our last words weren’t even real words.

Claire was wherever they took people like her, still blinking and breathing, camouflaged against a hillside of salt.

Esther was thriving in the world she must have always craved, where the washed-out idiots of preceding generations had finally been banished, rags crammed down their throats. I worried for her without a world of older people to loathe. Now she lived with a population of her own kind, where self-hatred meant you gnashed at whomever you saw. And they you. How much time did Esther have before her own face was touched, before her tongue hardened and grew cold in her mouth?

Oh, of course I did not know where Claire was. I did not know where Esther was. Even as to where I was, I was hardly sure. But my ignorance did not slow my mind from its suspicions, and these held a vivid persuasion all their own.

At Forsythe my sleep was not patterned enough to signal the hour. With no smallwork to perform, the time of day failed to matter. What did matter was so far beyond me, I sometimes could not even see it. But still it hovered out there in dark shapes, however much I wished it gone.

LeBov would find me. He’d hear of my arrival, come get me, bring me into some important fold, if there was a fold. LeBov needed me, if only to practice those black tasks no one else could carry out. I’d let him use me again. Better that than having no use at all.

Rabbi Burke never used the word devil. The universal coinage was worthless, in his view. Words that mask what we don’t know. But he spoke about dangerous people who orbited the moral world, building speed around us, rendering themselves so blurred, they looked gorgeous. Burke spoke of refusing dizziness, latching on to these satellite monsters, of which one must count LeBov, so we could travel at their velocity, see them for what they were.

For now I slept in my sweaty room, ate the briny lobes stuck to my hallway food stand, rested wide awake, venturing into the carpeted hallway only when I needed to pee.

Outside my door stood a wire magazine rack filled with a stash of refreshments, unlabeled glass cylinders of water, cloudy pouches of juice. Whatever I drank was so heavily salted, my mouth became scoured. At the urinal I peed a heavy, white pudding. But I lacked the strength to discharge all of it. Sometimes it sat low in me, an anchoring sediment, as if I were meant to carry this slow water forever.

The bathroom was dank and its lone faucet, protruding from the wall, blew debris-laden air from its nozzle. If liquid rode in this stream, it clung to the sand that blasted out. I held my hands under the nozzle, beneath a wind that scarcely moistened my fingers. I bent to it and swallowed jets of wind so fierce, they knocked me against the back wall of the bathroom.

The air sped through me with such turbine force, I sensed a bird’s violation when its beak opens, wind penetrating every last space inside its body.

When I pictured Claire, she crouched in the woods, caked in mud so the dogs couldn’t smell her. In my wishful thinking, which amounted to all my thinking, Claire had fled the truck, scattered to the tree line, then vanished into the woods. From there she watched our house. In her gown she strained to get a safe look at Esther. She strained and failed. When I pictured this, Esther remained hidden from Claire, would not show herself, and her mother did not relent, crawling through the woods for every advantage of perspective.

No matter how much I wanted to, I could not get Claire to see Esther, even though I should have been in charge of my own imagination. It should have been child’s play to picture these events, but somehow this imagery was blacked out in me. When I moved Esther and Claire together in my mind, a darkness fell and they turned into distant, weak shapes. Even if I could collide these shapes, at that point they were not even people, just blocks of cold darkness that looked nothing like my wife and daughter.

Early in my stay, I discovered a way to access Rabbi Burke, but the method had difficulties.

At some point I woke up to an engine shrieking overhead. It was day, it was night, it was early, it was late. The time was best judged, if it needed to be judged, by how thirsty I was, and now my tongue was as dry as a sock in my mouth.

Above me, jets of smoke poured from a ceiling fixture. I reasoned it to be intentional smoke, a smoke meant for me, the patient, as opposed to exhaust fumes from an accident elsewhere at Forsythe.

Finally they were medicating me so I could get out of there. A nozzle in the ceiling pumping vapors into the recovery wing.

The flow was loud and cold. No matter where I huddled in my room it reached me, pouring cloudy fumes over my face. In the hallway it pumped. In the other rooms, even Room 4, covering in fog the man on the floor.

Sometimes the machinery behind the spout whined and the smoke spewed faster from its hole. When I tried to stop it, thinking perhaps the spigot could be dialed down, I discovered that the cork ceiling panel it protruded from was unusually soft. Soft and easy to remove.

I stood on my chair, ducking the putrid smoke, rotten and icy at its source, and pushed aside the panel. The drop ceiling disguised a tangle of plumbing ducts and power lines, but something else snaked through that space as well: a bright orange cable such as the one that pulsed up from our Jew hole. A shining orange piece of conduit. I’d recognize it anywhere.

I wanted to think that this cable could have been anything. It probably was a coincidence. Plastic orange insulation could not be exclusive to the forest Jews who deployed a Jewish radio. But when I gripped the cable it warmed in my hands, pulsing as if fated with a heartbeat. It gave off the same heat, the same nauseating smell, as the cable of our hut.

To be sure, I checked the other rooms, the hallway. I dragged my chair throughout the recovery wing, pushed aside ceiling panels, and found the orange cable wherever I looked. In Room 4 I stood over the fallen man and found the orange cable buried in his ceiling as well.

When I traced the cable out of the recovery wing, I struck a concrete wall and could follow it no farther. The cable flowed up from somewhere and retreated, never revealing itself from the recovery wing ceiling. It was tucked away. It was traveling elsewhere. To some other Jew’s hut, perhaps. Why it detoured through Forsythe, a building that was once a high school, and not even a Jewish one, was beyond me. Clearly it wasn’t meant to be found.

But I had found it, and now I wanted to listen in. If LeBov could intercept the feed without a listener, then so could I. I’d worked my own orange cable for years, learned a thing or two about the secret Jewish radio.

The wire magazine rack was easy to dismantle. I straightened the curved frame, rotating a small length of wire like the hand of a clock until it snapped off. With this short wire I climbed back on the chair, grabbed the warm meat of the cable, and pierced the shielding until the wire penetrated the cable’s core. A sudden antenna.

On the chair I braced myself, thinking I was bringing together two powerful forces that might knock me to the ground.

But nothing happened. No transmission, no sound.

I’m not sure why I thought there would be. I’d bridged no signal, simply pierced the cable and possibly deferred one channel of the transmission into the air of my room, where it died out inaudibly.

It’s true that the medical smoke briefly faltered in my room when I pierced the orange cable, sputtering from the nozzle, but that might have been a coincidence.

What I needed to do was extend the wire from the orange cable to a grounded point of metal conduction, then parlay the transmission into something that could pass for an audio speaker. Then I’d be able to hear the feed. If there was a feed. If this was a Jewish transmission at all.

From the straightened coils of the magazine rack I snapped off a clutch of longer wires, crimping them onto the short piece that pierced the cable, and in this way I wove a necklace of wire from the ceiling cable to the electrical outlet in the baseboard.

From here I used the final length of wire to bridge the signal into the best point of conductivity I could think of, the most natural audio speaker there is, at least when you have no other radio equipment on hand: the flesh inside of one’s own mouth.

I coiled a tight nest of wire using the last scraps of the magazine rack and stashed it under my tongue. This was elementary antenna work. When I was ready I would feed the wire from the electrical outlet to the nest in my mouth, consummating the transmission. Perhaps then Burke would speak. Burke would make himself known through my mouth. My rabbi could be heard again.

My face was cold, as rough as an animal’s back. LeBov’s ointment last week had bought me some time, softened my palate enough for me to speak in ways I didn’t understand. But that had worn off by now and my face had the buzzing, numb feeling of a sleeping limb. It therefore did not concern me that I was delivering the Jewish voltage to my mouth. My mouth was probably the safest place to test this bit of smallwork.

I sat down on the floor with the conducting wire, gripping the chair leg for support. At this point I should have taken stock, given some last thought to my Esther in the quarantine, Claire barely alive. I should have paid my respects to what little was left of the world I knew. But instead I touched the wire to the metal nest inside my mouth and fell at once into a tremble.

My vision blistered, blackened, and a seizure surged through my body. A darkness came over me, and in a great rush of sound, the Jewish transmission gushing from my face at a shattering volume, I blacked out.

27

This is the prayer that flowed through my mouth in the Forsythe recovery wing. It repeated day and night, even if I slept through it, even if I shut my mouth. It streamed at such a volume that it shook the room. When I sealed my lips the sound of the prayer beat against the backs of my teeth, fought its way out, the wire so alive with the transmission, you could still hear it resonating inside me.

I was scared to move, afraid to disrupt the transmission as it shook through my person, the nest of wire so hot in my mouth, it burned.

But for however many days I hosted the transmission, this prayer was all I could get from the cable, all that played, and the person behind it did not sound like Burke.

I adjusted the wire, shifted the nest in my mouth. To no avail.

I came to know the prayer with the greatest intimacy.

Your word I have buried in my heart.

I grew so alert to its obvious meanings that they sickened me, leading me to secondary, ironic intentions, disguises of rhetoric I would not normally notice. But soon these, too, felt fraudulent and then I returned to the literal meanings, which had gained more force now that I’d spurned them. That, however, did not last, and by the end the words had shucked their meaning entirely and evolved into a language of groaning, beyond interpretation. Or susceptible to the most obvious interpretation of all.

I wish I could report that the prayer flowed from my mouth in the broken, transfixing voice of Rabbi Burke, a voice I longed to hear again. But it did not. A prayer repeated by Burke would be one I could endure, could grow to love, even blasting through my face so hard I couldn’t see.

But this prayer came from my lips in a horrible voice other than Burke’s. The tones of it were weak and scared. It was a thin voice: my own. The voice I used back in the days of speech. The voice that had never worked very well or much and that sometimes repulsed me, even before it sickened anyone else.

Around the burning wire I spoke this prayer in my own voice, and even though it came from me, sounded like me, seemed in fact to be my very own prayer, I could do nothing to make it stop.

I removed the wire. I spit out the nest. I climbed back on the chair and severed the transmission from the wire to the orange cable, replacing the cork panel in the ceiling so the cable could no longer be seen.

But it didn’t matter. The prayer came harder out of my face, even when I hid in the bathroom, even when I nuzzled up to the fallen old man of Room 4. I’d triggered it myself and now this prayer wouldn’t stop for anything.

28

On a warm day in what turned out to be April, I departed the recovery wing of Forsythe Labs. I was woken gently that morning and from a steel door at the bottom step of my lodgings, goggled men helped me inside a light-soaked tunnel.

My guides did not seek to communicate. They maneuvered me with their hands, herding me to the other side.

Above me holes pierced the arched roof, where harsh portions of sky shone through.

When we cleared the tunnel we entered a tube-framed dome, its roof covered by plastic clear enough to give a view of the area. Outside the dome, the broad trees of Rochester hung over us. From the branches grew leaves so fat, they dripped a green fluid onto the roof.

Leaves already in full bloom, grotesque with life. Temperate air and the sun stalking a route impossibly high for the winter months.

I performed some calculations. The season was spring. Spring was well along now. When I arrived here it was December. I had served over four months in recovery, by myself. It was difficult to factor how the time had passed.

The prayer had finally died out in my mouth, I think. But in some ways I never stopped hearing it. Perhaps I’d simply learned to relegate it to the background.

The morning of my release into the research wing was reserved for procedural matters, decontamination. A truck drove through and sprayed me with an air hose so forceful, I clutched into a ball on the dirt until it passed.

A clump of black fur was pressed to my neck with a forceps, and when I buckled with dizziness I seemed to have passed the test.

A man used a tweezers to extract a piece of paper from a medical waste bag. I squirmed away from it, some deep instinct repelling me from reading. From behind me someone gripped my face and again the paper was dangled, twisting in the breeze.

My handlers averted their eyes.

The paper tilted, caught the perfect plane, and for a moment I saw it clearly. It had words on it, the sort I knew and would never forget, and I was forced to look at them. Yet more papers were tweezed from the bag and held before me, one after another. I was out of practice, but I knew I could estrange myself from language, should I encounter it. I could squint away the particulars, fuzz them into nothing.

But part of me was curious. Perhaps this was their only way of telling me something. Perhaps these notes held a message for me.

My interest appeared too late. The last page was retracted, the bag sealed, and then a handler stepped forward, gripping a short needle in his work glove, and jabbed me with it. I looked away as he drew from my thigh the blood they apparently required.

The other tests were routine and I submitted to them patiently. The goggles worn by my handlers were curious: the light was not bright enough to call for them. I realized then that they did not wear goggles to shield their eyes from the sun, but rather to keep themselves from being seen, to hide their eyes. I had seen no other unadorned faces, made no eye contact, heard no speech. The silence of everyone and everything felt pressurized, achieved at some cost I couldn’t calculate.

When my examination was done, someone nudged me from the filthy yurt into a clearing, the Forsythe courtyard.

On top of a perfect circle of grass, a table stood loaded with bread, toasted seeds, a bowl of jam. The rolls were still warm. When I tore one open the steam bathed my face, and in my mouth it was soft and salty, so lovely to taste I nearly wept. On my second roll I spread some of the pale yellow jam and scattered the blackened seeds over it, stuffed the hot mass into my mouth, then looked for something to drink.

Nothing else had been laid out. When a handler passed me I grabbed his arm and made a drinking gesture, but he ducked away. The nimble way he evaded me, not hostile, just effortless and fast, as if he were executing a precisely timed dance move, suggested he had practiced this kind of avoidance before.

I waited while my work order was finalized, shifting along the courtyard every so often to keep the shade, which was terribly cold, from overcoming me. There were others, apparently dragged from a recovery tank somewhere also, likewise encased in oversize pajamas, huddled against themselves inside the great open courtyard. We looked like prisoners staggered in precise intervals so someone, stationed in a high tower, could practice his rifle skills.

In buildings as formidable and cold as this, one expects to look up from a courtyard at cruelly small windows, and see desperate faces pressed to the glass, the urgent signals of people held against their will. Instead the facility wall that gave onto the courtyard below featured broad sheets of transom glass, allowing more sunshine than a building as featureless and leaden as Forsythe would seem to be able to tolerate.

No ashen prisoners crowded behind the glass, only lab-coated observers, standing in full view. The glass shielded an indoor deck of some kind, allowing people to stand and study the doings below.

Before I was taken to my new room, I glimpsed what must have been capturing the interest of those people up in the observation booth: a man under a clear dome in the courtyard, his head encased by bright yellow earphones. A crowd of lab-coated observers stood outside the dome with clipboards, while above them their supervisors surveyed the spectacle.

The man tugged at the earphones, righted himself, and shook his head, trying to tear them free, but they were fastened tight. The observers, near enough to enter the dome and help him, showed no reaction.

With those lemon yellow headphones and his black suiting, the subject looked like a bee trapped in a jar. From his gestures one might conclude that the headgear was burning his ears.

He was the first of many I would see. I would never learn what they called them, since naming of this sort had no application anymore, and anyway could not be shared.

Volunteer, test subject, language martyr: tasked out for experiments to test the toxicity of the languages being devised by people like me.

By the time I was ushered inside, he whimpered silently under the glass, having given up on removing his headphones, which one supposed were transmitting language his body could not bear.

Oh, one supposed this all right. A froth of bubbles clouded from his mouth.

I did not look at his face very carefully, but I would see him again. And again. And again. Within weeks, once I took up my new role, this man’s agony would be my responsibility alone. The voice pumping poison into his body may as well have been my own.

29

On my first day of work in the research wing, in a private office with a view that gave out onto the rock face I would think of as Blank Mountain, I checked the lockers for medical equipment.

I had no access to my car, and no one would retrieve my gear, my samples. My mimed requests were ignored. Or a blanket was tossed over my hands and someone bowed before me, head averted, and squeezed my wrists so tightly I fell.

I got the message. Sign language was restricted unless new forms of it were being tested under controlled circumstances. If you forgot this and brought your hands into gestural action you were subdued. They came out of nowhere and they did not look at you but if you tried out a language, even a silent one, they put a stop to it fast.

In my new office I believed I could resume my work with chemicals, with vapors and mists and smokes, with augmented medicines. Even if LeBov had been Thompson, it didn’t mean that the medical work was a dead end. I’d given some thought to this. LeBov trafficked in long displays of falsity, perfecting his untruths, and I’d been listening to Rabbi Thompson speak from the Jew hole for years. If there was identity subterfuge at work, it did not automatically negate the recommendations of Thompson, whoever he really was.

Other mysteries remained. I had yet to determine what went into LeBov’s speech-enabling grease. I was also unclear about the white collar at the Oliver’s.

But in the low cupboards and drawers, in the cabinets mounted above a faded slate counter, I found no beakers, tubes, or burners. The raw materials for a chemical kit were absent. There were no raw materials for anything, no bulk drugs, no running water or salt bag. The medicine cabinet was empty of medicine, the refrigerator was tilted open, rimed with mold, gutted. Its power line curved around the back, with no sign of an outlet.

A drafting desk stood at the window, and in its drawers I found paper and the makings of a lettering kit. Rubber stamps, ink pads in different colors, and a set of baby sawtooth knives. Alongside these were a clutch of chrome pens, bottles of ink, an engraver’s kit, a set of reference books labeled with a poison symbol, and, most interestingly, a scroll of self-disguising paper—paper with small windows factored in that could be enlarged with a dial—that allowed you to see only the script character you were presently reading, and nothing else, not even the word it belonged to. It broke the act of reading into its littlest parts, keeping understanding at bay.

Smallwork.

Unless you dialed open the window at your peril, this device revealed only part of a letter at a time, and even of that part it revealed so little that you might never guess that this mark on a page was participating in the larger design of an entire letter, which itself joined others in a set of interlocking designs called words, that would coalesce on the page to mean something, and thus bring a reader to his knees. This paper let you forget all that.

I sat down and fiddled with the apparatus, trying it out on whatever text I could find. Such redactions would keep my own work from poisoning me. If I desired, with the self-disguising paper, I could write with the perfect impassive remove that would keep me detached from the very thing I was writing. I’d have full deniability.

Elsewhere in the desk were some retired alphabetical designs, produced perhaps by my predecessor.

I pictured a man with blackened limbs, sitting on the high stool with his stylus. Of course he died of his own work. One day he lets down his guard, forgets his language shield, starts looking through his alphabets, and they poison him.

The work he left behind came stuffed in a binder. Had any of it mattered to anyone at Forsythe, had it somehow transcended the limitations of our current repulsive alphabet, I figure I would have known—it would not be here, we would not be here—so this was failed work. But since it was failed work, I wanted at least not to repeat it, which meant I needed to study it, to understand what went wrong. And that struck me as problematic. Such work would take me days with the self-disguising paper, as if I needed to go thread by thread through a pair of trousers in order to determine that they were wearable.

To examine my predecessor’s work I customized the pinhole device, scissoring a thumbprint-size divot from a page of cardboard, then running that cardboard over the materials inside the binder. And with that I toured through his written work, studying dissected parts, the spatter of letters, drops of what must have been his own blood mottled into the page.

Much of my time in those early days at the script design desk was spent creating inhibitors that would keep me from seeing what I was doing.

After some hours of scrutiny I concluded there was nothing here of any use, just examples from our own alphabet, fattened here and there, rendered so erratic that they looked like the lines of an EKG.

My predecessor was poor at his job. He seemed to have looked at our existing alphabet, decided that nothing was wrong with it, and, in fact, if only its parts were emphasized, bolded, the As fattened, blackened, perhaps, and so on, then all of the sick fakers might finally fall at his feet and praise him.

Or perhaps my predecessor enjoyed sending obviously fatal scripts to the testing grounds. He could watch from his glassed-in perch as the English language quietly picked off test subjects one by one, eating away at everything crucial inside their heads until there was nothing left but mush.

That first day, after studying the examples left to me, I realized what I was meant to do here in my office with no trace of medical equipment: I was meant to test letters, alphabets, possibly engineer a script. I was meant to string together symbols that might be used as code, a new language to outwit the toxicity.

The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?

Visual codes? Except not the ones we know?

Of course LeBov, then Murphy, had said this to me for a reason. And maybe this was it.

Outside, hordes of people sought entrance into Forsythe. A mob of bodies swelled before the gate as if suspended in emulsion. Some had covered their heads. The ones with kerchiefs looked like mummies floating at sea. Others were fitted with masks, dark scarves, some kind of putty that filled their eye sockets.

At the very back of the crowd, keeping their distance from the others, stood a group who had fashioned homemade tackle to defeat language sounds from penetrating their defenses. Headphones reinforced by wood, by metal disk, spread with a cream.

Elsewhere stood those who had dressed for the weather, as if waiting for the train to take them to work. Perhaps for them such defenses were futile, too much bother, an assault on their pride. They were born to language, to speak and to listen and to share what they felt and thought. If such activities would kill them, then so be it. They’d not debase themselves by wearing equipment that didn’t even work.

These people, whose worlds had been suddenly sealed up by a sickness from language, who had been forced to cease all communication with their loved ones, their friends, strangers, and who now stood patiently outside hoping some answer was being devised in here: What might they say to each other if they were suddenly given a language that worked again?

30

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.

31

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.

32

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.

33

At Forsythe there was little news of the outside world, because the outside world had slowed to a freeze. Most of what happened elsewhere happened silently, underground, far enough out of sight that unless you saw it for yourself, it probably happened in your imagination.

What there was to know could be seen on surveillance monitors throughout the suite of leisure byways on the Forsythe laboratory mezzanine.

Footage came in of some settlements overseas. A cinema of the perished. From Denver also came film. Grown men locked under glass in a bleached field. On some rocky coast a houseboat of old people tied off to a dock, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed, shouted into the cold water. The film out of Florida was so finally blackened, no shapes bled through.

On the monitors you could see children on horseback in the Catskills, dragging audio sleds. Faces brilliant and large, the happy people we once were. By now I’d gotten used to the button mouths on grown men, eyes crowded in close as if for warmth. It was too much to see a face so large, a child with feelings that could not be concealed. I preferred the new smallness that better hid the insides of people. Insignificant faces that bore no message. Another house with the lights out.

The strategies of the speechless were obvious. There was the strategy out to sea. The strategy in the mountains. Overseas the strategy was similar, but fire seemed more frequently involved. Films from there were burnt or films were blank or the films only showed water in looping reels that never seemed to end. If this was a catastrophe, many parts of the world stubbornly showed no sign of it.

A project was under way in Montana, copied in the Dakotas, in a sandy stretch of what looked like Utah. Corridors of speech ignited by children would block the passage of the older weaklings. Telephone poles and electrical towers were pressed into service to keep the vocal weapon in play. Speech was routed out loud from every kind of vertical structure, pinged across wilderness coordinates so no space was left silent.

Beneath these channels of speech were the most vicious accumulations of salt.

Too often the footage revealed some badly swaddled survivor caught out in the language. If you watched all night you could see him starve.

Sometimes after working hours a small-faced scientist stood staring up at one of these news monitors, so riveted in his vigil that you had to step around him on your way to the coffee cart.

Finally among the speechless there was the strategy of the tents. In every location tents in circus colors had been erected over the ground, strung up from trees. In line at the cloth doorways of these tents stood the speechless, and one at a time they entered. Five minutes, ten minutes inside, sometimes longer. You didn’t get to see their throes, their fits of expiration. They departed on stretchers, covered in a sheet. Sometimes uncovered. A team of volunteers took the stretchers to a field and rolled them over a hole until the stretchers were light again.

These were the mercy tents. Inside people heard some last song, whatever they chose to dial up, and then down they went to those sounds. A strategy of acoustical expiration. Suicide by language. Mercy was right. The tents were clearly a kindness to those who remained. No one was forced in. On the contrary, people fought to get inside first. And when a funeral field had filled, the mercy tents were struck and dragged away. Audio equipment pulled alongside by wagon. A jukebox of words to die to.

I had to believe that LeBov, if he was even here, wanted us to see what had become of our peers in the world outside.

If I were in line at a mercy tent, it would be Rabbi Burke I’d most want to hear. Burke or something closer to home. A final message from Claire or Esther, if I had any recordings. I would have liked to have heard their voices again.

Of the footage shared with us in the corridor, one only rarely saw evidence of the child quarantines where our children lived. The quarantines had evolved into defended settlements, but it didn’t take much to keep us out. Loudspeakers on poles, broadcasting the famous old speeches, the fairy tales, radio serenades. It was a hissing wash of poison to traverse, and unless you’d rendered yourself deaf, you didn’t get far inside such sound. You stumbled, fell, and probably could not even crawl away. Speech at that volume flashes out deep into the woods, a murmur line. The new maps would be blackened with them.

Some lonesome fathers and mothers tried to penetrate the quarantines, shielding their soaked faces, burrowing in. Individual missions, no doubt. Projects of intimacy. Every so often a dark shape streaked across a field, pierced the sound barrier that blasted an impermeable language to prevent intrusions by the speechless, and disappeared into the darkness of a quarantined neighborhood. What these people did when they got through was not available. How they survived was not available.

Even a camera had not lasted in one of these places for long. Recording devices were discovered and smashed, but that was only a matter of time. Cameras were too obvious. They needed to send not a device inside, but a person, one of their own, and that person would be very young, well trained, and entirely hostile to the locals.

Somewhere at Forsythe, if they knew what they were doing, if this place was being run by someone who was thinking clearly, working to outsmart the dilemma, they were raising their own children. It sounds like a fictional conceit, the idle imaginings of a culture unimpressed by its own reality, but it would have been one of the first ideas to try. And once, as they say, the asset had matured, the asset would be released into the world loaded with enough misinformation to be dangerous. First stop, the quarantines. Project, fucking overthrow. Project coup. This work was a given. Perhaps that seems far-fetched. It actually is far-fetched. Which, in my mind, made it all the more likely. As of last December, the far-fetched had pretty much come nigh.

Children, after all, were the ultimate asset.

This would turn out to be true in ways I could never have predicted.

On the last monitor of the corridor, a lone black-and-white unit that hung at face level, one could sometimes find footage taken from inside the quarantines. When it flickered on it attracted the interest of most of the loitering scientists, who would crowd the set and try to see.

One’s first assumption of a child-run community, supervision-free, calls up wolflike youngsters crawling through dirty hallways, eating each other’s torsos with lazy relish. But the evidence I reviewed presented a subdued crowd. The children, in the footage we had, their faces turned bland by the editor, had set a long table with plates. They raced across a room, bringing supplies to this table, then sat down to eat. But with their features smoothed over they seemed to be spooning food into the blurry holes of their necks.

In an outdoor scene, captured from what seemed to be an upstairs window of a house, a formation of children moved on the street in the regimented patterns of an old-fashioned dance.

At times the children clustered so closely together, it was as if they’d become one body, swaying over the floor. Why they kept huddling so close together was unclear to me. To the unspoken dismay of my colleagues, I would get right up to the monitor so the heat of it bathed my face, and I’d wish I could clear away the fog from the children to see what it was they were feeling as they clustered against each other like that.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

The background of this imagery had been scrubbed, censored. Instead of the hills and trees that loomed behind them, or even the other houses, the scenery had been pixilated. Someone didn’t want us to know where this was, and the children were meant to be shown playing or dancing in the street as though that street was suspended in space. But something gave away their location, and I stopped often when this scene was playing to confirm my suspicion.

On the asphalt, in a pattern at the feet of the children, were the cold mesh bars of shadow that could only have come from a signature electrical tower anchored to a slope not so far away from our old Jewish hole.

I think I knew exactly where those children were, and it was just blocks from my old house.

Even so, what did this mean? It meant nothing. I could not share it, I could not go there, and after watching this loop too many times it began to bore me, even as I sometimes thought the loop kept changing. I knew there was a quarantine in Montrier, because it was forming when I left, and our little town, with its valley on one side and the great hill behind it, offered natural protection. But this footage, from the looks of it, might have been taken years ago.

I wanted to pass it by, duck the dull high monitors, ignore the face-level screen, even if the crowd of scientists suggested there might be new footage streaming through. I wanted to ignore these diversions and move directly to the coffee cart, where the relief and comfort and, if necessary, savagery, were far easier to regulate.

If I got to the coffee cart early enough, I could tap Marta, retreat to one of our rooms for a transaction, then be back at the cart before the last person had been tapped, and there I could tap again and retreat to my room for a second round of intimacy, to wipe up any needs I’d not soothed the first time out.

But on harder days in my office, after watching from the observation deck as my work was placed before some crowd of subjects, who at once fell to fits on the floor, who did not recover even when the offensive material was removed, and who continued in mute throes of agony as I returned to my desk and picked up on yet another dead-end script that was sure to fail, I had needs that sex with Marta only antagonized when the working shift finished. On those evenings, when I passed this corridor through the spotlights shed by the high monitors, and then that white cone of face-level light at the end, I did feel compelled to study this imagery for a familiar landmark, some sign of home, or, and this I hoped for most stupidly, and most desperately, evidence that Esther, older now, meaner, stronger, nicer, I did not know, might have lodged herself among these strange, faceless children and might have decided to place herself in front of the camera, so her father, wherever he was now, might see her and might, if he was any kind of human person, do whatever he possibly could to get her out of there.

34

Weeks passed like this. If LeBov was here, I did not see him.

I did my work and fed the material to the technicians, who came to my office with a bucket to collect what I’d done. That’s what the work I gave them amounted to: slops. In the courtyard men and women fell unconscious, turned into gazeless creatures. Some of them were sick because of alphabets I made. I raised a sparse beard on my face and I learned to stare between the people I saw.

At work I bent yet harder to the task, determined to rule out anything, however archaic or difficult or obscure, that had once let people connect.

Rebus writing, rune writing, pictograms, they all failed.

Administrative script, scripts of love, the scripts used to conceal secrets and deflect attention. All of the specialty languages I tried. I tried the languages of complaint, of apology and denial. I wrote out simple sentences, hiding my own words with the self-disguising paper. By design I wrote sentences filled with errors, sentences afflicted with inconsistencies of tense and tone. Sentences of poor taste, good taste, no conspicuous taste at all. Grammatical rules, rules of usage, rules governing rhythm and silence, these I broke hard. I used a conventional Roman alphabet but spelled everything wrong. Would it matter? I tweezed letters from words, obliterated vowels, used only vowels, repurposed a single vowel, O, to stand in for all of them, to give air to the words, a universal breathiness from a single source. Let them all drink from the fat O. And when O didn’t work I tried the others, to be thorough, but just as O failed, of course the others failed, too. Of course is the operative term here. Not once did I believe that through lettering alone we’d reach people without harm.

Through lettering alone. Good fucking luck.

I tried everything but the Hebrew alphabet. I knew it was poison, too, but I didn’t want this script to cause pain. Lift not the language into the service of bloodshed, Burke had said. Or, these words will open up holes in men. I would not be the person to pass scripts of these symbols into the courtyard, where seizures would occur. But though I never sent down work that explored the Hebrew possibility, I did make latex letters in the Hebrew script that inflated, once I’d sewn up the sutures, into fat, black clouds. Little floating tumors that were language-free, hovering over my desk until I pierced them. And when I did that, they fell into shredded piles and I swept them into a drawer.

Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I re-created what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.

To readers not versed in the code, this presented like pulp. No sense could be had unless the subjects sat down with a Caesar wheel to decipher what I’d done, and we allowed our martyrs no equipment, let alone enough time to drag meaning out of the ultra-cloaked messages before them.

But it didn’t matter. Sense wasn’t what was getting them, the immediate impact of comprehension in the brain. It may have been meaningless, but they were sick regardless, even sicker than before.

The progression of our shared disability defied the going modes of understanding.

So I tried different colored papers, clear papers, walls, cloth, skin. I ran troubleshooting on backgrounds, which interested me, the visual phenomena that stood behind the text in question, to determine how the backgrounds to our written language either support or defeat the toxicity. What kind of air masks a language, and does that air matter?

We lacked the equipment for a smoke machine that might be fitted with a text filter, through which legible typefaces could float out and dissipate in time. A self-eroding writing, a writing that dissolved when it was seen. But I didn’t need to make skywriting to know how we would react to it. With cotton balls I tufted up letters, glued them to cork. I acquired an LED board, rigged it to scroll words, to blink the scripts that I commanded.

These light boards not only failed, they brought on new symptoms, triggering a palsy in our subjects, sometimes rendering them moribund, twitching on the testing-room floor until we unplugged the board.

A writing might be made of air alone, I reasoned, colored air, the brittle air in zero-humidity climates, fur or animal hair that’s been pulverized by mortar or woven into strands, any kind of cloth, any kind of object, or ink alone, ink on paper, ink delivered by means of stylus. It was worrisome how bottomless my project was. For a stylus I defaulted to reed. But I also used pens, pencils, knives, my own finger dipped in pigment, and a lead nail for scratching over glass. The ancient tools were there for me, dragged from some useless museum, no doubt—everything at your disposal, sir, the technicians never said—and I used them, but to use them convinced me further that this direction was doomed.

After every failure I returned to my desk more certain that scripts were finished. No matter how I ornamented them, in the courtyard the result was the same. Months of this confirmation took place, played out against a range of test subjects. The work that I produced, the letters and codes and then the aggregates and compilations of these, sometimes brought to further order and logic by the Forsythe technicians, was nothing but a weapon.

When I looked from the window at the crowd outside Forsythe, clamoring without a sound to be let in, I felt wildly blank, unresponsive. They were desperate for admission but too cautious to riot, too scared, because it’d be so easy to douse them all with speech, to drive them away with a steady broadcast of the simplest words. In days, maybe weeks, they’d be processed through the system, and they’d sit before something I had written, and all I would have to say to them, after all of the effort they went through, was The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

What was compelling them to come here in droves like that, to lay themselves open to such rank poison? What on earth, I wondered, was misleading all of these language martyrs into thinking there was something inside of Forsythe that would deliver them?

35

In his early writings, Thoreau called the alphabet the saddest song. Later in life he would renounce this position and say it produced only dissonant music.

Letters, Montaigne said, are a necessary evil.

But are they? asked Blake, years later. I shall write of the world without them.

I would grow mold on the language, said Pasteur. Except nothing can grow on that cold, dead surface.

Of words Teresa of Avila said, I did not live to erase them all.

They make me sick, said Luther. Yours and yours and yours. Even sometimes my own.

If it can be said, then I am not interested, wrote Schopenhauer.

When told to explain himself, a criminal in Arthur’s court simply pointed at the large embroidered alphabet that hung above the king.

Poets need a new instrument, said Shelley.

If I could take something from the world, said Nietzsche, and take with it even the memory of that thing, so that the world might carry on ever forward with not even the possibility that thing could exist again, it would be the language that sits rotting inside my mouth.

I am a writer, said Picasso. I make my own letters.

Shall I destroy this now, or shall I wait for you to leave the room, said his patron to Kadmos, the reputed inventor of the alphabet.

Kadmos is a fraud, said Wheaton. Said Nestor. Said William James.

Do not read this, warned Plutarch.

Do not read this, warned Cicero.

Do not read this, begged Ovid.

If you value your life.

Bleed a man, and with that vile release spell out his name in the sand, prescribed Hippocrates.

No alphabet but in things, said Williams.

Correction. No alphabet at all.

36

Sometimes an assembly was called, heralded by a long, dissonant bell.

Here the researchers, scientists, administrators, and the animal handlers who worked their tests in the walled-off southern wing could settle into the surgical theater and view the latest work on display, the experiments with comprehension, the medical tests.

Usually I sat through these assemblies inside a deep facial paralysis. The gatherings had a grueling familiarity to them, and to me they smelled of sport and torture.

Onstage we’d see language spoken through every kind of contraption on the mouth: filters, dampeners, horn-shaped protrusions that must have addressed an acoustical toxicity and turned subjects into ragged, costumed clowns, although by the results witnessed at assembly, they did not soothe the acoustical toxicity, but inflamed it instead.

We observed the testing of a whistle language, delivered through the gashed-open faces of mannequins. Subjects could tolerate, and moderately comprehend, the signals, but when they were forced to whistle, employing a rigorous system of codes, they declined rapidly, showing clear signs of toxicity.

Gesture was tested, mostly on the sick, to see how rapidly they would expire if exposed to unceasing and explicit mime.

Again a mannequin was commanded by remote control to produce the behavior.

We saw every kind of semaphore, like a silent and benighted exercise class conducted by the dead, from the arm-waving style, to be viewed at a great distance, to the single finger-sign languages developed on the middle north wing of the lab.

We watched through perforated masks, distributed upon arrival, lest some of the sickening stuff leak into our senses. Of what we saw, we saw as little of it as we could, which was more than enough for me.

With bloody persistence researchers tested how complex a language of touch could really be. Technicians sat with test subjects and, wearing gloves tipped in abrasives, tapped out rudimentary communications, of distress, of commerce, of desire.

The subjects, reclining in their wheeled hospital beds on the dark, oak stage of the theater, generally endured this work, but only at first. And when they did not endure it, when they made profound protests to the material that was clearly undoing them in every significant way, we were marched from our seats, led from the hall, and corralled as usual back to our offices.

Everything I’d seen so far had prepared me to pay as little notice as I might during these mandatory sessions. And this is right about when a new paradigm was presented to us at assembly, and everything changed.

It was late in my stay in the research wing, when I had already ruled out the efficacy of ancient scripts, had sent reams of alphabets downstairs for toxicity testing, only to have them return in the sleeves reserved for failed research, and I had moved on to the equally unpromising grotesqueries of modern script.

It was a morning around that time when the long bell sounded and we took our seats in the surgery. The lights dimmed. Onto the stage came an old man, his head draped in testicle skin. When he rubbed it and blinked into the lights I saw it was merely his face, beset with a terrible, taffy-like droop. I did not want to reflect what sort of experiments, or what sort of life, had led to possessing a face like that. Behind him wheeled a creaky IV cart.

It was pushed by a child, who was tethered to the thing itself.

I would say that a hush fell at the sight of this man, or more correctly at the uncommon sight of a child, especially one who did not seem to be under guard, but a hush had already fallen. We were steeped in hush, drowning in it. The room was sickeningly quiet. I knew nothing of my colleagues, saw almost nothing of their robed and lab-coated bodies, and could detect little from their impassive, gestureless faces. The lack of speech, the absence of language to build us into full people, had turned us into a kind of emotive cattle. Perhaps a raucous inner life produced shattering notes inside us, but with no extraction tool, no language to pry it free and publicize it, even if it was moronic, one sensed that the whole enterprise of consciousness had suddenly lost its way. Without a way to say it, there was no reason to even think it.

Our faces, without the exercise of speech, had atrophied into slack, piggish masks.

Some of us, I would guess, had not spoken in months, more.

That morning a sheet of glass descended from ropes over the stage, walling off the man and the child.

Once they were enclosed, the man looked up, having apparently heard sounds. He studied the ceiling and then, to what seemed like his own astonishment, he began to speak.

There was nothing to hear. All sounds were sealed from us. On the whole it was an unremarkable spectacle, except for when it came to how this feat of nontoxic language exchange was being achieved.

Our jaws were supposed to drop in amazement that an old man could speak. A year ago none of us would have cared. We would have run screaming from what this man had to say. No doubt he’d have trafficked in platitudes, the most killing forms of banality. He’d use speech to tyrannically reaffirm what we all already knew and we’d only be tortured when he spoke. At the very least we’d have been deaf to his message, and even if he lay bleeding at our feet we’d have stepped over him on the way to our group picnic, where we’d feed each other sweaty cubes of honey rolled in salt. Now we sat in our important seats and were meant to marvel over this reinvention of the wheel. Not even the whole wheel, but only a lug nut of it.

And I’ll admit that it was impressive. He spoke with no apparent agony, without the clenched pain and contortions every single one of us expected to see. Put him in a tuxedo, I thought, and he’s almost a gentleman.

On a side-mounted video monitor, the spectacle unfolded in close-up, but what the camera seemed most interested in was not the man or the child, but the apparatus that held the transparent business that I had thought was the man’s IV bag.

Indeed it was a bag of fluid, but it dangled from the little neck of the child, puckering from his skin into the tube.

From this it flowed directly into the man.

Allowing him to speak, one presumed.

A fluid drawn directly from the child.

Like most important solutions throughout history, this one seemed inevitable. Our own dear children, immune to the malady that is killing us all, must have within them a resistance that, with a long enough needle, our best scientists should be able to extract. Finding such a solution was just a matter of time.

Everyone will soon come over to this approach, LeBov had said to me that freezing night back in the neighborhood.

It needn’t cause any trouble. In the spirit of science.

After the assembly, the glass sheet lifted and the man shuffled from the stage. Were we meant to applaud or weep for him? We did neither.

The child had to be carried off, but first they threw a sheet over him. The tube that joined them was severed by one of the technicians. It was too far away for me to determine if this liquid was clear or dark. But it hung in a clump from the severed tube, suggesting viscosity. Working quickly, they squeezed the remaining stuff into a vial. Whatever it was they’d withdrawn from this child, they didn’t want to waste it.

Assemblies after that featured similar spectacles, and this fluid factored as the golden constant. Whenever it appeared, frequently under guard, always sourced by some oddly well-dressed child who seemed styled for his first music recital, we were supposed to leap from our chairs and rush the stage in order to drink the slimy dregs of it from the tube. The child was never the same one, though sometimes the man was. He was a tired specimen and his face, as I’ve said, hung badly off his head. But as we moved into summer and the uncirculated air of Forsythe began to stink of blackened medicines, this man, who early on seemed to have been thieved from the morgue and filled with a last-ditch animating dose of adrenaline, began to look functionally dead, dead in all the measurable ways. When the serum was pumped into him he bled freely from his ear. They began to plan for this in advance, packing gauze on the bad side of his head. But even that darkened quickly and slid sometimes down his face during the presentations.

I suppose it wasn’t so terrible to become a guinea pig during your last days.

It wasn’t hard to piece together what they were showing us. The assemblies never featured text, we were never addressed. If there was sound, it was the kind of dissonant code music that was precisely designed to evoke nothing.

In most of the presentations the subjects were plugged into something, a child, a bag, or a machine offstage, perhaps, suggested by the medical tubes snaking under the curtain.

They clobbered us with the obvious. Okay, I get it, I wanted to say. You’ve struck gold in those kids. But until they released this fluid into our own labs, until they even gave us a fucking operational lab with actual equipment, what were we supposed to do about it, and how impressed was I supposed to be that you needed to be fed by a live connection to a living human child in order to cough out a few unimportant words?

Unplug one of these motherfuckers, I thought. Unplug him from the child and let him run around barking his silly words. Then maybe I’ll be impressed.

37

It happened pretty soon after that.

I had finished work early and was on my way to the entertainment suite. Perhaps I’d stare blankly at some faceless television until the coffee cart opened, at which point I’d drop a tap on my partner. On days like this, Marta offered the most reliable respite from a sense of futility, and with Marta I’d never experience the shame of having confessed frustration or despair, or having confessed a single thing, because we did not speak.

Nothing had come of my projects today, as usual. More slogging, more obviously failed scripts, more redundant work that was doomed in advance. Yet I sat there and wrote the deathly language until my eyes watered with exhaustion and my back ached and I wanted only to tap Marta, then try not to drag her to the consort room, where we’d have our angry physical exchange and she’d stare with admiration, with admiration and awe, at something just beyond my face that I would never understand.

But none of that was to be tonight.

I took my usual route from the office to the mezzanine, following the brown hallways that had been scrubbed of every directional marker and now featured only windowless, oval doors every so often, behind which I never heard anything.

I must have been rounding a corner when a team of technicians walked out of one such room, quietly fell on me, covered my head with something hot, which was tied tightly at my neck, and dragged me into a room.

I was thrust into a darkness made swamp-like by my own breath, which steamed up over my face inside of what seemed like a woolen blanket.

Something heavy was dragged across the room, scraped the floor so violently it shrieked, and then I heard the clicks and manipulations of a machine. A fan switched on and a chill settled through the room.

Inside my hood I pitched my breath down over my chin to keep it from reeking up my space. Whoever the technicians were, they were breathing hard, and I registered a worrisome silence until one of them pressed his weight against me, removed some piece of my clothing, and brought a cool solution that felt like alcohol over my skin.

A sleeve was cut free of my shirt and I felt the tickle of a razor shaving the hairs of my forearm.

They were prepping me to receive an injection, and I waited for the sharp insult of a needle, but it never came.

Throughout my captivity I did not struggle. I went limp, tried to comply. But it was hard to comply when I didn’t know what they wanted me to do.

And so I settled into the dark, felted cocoon they’d made for me, wondering why I’d been singled out for this molestation, and what kind of procedure was in store.

Nothing I’d done seemed to warrant the attention of anyone powerful. Most of my morning had been spent in futile paroxysms of invention, itself too strong a word. The work was a chore, but I forced myself to do it. After a quick breakfast of peaches at my desk, I’d looked into yet more defunct writing, undeciphered and disappeared scripts, scripts that had failed or been abused or misused or just gravely misunderstood.

I moved from Olmec to Meroitic. In Rongorongo I burned letters onto wood. Always throughout the testing of defunct scripts, I paired Roman samples as a control.

Then I stepped away from the visual side of scripting and began to wonder how content figured into the revulsion. Was our aversion to language based on what we said to each other: the cryptic things, the direct things, the disappointing things, the neutral ones? Was it because of what we didn’t say? Had we failed to say or write something that would ensure our survival, and now this failure had grown too massive, become irreversible?

These questions I dodged. They were too big, too hard.

But more came. Was language rich in information, filled with verifiable detail and data, worse than language that lied? Which diction made us sicker? Could abstract language, the kind that skirted anything visual and posited ideas and qualifications over the concrete, be less harmful? Were expressions of love safer than threats?

Everything I produced and sent down to the yard for testing suggested that it was comprehension itself that we could no longer bear.

The days of understanding were over. The question I could not even formulate was this: What was it we were now supposed to do if it was medically impossible to even understand each other without a rapid, ugly sickness taking hold? This was not a disease of language anymore, it was a disease of insight, understanding, knowing.

I thought about all of this as I sat in a Forsythe room with a blanket over my head.

My captors pursued a soundless agenda. The room was chilly and smelled of nothing, and I had a sickening fear that whatever aggression they might have planned against me would be nothing compared to simply being abandoned there to expire under a blanket in a side room no one ever visited.

I resolved to make myself as quiet as possible, to silence my movements and breath in order to determine what was going on. I would listen my way out of this dilemma.

Then someone cleared his throat, unwrapped my hood.

Standing over me, holding the dark blanket, was the redhead LeBov. It looked like someone had vacuumed the extra flesh from his head and body. He didn’t seem older so much as deflated. He smiled, as if our wonderful meeting had been scheduled long ago and now it had finally arrived.

LeBov helped me to a chair, slid me in, then took himself to the other side.

“You’re looking… not so well,” he said.

He was not supposed to be able to speak, and I was not supposed to be able to hear it. We were long past that. My face wasn’t hardened so much as lifeless now, a phantom face where my real face once was.

I cringed as a reflex, at the sight of LeBov’s mouth moving, waiting to feel the hot speech pour over me, tighten me into crippling spasms. I gripped my chair, braced as if a car was about to hit me.

But something else happened instead. Nothing. Like the night in the bushes when Esther marauded through, and LeBov filled my mouth with grease. I still felt the muscled roughness of speech, almost like a smoke too thick to inhale. But instead of a toxicity, it was cold and oily in the air.

I coughed, tried to swallow.

“You’ll get used to it,” LeBov said, bored. “Just keep listening. Let it take hold. It’s fucking weird at first.”

LeBov was right. As he spoke, his speech felt solid in the air. It seemed like I was trying to breathe underwater, and with concentration I could barely do it. I could allow his speech in and it would pose no danger.

I looked at my naked arm, which felt heavy and weak. They must have injected me after all. I wanted to say: But I never felt a needle go in.

“It’s impressive, right?” said LeBov, noticing my amazement. “Those guys are good.”

On my arm a cold bead of blood crawled out of the puncture. I stared at it as if it were a jewel. They’d shot me with something, and now I could speak, could listen again.

My first spoken words in months came out in a cracked whisper.

I said, “Can I ask to what do we owe this conversation?”

LeBov sat back in his chair, looked at me without disguising his excitement.

I found I knew the answer without his help.

“It’s that stuff, right? The stuff you gave the old man up onstage?”

LeBov chuckled. “Yeah. We call it ‘that stuff.’ How do you like it?”

My voice came out weak. It did not sound like me. “So children are fueling this conversation?”

“This very one. Better make it count.”

On the table LeBov had gathered some of my work, a stack of scripts, some of the 3-D models, slabs of stone. He made a show of looking through it, scowling at the sheaths of letters, squinting to communicate his displeasure. He passed through it so rapidly, and with such disdain, he could not possibly have given it the attention it deserved.

“What are you doing with this stuff?” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”

I’d never seen my work exposed like that, cut free of the self-disguising paper. It stunned me that we could spread it out on the table and not retch with illness. My technique was messier than I expected, incoherent in places, letters dropping off pages, failing to come together, breaking into pieces. Imperfections everywhere. I felt ashamed to see it unclothed like that. And yet I wanted to grab the materials from LeBov and rush back to my office. If I could take it all in, if I could actually fucking look at my own work, I might be able to really do something effective.

LeBov flipped through more of it and then pushed it all aside. “Are you serious? Do you honestly believe we haven’t thought of this already? You’re sitting here creating fucking alphabets? How small exactly is your mind?”

I tried not to look at him too closely. His teeth had the quality of fossils.

When I spoke my voice was quieter than his, less convincing.

“It’s the work you seemed to want,” I offered. “There’s no equipment here, nothing. So I’m creating scripts, alphabets. You said yourself that the solution was in scripts, visual codes. You said that.”

“Correction. Murphy said that. Slightly different person. Dead to me now, in any case. Along with his so-called ideas, thank god.”

“Well, how would I know?” I said. “There’s not exactly an open channel of communication. If I could get my gear, I think I could get back to some of the medical stuff.”

“We have real doctors for that. We have people who actually know what they’re doing. Your little purses of smoke, I popped them over my children’s heads to make them laugh. Kids love their own little mushroom cloud. They’re tchotchkes, and they stink. Seriously. They smell awful. That’s probably why your house is still abandoned.”

He checked his watch.

I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to say. This was the first conversation I’d had in months, and the muscles of my face had gone soft.

“Maybe I should give you a tour of the real research wing,” said LeBov. “We should have ‘Bring a Naïve Pretender to Work Day,’ and then I’ll let you check out the pros.”

I did not respond. The antagonistic foreplay had lost its appeal. In my limbs, in my head, I felt the heaviness of what they’d shot me with. It was rough, unrefined, but I wished I could get my hands on it.

I had questions, too. How long did a dosage last? What were the side effects? What exactly was the fucking stuff, and… I didn’t even want to think through this last question, but at what cost comes this serum? What does the extraction do to its… host?

LeBov held up one of my finer pages of cuneiform, some Presargonic panels I’d written about a poisoned body of water in the netherworld. Experimenting with one of my Aesop’s templates.

“Has it occurred to you that these things are useless if people can’t decipher them? You’ve given cuneiform to people who barely read English?”

“Yeah, that did occur to me. Right around the time that you were drawing fluid out of children’s bodies.”

“But you did it anyway? See it through to the end even if it’s obvious?”

“Well, have you stopped to wonder why that very script, which you say they can’t understand, is still making them sick? Isn’t that a little bit curious to you?”

LeBov checked his watch again. He closed his eyes in some exaggerated show of irritation.

“Do you have any confirmation that we’re even showing them your stupid alphabets? Have you verified that?”

I thought of my time on the observation deck, watching the subjects spoil in the heat, get carted off. Wagons of paper were brought to them, unloaded, shoved in front of their eyes, and they pored over it like dutiful patients, scrutinizing it until their vitals flared and someone called a code. This was my work that sickened them, even if I could not see it precisely. It must have been my work they saw. But I knew that I was never on-site confirming that, never actually down there to be sure. Such vigilance hadn’t occurred to me.

It should have been a relief to discover, to even consider, that I had not caused more pain for all of those people.

But I somehow did not feel relieved.

LeBov stood up, pushed my alphabets into the trash. “C’mon,” he said. “We’re going for a walk.”

He helped me up. I didn’t realize I needed it, but I was unsteady, a bit nauseous once I got out of my chair. His hands under my arms felt like metal tongs. We’d be back soon and I’d feel better, LeBov assured me. There was something small he wanted to show me, something he thought might be of interest.

Into the halls of Forsythe we went. We climbed the ramp and came upon the assembly area, but this usually hectic space was empty. Everything was quiet.

We took the stairs to my wing. On the landing we stepped through the side door that brought us to the observation deck, where I’d only ever stood with crowds of other scientists, looking down at the testing below.

Again I saw no one, just the decontamination procedures outside in the courtyard, a man curled up under the harsh ministrations of a hose.

Here I tried to take a step that wasn’t there and I stumbled. LeBov reached for me, but I fell, and for some reason I couldn’t get my hands up in time.

My face smashed undefended against the floor.

I scrambled back up but wobbled, tipped, and fell again. The walls were spinning. Above me stood LeBov, studying me.

“That’s something we’re working on.” LeBov stuck out his hand for me. “There are some balance things we need to tweak.”

I got up without his help but as we walked to the observation deck I held his arm in case I fell again.

We were still alone. Since I’d left that room with LeBov we’d seen not a single person.

“Where is everyone?”

“I don’t care for this place outside of lockdown. The bustle and whatnot. The human contact. I find it distracting. It’s rather nice not to be seen, don’t you think?”

It didn’t really feel nice.

A trickle of blood fell from LeBov’s nose and he caught it with a tissue. Then the tissue blackened, started to drip.

He laughed, his head tipped up to stop the blood, which ran from the tissue in a trail down his wrist, right under his shirtsleeve.

“C’mon,” he said, through a bloody hand, “I want to show you something.”

LeBov’s hands and wrists, I noticed, had been badly burned. That would have been the gel from the listener he stole.

We took a hallway that I’d not seen open before, stepped into a side room that featured a narrow spiral staircase, and then descended several flights until the light from above shrank into a star before disappearing, shutting us in darkness. I hugged the railing, took small steps, and kept my eyes down. Something had scrambled my balance and I felt wrong in the head.

At the bottom of the stairs we went through a double door, moved down further hallways that at first I thought were painted brown, but when I came closer I saw that the walls themselves were glass, pressed dead against sheer cliffs of dirt outside. We were underground, in a basement corridor built into hard-packed earth.

LeBov opened a tall door and we stepped into a space that, at first, seemed entirely empty.

“Welcome home,” he said, and he gestured me inside.

The room had no finished floor, just soil, with stone walls climbing several stories. In the center, lined with benches and some small generators, was a hole. A perimeter of klieg lights dumped a wretched blast of light down its center, so it looked lit from below. And from the mouth of the hole came the prettiest sight: a bouquet of bright orange cables as if retched up from the center of the earth itself.

I commanded myself to show no reaction.

They’d found themselves a Jewish hole, and it looked like they’d been working it hard.

LeBov said, “So what do you think?”

I moved to the rim of the hole, looked in. They’d roughed out scaffolding down there, reinforcing the crumbled sides of the hole with long, warped two-by-eights. A double-wide ladder, black handprints smeared on the rungs, disappeared deep into the pit, and a braid of extension cords passed the orange transmission lines on their way down.

Was there a hut over this hole once, before it became a high school? I looked over at LeBov, who allowed me my scrutiny. What a curious accident that they’d have one of these down here.

I made a point of showing no interest in the orange cables. I gave them no second look, did not stoop over them to even examine if the outlets had been converted to the Jewish standard. These were thicker than the cable in the ceiling of the recovery wing. Thicker, and there were more of them. As far as I was concerned, the cables were hiding in plain sight and it was perfectly normal for fat cables to pour from the earth from some unknown source very far away.

Under a tarp at our feet wriggled something that seemed to want to get out.

“Is that a balloon?” I asked.

LeBov paused, touched the tarp with his boot. “Not yet,” he said.

In the space above the hole they’d carved out a few of the higher floors of the basement, vaulting the room into a huge atrium, but there were no windows.

One wall, however, was devoted to something I was careful not to look at too closely. It was a collection of listeners, perhaps forty of them, nailed to plywood. They differed in size and shape. Some glistened, others were shrunken and dry. They were lobes, or orbs, or limb-like. Most were deep brown in color. A rail at the top of the wall misted some fluid in a cloud that rained down over them, keeping them moist. Beneath each listener trailed a piece of thin, white cabling that joined in a fixture at the bottom of the wall and traveled over to a table covered in a black blanket.

The listeners pulsed generating a low, dark hum. On the top row, in the middle, was my very own listener, shriveled and pale, like an oversize raisin cast in cement.

I turned my back to it.

“Nice hole,” I said.

“Right,” agreed LeBov. “We think so, too.”

I walked back to the door. “Can I return to work now?”

“Well, that’s why I brought you here. What would you think about working here instead?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I enjoy the view from my office. It’s kind of dark in here.”

I imagined this massive space filled with listener’s gel, LeBov and me swimming around in it, trying to strangle each other before we suffocated and sank. It was like a vast, desiccated aquarium, the sort of space whose bottom surface should not be traversable on foot. And then there were the throbbing, brown listeners, like a collection of human livers. I wanted to get out.

I tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it opened and we stepped back into the hallway.

LeBov was casual, as if he was asking me to join his softball team. “So will you help us?” he asked. “It could be an interesting project.”

“I thought you had what you needed. You said that yourself. What you took from me when you left.”

I remembered the punctured listener leaking down his wrists as he tried to wriggle through the hole. Along with his burns, it could have been a cause of the nosebleeds.

“Well, I thought so, too. But I didn’t. Your listener has proven stubborn to us. That’s why we need your help. The original owner of the thing, certain administrative rights, the ability to modify the property in ways we require. Something about you people is a catalyst.”

“Us people. How frustrating for you to have something you don’t control. But I’m not sure I understand. Why don’t you force me?”

LeBov broke into a fit of coughing.

“That’s a really good question,” he said, when he’d recovered. “It’s a pet topic of mine. Our studies show that coercion has a fairly poor track record. Otherwise, of course, we would.”

“Then no, thank you. I do appreciate the offer, though.”

“That’s not the whole story,” said LeBov, and I thought, Too bad. It never is.

“We saw what you did with that wire when you first got here, that little act of ventriloquism. That was of enormous interest to us and that’s why we pulled you out of isolation. You channeled a prayer none of us had heard before.”

“You were watching me?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And we’ve tried to duplicate your work, connecting wires to the mouths of Jews, to mannequins, to anyone, but no one else is conductive like you appear to be. Something about your mouth we’d like to study. And that prayer you were transmitting, that prayer doesn’t even… exist. We can find no record of it. It’s not a real prayer, which confirms to us that there’s something out there that we need to hear more of. There’s a territory of wisdom we don’t own, and that’s troubling. We need to get you connected in here.”

“You want to nail me to your wall and use me as a listener?”

“Well, not if you don’t want to.”

“Good, because I don’t want to.”

LeBov checked his watch.

“Whoops. We’d better get you back.”

This wasn’t the last word on the hole, obviously. LeBov’s mildness on the subject was unnerving. But he didn’t bring it up again and he seemed in a hurry to get rid of me.

On our way back to the spiral staircase, LeBov stopped at a door and looked in the high window.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Take a look,” he said, standing aside.

Inside were children, seated in rows, like in a classroom, except this wasn’t a classroom, it was some kind of hospital ward. The children were drawing, reading. Others stared at a television.

When I saw the medical carts, the tubing, a masked technician bending over one of his subjects, who smiled up at him as the needle was raised, I turned away and walked off. I wanted to get out of there, and I wasn’t waiting for LeBov.

LeBov started laughing. A feminine laugh like a cat getting killed.

He fell into step with me, and we made our way back to the staircase.

“Shall I congratulate you?” I asked.

“You shall not, I fear.”

LeBov did want to be congratulated. He seemed so proud, cheerfully indifferent to my outrage, almost pleased by it.

However they were harvesting their serum should not have mattered to me. But I had questions.

“And the test subjects. Why don’t you give them this serum from the children?”

He laughed. “Test subjects? Are you fucking kidding me? Is that what you actually call them? We wouldn’t waste it on them. It’s too precious, too difficult to, uh, make.”

LeBov narrowed his eyes.

“Well, why are they here?” I asked. “How do you get them to submit to these tests?”

I thought of the endless crowds, clamoring to be let into Forsythe.

“Your mind has been wasted on small questions. They want to be here. It’s called choice. They come from all over and beg to be let in. We have a security issue, really. There are too many of them. If they weren’t so collectively uninspired, so unspeakably”—he paused, searching for the right word—“stupid, they could launch a pretty effective attack on us.”

“Right.”

“Of course the pictures we’ve gathered of their children don’t hurt. A photo of a child is such a strangely powerful tool. Family pictures are funny. Sometimes they are the most boring material on the planet. Literally. There is nothing that causes more agony than someone else’s family photo. I weep with boredom at the sight of these things. They could almost be used as a medicine to cause indifference. And yet, if you show one of those very same photos to a parent who has, for the moment, lost track of that child, or even voluntarily surrendered that child for medical safekeeping on one of our busses, and you suggest, through mime, because language would fucking kill those miserable, anxious parents, that you might know where that child is, uh, presently residing, well then suddenly that photo has turned into what we call here an outstanding piece of leverage. Currency for the mute time. The new money. It’s a pretty straightforward economy.”

On our way up the staircase LeBov’s nose started to bleed again, and as we hurried up the narrow passageway his breath grew wet and ugly. We stopped to rest and he coughed a slurry into his hands, mumbling something. Again I hugged the railing, shutting my eyes against the spinning walls, and followed.

I was released upstairs later that night, disoriented and hungry, as the last protection from the serum fizzed away. I found myself back in the land of the mutes and I was relieved.

Down on the mezzanine I raced to the coffee cart, hoping to find Marta, or anyone. There was no way I would be alone tonight. I would have tapped the old man from the tests if he’d have me. I would have led him to my room, peeled down his robe, and tried whatever I could get away with against his body until he dragged himself from me in exhaustion.

There was no one at the coffee cart. The scientists had paired off already. Tripled off. Gone back to their rooms to nurse their sense of specialness and to marshal every kind of argument for themselves that what they think, what they feel, has any value at all.

I returned to my room, closed the door, and suffered the long, violent seizure of alertness that had come to pass for another night of sleep. Waiting. Thinking. Not sleeping. Never really sleeping.

38

I avoided the observation booth after that. I did not like to join the other scientists for the afternoon stroll, the old thoughtful walk we took with our great brains towering over us, down our serious corridor that ended in glass, where we could watch the good people of Rochester bleed from the mouth, trembling with sobs, while they tried to endure exposure to our work.

Once I knew my scripts were pre-classified as doomed, never even shared in the courtyard, or, if they were, used on the test subjects merely to confirm a previously held certainty, a certainty that written language, no matter how inventively conceived or destroyed and then remade, could not safely be read again for very long by people over a certain age, I began to keep some experiments to myself, substituting credible symbol systems and scripts for the technicians to take away, while concealing anything promising—the project that might deliver me from this facility—beneath a pile in my desk drawer.

I even sent down alphabets that had already been tested.

For the decoy work I faked my way to bedtime. When I did not use letters soaked with ink I used objects, mostly bones. These were brought to me in a wire basket, with a set of burnishing tools, abrasives for sanding, some picks, little chisels, a mallet.

This decoy work could not be too amateur. I thought I could go down to the courtyard myself, in person, and use a small hooked knife to slice a divot of skin from myself, then flick that skin over a subject, a language of the body, piece by piece, until I expired at the table.

Or we could perform suicide by fairy tale. Issue a classic tale to each test subject, each technician, which would include the motherfucker LeBov. We could give a fairy tale to every unnamed person of Forsythe, and then on cue, we could commence to read our little tales.

I knew the fairy tale that I would select for my last obliterating language. I knew it inside and out.

Then we could finally bring an end to this thing, a lovely end, death by reading. How many sentences in would we get? Could we get to the part where the wolf is waiting in the grandmother’s bed, or would we have collapsed in agony already? Would we miss the best part?

It was a matter of choosing which form of failure to ride out to the spectacular, bloody end.

If I produced the decoy scripts fast enough, and had them available for the technicians when they came, I had enough time to think about my real work, and this, inevitably, had to involve a complete rethinking of the Jewish script.

From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.

With this material I fussed throughout the day, doing mock-ups in ink, laying down string for patterning, making textile samples of this lettering and wrapping the material around different lengths of iron rod.

The script, when I erected it on pins and experimented with small jets of air, looked like the folds of a brain.

I staged it in arrangements that might constitute sensible order, the logic of words, but not the sort of words we’d ever use.

It was foolish, maybe, but I wouldn’t be sharing it with just anyone, and if it wasn’t harmful, then this was the work I wanted to do, these were the letters I preferred to be near. The Hebrew letter is like a form of nature. In it is the blueprint for some flower whose name I forget, and if this flower doesn’t exist yet, it will. It is said that the twenty-two Hebrew letters, if laid flat and joined properly, then submitted to the correct curves on a table stabbed with pins, would describe the cardiovascular plan of the human body. And not only that. That was child’s play.

The absolute key was that this letter would, by necessity, need to be orphaned from the flame alphabet, toxic to it and in no way capable of joining its system. No matter what else you could communicate with it, it was imperative that this letter could never indicate the Name, or be part of a word or words that did, however indirectly. It would be the flame alphabet’s bastard letter, and I knew who would be the first to receive it.

When the technicians came for my materials, I swept this work aside, passed them Dravidian syntax instead. When I thought they needed something new, I gave them some Foster, one of the more recent, specialized languages, invented solely to promote doubt and uncertainty.

If I deployed the Hebrew script in the predictable ways, using it in words we already knew, it was still too sickening to use. I had tested enough of it on myself to know. But this only suggested to me that standard forms of communication were off-limits.

I hung my secret Hebrew letter on sticks, enlarging the aperture on the pinhole over sample words. These were words that were not even clearly defined and, to my mind, could not possibly exist. Something of their design, the precise way the details of the letters converged when placed together, fused so quickly into the shape of a toxic emblem that I felt an instant chill of comprehension.

But with this comprehension did not come the crushing. My gag reflex was not triggered. I felt a mild revulsion and that is all.

This is what I wanted. It is what our old poisonous alphabet must look like to an animal. Unpromising, of no interest. If it could not be eaten or fucked, what other use could it possibly have? Ambivalence was a starting point. When I studied the letter, looked at it from every angle, I was indifferent, unmoved. I just did not care. This was, if you’ll accept the phrase, a breakthrough.

I enlarged the pinhole, allowing more language to fill my field of vision. And every day I—I’ve never used or even thought this word before—but I fucking rejoiced, because when I looked at what might be possible with this alphabet, when I spelled with it by severing it to pieces and using its parts, omitting vowels with it and some crucial consonants, and wrote the safer words with it and then deployed those words into word strings that fell just shy of forming sentences, I was not so fully blinded by sickness that I collapsed unconscious in my chair.

I may have retched, I may have felt the room spin off its moorings as if I’d suddenly been launched from my window over the countryside of Rochester, but foul as these symptoms were, they did not of themselves seem killing, which meant the Hebrew letter had more promise than anything I’d ever seen. I may have been repulsed by the script I made with it, but because it did not finally destroy me, I felt that I had the beginnings of a solution.

With this new Hebrew lettering paradigm I began work on a non-alphabet, a system revolving around one symbol that could never be used in a word, a letter that did not even exist yet, a letter whose existence was merely inferred by the other letters. This letter could fluidly receive or reject ornament, be layered or cloaked, snap open and release, and ultimately be totally disguised, but I had yet to complete the instructions, I had not actually loaned this symbol into a vocabulary, and to one of the test subjects it would look and sound too much like the alphabet that already sickened us. I imagined a single-letter alphabet, one you could hold in your hands. Not that I planned to show this thing to just anyone. This I would be keeping to myself. Myself and maybe one other person.

It would require redundancy and nonsense built in, ligatures that expressed merely noise, to soften the harshness of meaning, extend it, disguise it. I saw it as a foam I needed to add to my system, a cloaking agent. I wondered if it could be built into a person’s body, to be activated by touch, by the absence of touch. This, too, must have been tried. We did not precisely understand how to control which symbols were perceived as nonsense, and which ones suddenly came to mean something. In fact, we understood nothing.

When I finished the first prototype, an inflatable letter vacuumed of air so that it looked like a miniature collapsed building, my idea of what had been missing from the Hebrew alphabet all along, I realized that I had inadvertently constructed an artifact that was, in appearance if not in function, very nearly identical to something from our Jewish hut, an item now confiscated. A listener, a Moses Mouth. But smaller. A baby one. New to this life. I’d finally found my smallwork. I could keep something from the motherfuckers who would abuse it.

I put it in my pocket and went out.

39

A few days after my encounter with LeBov, and my first dose of the child chemical that triggered brief fits of speech and illness-free comprehension, I left my office, rounded a corner, and was abruptly ambushed by one of his people. Someone with a covered face hugged me and below my buttock I felt the cold potion flow.

LeBov was waiting for me in the cellar, outside the door to their Jew hole. He was attended by technicians hidden behind goggles, their heads wrapped in flesh-colored rags. Enough strips of foam insulate to cover a large man.

On LeBov’s neck a stained, brown bandage peeled up over a wound, threatening to fall off.

LeBov wanted to know if I had changed my mind, if I’d consider helping them.

The fluid from the injection activated, shooting through me like a rope of electricity. Immediately I felt that this dose of child fluid was different, laced with something harsh, a ballast of amphetamine, a numbing agent. They’d been tampering with it, pushing it through betas.

My speech resources were back. In my face a buzzing commenced, to be relieved only by talking. This medicine didn’t seem to just allow for language, it demanded it.

I looked through the window to the cold, vaulted space where the hole was.

Something pink was tied off to a pole, floating out of sight. It looked like a person hovering in the air.

LeBov asked, “Are you in?”

“You must have others,” I said.

LeBov said, “We do. Nine of them. Foresters. You’ll meet them. They’re a lovely crowd, and your participation, as they say, would round things out nicely.”

Nine of them. And I would make ten. Someone had been doing his reading, a little elementary Jewish procedure, put abroad into the world by our clever elders only to mislead the curious. It astonished me that people expected us to share our holy text, our rules and rituals, with just anyone, or even with each other. Sharing. What a tragic mistake. While the other religions begged for joiners, humping against the resisters until they yielded and swore themselves forever to their principles, we set about repelling them, erecting barriers to belief. It was how I preferred it. And LeBov had taken the bait. The so-called quorum of ten Jews required to ignite proper worship. This rule was one of our better decoys. I marveled at how off track he was. Whoever was running Forsythe thought a Jewish tradition, invented in the first place, was going to assist their decipherment of the transmission, a rigorously difficult act not tied to mystical belief whatsoever.

“You think a minyan is going to help you here?”

LeBov coughed with wretched force, while the technicians kept him from falling. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.

“Well, you tell me,” he said, heaving. “Enlighten me, please. Tell me what will help. I’m at your mercy.”

I looked away from him and said, “I wish you were.”

LeBov waved aside his technicians, but they didn’t leave, only took a step back while continuing to hold him up.

“How about this?” he said to me. “Let’s go take a look at something.”

I paused. LeBov’s show-and-tell had its downside. The last time he’d offered to show me something, it was a room full of children having their essence sucked free into a cup, to be boiled down somewhere into a speech-releasing agent. An essence now forced into my body twice. I didn’t get to see what happened to those children after the fluid was withdrawn, and I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see anything new that this man might have to share, but, despite myself, I was already following him.

We went up one level to a low, ankle-height window. You had to crouch to see out, pressing your face sideways against the cold floor, but this required too much strain for LeBov, so he reclined on the floor with his face at the window and invited me to join him. It was like we were testing a bed together in a department store and the headboard was a window we could see through.

Together we looked into a wet, stone room that held a crowd of people who seemed to be test subjects, potential ones. An endless supply of test subjects seemed to appear at Forsythe, and here was yet another holding tank. This group was no different from those I’d seen, and I was relieved; at least I’d not be shown some gruesome sight today. I knew I should feel pity for these people, but their endless numbers, their compliance, made sympathy difficult. These people today who we saw from the low window apparently had made it through most of the admissions process and were here waiting for their final decontaminating showers.

A jet of water shuddered through the room every so often, and someone stepped up to take his turn, twisting in the spume.

Among this group, huddled against the back wall waiting her turn, was my wife, Claire.

She looked calm, even pleased, as if she was waiting on a bench for the doors to open on a movie she wanted to see.

I tried to animate the months she’d spent since I’d left town, but could not will a picture of the extraordinary narrative that must have unfolded. I could only see her gasping on her back in the woods, trampled by a feral child, or scratching at the door of our house while Esther and her friends barked debilitating language sounds inside. I could not will her image into any functional mode, modes of escape, flight, competence—she had been so ill—such as what might have been required for her to first survive, and then to get all the way to Forsythe.

“So,” said LeBov. “The plot thickens.”

“The plot sucks.”

“Well,” he replied, as if there were some debate.

“Go on,” I said. “This is the part where you spell out the blackmail.”

LeBov took that in, said, “That seems tiring, though. Must we really get into that?”

In the stone room Claire had found a friend to huddle against. He seemed nice, a man with no hair. Not fat now, but probably once fat, because he had too much skin everywhere, skin hanging off him. I guess that meant he’d had trouble finding food. He wore large, women’s glasses and I wondered if he walked around expecting to be killed. He had accepted Claire into his arms as if she were a pet, stroking her hair. Maybe he was protecting her.

“What’d you tell her?” I asked LeBov.

“Well, it didn’t take much. Actually it took no telling. No wonder she married you. She thinks we have Esther in here. I waved a photo at her. Those family photos again. I’m not even sure it was actually a photo of your daughter. Maybe it’s a soft spot for children in general that your wife has?”

I asked, quietly, “And do you have Esther here?”

LeBov smiled. “It’s amazing what people will believe.”

“Would you have us believe nothing?” I said, so softly I hardly heard it myself. I knew I was taking the bait. I couldn’t help it.

He paused, gave it some thought. “Well, I do have that also. I have that right now, with some of my workforce, and I quite enjoy it. I have them believe nothing. And then with people like your wife, I have them believe what I require, which is slightly more than nothing. It’s not even that impressive. Is there anything more basic than having people believe things? It’s an elementary strategy of control, to get people to believe things. There’s not even that much artistry required. You should try it.”

If someone was operating the faucet in the holding tank where Claire waited, I couldn’t see him. One by one the potential test subjects rendered themselves nude before the cold jet of water, brought their speechless bodies into collision with the liquid blast. But it wasn’t strictly water, because what collected in the drain had a soapy, black foam in it, a dark brew of bubbles bearding up on the floor.

Soon it was Claire’s turn. She shed her coat, stepped from her nightgown, and with self-conscious charm flipped her hair back before submitting to the fierce spray.

She was really quite lovely, my wife.

LeBov seemed transfixed by the shower spectacle. His mouth had gone slack on the window, mist flaring over his face.

So he’d indicated to Claire that they had Esther in here, and now Claire thought she might just come in and get her? It was hard to think that Claire’s stubbornness had persisted over these last few months, had not yielded even slightly to the crush of reality. Esther would be too old for their purposes by now. At Forsythe teenagers were on the brink of illness themselves, but there was no way Claire could know that.

Or there was every way Claire could have known that, and more. I should have reminded myself not to think I had some advantage of perspective here. What you are most certain of is what will undo you, had said Rabbi Burke, once long ago. I had scoffed. It sounded like the mantra of a high school teacher who trafficked in homilies that no one believed.

The naked Claire stepped behind a curtain.

“And your plans for her now?”

“She’ll serve as an associate tester for us,” said LeBov, bored. He motioned his technicians over and they helped him up.

I pretended to know what that meant, and LeBov caught me trying to decipher what he’d said.

“You think we don’t rank them?”

“Does it matter what I think?”

“Good point,” he admitted.

He went on to explain that her class of test subjects would not die immediately. Claire would be exposed to materials that had not formally been ruled out, scripts, historical speeches delivered in a spectrum of accents, languages laced into ambient room sounds at subvocal thresholds, even though prospects were …

LeBov did not finish saying what Claire’s prospects were.

“It’s possible she’ll even get to read one of your funny little alphabets. What a nice reunion that will be. Maybe you should encode a message to her? ‘Dear Claire, how are you today? I am fine. This script, by the way, I made it myself! And… it will kill you. Love, Sam.’

“Turns out it’s not too late to apologize after all. What’s the hieroglyph for ‘I’m sorry’? In fact, let’s arrange that,” LeBov said.

He laughed. “Don’t you love closure?”

LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really say what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel the words of an invader. This kind of concealment was supposed to create tension, build mystery. We spoke in code, but no one was listening in, and we no longer knew the original language to which our niceties would be translated back. We were trapped in the code now for good. A language twice removed, stepped on, boiled into a paste, and rubbed into an animal’s corpse.

We returned to the door outside the Forsythe Jew hole.

I thought of Claire covering herself with the robe they dispense to the subjects, moving into the final processing line, waiting with the others. I thought of her standing there missing her daughter, looking strong and indifferent on the outside, but missing her daughter so hugely that she worried it would show, it would show and then she’d do something wrong, something that would only hurt her chances of seeing Esther again, so she braced herself further, hardened her look, erasing all signs of desire, of interest, of anything. Such erasure of one’s appearances, how can it not seep into the interior, even a little bit? What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?

I pictured Claire going to bed tonight. I didn’t even know where the subjects slept, and under what conditions, but that just made it worse. It could not be good, they were not providing comfortable hotel rooms for these people. She’d go to sleep tonight, I thought, and she’d be thinking, Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll go to where the children are, and they’ll show me to my Esther, and then, and then… And maybe Claire would fall asleep before working out those details, because those details could not be worked out. Maybe she’d not be too hard on herself by realizing how little she knew and how little she’d planned ahead for any of this.

I returned more seriously to LeBov’s request that I change work assignments.

“And is one medicated for this work, poking around in that hole?”

LeBov registered this shift in my resistance. I saw the shit in his eyes, the shit that appears when he knows he’s getting his way. It filled his eyes and some of it spread onto his face, and even though he had blackened teeth and a festering wound on his neck and his cough seemed like the worst, scariest cough I’ve ever heard, he beamed with pleasure.

“Sometimes, in theory, you’d be given the serum, but it’s going to depend on some issues surrounding supply. Supply and priority.”

“Well, count me out of these medical trials. I can do my work without speaking.”

“But you can’t,” said LeBov. “Seriously, are these really the conditions that will allow scientific progress, working mutely in a mute room with mute fucks wandering by who can’t tell you what the mute loser down the hall is even doing, or even how what you’ve just done, what you’ve tried to pass off as adequate research, is more mute loser work that is only a setback for everybody? Don’t you find it hard to be productive when you can’t communicate with anyone?”

LeBov paused, pretended to think.

“Oh, right. You’re not productive at all.”

The chemical from the child serum left a taste of berries in my throat.

“I won’t be fed this liquid,” I said.

“Won’t you? Without this liquid you wouldn’t even be able to tell me you don’t care for it. You see the problem, I’m sure.”

I remained silent.

About this liquid, LeBov remarked that the children were not too pleased to part with it. What resulted, after enough of this liquid had been withdrawn—I got no specifics—was a person not quite a child, not quite anything. LeBov said that there might be abilities, or talents, for these children post-procedure, but that these were still, and here he paused, undiscovered.

“Maybe you can write stories for them. They can still read. I mean, we don’t take away their immunity to language. But their comprehension levels are quite low. What we’ve found, though, is that people with very low comprehension levels, people who fail to understand things, did not get sick so readily when the toxicity first hit. If your wife got sick faster than you, it means she understood more. Does that ring a bell? Some pretty smart people died instantly. It was nice. It cleared space for lots of less intelligent people to take over.”

“Can’t you duplicate this liquid in a lab?” I asked. “Make a synthetic version?”

“Have at it,” he said. He winced, gently touched the bandage on his neck.

I wished he meant it. Instead, I was having at something they had all agreed was futile. I didn’t want that anymore.

I asked who else was using this liquid, what the other side effects were.

“What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a LeBov? If you want access, and information that doesn’t even fucking concern you, then do what I’m asking, fix the motherfucker for me. Get some secrets out of that hole before I rip someone’s face off.”

The exertion triggered something in LeBov and he fell to the floor, coughing. Around him crowded his technicians, and by wagon one of them dragged in something covered by a blanket. It wriggled under there, groaned. A wet spot soaked up through the wool.

I thought of Claire waking up tomorrow morning thinking This is the day, stepping over the badly slept bodies of her cohorts, and then getting led down hallways and corridors and through rooms and out, finally, into the sickening light of the courtyard, where she could finally, she just knew, run to Esther and hug her close, and even if they could not speak, couldn’t they be near each other, maybe find a shelter somewhere to enjoy each other’s company in silence? Why, after all, would anyone want to keep Esther from her?

But instead there’d be no children greeting her in the courtyard, just a table and chair, and Claire would take a seat as the technicians approached her with a foil envelope.

What would be inside it? she’d wonder, as the faceless technicians opened the seal and removed the contents, page after page, to place before her eyes, retreating quickly to the safety of their shielded rooms.

Now what could this be? Claire might wonder, picking up the materials.

This is when I agreed to help. I would join the crew at the hole, help them fix the transmission, if I could, and leave them to eavesdrop on messages—the old Jewish services that no longer worked—that were none of their business.

It took some time but we worked out the details, polishing LeBov’s blackmail until it had a disgusting shine to it.

“I’ll need some assurances,” I said.

“Of course you will.”

“Something I can count on.”

“What, Sam, do you want something in writing?”

His smile revealed a slick, black film that had crept all over his teeth.

I didn’t, no. I didn’t want anything in writing ever again.

We were about to part when I asked LeBov a question, something that had been on my mind.

He sat on the floor, breathing through a respirator. The mask fed into a dark wooden box resting in the wagon.

“When I first met you,” I started.

“Memory lane?” LeBov asked, removing his mask. “You want to talk about the old days?” He checked his watch, then signaled to a technician, who appeared to convulse at the signal, folding his body inward as if he’d absorbed a cannonball, like one of those old-fashioned performers.

“When I first met you,” I continued, “you were getting sick in the bushes. Vomiting. You were sick.”

“Oh, the good times.” LeBov took a desperate breath from his mask.

“But were you actually sick? Was that real?”

LeBov dropped the mask, hacked into his towel.

“That’s mirroring. I learned it in fucking first grade. You adopt the behavior of your opponent, then escalate it. Saw it on one of those film strips about insects. If he’s susceptible, you gain his trust and he thinks he’s found an ally for life. Finally someone who suffers like me! A friend! Works pretty well on Jews, who usually think they’re unique. Maybe even in kindergarten I learned that. With Mrs. Krutz. She was a fucking genius, actually. Mrs. Krutz once …”

“You didn’t gain my trust. I was already suspicious of you. I felt sorry for you. But up at Tower Ledge, that couple you were harassing? What did you want from them? What happened to them?”

“Which couple? There were so many.”

I told him which couple. I told him when.

“Oh, I ate them alive, probably. Isn’t that what you think? I cooked those bastards in a sauce. Can you picture that? This is ridiculous. Your questions are the questions of a two-year-old.”

“Did they have a listener that you wanted?”

“I already had their listener. Spent some time alone with it. Punched it into shape. Have you ever punched one? It’s amazing. It’s like punching a baby. You know? I mean it’s just like that. Their listener is nailed to the wall now. A hand-forged copper nail, in case there’s any residual current in it. That part was easy. They kept their listener in a cigar box because, believe it or not, they never went out to tie it off on a cable. Bad Jews. Very bad. They’d stopped going to synagogue. But their boys, those were harder to acquire. Negotiations were more… demanding.”

“Were they your first?”

“My first? My first what? Mother was my first, and then Father. And after that my brother Stewart. They were my first. Then I went back for seconds. Because I was still hungry. Do you think the demon speech began out of nowhere a few months ago and swept through town all of a sudden? A little suburban catastrophe? Is that really what you think? You think I fucking work alone? You think there’s not a human machine the size of the world that didn’t anticipate this transition?”

“You know,” I said, “rhetorical questions, even with your fucking potion, make me sick to my stomach.”

LeBov fell to coughing again, and when he returned the mask to his mouth and continued to cough, the sound of his hacking was rendered hollow, echoing as if from outside the halls of Forsythe, like a secret code in the forest being shared among animals.

40

With LeBov in distress, attended by faceless, hose-wielding technicians, I was released too early back into the facility that afternoon. Before I was escorted away, LeBov started to seize, then yelled something through cupped hands, his hands shaping his cry into a curious acoustical object, as if he’d built a bird from pure sound. I grew suddenly light-headed, and one of the technicians fell to the floor, twitching.

It might have been wiser had they returned me to the holding room and wrapped the blanket over my head until the dosage expired. Instead, I was at large in the halls of Forsythe, where I enjoyed strong minutes of language power before the fluid wore off, a protection that surged into my evening encounter with Marta, which I will relate in a moment. First I hurried back to my office so I could work on the Hebrew letter in full view, without the pinhole device, without the impediment of the self-disguising paper that denied nearly everything of an object. None of those cautions were needed today. These were the working conditions I had craved, and I didn’t want them to go to waste.

It was a poor decision.

At my desk, with my language immunity still juicing through me, I surveyed the whole letter, if that’s even an accurate way to describe it; this wasn’t a letter anymore but a gristled cluster of cells, nearly bone-like, smitten around the rim with hair. It required the moisture and warmth of a hand to activate, at least if I would have my way, and I started to deploy it into communicative service, producing with it a script of a distinctly personal nature. As a complete object, liberated from its concealing medical tape and propped against a plywood backdrop, the letter repulsed me, but I took no interest in my own reaction. My own reaction, my own interpretation, my own feelings, for that matter, held little useful meaning for me.

Whoever said that had been right.

Without language my inner life, if such a phrase indicates anything anymore, was merely anecdotal, hearsay. It was not even that. It was the noisings one might detect if a microphone were held against a stone in the woods. Too much effort is required to divine activity within things like persons. There is a reason this subjective material is trapped inside people and cannot be let out. As such, my thoughts, when I bothered to have them, bored me, especially if I could no longer unleash them into the world with my mouth and effect some kind of response from people, so I ignored them and set to work.

I’d never held a shrunken head, but this was what one must be like: a cold, wrinkled organism submitted to a blistering round of dehydration, then crushed down to alphabet size. There were letters based on body parts, activities, feelings, but this was different. This letter, composed of what was missing or inferred in all the other Hebrew letters, was a species unto itself, and while I worked under the bright shield of the child serum, immune to the sluices of resonance, of comprehension that flowed so jarringly into me, my experimental letter gave off the unmistakable stink of organic matter left too long in the sun.

I pierced it with a needle. I pierced it and then squeezed it, examining the hole with a magnifying glass, but no matter how hard I squeezed, no black fluid beaded up. Not even a puff of dark powder.

Several times I gagged on the fumes, which only confirmed to me that it was nearly ready.

The potential was here for a self-disguising object that might be used as languages once were. Even though I could not assess its toxicity today, since I was protected by the serum, I recalled that under no protection, days ago, I had not been durably sickened. Even without the serum this letter had not wounded me. I had to believe the letter would allow for some elementary, nonfatal communication. Serum or not, I had to think this letter would work.

Such was the flawed reasoning I practiced.

As a test I would embed a message Claire would instantly know, something that could only come from me.

My focus felt cold and clear. I did not ask for the serum that made this work possible; I wished it never existed. Yet since it did exist, since someone had discovered that a child might be siphoned in order for our speech to resume, I could not now deny its merits.

I pictured the children surrendering it through tubes in an underground room at Forsythe. Not just Forsythe, but elsewhere, at facilities in Wisconsin, Denver. I’d lost track of where the important work was being done.

I pictured myself in charge of this extraction. I lacked discipline when it came to the imagination, and here I was in my own mind leading a team, holding down children, some of whom grew distressed during the procedure, withdrawing the essence that protected them from the toxic speech. Withdrawing it so people who mattered—who had tangible communicative aims that they would soon enact, for the benefit of every living person—could ingest it and carry on in the world. This was simply about loaning a resource from a surplus site and shuttling it to an area of deficit.

Not everyone needed to speak. We’d have delegates, elected language users. Public servants.

Resource management involved compromise, but the gains could be so glorious.

For reasons totally other than moral, completely outside of the so-called human implication, a child-fueled communication system was problematic.

I knew that. And yet when my first dosage wore off I felt a skin peel away, and a skin, and another skin, and it was a great loss, a technical, objective sadness. Not my own, but a sadness belonging to the situation. Unprotected, the air was suddenly a salt on the body, and the overhead lights were a salt, and when I moved too quickly I felt a blast of granular salt at every turn.

An anecdotal observation, meant to illustrate how much protection this serum offered, regardless of its source. It was an exquisite thing, and without it we would be walled off from one another forever.

If the serum was high and burning in my blood right now, I would use its defenses to finally tackle my work with all of my faculties in play.

The first time they’d shot me with enough fluid to endure the session with LeBov, but this last time the antidote lasted longer, and I forgot myself.

I finished work and left my office, testing my power in personal whispers as I went, talking to myself out loud. Through the corridors and halls and then on the entertainment byway I walked with a weapon, one that could not hurt me, past my fellow scientists and the technicians and the women in white business attire, some of them dragging bright wagons that carried the same kind of old oak box they used on LeBov.

In the television room the facially distorted children ran as a group into the sea and did not come out.

Out in the hallway nothing was happening on the high monitors. The video feeds of the world offered the same dull exteriors. One feed revealed a man on a scooter whisking down the highway. On another feed a meadow spread out into the distance, disrupted by strange swells. These were shelters, but if people came and went, if people even existed, one saw no evidence of it.

At the child quarantine monitor a small clutch of scientists had gathered, studying the screen. They stood there pretending they were not hoping to catch sight of a child of theirs. They studied the screen as if their interest was merely professional, when in reality they were window-shopping against the glass that held the last possible hope that they might see their children.

I went to the coffee cart and found my sexual partner straightaway, and together we moved quietly back to my quarters, our hands lightly touching.

The ordeals of the day had demanded a trip to the coffee cart. Seeing Claire undergo the shower sequence, prepped to serve inside the facility as a test subject, seeing her endure the decontamination proudly, as if she’d been selected for special service based on her unique abilities, and, further, agreeing to change my work assignment in a few days and begin to help decode the transmissions from the old, abandoned Jewish hole hidden beneath the facility, all of these things led me to the coffee cart, where I felt a sexual engagement was now appropriate.

Tonight with a paralyzed face Marta unzipped my jumpsuit, gathered it up, and placed it folded on the dresser. This was kind of her. I dropped to the bed and watched her undress.

It would have been nice to see Marta undergo the horizontal shower spout where they prep the test subjects, if only because she would handle it gracefully. I felt strongly that it was not a harsh treatment to be sprayed that way, just a forceful one with a specific aim, but it allowed a naked body a particular luminous beauty, absorbing propulsive blasts from the water jets. Marta would have sustained such a treatment nobly, and if I could have watched it facedown against the floor looking through that low window—even if LeBov, wheezing through his blackened teeth, had to join me—I would have gladly done so.

During intercourse with Marta, the last traces of the serum still fizzing in me, I tested the air with a word.

In bed, in the early part of our expressionless exchange, when sexual release seemed so distant as to not even be likely tonight, no matter what techniques were deployed, I spoke by mistake or on purpose, or, more likely, I spoke from a mixed motive that had not been properly examined, and Marta tensed in my arms, tensed and grew cold.

I cannot remember the word I spoke, but I do remember what it felt like to have my hands on Marta when I did it, to feel the violent rejection shake through her body at the release of a single word. I was able to hold her body in my hands and speak, and there was no stronger demonstration of how the acoustically delivered word was simply violating. A disease born straight from the mouth. How she reacted as if I’d pushed a knife into her ribs and then kept pushing, when it was no longer funny, leaning on her with all my weight.

Marta shot from the bed, rolled against the wall, and came to rest panting. From the chair she grabbed her things and hurried into them. Only then did I start to see what might technically be considered a feeling from her. I’d unleashed something, and I wondered, hypothetically, what more words might do, a sentence, several sentences, if I managed to lock the door and bar her exit while I held forth on some topic that might have concerned me, or even addressed the growing bond between us, since we had never once spoken about our relationship.

I had all the power of a child.

As she got dressed and made her way out of my room, Marta looked at me plainly, as if she was curious, in the detached, scientific sense, why I would have any interest in hurting her. I’d seen that face before, and I hadn’t realized it was a face that could be shared, used by more than one person, but it had appeared on Claire, and I had always thought that it was hers alone, to use only on those special occasions when I had disappointed her. But apparently this was a face that Marta had access to as well.

Marta’s unspoken question—why I had caused her harm—was one I would not have been able to answer. There was a small, decisive advantage to the language toxicity here. One did not have to stand there explaining oneself, inventing motives that might make sense to someone. Explanations of any kind, in fact, were simply extinct.

Among the many rhetorical modes that had perished, it was this one I was not sorry to see go.

41

In the days after that, the serum fully discharged from my system, my immunity depleted, I braced myself for assault. I waited to be ambushed, then hauled off and injected with vile stuff. I didn’t just wait for it. I wished for it.

It happened again a few days later.

When my hood came off, a technician was putting drops on LeBov. From a baster he squeezed a pearled fluid over LeBov’s face. It smelled of flowers. LeBov clenched in his chair as if the substance burned. The technicians leaned over him, tilting on their toes to press all their weight into holding him down.

The puncture wound on my arm, where the needle had gone in this time, was rimmed already by a shiny black scab.

To LeBov I said, “Was that really necessary? I’d have come to you willingly. I honor my agreements.”

He stood up, coughing into a towel, and waved me after him. It was my first night of work at the Jewish hole.

But two things happened the night before that need to be related first. Two things, and then I’ll report on my first engagement with the hole.

The night before, I went to the coffee cart and, from behind, tapped Marta, maybe a bit too hard. We’d not been together since I had repelled her from bed with language.

Maybe I struck her on the shoulder. Not a blow to knock Marta down, although it happened to do so, and not a blow to injure her, because that was not a desire I knew about having, even though I had recently caused her pain in pursuit of a broader curiosity, but a firm tap of the sort one delivers to an object to keep it from moving. An anchoring gesture, one might call it. And when I did it Marta buckled to the floor, a surprisingly soft fall, executed with a dancer’s grace.

The scientists at the coffee cart looked down at their fallen colleague. We’d all of us developed, in our time at Forsythe, the remotest style of curiosity. We looked at fallen people with the clinical gaze of someone assessing an old painting. What do have we here? If my colleagues had any reaction, I was grateful that I would not learn what it was.

Marta was not long for a posture of collapse.

When she stood up to join me, showing no distress at having been knocked down, I saw that it wasn’t Marta I had tapped.

It was Claire.

Here was my very own wife in a scientist’s disguise on the grounds of Forsythe. LeBov had kept his promise. He’d brought my sweetheart to me and she was safe.

Poor Claire’s face was small, her hair too thin. I wanted so much to hold her, to take her to the video feed where I thought I’d seen our old neighborhood. But I had an agreement to honor.

I clutched my wife and together we hurried through the Forsythe hallways. At the door to my room the technicians rushed her with the serum and she did not cry out. She was so brave.

I gripped Claire’s hands, forced her to the wall. She couldn’t know what we were doing. I would explain later. LeBov had urged this upon me—when the time comes you must control your wife—and I had agreed.

The injection would need to penetrate Claire’s back. Protocol. I kept her hands from thrashing while the technicians readied the needle. I jammed a knee against her bottom, forcing her to submit.

Poor Claire did not really struggle. She gave me such a trusting look as I restrained her, a shy smile to suggest she would have done anything, anything. And so would I, I tried to silently say back. This was me doing anything right now. I swear I am doing this for you.

When the needle went in, Claire sputtered from the throat, tried to summon a voice that had fallen so slack it could not even moan. Only a drowning sound came out of her.

I know, I wanted to say. I know, Honey. I do. I know.

Inside my room the technicians plugged in a tape recorder and settled the yellow headphones on the desk. Then from a foil bag I knew too well, they retrieved the toxic tapes, the whole sonic archive I’d stashed in the car. The last record of my daughter. Our own Esther’s voice, recorded when I thought that one day I’d need to study her words to figure out why we could not bear them. Oh, one day.

Claire curled up under the sting of the injection, twitched softly on the floor. A technician caught some of the froth that poured out. I stroked her hair, waited for her to open her eyes. It’s all right, I didn’t say.

You could see the child serum start to activate in her, a mineral deficiency erased with one honey-colored syringe, the person brightening again to a world that had been closed to her.

The technicians flashed miniature tools, the instruments of a dentist, a botanist. Fingernail-size mirrors on gleaming, chrome sticks, measuring the moisture in her breath, clamps made of something the color of skin. With a dropper they squirted the same pearled fluid I saw them use on LeBov, but this they squeezed into Claire’s mouth. She sucked the dropper like it was a pacifier.

Claire sat up, rubbing her face, and before I could hold her—she seemed confused and scared now—the technicians pulled me into the hallway. They shut me out of my own room and guarded my door. I’d have to sit out here and wait for Claire to be done. I could picture her inside listening to Esther’s voice and this would have to be enough.

This was because I’d be getting no dose of my own. Only Claire would get to listen to the Esther tapes. That was the deal. Claire could hear her daughter’s voice. Even if her daughter was only reciting lists, Claire could finally listen to her with no ill effects. None. This was all I knew to give her. It was all I had.

The agreement with LeBov was worked out in stages. If things went well with the Jew hole, then my turn was next.

If things went well. What that meant, apparently, was whether or not I could summon LeBov’s wall of slick listeners in tandem, because each listener faltered in the presence of another, and the problem was not just electrical. Get the motherfuckers to work together. Braid the orange cables into some kind of sisterhood, then prize them into the dark brown apertures of the listeners. Sneak the conduit into its appropriate cavity, escalating the detection frequency to x, to n? Put a maximum latch on that cable so Rabbi Zero could be heard, whispering from his Buffalo fortress.

But more important, let them thread any gauge of wire into my mouth. My mouth would no longer be mine. From now on my mouth belonged to them.

We’d hear beyond the rudimentary transmissions of the fraud Rabbi Burke. What a joke. Beyond the hierarchies of middling low-level so-called rabbis on the closer reaches of the radio, into the darker, more exclusive terrain of… whom, whom?

LeBov wouldn’t say.

Because maybe LeBov didn’t fucking know? Because maybe there was nothing to know. There was no one else out there? No unspeakably wise rabbi, Rabbi Zero, issuing guidance beyond the toxicity, advising survivors on some life we are meant to lead after language, since the human sound on our lives had been turned off, and our mouths had been seized, and even our minds, little and dim as they were—I make no argument here—could no longer bear to understand the smallest things?

And if this all worked, it wasn’t just the tapes of my daughter I’d get to enjoy under the spell of the child serum. Claire and I would be allowed to leave Forsythe. The only solution I saw. The only one. I wanted nothing of the feeds or some phantom rabbi, because there was nothing to know. What a fucking joke. Knowing of this kind was only a harm. I would have killed to know less than I did. I wanted to finally be gone from here. Claire and I would be safely escorted somewhere downstate. Maybe they’d put us in one of the red busses, drive us out to the countryside.

Give me four walls of soil and a breathing tube. And a knife. Give me a supply of water. And give me my wife back, you goddamn monsters. Even silent. Return her to me. Then promise you’ll leave us alone.

Unless LeBov was deeply full of shit again, sticking his hand into my whole life and squeezing the pieces until they broke. Because that’s what people named LeBov do. Because restoring the language to a people was only one small piece of his work. Child’s play, I bet. Smallwork is right. In the end it’s too small, isn’t it? Easy enough to shoot everyone with a fluid so they could shout insults at each other again, launch their campaigns of vocal blame. Easy. He would do more than that. LeBov would also erase a belief system, remove love from the air as if it were only an atmospheric contaminant. Love was just a pollutant you could blow clear of a person, right, LeBov? If only you had the proper tools.

I had to believe that LeBov’s ambition extended beyond my imagination, into territories yet more awful. I had to believe this, because it kept coming true. I had to start working harder to imagine the worst.

42

When Claire finished her listening session with Esther’s voice, the technicians monitored her by console until her language immunity expired. The injection worked for an hour at most. I did not get to see her during this withdrawal, but from the hectic procedures outside my room, I could guess they were deflating their equipment, ensuring that their patient could no longer hold a word.

How they test that I don’t know, but I hoped they did it without hurting her.

Claire was in my bed when I was permitted back into my room. The technicians would give us a little time to ourselves now.

I would say that Claire looked like she’d been crying, but everyone looks that way. Faces wrecked and wet, eyes red. Everyone always seems to have just wept their hearts out before rounding a corner and forcing out a fake smile for whomever they saw.

I locked my door and went to her. Under my sheets she was cold, still clothed, stiff in my arms.

She looked at me only briefly, then looked away. Claire seemed stunned, tired.

Perhaps it was too much to let her listen to Esther like that. Perhaps she had heard something—our daughter reaching into the future to disturb us—that made her want to be alone now.

What was it Esther even said in those recordings? Numbers and names, I thought, vocal specimens to flesh out the medical picture. A story or two. Could such a listening regimen be so disturbing? I’d never listened to the tapes myself. By that point it was getting to be too late.

When the child serum wears off the face settles back into lockdown and it doesn’t feel good. Claire’s little face was hard and she looked at me as if I were not her living husband but a frozen exhibit of him that she could study while entertaining an old memory.

It might be easy to presume that, had Claire and I really wanted to that night in my room at Forsythe, we could have spoken. We could have, had we really wanted to, weathered the convulsive speech, the air-shredding toxicity that brought us to our knees.

None of that, it could be argued, should have stopped us. Hardened faces, docked tongues, throats stuffed with bloody wood. We had not seen each other in months. Intimacy overpowers such literal impediments, does it not? Haven’t the great loves conquered far more than this, surpassed difficulties that made a literal language barrier, such as what we suffered, seem trifling?

Yes, I suppose the great loves have done this.

And ours, that night, did not. Our love that night was minor and it was hard to find. Our love could not overcome the medical dilemma. As the night wore on I became more afraid of what Claire would say to me if she could say anything. The barrier tonight was only a relief. Thank god the language had died between us. Some things should go without saying forever.

In bed we groomed and stroked each other, we rubbed each other’s necks. I freed Claire of her clothes and she made of her body a cooperative object.

She was too thin, with a low, sweet bulge in her tummy, the last little part of her to shed fat. Her legs were chalky, dry, as if she’d walked through salt to get here. Should there not have been more evidence of her days and nights, her feelings, the things Claire kept herself from feeling? What was her body for if not to record something so simple as that?

I peeled down my jumpsuit and returned to bed, but Claire took no special notice.

Claire and I had been naked together as a matter of contract for so many years at bedtime that an animal indifference had developed. Perhaps that’s a working definition of love. We were fellow creatures who grazed and fed nearby, who tended the same difficult offspring. We opened our faces in complaint to each other when some injustice showered down, frequently by our own hand, and together we linked arms to squeeze out vocal notes of disapproval whenever something struck us as wrong, which only meant we had not thought of it ourselves.

Such a shared habitat allowed ritual nudity to occur at home, a nudity that often heralded nothing but private fits of sleep on top of the same, vast bed.

When Esther switched from needing us to hating us—perhaps the two are not so different—Claire and I stopped being naked together. This is one of the thousands of coincidences that combine to assemble the skeleton of a marriage. After Esther switched off her feelings—after she instituted delay strategies when it came to demonstrations of love—Claire and I undressed and suited up in private instead, removing our nightwear, if the occasion called for it, only after we’d crawled under the blankets and turned out the light.

Just when there was no reason for it, when our history and intimacy made such shyness preposterous, we’d each discovered shreds of modesty with which to build out our evening endgame.

It had thus been longer than usual since we had been under the light and fully nude together. And as lovely as Claire looked, I felt sorry for her tonight, sorry for her and somewhat ashamed of myself for getting us undressed so quickly.

I took Claire’s hand and rolled over her. Beneath me her body felt cold and long. I tried to fit myself over her in a way that would trigger something. It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

Everywhere people must have been exploring the alternatives; otherwise they’d be sentenced to solitude. But that night Claire and I showed a mutual failure of the imagination. Without speech we were unskilled mimes locked into alien vernaculars, missing every connection, growing slowly angry that the other person could not decode our thoughts.

I would like to say that without language Claire and I exchanged something. But in fact we did not. We simply looked at each other, at most with forced curiosity. The channel that was meant to dilate between us to allow our feelings and thoughts to flow back and forth, well, it didn’t. One witnessed no such channel.

Throughout our endeavors on my bed we remained dutifully mute. We wrestled in much the same way we had when we were erecting the play tent for Esther when she was four, sliding collapsible stilts through a long canvas sleeve, except this time there was no play tent between us, just deflated geometries of air, and we were two old acquaintances grimly determined to extract pleasure from each other. But when our pleasure centers met, they were cold and shielded by brittle walls of hair.

Claire arranged herself on her knees at my side while I settled back and permitted the ministrations that would ready me for our sexual encounter, since that transaction would be the only way to rescue us from our awkward wrestling. Such she did, in rote style, pressing my penis between thumb and forefinger so the top part ballooned angrily and flipped from side to side as she moved her hand.

Her activity was smart, rigorous textbook arousal technique, and she labored with her hand with such determination that her face grew misted in perspiration.

But her manipulations turned my item not toward readiness but to putty. A cold putty that did not stand, but seemed that it would melt into clammy liquid against my leg instead.

When it was clear that her work, tendered so sorrowfully, was not effective and that I would not be able to fulfill my part in the exchange of intimacy, Claire stopped touching me and stared away at the wall.

I was never very good at knowing Claire’s feelings, even, unfortunately, after she’d shared them with me. Somehow I still didn’t understand. Now, in silence, insights into my wife were out of reach entirely.

For the rest of our time together, we lay on the bed listening to each other breathe. I would like to think that this was nice. A peaceful way to reconnect and feel our bond restoring itself. I would like to think that, but I’m afraid I cannot.

When the technicians knocked I was relieved.

At the door Claire and I exchanged a dry, glanceless kiss. The technicians hovered, faces hidden behind gauze.

Before she left I reached into my workbag, pulled out the Hebrew letter, a cold pelt of hairiness, and pressed it into Claire’s hand. My actions I hid from the technicians. I felt like I was handing off a shrunken father. Someone to look after her. The Hebrew letter was the only possession I cared about, and it fit into her hand perfectly. She could hide it there. It would not be discovered.

Perhaps it would read itself to her through her hand as she walked back to her quarters. If my work at the hole went well, we’d be back together soon. Oh, I had no idea how I would activate a wall of listeners I could not understand, especially when, according to LeBov, I had never even properly used my own. Already I was wondering how I could fool the man who seemed to be aware of my thoughts before I even had them.

He’d be ready for any trickery I could devise. He’d have planned for it. He was probably hoping I’d try to deceive him.

I watched Claire’s face when she took the Hebrew letter from me.

Thank you for the gift, she didn’t say. I will look at it later.

And it was only because Claire couldn’t speak that she didn’t say I love you. That was the only reason.

For a moment in the doorway the simple things between us went without saying. You could feel it.

She squeezed the Hebrew letter in her hand and I could almost hear it working. Almost.

He does what we all do, I couldn’t say. Doesn’t he?

Then Claire was gone.

43

One more thing happened that night, but before it did, I fucked Marta again.

After Claire left my room, the Hebrew letter hot in her hand, speaking only to her the more she clutched it, I went back out and found Marta at the cart, spun her around to be sure it was her this time. I ignored the protocol of tapping and brought her back to my room, my bed still destroyed from the visit with Claire.

Marta could not know that. What happened with Claire happened in a different world. And what was fine about Marta was that she concealed her apparatus for caring. She had an expertise at hiding what mattered most.

In my room I experienced a surge of virility. My area was rigid, but it was also numb. Marta worked calmly at it, ferreting the difficulty, stared past my head and labored to ease the issue.

The room fell quiet and for a moment a trickle of wind intruded our space, as if a whip had been cracked and a sharp rope of air snapped past. It was cold and I thought I could taste it. The flavor of berries trickled down the back of my throat. My vision browned and when the completion came down below, the sudden sweetening, a feeling I could very nearly claim as my own, it flashed through my limbs. Flashed, spoiled, faded.

It was finally clear that I did not need a woman for this, or even a person. I needed a knife.

After she surrendered her hold on me, Marta quietly arranged herself on her side, curled into a ball, because from there she could most easily gain satisfaction, provided I supplied the labor. We could face the same direction, prone in my sweaty bed, as if we were traveling to the countryside, waiting for the piece of perfect scenery to explode before our eyes.

This felt fair, and for a while I spent energy on the project, I put time in. I owed something to Marta. Perhaps this was a way I could repay her.

Marta was silent, and I responded with silence of my own, but still I burrowed away behind her, working through repeated waves of exhaustion to deliver my favor. I kept my hands well free of her neck.

Finally Marta clenched, a wave of coldness overcoming her skin. Or perhaps she coughed and swallowed. In any case she scooted forward and made it known that our activity had ended.

When we finally stood to dress, Marta got herself buttoned up, but before she opened the door she turned to me. This was not part of our routine. She never stopped for an encounter like this, and so I looked down.

It was time for me to be shy. Eye contact with Marta felt like more of a betrayal to Claire than anything. I did not want to be seen seeing her.

This is when Marta struck me in the face.

Had I not been looking down, perhaps I could have protected myself from the blow. Or perhaps, had I seen Marta’s fist coming at me, I would have allowed it to travel, just as it did, on its course with my head. Even had I seen it coming, I may have let it through.

I wanted to smile at Marta, and I believe I did, through salty warm blood, but I had fallen to the floor, and she left my room too quickly to notice.

I felt like watching TV before bedtime. My face throbbed. When I touched it, it felt like another man’s face entirely. Perhaps in the TV room I’d fill a bowl with broth, maybe find one of the salted cookies for after. I could stretch out in a chair and watch the children follow orders. Maybe they’d try to walk on water, then drop quietly into the sea and the camera would stay fixed to the water until the last bubbles rose and dissolved into the air and the water fell calm again.

A cold, hacking sound track, precisely applied, could leach the moment of all feeling.

But I never arrived at the TV room, never again saw the blur-faced children taking a pet monkey to the grocery store, and only from very far away did I hear the sound track meant to wash this material of meaning, the noises a giant might make from his chest after he’s been dealt his deathblow.

One must fairly consider that all music is the sound a body makes as it comes to its pretty end. Is there any sound that cannot be traced back to that?

Usually in the public space of Forsythe I had to wade through mesmerized crowds of scientists, but tonight the entertainment corridor was oddly empty.

Down below, in the hallway outside the assembly, a pack of scientists hovered over something, and from the north hallway sprinted a retinue of technicians, who pushed their way through to what turned out to be a lab-coated body sprawled out on the floor.

There’d been an accident. Someone had fallen and was not moving.

The scientists stepped back to let the technicians work. From a white box came a stethoscope, and this was pressed onto the chest of the downed scientist. The victim was a woman, from what I could tell. She had lovely hair.

As the technicians worked to revive her, the scientists who had gathered started to drift away. They were lost in thought, or maybe just lost. Their minds were hollow and they walked away thinking nothing.

I felt a kinship with their indifference. Someone else’s collapse was of no interest to me, either. When you remove the sound from a medical crisis, it feels far less worrisome.

The technicians circled the fallen scientist, lifting her onto a stretcher. With heads down they moved as one and led the woman away. They took their time. The casual pace suggested that their patient hadn’t made it.

A reaction seemed optional.

Now I had the face-level monitor to myself, so I checked in with the outside world to see what the children were up to these days, out in their idyllic quarantine where they could hurl language at each other without consequence.

The video revealed the same sunny street as before, a crowd of children circling something, their heads so close together that, with the distortion painted in by the editor, they seemed to belong to a single, blurred cloud. At their feet was the same imprinted shadow, like graph paper tattooed on the road, even while the scenery behind them had been reduced to snow and noise.

The shadow from the Montrier electrical tower again. My old neighborhood.

None of this concerned me, though. None of this held any interest.

I was about to move off and settle in for more entertaining TV when I saw something in the corner of the frame. A girl sat on the steps to a house. She was alone, her hands melted into the blur where her head was, which meant she was hiding her face in her hands. I saw just her body, and it was the bouncing of her legs that interested me. Her knees were together and both legs bounced as one, bounced and then tilted.

This was curious. I’d seen this before.

On the steps, this girl, doing something very particular with her legs.

Still, this meant nothing. Still it could have been any kid doing that. Wishful thinking could be vicious. Why should I be impressed? I was not impressed.

Then I saw the shoes: black Mary Janes scuffed to hell, and the sweet little head of hers, even through the blurring, most certainly more long than round, very much unmistakably tubelike in dimension, this poor girl, despite the scarf she wrapped around her neck, the square spectacles. Despite everything. The poor thing. She really did have such an unusual head.

My little Esther sitting alone on the steps.

I’m coming for you, Darling, I didn’t say. I’m coming to get you.

44

The next morning, after being medically ambushed and stuck with a syringe of the child serum, I descended the ramp with LeBov to the room with the Jewish hole in it, where I’d begin my first day of work.

Behind LeBov trailed a retinue of technicians, faces hidden in foam, which made them look not unlike the children on television, sprung to real life and engraved on the air, reeking of illness. In two wagons the technicians pulled a piece of gear that produced a long, low moan. Through the thin metal bars of one of these things I thought I saw the bright glowing eyes of an animal. Well, perhaps it was a small person. Something looked at me from the cage.

LeBov moved with the careful steps of an old man, but he did so under his own power. Whatever was wrong with him, he seemed proud. I found it to be an interesting strategy. When he stopped, his entourage stopped, hanging behind with their tall foam heads tilted down, as if they were shy.

“We were all sorry to learn about your wife,” LeBov wheezed.

“Sorry what?” I said. For some reason I pictured not Claire when he said this, but Esther, sitting on those steps, smoothing down her clothing, as if someone might soon approach and ask her to dance. Her legs swinging back and forth. I so wished Claire had seen this with me last night.

LeBov looked at me. “About what happened. I figured you were there.”

I must have been staring at him because he retreated facially, blanked out his features.

“I promised you her safekeeping and I wanted to let you know I didn’t do it.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“We’re not sure what happened. Perhaps it was an allergic reaction to the serum, perhaps she was already sick. Or your daughter’s voice penetrated the immunity. This is still happening when the emotional connection is high. We don’t know. Or somehow someone broke protocol and rushed her with speech. Whoever it was who spoke to her, it hurt her.”

Whoever it was.

I asked, “Hurt her how?”

I pictured Claire leaving my room, the Hebrew letter nearly boiling in her hand, then making it out to the assembly area where something went wrong, and she collapsed.

The scientists circled her, probably wished they could undress her and cut her open. No one noticed her fist clenched over the Hebrew letter that might have poisoned her. Then came the technicians and their paddle, their dun-colored tools of revival, and the scientists backed away. That was Claire they worked on. While I was upstairs looking at our old neighborhood on the video monitor, catching sight of our shared daughter on the steps.

Was that the word for it? We shared a daughter? I’d not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to share Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.

Only true in a glorious world of hypotheticals. The real truth was that neither of us had Esther and in the end we shared nothing.

Outside the door to the Jewish hole, LeBov bent over a wagon, attended to the piece of gear. He rummaged in the wooden box, got his arm in there as far as his shoulder.

Then he fed a length of clear piping into his mouth and spoke, his lips stretched bloodless.

LeBov’s words came out watery, leaking around the pipe.

“I’m not going to tell you that she’s going to be fine. That I won’t do.”

I said, “And yet you’ll do almost anything else. You’ve suddenly drawn a line?”

I pictured Claire alone on a hospital bed, ignored by a man who had a cushion for a face. If they confiscated the letter, the corpse of it, there was no question they could track it back to me. If they cared to.

That letter, sucked free of meaning, its story discharged, probably looked exactly like me now. Decayed to resemble its miserable maker. We make the language in our own image and the language repulses us. A damning piece of evidence, as if I’d torn off my face, shrunken it in fire, then sent it out to harm the woman I was supposed to love.

“You’re doing everything you can for her, right?” I said. “You’re going to tell me that there’s nothing you won’t do. All the expertise of this shithole is being brought to bear on it, and now you’re going to make her better, right?”

A dark froth rose in the pipe that fed into LeBov’s mouth. Whether it came from his own nasty interior or the little medical wagon, I wasn’t sure, but it filled the pipe and seemed to churn in there.

The chemical reaction did not suit him. LeBov’s eyes fluttered, rolled back in his head. He reached for me, to hold on to something, but I stepped back and he fell.

I distanced myself further to allow the technicians access to the man. They’d want to perform their intervention now. Usually they were so quick to come to LeBov’s aid. But the technicians hovered and, if anything, pulled farther away, their pillowed faces revealing nothing.

Perhaps they were under other instructions now.

I yelled at them and they tilted, as if they could dodge what I said. Without faces it felt absurd to shout at them, like scolding a stuffed animal. It was clear that they would not be helping their leader.

I crouched over LeBov, pulled the tube from his mouth. It was jammed in there pretty badly and he wheezed when it finally popped free.

Some dark spit clung to his lips, seemed to harden as he breathed on it.

“You should never have taken our listener,” I said. “It didn’t belong to you. And you shouldn’t have pierced it. That was a big mistake. A really big mistake. That’s why you’re sick. You’re not supposed to get that stuff on you. Perhaps you’re going to die again.”

“That’s not it. It’s the Child’s Play, the side effects.”

“Right.”

“That’s what we call it.”

“Who is we?”

“The other LeBovs.”

LeBov seemed sad to have admitted this to me. The other LeBovs. From the wagon came an animal growl, so throaty and plain it sounded like a person.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

I pictured a room full of redheads eating from the same animal carcass, licking each other’s bloody faces. The LeBovs.

“One too many, maybe.”

It worried me to see LeBov so scared, ill.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you feel sorry for yourself.”

“There is no myself. I bargained out of it.”

“In return for what?” I asked.

“Not this,” he said. “I definitely didn’t think it would be this.”

For a moment LeBov couldn’t breathe and his eyes bulged with panic. He grabbed his throat and seemed to choke himself, which somehow restored his air.

“Why don’t you stop taking the serum if it’s making you so sick,” I said.

“I don’t care for silence. It’s not my specialty to keep my mouth shut.”

“Then you’ll never fit in. I think silence is headed your way.”

LeBov endeavored a long blink that did not make things look good for him.

“Don’t forget that you’ve made a commitment,” he whispered, eyes still closed.

“That’s true.”

I palmed his sick face, leaned into it, as if a man had popped through the earth and I was stuffing him back into his hole, where he belonged. If the floor had been soft, I might have pushed LeBov through. His head seemed to give a little as I pressed on it.

LeBov tried to look at me, but his open eye would not obey. His eye followed, with apparent interest, some invisible object in the air. I’d seen such detachment before, when Claire collapsed in the field, a rapturous commitment to an invisible world, and I was starting to covet it.

I said, “I always keep my promises,” wondering if I ever had.

Just not to you, I didn’t say. Not to you, or your kind. And if you will hijack my body with a chemical in order for us to speak, then I will not be accountable for anything I say. Whatever words I said to you were borrowed. Brought to you by some child lying listless somewhere. One of the siphoned ones. You sponsored what I said. Those words are on you.

I left him there. If LeBov was breathing, it was only mildly. He seemed unsure that breathing would help. On the fence about it. Ready to stop trying, maybe pursue other avenues. Weighing his options. I envied the attitude. At least he was at peace with the coming coldness.

From one of the wagons came a low, soft growl, the unmistakable click of teeth. The technicians bobbed in place like rifle targets.

45

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 nth 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.