The Flame Alphabet

46

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, of course. She couldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

47

Not so far off in the sky, the odd bird tours the valley. Birds seem to prefer the speechless world. If you lived here you’d have to be buried alive not to notice the superior joy they demonstrate overhead. Victory laps inscribed in the air. Rubbing it in. Admiring the way their shadows crawl over the salt below. Perhaps you require no convincing. Perhaps such sights are available where you live as well, and you, too, look from your shelter at this airborne gloating.

When I picture you examining this account, dangling each decaying page aloft with a tweezers, I wonder if you are alone, barricaded from someone with whom you once spoke freely. Are you reading this with assistance, an inhibitor cutting into the folds of your mouth? Does some cold, salted tonic sluice through your blood to give you shield, if briefly? Or is your protection something more, shall we say, bitter and problematic, achieved at a greater cost?

Perhaps a little one fell down in a great black swoon after you sucked free his assets, and the transaction has left you, what is the word, troubled.

Is there salt where you are, too? Just so much of it everywhere? Can you reckon that it is really the residue of everything we ever said, piled now in soft white mounds? It seems far too pretty to only be our spoils.

I would like to question you on your symptoms, the path you navigated to language, the choices you’ve faced. But we will never speak, as I will be dead by the time you read this. We do not get to survey the people of the future, who laugh at how little we knew, how poorly we felt things, how softly we knocked at the door that protected all the best remedies. You are monstrous and unreal to me now, it is important that you know that. You are my reader but I cannot reach into your face and pull out your secrets. Perhaps you live in a time when someone else’s harm is not bound up with your pursuit of words and you traffic easily with the acoustical weapon, the clustered scripts. Congratulations, if so. I remember those days, too. It is my true wish that you enjoy yourself.

But enjoyment is not one of the choices we have here today.

Darkness soaks these woods by afternoon, browning in so low. One must be careful in this season not to be caught past noon on too remote an errand in the woods, because after sunset a return home is difficult, even for me, who knows these trails by heart. This darkness is different. It interferes more finally with one’s passage through the woods, and one must halt all activity until the sun boils it off, if only partially, in the early morning.

I will admit that I supply some of this darkness myself, through failed eyesight, draining health. My pursuit of language immunity has come with its own dear little cost. A certain serum I use has not agreed with me. Some mornings I discover my yellowed bandages, smitten in dirt and dew, and for a minute I think there is another one like me. I see these bandages strewn around my hut like tufts of rancid snow and think I am not alone until I realize that, oh, yes, these bandages are my own, aren’t they, and I tore them off last night because they burned. I could not bear the hot wadding on my skin.

As such, I cannot accurately make a statement about some objective loss of light. I have no device to record the expiration of daylight I suspect. I’d not be able to supply evidence for such a decline, my faculties of detection are compromised, and in any case I am not a specialist on the atmosphere.

What errands I have are few. Such freedom to come and go might have been useful back when people spoke, but now it is only a bitter advantage. What an archive of hindsight I’ve grown fat on, spoiled ideas and second thoughts ripening in my body now for no one, the putrid material. I’d like a more physical way to extract all of it, memories, too, a surgery I could perform to finally release it, burn it down.

It is not clear why the ideas are put in us if we only wish they could be removed again.

Instead of errands to kill the day, I can sit in my hut and wait for my wife’s arrival, listening at the old Jew hole for the sounds of her crawling this way.

Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.

But this waiting has its challenges. It is too easy to imagine that one hears a person struggling on her stomach through a narrow tunnel, from Forsythe to here, and the suspense is difficult. When I cannot endure it, I hike up to the vacant town that has stored enough untouched goods to sustain me for years. Some of the food was looted, but only some, as if when people first stormed through, arming their new life of solitude, they found they were not especially hungry.

So for errands there is the gathering of food and tools even as the surplus spoils in my cold locker, plunder spilling down the hillside. Mostly I grab what I already have. I hoard. I stockpile. I do what solitary men in the speechless world must do.

How important that sounds. I mean only to say that the published etiquette for life in these times is slim. A code of conduct for people like me is unavailable, and if it were, it would damage one’s body to read it.

What is it called when a dark, hard magnet has been run over one’s moral compass so many times that the needle of the compass quivers so badly that it cannot be read?

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.

I forget who said it and I no longer care.

I suppose with my time I could farm and hunt and subsist through harvest, but all of those food products on shelves in empty stores off the quiet freeway make such labors unnecessary.

As to hunting, when I consider it now, there is a certain version I have practiced. I had not really named that form of smallwork. Hunting. But if hunting means the careful tracking and subsequent acquisition of a living resource, for whatever reasons, then, yes, I have hunted.

Just the few times.

48

When I monitor the quarantine across the river, what I see is not so much anymore. The child quarantines here at this final New York—and staggered in settlements up and down the coast, even as the salt rises—have developed an orderly form of dispatch when they need to eject their own, young citizens of eroded immunity, tongues hard in their mouths, newly pained by language.

All of them will age, and all of them will have to leave, and then my town, my house, will be free of their kind, the easy-speaking ones. I cannot fathom another outcome.

Now the little gate opens and out they come, dazed and already ill. No doubt they will not live long, unless they can quickly adapt to the laws of the speechless world.

Hide yourself away, is one of these laws.

And, If you see someone, goes another one, exercise the necessary evasions.

The laws apply because I am not the only person hidden in these hills watching the exits. I am not the only one with an interest in these young people.

There are others like me, but they are not really like me. Escorts, predators, parents. So many different words might apply to them.

I’ve seen them rush to meet the exiles, using a mixed weaponry of kindness and cruelty. A gracious welcome, the offer of a blanket, a comfortable ride in a cart. Or instead a quick capture, a stifling, the enclosure of rope, an abduction. From my distance these transactions play out slowly, without feeling. They suffer from problems of believability.

The rescuers move alone or in groups, faces covered, and most often their lure is food, which our little speakers have had trouble securing. The exiles hardly ever resist. They get so hungry! They are still children, really, and they are sick, but now they are alone. So when the welcome wagon comes, they climb in.

Off they go with their new families to a life without words somewhere west of here. That is how they compass, usually, west, then south. Probably they go to Wheeling, Marion, Danville. I’ve been too bored to follow them beyond Albert Farm. They almost never drag back this way, into the salt, where nothing is good for anything and nobody would ever think to set up a life.

Perhaps the mute, gazeless family life in underground berms, where even eye contact must be kept in check for its lurches into nuance and meaning, is more pleasant in the sunshine of our warmer towns. Perhaps the salt is finer there, easier to sweep away.

Now that Esther has come to me, or I to her, as the case was, fighting off some rescuer waving sugary hunks of bread at her, then dragging her by spoiled light through the marsh, over the river, and up to the hut, I have little reason to keep watch of the town gate. I’ve gotten what I came for. My daughter is back in my custody. But sometimes I sit under cover in any case, hills away, watching these exits through binoculars. It’s a habit of years.

Over time people either gave up on the children harbored within, or the children came out of their own accord, contrite and quiet. If the parents were lucky, they got to them before anyone else did. But what they did next, where they went and what happened after they arrived, what those people actually did with their days when silence was enforced by the speech fever, that information is not available to me. I refuse to make up stories about such people. To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

Too many nights, hiding in the brush, I’ve lost track of time during my observational work and found it too dark to return to the hut. I’ve spent sunless hours dug in against some low hillside, forcing from myself an artificial laughter to keep warm. You’ve heard of laughter in the hills. This is all it is. It’s no mystery and nothing is funny. Just a person like me, pulsing sound and breath through his body, trying to stay warm.

I’ve lived these winters before, speechless, waiting. They bring one too close to the doings of one’s own mind, some of which—I finally believe this—must remain unheard, must have their meaning amputated until they’re reduced to babble. A careful listener to such interior speech is not rewarded. These winters fail to blot the mind, and what now could the mind even be for, since its fears and lies cannot be shared? Often I have wished that the toxicity, when it came, had reached deeper, into the unspoken speech we stalk and hound ourselves with.

Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.

Oh, I fucking hope so.

49

So yesterday I left Esther asleep on her cot and went out to get wood. I have a chain saw for clearing, but a tool like this is a luxury for someone who wants mostly to sit in his hut and listen carefully at the hole for news that never comes, for a person who is really getting late. I’d settle for a hiss from the wire, just the crackling of static, even, suggesting the orange cable has been plugged in again to Buffalo, to Albany, to I don’t care where. Then I might listen to a story from the old days.

They really are the old days. They have aged. They are not pretty to consider.

Why the Jewish feed is so long silent is a question I cannot resolve. Or maybe I should say that I don’t know why there’s no more bait on the line. Perhaps Rabbi Burke, in the tomb of Forsythe, is mouthing silences on the other end and that’s all that is left. Do the birds still bathe in his glass tank, I wonder?

For some years now, since leaving Forsythe by tunnel, I have been alone, and I have worked to leave no evidence of myself in this place. My solitude was corrected by Esther’s arrival, an arrival I arranged through years of patience, waiting under cover for her exile to end, hoping that through binoculars I’d see her emerge by horse and cart, by sled, on foot, out of the town gates.

She is my first visitor. Well, that’s not accurate. One or two times I brought another person into this hut, three times, a person unknown to me. Maybe we could say this happened five times altogether, persons other than Esther. Is person the right word? In truth I do not care for a tabulation of the activity.

Children, they were. I did not harm them. I fed them soup topped with cut squares of one of my long breads, which I crisped over the cold burner. You’ll wonder what these children offered in payment after they’d been fed. This is a natural curiosity. One feeds a stranger and in return, well. Soon I will share the details, before my language usage expires here for good.

So yesterday I cut and gathered my wood, then left it piled in its fine pyramid, and stealthed downhill to lie in wait for assets.

Sometimes you see them on the grass ramp that once featured children playing before school. Sometimes they wander right up to you and raise their arms, actually wanting to be picked up. At such times, one obliges. One reaches down and picks them up.

I stayed too long. The light failed. No assets came, just a horse. It was untroubled and calm as it stood eating grass in a field, not even startling when a loud crack shook the sky somewhere to the east.

Ammunition does go off every now and then. It sounded like a house breaking in half.

When I woke it was dark, and I broke my own rule. Esther would be alone all night in the hut if I didn’t return. I had to get back, even if that meant hours of blind groping.

Behind the hut I’ve dug a fire pit, where I cook the occasional brittle lobe, sear a cake of jam, and bring heat by venting into my hut so I can withstand the cold nights. The pit I fill with wood in the mornings, and then again late at night. Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I ache to pee, I wrap up in one of the buntings and stuff more branches in the hole.

Each week I dig out the ash and carry it by wheelbarrow to the softeries, out of sight of our old neighborhood, where the fencing starts, under the shadow of the children’s loudspeakers.

It’s Aesop’s fables they have playing from them now, but the speakers have fallen into terrible repair, warping the speech so badly that it no longer spreads the poison. If anything it sounds pretty, some low-toned singing as if from deep underwater.

Living here is not ideal, no matter how Claire and I used to dream of it. When I was alone I could endure the conditions. With Esther commanding the lone cot now, even my seat at the hole, where years ago I sat with Claire and clutched the orange cable, digging my fingers deep into the flesh of the listener, is too crowded.

Oh, I’m not forgetting that LeBov went down this same hole once. Or maybe sometimes I am.

On windless days I can hear Esther’s breath, wheezing from her lungs as if she were straining to inflate a balloon. Sometimes the wheezing stops and it’s too quiet in here. I look at the cloth wall that divides us and wonder if this is it. If only one of us gets to breathe, it had better not be me. Suspense left my life a long time ago, but now it has returned. I do not care for it.

It was so dark last night, I could not see my hand in front of my face as I tried to make my way back to Esther. Navigation by starlight was impossible because there were no stars. They were just too far away. Everything was. Had there been stars I could see, it would have meant nothing anyway. Above me would stand the rebuke of an information system I have failed to learn, a map written in one of those languages unsuited to describing anything but itself. Maybe all languages are like this.

I knew I had an incline to gain, but I did not know when to break from it to find the lateral path. Throughout the night I descended and climbed, then traversed along what was not the path. It was never the path. Too often I fetched up in a tangle of trees, probing a clammy flesh beneath the bark. Once my hand worried into what felt like soup, but this was waist-high, and I yanked it free when it started to burn.

I stumbled, fell, sometimes stayed down to rest, breathing in the fine iron smell of the mud, which dried over my face and brought the whole world into silence.

My absence tonight should not matter. Esther preferred me gone from the hut anyway. She’d not even try the soup I’d brew for her, and the bread might only get torn to pieces and scattered to the floor, tossed away angrily as if she were a toddler. Even if I got home before bedtime, when the lamp was snuffed out and the jar of water was replenished on the stone post, I’d be up and down all night anyway, awake on the floor listening to the rough struggle of Esther’s breath behind the cloth.

My absence should not matter. I was certain of that. Esther would be fine. Better to stay out here and sleep.

I did not try again that night to push free of my place in the mud. Nor did I will myself to stop thinking of Esther, alone in the hut all night. The night was warm enough for me to make it where I was. There was no question that she would be all right there by herself. No question at all.

I would wait for daylight, what little of it I had lately been allowed. With daylight I would crawl back to our hut and there I would discover that all was perfectly well with Esther. Of this I was sure.

50

Three years ago I made my escape from Forsythe down the Jewish hole. For months I crept through underground mud on my way home, stopping only to listen for pursuers. The first tunnel I traversed was little wider than the orange cable I followed, and I had to work with whatever digging implements were at hand to gain my passage. At dead ends I did soundings, thumped against the earth until it shaled, and when the wall reported a promising hollowness, I worked with my fingers to bore a cavity.

It was ugly, dark work, and I grew foreign to myself, my skin like a hair-soaked stone, my face too numb to feel.

Others had come and gone before me in some of those passageways. Oh, had they. Their evidence festered along the embankment, muddied, broken, spent. Clothing frozen in dramatic postures, books, papers, shards of once-clear lobes now coated in hair. Luggage stuffed into mud holes. I shed my jumpsuit and clothed myself with the outfits of these pioneers. I found a grooming kit and hacked at the fur on my face, used one of those soft, moldable stones to scrape myself bare.

What a terrible amount of salt was already everywhere, even down below. The first layer of it was burnt. It stuck to your hands.

The books I found remained sealed by glue. Loose pages, scattered like parade scraps, had their text blackened. The broken parts of writing codes were everywhere, handicapped scripts, decipher sheets, etchings in the walls, the local efforts of people to say something to someone, to get a message across.

If people had lived down here in the tunnels, they hadn’t done it well, and they hadn’t done it for long.

As I burrowed south in the next months I took many trips to the top, whenever ladders appeared in the tunnel or some knotted rope hung down or light wriggled in from above, or, most of all, when the orange cabling, my true mapping device, detoured vertically, usually at a bulging splice in the line. I always followed it. I burst out into fields, butted against concrete slabs, emerged at the bottom of shallow ponds, punching through muck into the air.

Sometimes I even pierced into huts covering the apparent Jew holes of strangers.

Once I came up under a trapdoor that wouldn’t fully spring. When I stopped to listen, I heard footsteps, the awful pressure that fills the air when people mute their fear. Someone had rolled a bed over the door I crouched beneath, and when I finally squeezed through, no one was there. It was a damp house that people had left in a hurry. They were outside cowering, probably, petrified by the man who’d broken through their floor. The orange cable I’d followed into this hut divided into a network of the finest little wires, so delicate I could hardly see them. If it weren’t for the miniature cups of liquid the wires landed in—brass thimbles scattered over the floor, tendrils of wire dangling into them—I might not have known they were there. Their strategy of conduction was curious to me, but I dropped away and left that place in peace.

Sometimes the orange cable frayed into nothing in my hands. At its pinched-off stump were teeth marks, a black calligraphy of blood where someone had chewed it through. Around me would be nothing familiar. Even the trees had an animal smoothness to their limbs, or there’d be no trees, not even the barest spasms of grass, just pebbled terrain as far as I could see, stones covered by a fine misting of salt.

More and more often, when I climbed through the earth to take a reading, it was night.

I am no reader of the nighttime sky, as I have said. I find its layout obscene. If it was nighttime aboveground, if I was in some kind of featureless lowland and could not safely find shelter, I dropped into the tunnel again, made camp, and waited in the safety of the tunnel for daylight.

Camp was a woolen wall I raised from blankets. With my knife I slashed a vent, then laced a stitching of twine in the seam, so that my window was a scar in the cloth. In daylight I crept out and disguised my hole, performing the obligatory landmark checks that would allow me to find my way back without a problem.

I did surface walks in towns that may have been Dushore or Laporte, the part of New York that seems to absorb so much sunlight it’s forever shadowless wherever you look. When I walked through the grass, I’d sometimes step on something hard, panes of glass dusted with dirt, windows to shelters below, installed flush to the soil, easily hidden.

I stopped once to sweep away the grass and dirt of one such window, only to see a small, dark room, where an old man’s face looked up at me. This man did not seem afraid. He beckoned. Aren’t you lonely, too, he didn’t need to ask. But I walked on.

In Wilbert, or maybe it was North Sea, smashed radios littered the road. From their severed antennas someone had built a figure of a person, gleaming in chrome, rendered in a posture of contemplation. It sat in a puddle now, starting to rust.

Weeks away from Forsythe, where the tunnel widened into a room-size cavern, I found a stash of jam jars, a cloudy red gelatin tiding inside. The lids pried off with a suck, and into the cavern drifted the bitter smell of skin. I used a pencil to spoon free some of the tinted jelly, which I rolled into logs. When these hardened overnight I subjected them to a long, slow heat.

Such little treats kept me nourished for weeks, and when I lodged one in my mouth, it released such a slow sweetness that for days, it seemed, I needed nothing else, not even water. I eat them still. Whatever’s in them is almost all that I need.

There is little else to report of this journey. I surged south, then took exploratory routes away from my path, emerged from underground, calculated coordinates, dipped back into the tunnels, and corrected.

When I saw the Level Falls horse farm stripped of animals, stripped of its barn, just a few troughs remaining that had been turned over and which I did not want to disturb, I knew I was close to home, but judging by the quiet open roads, the unprotected route south into town, I did not want to risk overland passage. I had come this far in the tunnels. Now I would finish my trip underground, where I was unfollowed, unknown, and I could get to my destination in secret.

I lurched east after that. It was trial and error, but mostly it was error, until one morning I shoveled into a crawl space that had no stable bottom, just slimy, flesh-like objects upon which I could not get my footing. These were the pink rubber balls Claire and I had dropped down the hole so long ago, coated now with something cool and slick.

I was below the old hut.

The orange cable elevated. I pictured Claire sitting at the mouth of the hole, waiting for me. She’d have a sandwich ready, a thermos of soup. She’d be laughing, that laugh of anger she delivered whenever someone else’s stupidity had been what she was waiting for, the perfect confirmation of all her suspicions. I’d yell up to her that I found the balls, all of them.

They’re at the bottom and they’re so weird all together, like one of those kid tents with balls in it, except the balls are all bloody. I’ll be right there!

I climbed into the corridor. At the top, the mouth of the hole was stuffed with shredded pink insulation.

Perhaps this was what had obstructed LeBov when he made his way out of the hut to Forsythe several Decembers ago.

I picked at the insulation until a sheet of it released past me and slid down the hole. Then I climbed up into the hut.

Everything was mostly as I remembered it. In the corner, undisturbed, was the wooden crate painted with the word Us, a tuft of bluish wool hanging out of it.

It was Claire’s winter hat, kept on hand for a just-in-case. I crawled over to the crate and put it on, smelling, I told myself, the very last remnant of her.

But the whiff I took returned nothing. It smelled only of smoke.

I walked outside, easily found the old path that dropped down to the creek, and beyond that, growing out of the embankment, was the still-recognizable profile of growth that Claire and I called the Seine.

This was it. I’d arrived. I was home.

Now I just needed to rescue my daughter.

51

Most of the rest you already know. The hut’s mechanics were fucked. The orange cable was not just cold but worm-gutted as well. I ignored it for too long, too fearful of town, at first, to trek in and get supplies, letting the wiring blister.

Meanwhile, one of those pink vermin got to it, started eating into the copper, rubbed his bald body against its length until the cable shredded, like bright splinters of candy.

Once, early on, I inserted a copper feeler into the frizzed wiring of the cable, and I wove, from memory, a conductive nest of wire that I slipped under my tongue to complete the facial antenna. When I kissed the wire against the nest, clutching a grounding rod for safety, the old prayer surged on and pushed its way out of my mouth.

You have commanded us not to know you and we have obeyed. When we have known you we have looked away …

Whatever this was, it was no real prayer. It sounded like an apology for something that had never happened. I could not bear the sound, particularly in my own voice, and so I put away my wires and did not eavesdrop on this cable again.

I did not give up on my religion. I found only that I no longer required reminders, assertions, repetitions, harangues. Nothing outside myself. Whatever I believed played on inside me with no help from a radio. I’d heard enough for a lifetime. I found I could do without more things to misunderstand.

I spent my first months home determining the safety levels of my new settlement, circling the hut in wider surveys, moving low and quiet, stopping always to listen for pursuers, building my inner map of the place.

Deer froze when I approached, their muzzles frosted and white. I registered no threats of people. In the end I realized that I was well bounded by the murmur line, protected from others, but also captive as well. Unless you were a child, you could only get to where I was by Jew hole. I set up a few alarm lines anyway, some rudimentary triggers that might give me good minutes to vanish if necessary.

I suppose I was really only concerned about LeBov. A new one, maybe, whom I wouldn’t recognize. That he was coming after me in the tunnel, would soon punch through the floor of the hut.

I should have filled the hole with dirt, with salt, so no one could come through again. Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow until the thing was sealed. But I wanted to keep the hole open for Claire. I could not close it down yet. I had to think she would solve the problem the same way I did. I had to.

I’d only been back for a few days when I crept closer to the old neighborhood, heard the tin-voiced stories bleating from the loudspeakers. The broadcast created an effective repellent of sound, the worst choking in the air. If I got too close, I felt the suffocation—an airless panic triggered by an area ripe with language—so I determined early on where the murmur line was, that point on the periphery where I could hear the voice but not understand it. Beyond this I wouldn’t go.

Then I marked the trees, some stones. I walked off distances until I found a natural observation point, one of a few that I’d rotate among as I spied on the quarantine, awaiting Esther’s release.

There’s little else to relate about my early time here. Waste and water were an early focus. Food was never a worry. I collected canned goods from the abandoned town, even if I hardly felt like eating. I must have spent a year without words.

Even in the summer there were cold, clear mornings, and I woke to a silence that only deepened as the day developed, a muteness that felt rich in nutrients, addictive. I was energetic and strong and almost fearfully alive.

On perfect days I braved the wall of trees on the back line of the swale and pushed up the cliff face to Tower Ledge, where we used to picnic. There were no families here now. The old grill cage had tipped over. The dog run was sick with weeds.

I heard nothing and said nothing, read and wrote nothing, and in time my thoughts followed into this hushed hole. I’d never much thought in sentences anyway, but there were always single words, phrases, sometimes lists, and these fell away, until what passed for thoughts were swooshes of sound, hisses whose meanings were clear to me and needed no decoding into language.

It was Claire who benefitted most from this sort of regard. She fit this way of thinking perfectly. When I thought of her while quietly clearing the land, as she’d wanted us to, while running water lines to the back stream, while washing and hanging the woolen skins I used on the walls for insulation, it was in the gentlest sequence of tones. Small, low notes like a lullaby.

I do not mean for this to be a statement of science, or even an experimental theory that the emotional consideration of a person is best undertaken with sounds, and not images or language—how could I prove this?—but I felt closer to Claire that year than ever before. Finally I stopped missing her, because she was with me now. I fell asleep to the sound of Claire, walked out to eat my lunch on the old shrunken rock above Tower Ledge, and all the while listened to sounds that brought my wife fully to my blood, my body. Through sound I felt finally bonded to her, in her company, whether or not she was even alive or, if she was, no matter what she might have felt about me. Her memory had evolved into sound, a perfect refinement. I loved her best that way with all that I had.

I mention this change only because this phase ended when I found the first child and began my project with assets, with person-derived inhibitors. Through medicine I brought myself back to the language and those tones of Claire went, what’s the word for it? They were gone. I do not hear them anymore.

For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.

52

A word about my serum: it is more bitter than water. It is not as cloudy as milk. In the winter it thickens with crystals. It foams into a butter when I squeeze into it, by dropper, a juice of the dark valley salt.

When I need some, I pull it out of little ones. I used it first at Forsythe. The crude kind, the roughly gained immunity, drawn on the priceless account of the child’s person. It is the ingestion of this Child’s Play, I am sure, that undid LeBov, if he finally did expire.

And it is the ingestion of this that will soon, no doubt, leave me frozen on the forest floor somewhere, blinking in perfect sunlight at a world I can no longer see.

53

I did not assign names to the children I saw in the woods. A remote perspective was best, sheared of sentimentality, which impedes a productive workflow. Name not that which you intend to cultivate, was the saying. Maybe it was just my saying. But cultivate is such a strong word. They were little ones sometimes sitting alone on a log. Medicine comes at us in so many disguises. It hides in the leaves of plants, grows under tree bark, mulch, sand. Sometimes it stows away in more valuable items, items more resistant to intrusion, and this is where our challenge is fullest. The smallworker addresses these shapes, living or not, and beckons forth that medicine that might benefit the person. But when that medicine resides within the bodies of those entities commonly known as children, the process of extraction grows more, what is the word?

I do not know what the word is.

54

My purpose here is not to detail exactly how I got the Child’s Play serum to work, what sorts of failures I suffered along the way. I labored alone with limited tools seized from the half-looted pharmacy in town, made every sort of error, and at first I did not even know what I was looking for.

Blood and skin, perhaps hair, were the likely targets, so I found my way to small samples of these resources, siphoned or scraped them into bottles with little harm. But that got me nowhere close, because what I never saw at Forsythe was how these resources were processed. I knew nothing of the refinements such materials were subjected to, and I had no old man but myself upon which to test my discoveries.

If a little one wept quietly I played music, brought in a soup. Silence was the natural state of my subjects, who rarely probed their surroundings or tested the air with their small words. Perhaps it is because I looked like nothing they could speak to. The years had made me look unfriendly. Or not the years. Blame for my demeanor lies elsewhere. Perhaps the children felt I would be displeased, but if I was displeased it was for reasons that far predated their arrival in my hut. In every way I was a gentle guardian. I provided food and shelter, sometimes sat on the floor with them and played with the little sack of acorns I’d brought in for distraction.

After each round of extractions I tested the results down at the murmur line, walking into the blizzard of Aesop’s fables until the crushing took me.

When skin and hair failed, I moved to blood, pricking the child’s heel for a drop. I employed coagulants rifled from the hospital in town, seizing the fluid with some salts I’d smuggled out of the pharmacy, salts from before. I suspected that blood would be problematic, no easy fix, and in this suspicion I was correct.

Among the many shames was that I focused so much on the interior fluid, overlooking what should have been obvious all along.

The discovery came by accident. One of my subjects, strapped to an old bottled respirator, so large it dwarfed his little face, began the rapid breathing one never likes to see in a small person. Too often it foreshadows the unproductive kind of stillness. At the end of this boy’s fit, after I’d removed the respirator and cooled off his head with towels, I noticed, while cleaning up, a residue in the boot of the respirator bottle. A powder.

It was impossible to account for the powder. I’d not medicated the supply of oxygen. It must have come not from me but from the boy, inside him.

I scraped it free with a knife, dumped some into a spoon, and lowered the spoon over my flame.

A clear smoke wobbled over the spoon. It filled the hut, stung my eyes. Into the air came a smell of berries, but within minutes, after my lungs had soaked it in, I collapsed on the cot. Not out of any physical distress. From what I could tell I felt fine. I collapsed because I had suddenly, with the arrival of this child smoke, been hit with a deep, unspeakable gloom.

The hut was colorless, my body in it a burden. The child on the floor looked to be squirming in mechanical postures designed to trigger a reaction.

I noted the repetition of his gyrations, the unimaginative way he thrashed.

I observed my mood, diagnosed it as incidental, then forced myself out to the murmur line. One might as well test the effects of every dosage, even an accidental one like this.

It was a warm day and I was flushed and sweating. Even in the sunshine my mood did not ease. It pulled at my breath, drew my sight into a darkened hole. It was a wordless despair I felt, a final sense of certainty that one’s maneuverings were all tethered to some vector of, not even folly, but something far worse. Something much more terrible than folly.

At the shallow row of stones, I crossed the murmur line easily and kept walking into toxic territory. The fairy tales boomed from the speakers with perfect clarity and I did not stop. The recording was crisp and lucid and finally, when I determined that I could listen without detriment, I sat down on the path.

I was fine. The language floated above me, entered my body, and I held my own, swallowing it whole.

The serum was working.

On the path I heard, from the loudspeaker, the old tale of the blindfolded bird who must search for his mother by sound alone. I had not heard this one since I was young. I am no fan of stories, perhaps because they seem more like problems that will never be solved, and this was among my least favorite.

The bird is alone and scared. Because of the blindfold it cannot do the one thing it was made to do: fly. And its mother, though always nearby, learns to keep perfect silence when the little bird is on the verge of finding her. She keeps herself artfully concealed from him, hops away whenever he approaches. All the older birds do, so the little bird thinks he’s the last bird left on earth. He calls out and no one answers. The mother holds her breath as her own little bird is so close that he can smell her. He knows it’s her, right there. He doesn’t need to see to sense his mother there. She holds her breath and stands perfectly still, a statue. He circles her, moves in, then finally cries out, at which point she leaps into the air and flies off.

When she returns later that day, laughing, with a lesson to share, he refuses to be comforted, will not acknowledge his mother, will not go near the older birds. He even insists on keeping the blindfold on his little head. Days go by and the bird won’t take off the blindfold. He learns to get where he needs to go. He doesn’t fly, but he can walk places. He gets around okay. Everyone thinks the little bird is sulking, taking himself so seriously. But it’s not true. The bird is in darkness under that blindfold and that is what he has come to prefer. He is not sulking. He is happy. The blindfold becomes a part of him. Even though he will not speak to his mother again, or to anyone else, he is grateful to them. Every day he silently thanks them for their gift.

The story puts it differently, of course. Stories always do.

More stories followed from the great loudspeaker, filling the woods with sound. I spent some of the afternoon enjoying the broadcast of tales down beyond the murmur line. The smoke I’d inhaled was a mostly thorough shield, though with certain words I felt mild convulsions, suggesting a partial immunity, which would need to be addressed.

If the tales themselves did not please me, the voice they arrived in did, and it was this that I wanted to hear more of. I’d not been spoken to in years and the effect was luscious. I had taken this pleasure for granted. The stories were read by a child with a scratchy voice. They’d found a child who herself did not seem to understand the stories, because always at the moment of crisis, of conflict, the child’s voice only became sweeter, as if she were entirely innocent of what she was reading. What an enormous gift that would be.

Or else to this girl these terrible moments were the good parts, the ones that gave her a thrill.

Finally my shivers came on more strongly, the stories cutting into my head with a cold pain, and my daylight began to spoil.

I walked home to see how my subject was doing. I’d need more of his breath in order to generate a true inhibitor, and I’d want to diversify beyond this boy. I’d need to establish that this extraction was not a fluke. It was the air of children I wanted, a fine-grained powder that rode out on their breath and offered to us a transformative medicine.

The discovery, in the end, was a simple one. I should have made it months ago. From hyperventilation of a child—ideally, one later learned, a child in agitated fright, surging with adrenaline—comes a residue in the lungs. Coughed up out of fear. And when this residue is refined of impurities, enforced with certain salts, then subjected to heat, it forms the foundation of our immunity. Child’s Play. It lets the words back in, if briefly.

Whether such a reversal should be sanctioned is another matter.

55

Once I’d perfected the serum, and could endure without sickness the full range of Aesop’s broadcasts below the murmur line, I sat down in the hut with the cherished contraband I’d smuggled from Forsythe: the voice tapes of my daughter, Esther.

A language archive of the girl. Paper and tapes, a broad syllabus of topics, a spectrum of moods. Our viral girl, fourteen years old, singing, laughing, yelling, whispering, arguing, speaking sotto voce, making up words. Reciting letters, numbers, crying out in pain.

I do not tire of these tapes. I will not. I have done the awful math enough times to determine that my inhibitor work is worth it to hear this girl speak. The work of gathering immunity, and the cost of such. Etcetera, fucking etcetera. The exchange, I believe, is fair.

It makes it safe to hear the girl’s voice, and for that I would do anything.

I am ready to debate this matter. My arguments are strong. This is the last of my daughter’s voice. You will be at a sad disadvantage if you challenge me on this point.

56

Last night I was stranded in darkness, out waiting for a child who never came. If one had appeared, and if I had secured possession, I would have led him to the extraction shed, applied the bottle to his face, and produced, if I could, a scenario that would lead to fright, which would lead to adrenaline, and, if I was lucky, my subject would hyperventilate, in those fast rabbit breaths, enough for me to collect a thimble of his powder.

A fairly standard bit of smallwork. I’d burn it down and bottle the smoke, which I could gust over Esther as she lay prone in the bed. If I’d done my job properly, the smoke would sink over her and she’d have no choice but to breathe it in.

This would be the last use of assets, just for this, so Esther could see something.

If it worked, if Esther sat up and passed the various little tests I could subject her to, to affirm her immunity—the shortest, smallest words I could say, offered in a sequence deliberately free of meaning so as not to disturb her—I would hand her the letter her mother wrote to her.

I’ve kept the letter safe since the day we left home. It is crushed and filthy, that is true, but I have not opened it. It is not for me. There were many times, under the protection of the serum, that I could have read it, but I didn’t. It is for Esther, her mother’s words of departure. I would let her read it alone. She could take all day with it in the hut. I would walk out to the clearing to give her time. I would wait as long as she needed me to.

When Esther finished reading the letter she could join me outside, if she wanted to, and I would not ask her what was said. I would never ask her.

But this was not to be. The day ended without a sighting, and my asset supply would have to remain low.

This morning the daylight finally soaked through the woods, forest sounds hissing up as I slept in the mud. Certain creaking reported in the trees, a whisper blew from the sturdier insects, roared over my wet resting place.

I slept well in the soupy muck. I was ready to return to Esther, and not make such a mistake again.

I wished only that I could better see the world in front of me.

A point of light appeared, then throbbed, stretching into a dime-size window, through which I could see just enough to fight my way back to my woodpile, then up the slope north and along that last crumbling ledge to the clearing where my hut stands and everything, from what I could tell, seemed to be exactly as I had left it.

Except that when I went inside the hut Esther was not behind the cloth. Her cot was neatly arranged, the blankets folded as if another houseguest might be coming. She’d made the bed, stacked her dishes on the doorstep, even swept the daily soot from our sill.

At the hammered vent in the wall a fresh blast of heat rushed in, suggesting a newly fed fire outside.

I pictured Esther taking advantage of my absence to tidy the hut, arrange everything neatly, then gather her things and leave. What a hurry she must have been in, thinking that at any minute I’d be home.

She must have stopped to look from the glassless window, hoping I’d not come groping up the path. How relieved she must have been when she could finally leave with no sign of me and night coming on so strong.

I went outside. My field of vision was still limited. Around me hung a brownness, so cloudy I felt I should be able to rub it away. I pitched my head through every contortion to be sure I wasn’t overlooking Esther somewhere, slid my vision over the property and yard, because maybe she was bundled under a blanket on a log, enjoying the late morning hum, waiting for me to return so I could brew us some tea.

It was time for her to have healed, bounced out of bed, taking to the air so she could see where she’d been recuperating these last few weeks.

I told myself there was no reason to be concerned, but since when did I believe my own reassurances?

She must have only gone off on a short errand, perhaps a walk to stretch her legs. She would need to return soon, because she was not well, and she was not familiar with these woods. It was unwise for her to hike alone in an area where whole patches of ground can suddenly give way to a lava of salt. She would know that. She would be the first to be aware of how risky it was for her to travel abroad from me when she was so weak like this.

I sat down, held my breath, listened. This silence was for the best. If Esther was nearby, if she could hear me, such a sound, even the pretty sound of her name in the air, would not have been well received. Her name yelled out by me would have hurt her, stopped her progress through the woods. I withheld it from the air.

I heard nobody crawling, walking, running. I heard no one hiding behind a tree, breathing. When I tilted my head, all I could see, very high above me, was a bird. At least I think that’s what it was. It was hairless, its face so plain. What troubled me was that I could see the details of its wings too clearly, better than usual, and then I realized it was because the wings weren’t flapping, weren’t even moving. The bird, far aloft, was perfectly still, falling through the air.

Perhaps it had received a fright, high up in the air. Perhaps it saw something, suffered a shock, lost its powers, and started to fall.

I shut my eyes, waiting for the sound of impact.

57

I spent the morning outside the hut waiting for Esther to return. I could have ventured after her, but there were too many directions she could have taken and it seemed safer to wait, since she would be back soon, I was sure.

When the afternoon dimmed and grew cold, when I heard nothing stumbling out of the woods, I took a pull from my last remaining stash of assets, then risked everything and whispered her name. The word Esther was so cold in my mouth. I whispered it, then spoke it, but my mouth was too dry and I’m sure I said it wrong. If Esther was still out there she would have heard only a low moaning, something senseless from far away. Whatever I said was not her name. I should have practiced more. I should have been ready for this.

Now in the advancing darkness I can only wait for Esther to return. One does not simply leave a father when there are still so many terrible uncertainties to master.

I would have served as an escort on her outing. Had Esther desired, I would have even hung back so she would not have needed to see me. I do wish she had availed herself of my experience. It is very possible that I could have helped. Yet I understand that Esther must do things herself, always, on her own terms, and that gains made in my presence, with my help, to her do not look like gains at all. I understand this.

To be Esther’s father is to try with all my might not to get caught being her father. I can be that person for her. I will be.

When Esther returns, healthy and strong again, ready to take her place as my daughter, together we can sit at the hole in our hut and listen as one family, the two of us bending together into the old hole that might deliver our missing piece.

We will listen for the footsteps of Esther’s mother, who could be here soon. It is a difficult trip, but not impossible. If I could find my way here from Forsythe, groping along the orange cable, then so can Claire. She is stronger, smarter than I ever was, and she can zero in on us even blinded, even ill. She will find us here, it is really just a question of when. When Esther returns to me, we will wait for her mother together, as a family.

It may take days or weeks, but it will not matter, we will wait. And when Claire climbs through the hole, exhausted from her travels, caked in the filth of the tunnels, Esther and I will lead her to the outdoor shower, boil extra water for the cleansing. We’ll ready a little mountain of soft towels, and Esther will go inside to choose from the bright new clothes we pulled from the shelves in town.

While Claire showers, Esther and I will smile at each other, look down, draw nonsense signs in the dirt with a stick. We will be excited, but we will wait, give Claire her time.

When my family is together again I will not need to speak, to read, to write. What is there, anyway, to say? The three of us require no speech. We are fine in our silence. This is the world we prefer.

It will be enough to walk out, the three of us, along the high, scary ledge that lords over the creek and cuts up past the shadow of the Monastery into the wide-open field. We will not need to speak. Under our feet will be the vast, shifting salt deposits, just a residue of everything that’s ever been said. That’s all that’s left. We will walk through it into the clearing. We can have a quiet lunch on the rocks, then stretch out to rest in the sun.

I will wait for them here in my hut, and when Claire and Esther return, this is what we’ll do, as a family.