The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [101]
“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