The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [103]
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