The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [105]
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