The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [111]
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