The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [113]
Such a phrase might serve as a new motto for our times.
At the feet of the Jewish scientists coiled the bright orange cable, snaking out of sight down the hole. They’d coated it in one of those reception-enhancing jellies. A liquid antenna ointment, rubbed onto the cable, rendering it so sensitive that it quivered in the dirt.
If you listened so intently into nothing, using gear like this, you might hear anything you desired. It made you think we were still being sickened from some language we didn’t even know was out there. Inaudible, sub-whispered, mouthed by an enemy from so far away, it could not even be measured. Still it pulsed some toxin on us that made us all crawl on our bellies and choke.
I did not count the scientists, but I could guess there were nine summoned here by LeBov. Nine Jews divining at the quiet hole, to which I’d be the tenth, which would suddenly create the quorum that would ignite the wall of listeners.
Speaking of which, the occasional bird landed on a listener and pecked at it desperately, drilling into the sweet, brown core. No one seemed to mind the vandalism of these birds. Perhaps their work was intentional. Perhaps this was a necessary priming of the listeners. Before they could work in tandem they needed to be mercilessly gouged by a bird’s beak.
Beneath the pegboard, there were skins shed by the larger listeners, collecting like shriveled faces in a trough. Next to the trough was a rumpled sack that looked to be filled with cream.
When I looked at the wall of listeners, for the first time I understood why a listener was once referred to as a Moses Mouth. Some names are so accurate they are unbearable.
A technician, stationed to monitor the doings of the Jews, gnawed at a sandwich through the tiny opening in his foam mask.
Nobody minded me as I circled the work site collecting what I could carry.
I received blank looks from the Jews. I’m sure I stared back at them the same way. My bruised face may have troubled them. Maybe they’d not even been alerted to my arrival. It looked like they’d not been alerted about anything for a long time.
Here we finally were in the community of Jews none of us had ever wanted. We were machines of indifference with a faintly human appearance. Stonewallers and deadpanners. Unimpressed, even when you pressed on us. Failures in one way or another.
Perhaps that’s why we’d all embraced our private style of worship out in secluded huts in the suburban forest. When we came together we felt too much like nothing.
I would not learn what blackmail had driven my forest colleagues into this room. Did LeBov vomit in the bushes for each of these men, months ago in different neighborhoods, laying his trap, or was that a piece of mirroring customized for me alone?
How do you even know that I’m the real LeBov?
As forest Jews, were we supposed to love one another because we drank from the same orange cable, shared the same shade of doubt about the same unknowable deity? I most certainly could not think of the reason. Because love one another we couldn’t. It was just a more territorial form of self-loathing to revile people too much like ourselves.
These were men too much like me. If they had a complaint, a disturbance, some kind of undoused anger scorching their interior, one would need a long knife to release it. What’s the name of the surgical technique required to draw forth a man’s hidden material? Who is it that forges and sells those tools?
We should have all lined up for a leeching procedure, and they could have bottled our private liquid after sucking it free of our concealing shells.
Far above the work site, birds rode thermals inside the Jew hole space of Forsythe. The most gorgeous birds I’ve ever seen.
When the air grew too crowded with them, a lone bird would plummet, returning to a glass tank in an unlit