The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [118]
I will admit that I supply some of this darkness myself, through failed eyesight, draining health. My pursuit of language immunity has come with its own dear little cost. A certain serum I use has not agreed with me. Some mornings I discover my yellowed bandages, smitten in dirt and dew, and for a minute I think there is another one like me. I see these bandages strewn around my hut like tufts of rancid snow and think I am not alone until I realize that, oh, yes, these bandages are my own, aren’t they, and I tore them off last night because they burned. I could not bear the hot wadding on my skin.
As such, I cannot accurately make a statement about some objective loss of light. I have no device to record the expiration of daylight I suspect. I’d not be able to supply evidence for such a decline, my faculties of detection are compromised, and in any case I am not a specialist on the atmosphere.
What errands I have are few. Such freedom to come and go might have been useful back when people spoke, but now it is only a bitter advantage. What an archive of hindsight I’ve grown fat on, spoiled ideas and second thoughts ripening in my body now for no one, the putrid material. I’d like a more physical way to extract all of it, memories, too, a surgery I could perform to finally release it, burn it down.
It is not clear why the ideas are put in us if we only wish they could be removed again.
Instead of errands to kill the day, I can sit in my hut and wait for my wife’s arrival, listening at the old Jew hole for the sounds of her crawling this way.
Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.
But this waiting has its challenges. It is too easy to imagine that one hears a person struggling on her stomach through a narrow tunnel, from Forsythe to here, and the suspense is difficult. When I cannot endure it, I hike up to the vacant town that has stored enough untouched goods to sustain me for years. Some of the food was looted, but only some, as if when people first stormed through, arming their new life of solitude, they found they were not especially hungry.
So for errands there is the gathering of food and tools even as the surplus spoils in my cold locker, plunder spilling down the hillside. Mostly I grab what I already have. I hoard. I stockpile. I do what solitary men in the speechless world must do.
How important that sounds. I mean only to say that the published etiquette for life in these times is slim. A code of conduct for people like me is unavailable, and if it were, it would damage one’s body to read it.
What is it called when a dark, hard magnet has been run over one’s moral compass so many times that the needle of the compass quivers so badly that it cannot be read?
Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.
I forget who said it and I no longer care.
I suppose with my time I could farm and hunt and subsist through harvest, but all of those food products on shelves in empty stores off the quiet freeway make such labors unnecessary.
As to hunting, when I consider it now, there is a certain version I have practiced. I had not really named that form of smallwork. Hunting. But if hunting means the careful tracking and subsequent acquisition of a living resource, for whatever reasons, then, yes, I have hunted.
Just the few times.
48
When I monitor the quarantine across the river, what I see is not so much anymore. The child quarantines here at this final New York