The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [120]
Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it’s the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.
Oh, I fucking hope so.
49
So yesterday I left Esther asleep on her cot and went out to get wood. I have a chain saw for clearing, but a tool like this is a luxury for someone who wants mostly to sit in his hut and listen carefully at the hole for news that never comes, for a person who is really getting late. I’d settle for a hiss from the wire, just the crackling of static, even, suggesting the orange cable has been plugged in again to Buffalo, to Albany, to I don’t care where. Then I might listen to a story from the old days.
They really are the old days. They have aged. They are not pretty to consider.
Why the Jewish feed is so long silent is a question I cannot resolve. Or maybe I should say that I don’t know why there’s no more bait on the line. Perhaps Rabbi Burke, in the tomb of Forsythe, is mouthing silences on the other end and that’s all that is left. Do the birds still bathe in his glass tank, I wonder?
For some years now, since leaving Forsythe by tunnel, I have been alone, and I have worked to leave no evidence of myself in this place. My solitude was corrected by Esther’s arrival, an arrival I arranged through years of patience, waiting under cover for her exile to end, hoping that through binoculars I’d see her emerge by horse and cart, by sled, on foot, out of the town gates.
She is my first visitor. Well, that’s not accurate. One or two times I brought another person into this hut, three times, a person unknown to me. Maybe we could say this happened five times altogether, persons other than Esther. Is person the right word? In truth I do not care for a tabulation of the activity.
Children, they were. I did not harm them. I fed them soup topped with cut squares of one of my long breads, which I crisped over the cold burner. You’ll wonder what these children offered in payment after they’d been fed. This is a natural curiosity. One feeds a stranger and in return, well. Soon I will share the details, before my language usage expires here for good.
So yesterday I cut and gathered my wood, then left it piled in its fine pyramid, and stealthed downhill to lie in wait for assets.
Sometimes you see them on the grass ramp that once featured children playing before school. Sometimes they wander right up to you and raise their arms, actually wanting to be picked up. At such times, one obliges. One reaches down and picks them up.
I stayed too long. The light failed. No assets came, just a horse. It was untroubled and calm as it stood eating grass in a field, not even startling when a loud crack shook the sky somewhere to the east.
Ammunition does go off every now and then. It sounded like a house breaking in half.
When I woke it was dark, and I broke my own rule. Esther would be alone all night in the hut if I didn’t return. I had to get back, even if that meant hours of blind groping.
Behind the hut I’ve dug a fire pit, where I cook the occasional brittle lobe, sear a cake of jam, and bring heat by venting into my hut so I can withstand the cold nights. The pit I fill with wood in the mornings, and then again late at night. Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I ache to pee, I wrap up in one of the buntings and stuff more branches in the hole.
Each week I dig out the ash and carry it by wheelbarrow to the softeries, out of sight of our old neighborhood, where the fencing starts,