The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [121]
It’s Aesop’s fables they have playing from them now, but the speakers have fallen into terrible repair, warping the speech so badly that it no longer spreads the poison. If anything it sounds pretty, some low-toned singing as if from deep underwater.
Living here is not ideal, no matter how Claire and I used to dream of it. When I was alone I could endure the conditions. With Esther commanding the lone cot now, even my seat at the hole, where years ago I sat with Claire and clutched the orange cable, digging my fingers deep into the flesh of the listener, is too crowded.
Oh, I’m not forgetting that LeBov went down this same hole once. Or maybe sometimes I am.
On windless days I can hear Esther’s breath, wheezing from her lungs as if she were straining to inflate a balloon. Sometimes the wheezing stops and it’s too quiet in here. I look at the cloth wall that divides us and wonder if this is it. If only one of us gets to breathe, it had better not be me. Suspense left my life a long time ago, but now it has returned. I do not care for it.
It was so dark last night, I could not see my hand in front of my face as I tried to make my way back to Esther. Navigation by starlight was impossible because there were no stars. They were just too far away. Everything was. Had there been stars I could see, it would have meant nothing anyway. Above me would stand the rebuke of an information system I have failed to learn, a map written in one of those languages unsuited to describing anything but itself. Maybe all languages are like this.
I knew I had an incline to gain, but I did not know when to break from it to find the lateral path. Throughout the night I descended and climbed, then traversed along what was not the path. It was never the path. Too often I fetched up in a tangle of trees, probing a clammy flesh beneath the bark. Once my hand worried into what felt like soup, but this was waist-high, and I yanked it free when it started to burn.
I stumbled, fell, sometimes stayed down to rest, breathing in the fine iron smell of the mud, which dried over my face and brought the whole world into silence.
My absence tonight should not matter. Esther preferred me gone from the hut anyway. She’d not even try the soup I’d brew for her, and the bread might only get torn to pieces and scattered to the floor, tossed away angrily as if she were a toddler. Even if I got home before bedtime, when the lamp was snuffed out and the jar of water was replenished on the stone post, I’d be up and down all night anyway, awake on the floor listening to the rough struggle of Esther’s breath behind the cloth.
My absence should not matter. I was certain of that. Esther would be fine. Better to stay out here and sleep.
I did not try again that night to push free of my place in the mud. Nor did I will myself to stop thinking of Esther, alone in the hut all night. The night was warm enough for me to make it where I was. There was no question that she would be all right there by herself. No question at all.
I would wait for daylight, what little of it I had lately been allowed. With daylight I would crawl back to our hut and there I would discover that all was perfectly well with Esther. Of this I was sure.
50
Three years ago I made my escape from Forsythe down the Jewish hole. For months I crept through underground mud on my way home, stopping only to listen for pursuers. The first tunnel I traversed was little wider than the orange cable I followed, and I had to work with whatever digging implements were at hand to gain my passage. At dead ends I did soundings, thumped against the earth until it shaled, and when the wall reported a promising hollowness, I worked with my fingers to bore a cavity.
It was ugly, dark work, and I grew foreign to myself, my skin like a hair-soaked stone, my face too numb to feel.
Others had come and gone before me in some of those passageways. Oh, had they. Their evidence festered along the embankment, muddied, broken, spent. Clothing frozen in dramatic postures,