The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [124]
Whatever this was, it was no real prayer. It sounded like an apology for something that had never happened. I could not bear the sound, particularly in my own voice, and so I put away my wires and did not eavesdrop on this cable again.
I did not give up on my religion. I found only that I no longer required reminders, assertions, repetitions, harangues. Nothing outside myself. Whatever I believed played on inside me with no help from a radio. I’d heard enough for a lifetime. I found I could do without more things to misunderstand.
I spent my first months home determining the safety levels of my new settlement, circling the hut in wider surveys, moving low and quiet, stopping always to listen for pursuers, building my inner map of the place.
Deer froze when I approached, their muzzles frosted and white. I registered no threats of people. In the end I realized that I was well bounded by the murmur line, protected from others, but also captive as well. Unless you were a child, you could only get to where I was by Jew hole. I set up a few alarm lines anyway, some rudimentary triggers that might give me good minutes to vanish if necessary.
I suppose I was really only concerned about LeBov. A new one, maybe, whom I wouldn’t recognize. That he was coming after me in the tunnel, would soon punch through the floor of the hut.
I should have filled the hole with dirt, with salt, so no one could come through again. Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow until the thing was sealed. But I wanted to keep the hole open for Claire. I could not close it down yet. I had to think she would solve the problem the same way I did. I had to.
I’d only been back for a few days when I crept closer to the old neighborhood, heard the tin-voiced stories bleating from the loudspeakers. The broadcast created an effective repellent of sound, the worst choking in the air. If I got too close, I felt the suffocation—an airless panic triggered by an area ripe with language—so I determined early on where the murmur line was, that point on the periphery where I could hear the voice but not understand it. Beyond this I wouldn’t go.
Then I marked the trees, some stones. I walked off distances until I found a natural observation point, one of a few that I’d rotate among as I spied on the quarantine, awaiting Esther’s release.
There’s little else to relate about my early time here. Waste and water were an early focus. Food was never a worry. I collected canned goods from the abandoned town, even if I hardly felt like eating. I must have spent a year without words.
Even in the summer there were cold, clear mornings, and I woke to a silence that only deepened as the day developed, a muteness that felt rich in nutrients, addictive. I was energetic and strong and almost fearfully alive.
On perfect days I braved the wall of trees on the back line of the swale and pushed up the cliff face to Tower Ledge, where we used to picnic. There were no families here now. The old grill cage had tipped over. The dog run was sick with weeds.
I heard nothing and said nothing, read and wrote nothing, and in time my thoughts followed into this hushed hole. I’d never much thought in sentences anyway, but there were always single words, phrases, sometimes lists, and these fell away, until what passed for thoughts were swooshes of sound, hisses whose meanings were clear to me and needed no decoding into language.
It was Claire who benefitted most from this sort of regard. She fit this way of thinking perfectly. When I thought of her while quietly clearing the land, as she’d wanted us to, while running water lines to the back stream, while washing and hanging the woolen skins I used on the walls for insulation, it was in the gentlest sequence of tones. Small, low notes like a lullaby.
I do not mean for this to be a statement of science, or even an experimental theory that the emotional consideration of a person is best undertaken with sounds, and not images or language—how could I prove this?—but I felt closer to Claire that