The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [19]
Our hut was assigned to us early in our marriage by Rabbi Bauman, and it was ours alone. If other Jews gathered there to worship, then we never saw them in that sector of woods. The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything. Bauman was firm on this, said our access would be revoked if we breached. You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise. Children were not allowed access to the hut. Their relation to you alone did not automatically qualify them. They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates. Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness. Burke called it a ploy against our own relationship to uncertainty. You can know nothing of another’s worship, even when they try to tell you. To desire that information is to fear a limitation to your own devotion.
There were rules of appearance as well. A hut could not look maintained. We tended the grounds, kept the landscape looking unvisited. In the fall I cleansed the surveillance camera, its lens gummed up by summer, by steaming heat and the moths that melted into slurry against the glass.
Build nothing of splendor over the hole, was the rule. If it were not for hostile visits, a naked hole would be ideal, a hole not hidden by any hut.
Rabbi Ira no doubt envisioned a hut-free world, where anyone could stop at a hole, crouch down, and avail himself of a sermon flowing up from the earth. The religion would be on all the time, would pour from the earth. But the world didn’t accommodate this ideal. Disguises were required.
The technology of the hut was a glowbug setup. The hut covered a hole and the hole was stuffed with wire. From our own hole came bright orange ropes of cabling, the whole mess of it reeking of sewage, of something dead beneath the earth. This wiring was grappled to the listener, and the listener, called a Moses Mouth by Bauman, even while we were instructed to never refer to it, was draped over the radio module. I’m understating the complexity of this. But on a good day, it just worked.
Transmissions flowed into the hut on Thursdays, usually at noon. Sometimes no messages came, or they arrived in broken notes from the radio and we suffered through services in languages too foreign to know. Our gear was faulty and old. The glowbug had one dry little input that always needed grease. In the winter it cinched shut and I’d have to stretch it back open with my finger.
Sometimes it was not word that we received at the hut, but a hissing silence, months of it, even as we waited for guidance, freezing in the hut under a pile of rotted blankets, groping beneath each other’s clothing to dispatch little moments of pleasure.
We did what we could, within the bounds of the rules, to make the hut cozy. We filled a wooden crate with extra hats, sweaters, mittens, then painted on it, instead of our names, the word Us.
Each time we visited the hut we brought a pink rubber ball to feed into the hole. We took turns dropping it in, listening for the distant, wet bounce. We wondered how many balls it would take, how old we’d be, when the balls piled up so high in the hole that they overflowed into the hut.
If we missed a visit sometimes we could coax a summary from the archive, my private term for the expired messages festering in the wire. But the summaries, if I released them, were skeletal, in bones of language that often could not be joined for sense. Such messages were often hammered flat, their meaning ripped out,