The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [2]
Even before the quarantine was announced, we knew we had to leave. We talked it through as much as Claire could endure, and she had agreed, or, at least, she had assented silently, before wandering back to her soundproofed room, that our exit would be undertaken without the complication of Esther’s presence. We would not so much as let ourselves see her.
She hated how I verbally rehearsed everything.
I hated it, too.
Once just days before we left, when she was eating candy with a corpse-like lethargy, her hand a cold, blue paw tucking sweets beneath her hospital mask, I showed Claire the timeline I thought we should follow and she held the paper away as if it were an old diaper, heaving an ugly laugh.
Claire had just accommodated a long needle in her hip and she remained perfectly quiet, the stoic patient submitting to her treatment. Now she was rewarding herself with a bowl of candy. My timing was not fine.
“You actually wrote this down,” she finally said, her voice hollowed out through the mask.
A statement and not a question. Some essential marital weaponry from the arsenal of not giving an inch. Verbalize someone’s actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.
“It’s a suggestion,” I said, in the bedside voice I’d adopted as her caretaker.
Of course it wasn’t a suggestion. It was the plan and it was what we had to do. Otherwise there’d be chalk marks around us in days. We had tripped our Esther threshold weeks ago, and our medicine—the comprehension blockers, the agents of estrangement, the treated smoke that left a sick chill to our faces—was only making us worse. There was nowhere safe to send Esther, so it was we who had to depart. The children would remain.
How the children would conduct themselves now that they were the only ones not sickened by speech, that was their business.
If you were smart, if you wanted to buy yourself a few more days, you wouldn’t speak at all. Perhaps you already couldn’t. The symptoms swallowed some people faster, circled others more slowly, allowing false strength to set in. But for most of us the face was hardening. The lips were pulling back. Inside the mouth was turning tough, numb, and the tongue was docking. Denial had lost its blissful appeal as Claire turned into a paper-skinned creature, sloughing each time she disrobed, too tired to cough. I could live without all the pretense we poured into discussions where the issue had already been decided, where the issue left us no choice. So much ceremony around caring what the other person thought. We’d rub our faces in etiquette, obsess over manners, and fail to notice that we were on the floor and the light was gone and it was no longer possible to breathe.
Claire gave the timeline back to me and turned away.
“Unbelievable,” she whispered. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Oh, I am, Claire,” I said. “The time of my life.”
2
The day my wife and I drove away, the electric should have failed. The phone should have died. The water should have thickened in our pipes.
When the Esther toxicity was in high flower, when it was no longer viable to endure proximity to our daughter, given the retching, the speech fever, the yellow tide beneath my wife’s skin, to say nothing of the bruising around my mouth, that day should have been darker, altogether blackened by fire.
That day should have been visibly stained at the deepest levels of air, broken open, sucking people into oblivion. The neighborhood should have been vacuum-sealed, with people reduced to crawling figures, wheezing on their hands and knees, expiring in heaps.
A seizure of cold brown smoke should have spilled over the house.
What are the operative motifs from mythology when parents take leave of a child? Is there not some standard departure imagery offered by the fables?
The day we finally left, birds should have frozen midflight in the winter