The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [25]
Nothing much lived in the air. The occasional sickly bird chugged past overhead, its body translucent. These birds were so undefended, so slow and stupid at flight, I felt I could grab them from the air.
When it was children I saw, particularly the older ones who roved together and glowed with obscene health, I changed my direction. Slowly, though. Careful to disguise my caution.
In our neighborhood, anyway, these children were not just Jewish. This was a mixed, feral pack, drawing from vast bloodlines. And together, when they spoke in unison on their nighttime tours, their weapon was worse.
Sometimes it was hard work, the air too rough with sleet, my body unfit for hiking so far afield. My equipment was awkward and heavy, like carrying a squirming person against my chest, and I would forget to turn it on. Or the battery pack overheated, burned through the shielding, raising welts on my skin beneath the warm metal plate.
I stopped to rest on benches, in the grass, against the knee wall at Boltwood Park, and then hours later I struggled to my feet and hoped I recognized my surroundings well enough to return home. Not that home was where I wanted to be. Sometimes I suffered shallow sleep on a bench until it was dark and then woke to wet, frozen pants at my crotch and a shard of drool solidifying into ice at the corner of my mouth.
On such nights I was critically chilled and scraped absolutely raw from such contorted sleep, but I walked home under streetlights and felt so lucid, so glaringly vital, that it scared me to open the door to my house again and fight back through the awful air to my room, where I would fail to sleep in noxious proximity to something my body could no longer endure.
On days of minimal exposure to Esther, I conducted perimeter and fence line ambient air quality tests and sent in the results for analysis. Sediments of speech, airborne now, might indicate different toxicity thresholds throughout the area.
The numbers that returned offered no insight I could use.
I utilized a real-time aerosol monitor with data logging, purchased secondhand from Science Exchange. Collecting air samples was straightforward, and I looked like any citizen out for a night of hobby work, gathering bugs in a jar, not that anyone ever stopped to question me.
This after administering a full broad-spectrum heavy-metals panel, inconclusive on us both.
This after following the standard collection protocol for poisoning, testing our blood, hair, saliva, and nails.
Such samples I scraped from Claire when she slept. Humors for a futile investigation.
You’ll gain no satisfaction through tests of the air or water, was a sentence making the rounds.
Point the testing wand into the child’s mouth, was another favorite.
Or, fill the child’s mouth with sand.
The walks each evening were my prescribed escapes from the home, and they became a necessary after-dinner regimen. I performed smallwork with salts, knowing little of how to modify my tonic, knowing nothing of a delivery system through poultice applications on the sweeter nerves inside of my arms, the so-called Worthen site, proceeding only with some unmodified antiseizure agents as a foundational syrup.
Laughably amateur modifications, yet ones I hardly understood. I needed to believe Thompson that my own understanding played no role. I could execute a procedure without knowing why. I had to believe, per Burke, that my own insights, if I even had them, were an impediment to survival.
At our home, since Esther’s return from camp, little household habits emerged that soon were absorbed into our schedule. A scattering after dinner, improvised medicine injected into the fatty softness of the leg from a Windsor needle, then flight outdoors. We practiced, with full complicity, an avoidance altogether of family time.
For once, Esther’s disgust for us was mutually convenient. An altogether necessary disgust. We exploited it, allowed her to think we were keeping our distance at her request. But we saw her sometimes looking in at