The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [27]
He was decorous in his expulsion and it appeared to come at no visible cost to his body. I reasoned that he must vomit with some regularity. He made it look natural, as if his face occasionally needed to void itself.
I turned away as he finished and asked if he needed any help.
The retching stopped.
“Oh, goodness,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.” He coughed, swallowed, arranged his appearance.
This was Murphy’s first lie.
I frisked myself for a tissue I didn’t have.
He brought out a handkerchief, touched it to his mouth, as if he were dabbing a drop of soup from his lips.
“Sorry about that. I thought I was alone. Give me a second.”
He opened a tiny bottle, swished a mouthful, then spit a black mess into the bushes. From a small tin he scooped a grease with his finger, then smeared it inside his mouth, running it around with his tongue. Some flavoring to mask the bile, maybe. I wasn’t sure.
With a spoon he scraped some dirt over his pool of sickness and then stood to kick more mulch over the area.
“It’s actually good for the plants,” he said, and he stuck out his hand.
I managed a laugh.
“Murphy,” he said, and we shook hands.
He didn’t seem to recognize me from the hiking trail.
I gave him a name for myself—share not your full story—and we stood there in the cold, looking everywhere but at each other. I needed to get at my gear for a measurement, or else this whole cycle was blown, but I couldn’t perform a half-mile reading in front of him and he failed to produce the body language that would allow us to go our separate ways.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” I finally asked.
He laughed. “Not even close. But at least I’m out of the house.”
He seemed pleased with this answer, but then he noticed the bulge under my coat.
“You’re not all right, are you?”
Murphy smiled at me with believable concern.
“I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh. Well, how many miles out are you?” he asked.
He tapped the machine beneath my coat, which he could not have known was there.
“From what?”
“Your kids.”
“I have just one.” As I said that I pictured an oversize Esther, towering above Claire and me, bending down to crush us.
“One will do it,” he said.
I’d not discussed the toxicity with a stranger, but the information was too rampant now to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. Everything is a disclosure.
Murphy did nothing to disguise his curiosity at my silence. Curiosity might be too kind a word.
“Okay, how about this?” he asked.
Murphy opened his coat and flashed some corroded metal, a vital signs kit not unlike my own, strapped to his chest like a bomb. There was something brown and wet on his, though, glistening as if smeared in paste, but I didn’t get a careful look at it before he closed up his coat.
In return I did not similarly open my own coat. I hugged it closer instead.
“I’ll do us a favor then and go first,” he said. “I have four kids. Try to multiply your bullshit into that. I am two miles out. That’s my minimum. Less than that and I’m sure we could bond over some symptoms. Want to?”
I didn’t answer, but I gave him to understand, through a controlled smile, that he was not wrong to confide in me. Perhaps there was something to be learned here.
Listen for a change, Claire’s old admonition, suddenly seemed useful. She would say it as a joke, mocking the folk wisdom, emphasizing the phrase’s secondary meaning—if you desire change then first you must listen—but I think Claire actually believed it. Wisdom would come from outside ourselves. We must keep an ear to the ground.
If that was true, then it was the deep listeners among us, consuming so much more of the venom, who would die first. My indifference to others might end up buying me a little more time.
Murphy and I walked together and I lost track of our direction. He boasted of the insulation he’d installed in his home. The soundproof barriers with R-values above twenty, the speech-blocking baffles, some sediment collectors that were yielding a not uninteresting powder, even if the